The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  Stifter wrote many long stories and short novels, the greatest of which was Der Nachsommer (Indian Summer; 1857), now counted a seminal Bildungsroman in the German canon. It describes the self-cultivation of Heinrich Drendorf, a German merchant’s son and shows how he gradually acquired all the necessary characteristics to look upon himself—and to behave—with dignity. Stifter himself lived through the violence and chaos of the 1848 failed revolution in Vienna and subsequently went to live a much quieter life in Linz. His book describes how Drendorf pursues his private fulfillment through a range of humanistic endeavors—science, art, history, pedagogy, but all at a distance from contemporary issues, avoiding, as Stifter puts it (and as he did in his own life), “locomotives and factories.”13 Although a merchant’s son, Drendorf is conspicuously uninterested in the practical world of trade and commerce. When he is out for a walk on a mountainside, a storm is brewing and he seeks shelter at the estate of an old man. Once on the estate, the Rosenhaus, Drendorf cannot help but notice that the old man, Freiherr von Risach (an important figure politically, though we are never told why), orders his life punctiliously around art, antiques, and gardening (books are always replaced on their shelves immediately after use), and that he is just one of several characters who enjoy this idyllic existence, controlling their passions rather than giving way to them. Nietzsche found Stifter’s Nachsommer a “distant celestial world,” with a “milky-way brightness” and, along with Gottfried Keller’s Green Henry (see Chapter 14), one of the two best German books of the nineteenth century.14

  Stifter’s point is that pleasure is derived from “the laws of gentleness,” that “evolution anticipated revolution,” that most of the lasting beneficial changes in the world are slow to emerge and silent in their effects—this is nature’s way. Friedrich Hebbel, another writer, offered the crown of Poland to anyone who could finish reading Der Nachsommer, but W. H. Auden, Marianne Moore, and W. G. Sebald all stressed their debt to him, while Thomas Mann said he was “one of the most extraordinary, the most enigmatic, the most secretly daring and the most strangely gripping narrators in world literature.”

  THE ALTERNATIVE BOURGEOIS

  Like Stifter, Gottfried Keller (1819–90) enjoyed painting. He studied in Munich for two years before deciding he would never be good enough and then turned to writing. His book Der grüne Heinrich (Green Henry) is regarded by some critics as the greatest Swiss novel, and was recently admitted into The Western Canon by Harold Bloom, the American critic. It was this book that, together with Indian Summer, Nietzsche described as one of the two greatest German-language novels of the nineteenth century.

  Born in Zurich, Keller was the son of a lathe operator who died when Gottfried was just five. He attended a variety of schools, including an Industrieschule until he was fifteen, when he was expelled for a misdemeanor. Forced to seek employment, he apprenticed himself to Peter Steiger and Rudolf Meyer, landscape painters in Munich. After two years, however, he abandoned art, returned to Zurich, and took up writing. He studied at Heidelberg, where he attended the lectures of Ludwig Feuerbach. Feuerbach was a great influence on Keller, who was much concerned with what Daniel Bell would call, more than a hundred years later, the cultural contradictions of capitalism, in particular how the individual could live a fulfilled life in a society where capitalism encouraged so much individualism.

  Keller was in a way a transitional figure between those writers considered above, who primarily turned their backs on the new urban bourgeois world, and those considered next, who recognized that it should be the chief focus of their concern. Keller preferred legal change to revolution (he wasn’t quite as gentle as Stifter), but he couldn’t quite embrace that change in his work, and certainly not after 1848. He was one of those who developed the nineteenth-century novella, a particularly German form of short narrative, brief and highly symbolic, summarizing life in society by focusing on an “extraordinary, individual event.”

  Green Henry is customarily identified as a Bildungsroman, following Goethe’s model, though it is also reminiscent of Balzac’s “Le chef-d’oeuvre inconnu.”15 There are strong autobiographical elements in the story. The protagonist, Heinrich Lee, is called green because all his youthful outfits are made from his father’s green uniforms, available because his father had died at an early age. Heinrich is expelled from school and studies painting in Munich. The other element in Heinrich’s life is his love for two women, Anna, who represents “heavenly love,” and Judith, a widow, who answers his “more earthly needs.” The plot resolves itself when Heinrich realizes he can never achieve more than modest success as an artist but is then overtaken by the death of his mother. This forces on him the realization that, in a very real sense, he was responsible for her death because of what she sacrificed for him and that he, in his self-obsession, had impoverished her. He dies of shame.

  Keller came to dislike this story—or the ending—and rewrote it years later. In the revised version, Heinrich doesn’t die, but lives on in a dispiriting bureaucratic sinecure. This seems to have struck a chord. The first version had not really caught on, but the revised version received wide acclaim.16

  This new ending was partly autobiographical too, because in 1855 Keller returned to Zurich, later becoming cantonal secretary. From this vantage point Keller was particularly aware of the growing division between capitalism and artistic individualism, the division that Marx labeled alienation, which Keller found equally abominable. He addressed this in a series of novellas titled Die Leute von Seldwyla (The People of Seldwyla; 1856 and 1873–74), a distinctly odd but not necessarily disagreeable place. Here the people are no less daring and enterprising than anywhere else but, as they gain experience of the world, they change. They become “whimsical philistines” who withdraw into the security of their own city: they refuse to see work as “a process of upward mobility,” they reject speed, derive pleasure from the trivial side of life, rather than what everyone else regards as “important.” They are, in effect, exploring alternative values to those of the bourgeoisie.

  COAL-SMOKE AND SONG BIRDS

  Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) is now recognized as one of Germany’s greatest writers. Yet, like Grillparzer, like Hölderlin, recognition was delayed for decades. One factor special to him was his Jewishness: anti-Semites in early nineteenth-century Germany denied that he could be “both Jewish and German.” The fact that he lived in France from 1831 to his death and was enthusiastic about French culture didn’t help either (in his memoirs he speaks of two passions: the love of beautiful women and the French Revolution).17 The Nazis tried to erase his memory completely.

  When Heine’s first collection of verse appeared in 1821, Weimar Classicism was long gone and Romanticism was fading too. He himself wrote: “The thousand-year empire of Romanticism is at an end, and I myself was its last and fabulous king, who abdicated the throne.” For him, Romanticism was “a desperate inward retreat from an unsatisfactory external world.” He studied under Hegel in Berlin when the philosopher was at the height of his fame and influence. And Heine agreed with him, seeing a Hegelian progression in the arts, which had begun with the most “material” art forms (for example, the Egyptian pyramids), then progressed via Greek sculpture and Renaissance painting to the least material—poetry and music. “Our present age,” he felt, “will go down in the annals of art as the age of music.”

  He divided his own time between prose (journalism—Georg Lukács described him as a revolutionary journalist of significance—travel writing, criticism) and poetry. His early verses were collected into the Buch der Lieder (Book of Songs), which Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, and Felix Mendelssohn helped to make famous. In his prose of that early time, particularly Briefe aus Berlin (Letters from Berlin) and Die Harzreise (The Harz Journey)—travel notes of a sort—he showed himself as sensitive to the very different Germanies that then existed, in particular the unchanging life of the countryside as compared with the industrializing, fast-paced, always-different world of the city
. After the excesses of the Napoleonic Wars, he anticipated that the great issue of the day would be emancipation, of races as much as of social classes and other oppressed peoples. “Our age is warmed by the idea of human equality…” In his journalism he tried hard to prepare the ideological ground for a German revolution.18

  Though the fragmentation of Germany, as reinforced by the Treaty of Vienna, did not appeal to him, Heine was by no means a nationalist, one reason being the nationalists’ espousal of a “Christian German” identity, which had no place for Jews, of which he was one. In Die Romantische Schule (The Romantic School), written with a French audience in mind, he drew attention to the cosmopolitanism of the great eighteenth-century German writers and explored what had been lost. Romantic poetry, he said frankly, was incompatible with modern life: “The railway engine shakes and jolts our minds, so that we cannot produce a song; coal-smoke is driving away the song-birds…”19

  The 1840s were a complicated time politically. Food shortages in several European countries during the “hungry forties” stimulated radical activity. In Germany, the accession of Friedrich Wilhelm IV to the Prussian throne in 1840 aroused hopes of liberalization after his father’s long (forty-three-year) reactionary reign. There was a flood of political verse, produced mainly by the so-called Tendenzdichter (committed poets) such as Ferdinand Freiligrath (later a political exile in London), and the philologist August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben, who was dismissed from his professorship on account of his political verse. This verse included “Das Lied der Deutschen” (Song of the Germans), “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles,” which is not always understood as a liberal work appealing for a German national state with free institutions.20 Heine thought these “committed” poets were banal; the proper poet-genius, for him, could belong to no party and toe no line:

  Aimless is my song, Yes, aimless,

  As is love, as life is aimless

  As Creator and creation.

  Heine wasn’t apolitical; he despised capitalism and expected more “heroics” from the bourgeoisie than were there, but for him the true poet searches for those deeper and more fundamental forces that go beyond the aims of the radicals. Like Jacob Grimm he thought that folktales—the deeper poetry—contained glimpses of the ancient Germanic religion.21 Christianity had drawn people away from earthly (and earthy) realities, as revealed in folktales, toward a more ethereal, disembodied spiritual realm. By recovering and reworking the original folktales, he believed he could revive the lost excitement (though he believed “God’s opium” was passing).

  The radical turmoil that existed in “the hungry forties” produced a foretaste of revolution in Germany in 1844, when the Silesian weavers mounted an insurrection. Their traditional cottage industry was simply unable to cope with the industrialized textile manufactures of Britain. Reduced to starvation, they were a pitiful group and their uprising, quickly put down, inspired Heine’s famous bitter proletarian poem, “Die schlesischen Weber” (The Silesian Weavers), which would resonate throughout Germany down the century:

  The shuttle flies, the loom creaks loud,

  Night and day we weave your shroud—

  Old Germany, at your shroud we sit,

  We’re weaving a threefold curse on it,

  We’re weaving, we’re weaving!22

  The idea, stemming from Heine’s deep concern about the anachronism that was Germany, was partly based on a song composed amid another uprising, that of the Lyons silk weavers in 1831: “We shall weave the old world’s shroud.”

  Heine was famously ambivalent about his Jewishness. Like many German Jews before and since, he was first and above all else, a German. In 1824 he described himself to a friend as “one of the most German beasts in existence…my breast is an archive of German feeling.”23 At the same time, one of the features of his unfinished Jewish novel Rabbi von Bacharach is his loving description of kosher food.

  This did not stop Heine from converting to Protestantism in 1825. It was a curious business, secret at the time, famous afterward. It was not a case of “instant bleaching,” the term applied to Jewish converts who were given a baptismal gift of ten ducats by the Prussian state if they named the king as their godfather. Heine had always been uncomfortable with his Jewishness and used to describe himself only as “of Jewish ancestry.” Crescence-Eugénie Mirat (“Mathilde”), who met Heine in 1834, began living with him two years later, and married him in 1840, had no idea he was Jewish. He always anticipated that German Jews would achieve full civil equality, explaining the anti-Semitism of his day as economic, not religious.24 He thought of his own time as tolerant.25

  In 1848, the year of revolution, Heine’s health dramatically deteriorated and for the last eight years of his life he was bedridden, forced to lie on mattresses laid on the floor, which, he complained, formed his “mattress grave.”26 His speech could be labored but his mind was still agile and illness brought him back to God. He observed mordantly that the healthy and the sick need different religions and that Christianity “was an excellent religion for the sick.”27 Ritchie Robinson has described the late sick-bed poems as unlike anything else in the canon save, perhaps, the late poems of Yeats, savage and playful. In one memorable verse Heine bequeaths his ailments one-by-one to his enemies. In another he challenges God head-on:

  Drop those holy parables and

  Pietist hypotheses:

  Answer us these damning questions—

  No evasions, if you please.

  From his mattress grave he tells us that poetry can be no help in this desolate world—he agreed with Hegel that the world “had entered the age of prose.”28

  MODERNITY AND MURDER

  Many people—especially in Germany—believe that, had he lived a normal lifespan, Georg Büchner (1813–37) would have become the equal of Goethe or Schiller. His best known work, Woyzeck, is certainly an arresting masterpiece. Born in Goddelau, near Darmstadt, Büchner was the son of a doctor and the brother of the philosopher Ludwig Büchner. He studied medicine at Strasbourg, published his dissertation, on aspects of the nervous system, and moved to Giessen, the up-and-coming center for scientific research. But Büchner had always been interested in politics and, appalled by the conditions in Hesse, helped to form a secret society dedicated to revolution. He longed for the poor to attain self-consciousness, realizing that, in his day, the proletarians were not yet a “class.” In a letter written from Giessen, he observed: “The political conditions could drive me crazy.” He was forced into exile when one of his pamphlets was judged too incendiary, first in Strasbourg, then Zurich. He became professor of anatomy at the University of Zurich but died almost immediately of typhus at the age of twenty-three.

  Büchner produced his first play—Dantons Tod (Danton’s Death), about the French Revolution—in 1835, followed by Lenz, a novella based on the life of Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, a poet of the Sturm und Drang period. His second play, Leonce und Lena, was about the nobility but then came Woyzeck, unfinished, published posthumously and the first literary work in German whose main characters came not from the aristocracy or the bourgeoisie, but from the working class. (The title of the play was chosen by subsequent editors.) Büchner left four drafts, which among them allow for a proper reconstruction. The drafts were probably begun in 1836, but a performance was not arranged until 1913. The work is perhaps best known through Alban Berg’s opera, Woyzeck, which premiered in 1925.

  Woyzeck, based on true events, tells the story of a common soldier driven mad—and to suicide—by unyielding military discipline and strict hierarchical societies where, as he says at one point, “Man’s an abyss; you get dizzy when you look down.” Büchner had followed a lengthy debate in a medical journal regarding a convicted murderer, J. C. Woyzecjk, who had killed his lover in a fit of jealousy in Leipzig in 1821 and was subsequently beheaded in public. A soldier and barber, Woyzecjk had fallen on hard times, sliding into unemployment, beginning to hallucinate, and then showing signs of paranoia. Despite all this,
the King’s Counselor, who had examined Woyzecjk twice, found him “depraved but not insane.” According to the counselor’s moral standard, derived from Kant, Woyzecjk had deviated from society’s norms and had to be punished as a deterrent to others. In the course of the play, Woyzecjk kills his lover and then himself.29

  The play is a savage indictment of the social conditions then existing in Germany, the new forms of poverty caused by industrialization, the “atomization” that drives all individuals against each other in a society which ostensibly values individuality, and the fundamental ignorance of most people about the psychological pressures that can exist in simply getting through the day. Guilt is to be found neither in the murderer nor in his victim—nor in his tormentors, who are themselves tormented. In a letter to his parents, written in 1834, Büchner said: “…it lies in no one’s power to avoid becoming a fool or a criminal.” The jagged nature of the scenes, the way they do and do not follow each other, the use of working-class dialogue and accents, was all new on stage and meant that the play would eventually have an enormous impact—on Expressionism, for example, and on many modern and even postmodern authors.

  Büchner was appalled and defeated by the fatalism of the poor. One of the poor characters in Woyzeck says: “I think that if we went to heaven, we’d have to help make the thunder.”

  THE END OF THE GOETHEAN AGE

  From 1829 onward, Heine had on several occasions addressed the significance for him of the forthcoming “end of the cultural age” that had “begun at Goethe’s cradle and will end at his [Heine’s] coffin.” Despite his very real admiration for Goethe, he bemoaned the “quietism” that he felt characterized the bulk of the writing of the period, particularly since the turn of the century. Great periods of art in the past, he claimed, were never divorced from the great issues of the day, pointing to Phidias and Michelangelo as two great artists whose work exemplified this premise. In fact, Goethe’s death in 1832 came to mark a watershed in German literature of the nineteenth century, as we have seen. A clinging to the values of the Goethean legacy—his inwardness and a turning away from the world of industrial change—characterized the writing of Grillparzer, Stifter, and Keller (all, significantly, living outside Germany proper), as well as the novellas of the Biedermeier period around the middle of the century.