The German Genius

by Peter Watson

  But there were also a number of authors who looked up to Heine, despite the fact that he spent most of his mature years in exile in Paris. The writers of Junges Deutschland (Young Germany)—Christian Dietrich Grabbe, Karl Gutzkow, Heinrich Laube, Theodor Mundt, Rudolf Wienberg, and Ludwig Börne are the major names—were most active in the 1830s, addressing various social issues in their novels and dramas. All these writers have in common that they were writing in an age marked by strict literary censorship that was designed to quell any form of public dissent. For this reason the ascent to the Prussian throne of Friedrich Wilhelm IV in 1840 was seen as a key turning point, as he announced his intention to liberalize the constraints on writers. Although the monarch soon found himself forced to backtrack, the brief period of liberalization was a catalyst to a veritable torrent of political—at times intensely nationalistic, at times more or less Marxist—writing that marked the Vormärz. This period saw the emergence of the hugely popular sociocritical novels of Ernst Willkomm, who was influenced by Eugène Sue and Charles Dickens, as well as a host of other novels based on The Pickwick Papers. Georg Weerth was important too—he, like Friedrich Engels, drew on his personal knowledge of the conditions of the working class in England in his writing.

  But the most notable writing of the time, undoubtedly influenced by the important peripheral presence of Heine (and despite his scorn for the genre), was the realm of political poetry, already alluded to, with Georg Herwegh, Ferdinand Freiligrath, and Hoffmann von Fallersleben producing sociocritical verse that was often distributed via the broadsheets and not infrequently written so as to be sung to popular tunes, especially in the workingmen’s clubs that sprang up at the time. The failure of the revolution of 1848 brought all this to a rapid end, with most writers fleeing abroad—to London or the United States, which saw a huge and influential influx of German refugees (see Chapter 15).

  THE BIEDERMEIER PHENOMENON

  The immediate consequence of the post-1815 world was that, in an effort to avoid a repeat of the French Revolution, the reestablished monarchies of Europe kept a much firmer political grip on their subjects. There was not just strong censorship, as we have seen, but a widespread use of secret intelligence agencies to root out subversion. The restrictions in Austria were as bad as anywhere, with Prince Klemens von Metternich’s actions paralleling Napoleon’s—lodges, clubs, and societies were all closed down and “inconvenient” members imprisoned. This produced a medium-term reaction in that it forced people out of the public coffee houses and meeting halls and into the secluded world of their private homes. Raymond Erickson, in Schubert’s Vienna, tells us: “The world outside was politically dangerous, so private life, home, and social contacts were restricted to a circle of true and reliable friends.”30

  This is the background to what eventually became known as Biedermeier culture, a decisive shift from—even a reaction against—high Romanticism (a “lull” before the storm of modernism in Thomas Nipperdey’s opinion). In the Romantic movement the focus had been on an individual’s own experience. The Biedermeier changed that to a focus on relationships. The private world of friendship took on a significance that had hitherto been neglected and this more intimate atmosphere was reflected in the arts of the time. Biedermeier culture lasted longer—well beyond 1848—in literature than in the other arts, but was even seen in architecture, where houses became drawn back from the street. In literature it can be seen in the quiet, intimate poetry of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Adelbert von Chamisso, Eduard Mörike, and Wilhelm Müller, the last two being set to music by Hugo Wolf and Franz Schubert. The growing urbanization and industrialization led to a new kind of audience: the early Lieder of Schubert could be performed at the piano without a substantial musical training, signifying a far more private existence than had occurred before. All this helped ensure that one of the main forms of Biedermeier culture was furniture—objects that decorated the private home.31

  Biedermeier furniture is less aggressive than the Empire style; it has simpler, less ambitious lines, is made of cheaper, locally available woods, like cherry or walnut, rather than than the more expensive imported mahogany. It is “reliable,” “common-sensical,” even—according to one authority—“boring.” The very word “Biedermeier” is itself mocking. In 1848, the painter-poet Josef Victor von Scheffel published a number of sarcastic poems in the Viennese satirical magazine Fliegende Blätter (Flying Leaves), among them “Biedermann’s Evening Socialising” and “Bummelmeier’s Complaint.” These names were combined (satirically again) by Ludwig Eichrodt into the pseudonym Gottlieb Biedermeier. “Bieder” is a German word meaning “common, everyday, plain,” “boring but in an upright way,” and Meier, or Meyer, is a common German last name, like Smith.

  This surfeit of satire is a little unfair to the chief Biedermeier furniture designer, Josef Dannhauser, whose designs could be quite flamboyant. At its height, his factory in Vienna employed 350 workers, designing and manufacturing not just furniture but sculpture and devices for interior decoration. After the factory closed in 1838, several of his workmen traveled around Europe as far as Stockholm, St. Petersburg, and Budapest, where their skills were in demand, spreading Biedermeier ideas.32

  As all this shows, Biedermeier culture was essentially a middle-class phenomenon, and a particularly German middle class at that. Unlike in France, the aristocracy and the administrative/middle classes in Germany rarely if ever mixed. The new furniture designs therefore enabled the newly enriched bourgeoisie to make their mark. It was all quite different from the worlds of Büchner, Keller, and Heine.

  The industrial revolution, delayed in Germany but beginning to take off in the 1830s, and gathering pace in the 1840s, made this a period of technical innovation as the steamship, the steam railway, sewing machines, gas lighting, and the mass production of more and more objects became common. This had the perhaps predictable effect that the “Biedermeier person” came to take pride in his or her artistic taste, identifying craft works as superior to machine-made items. Tableware and glassware became adorned with detailed miniature paintings, and highly decorated porcelain flourished, as did handmade fashions. In painting, the laborious copying of nature became popular and in portraiture realism prevailed, with intimately observed psychological detail. Pictures of family life were popular, the bourgeois parlor a refuge from commercial and industrial reality.

  This mustn’t be overdone. The Viennese did get out. Theater became chiefly known for its spectacle (it became customary, for example, to announce ahead of time in the newspapers how many shots would be fired in the battle scenes). The Biedermeier period also saw the rise in popularity of Schubert’s songs (considered earlier), when his friends began to organize the famous “Schubertiaden,” sponsored evenings in which nothing but his music was played.33

  Schubert wrote several symphonies and it was his last, the Ninth, the “Great” in C Major, that was famously rediscovered by one of the other great composers of the time, Robert Schumann. He had heard of its existence and ten years after Schubert’s death visited Franz’s brother, Ferdinand, who showed him great swaths of manuscripts, among which Schumann recognized an entire symphony, and was allowed to take it away. Just over a year later, Mendelssohn conducted the world premiere in Leipzig. When he heard it, Schumann said, “This Symphony has created a greater effect among us than any other since Beethoven…”

  Schumann (1810–56) was himself the most complete Romantic. Surrounded by insanity and suicide in his family, he worried all his life that he too would succumb in one way or another. The son of a bookseller and publisher, he grew up suffused in the works of great writers—Goethe, Shakespeare, Byron, and Novalis—all of whom exerted a great influence on him (he burst into tears when he read Byron’s “Manfred,” which he later set to music). Schumann tried to write poetry himself and emulated Byron in other ways too, embarking on numerous love affairs. In the early 1850s he suffered a week of hallucinations in which he thought that the angels were dictating music to h
im while he was threatened by wild animals. He threw himself off a bridge but failed to kill himself and, at his own request, was placed in an asylum in 1854. His best-known work, and perhaps the best-loved, is Carnaval, in which he paints pictures of his friends, his wife, Clara Vieck, Chopin, Niccolò Paganini, and Mendelssohn. (Carnaval was a great influence on Brahms.)34 However, Schumann’s music was intensely disliked during his lifetime, and he found it necessary to earn a living as a critic. He was a good one—one of his first reviews introduced Chopin to the German public (“Hats off, gentlemen. A genius!”), and one of the last introduced Brahms. He could have been a great pianist but, in attempting to improve his fingering technique, Schumann stretched his hands so much that he permanently ruined one of his fingers.

  By the time of his death in 1856, after several difficult years, Schumann’s music was at last beginning to earn an international reputation and is mainly remembered for two things. The Fantasy in C Major, his greatest work for solo piano, is now recognized as “one of the trinity of pieces upon which all romantic piano music rests” (the others are Chopin’s Sonata in B Flat Minor, and Liszt’s Sonata in B Minor).35 Schumann’s second achievement occurred with his move from piano music to song. Some of his songs, such as Dichterliebe, now rank with Schubert’s Die Winterreise because, in a very real sense, he took up where Schubert left off, expanding the role—formal, technical, and emotional—of the piano, adding preludes and postludes, for example. He composed 250 songs and expanded the repertoire of voices, producing a series of very melodic vocal duets.

  THE INVENTION OF THE MODERN MUSICAL REPERTOIRE

  Schumann himself revered Mendelssohn, for Felix Mendelssohn was possibly the most widely accomplished musician after Mozart. A fine pianist, he was also the greatest conductor of his day and the greatest organist. He was an excellent violinist and was well read in poetry and philosophy. Born in Hamburg in 1809, he came from a wealthy Jewish banking family and was the grandson of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. A fervent German patriot, he believed that his fellow countrymen were supreme in all the arts. Indeed, if there is such a thing, Mendelssohn was overcultured. As a boy he was made to get up at 5:00 A.M.. to work on his music, his history, his Greek and Latin, his science, and his comparative literature.36

  Like so many of the other Romantic musicians, he was a child prodigy, though he was doubly fortunate in that his parents could afford to hire their own orchestra and he could have them play his own compositions, where he would conduct. He went to Paris and met Liszt, Chopin, and Berlioz. For his first work he took Shakespeare as his inspiration: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a fairyland that was perfect Romantic material (though Mendelssohn never had much in the way of internal demons). After Paris, he went to Leipzig as musical director and quickly made it the musical capital of Germany. One of the first conductors to use the baton, he employed it to turn the Leipzig orchestra into the foremost instrument of musical performance of the day—precise, sparing, with a predilection for speed.37 He increased the size of the orchestra and revised the repertoire. In fact, Mendelssohn was probably the first conductor to adopt the dictatorial manner that seems so popular today, as well as being the main organizer of the basic repertoire that we now hear, with Mozart and Beethoven as the backbone, Haydn, Bach (whose St. Matthew Passion Mendelssohn rescued from a hundred years’ slumber), and Handel not far behind, and with Gioachino Rossini, Liszt, Chopin, Schubert, and Schumann also included.38 It was Mendelssohn who conceived the shape of most concerts as we hear them: an overture, a large-scale work, such as a symphony, followed by a concerto. (Until Mendelssohn, most symphonies were considered too long to hear at one go: interspersed between movements there would be shorter, less demanding pieces.)

  Mendelssohn’s own music was very popular in the middle of the nineteenth century, but his reputation today is divided. There are those who feel he was the nineteenth-century equivalent of Mozart, others that he never quite lived up to his promise.

  Germanistik AND THE CENTRAL DRAMA OF MODERNITY

  Underneath and around Biedermeier culture, another concept was developing in nineteenth-century Germany. This was the idea of Volkskultur, allied to mass culture. It developed out of the ideas and activities of Herder and the Grimm brothers, described earlier, which, as the nineteenth century wore on, extended to Volkskunst, Volksmusik, Volksliteratur, Volkstheater, Volksdichtung (folk or national art, music, literature, theater, poetry), Volkstum (folkdom), and Volkskunde (popular culture, of which a big strand was occupied by the Volksbuch, or popular narrative).39

  Behind these was the idea that there was such a thing as a collective genius in Germany, which gave the nation an organic unity, a Volksgeist, or national spirit. This enabled Germans to feel that their culture and history represented a proud alternative to the classical Latin culture of France, Italy, Spain, and the Holy Roman Empire, which had dominated European thought for centuries. On this vision, high culture and Volkskultur were seen as different sides of the same coin, different expressions of a common root, an essentially uncorrupted collective genius. This emerging speciality came to be known as Germanistik, German Studies. Writers like Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769–1831) and Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (1778–1852) were united—and increasingly strident—in their belief that there was a genius in the Volk “whose voice must be preserved and articulated by transposing oral traditions into a written record of folk tales, folk plays, fairy tales and folk songs.”

  In the years before 1848, the term “Volk” became gradually interchangeable with the term “Masse.” The meaning of this term, “mass” in English, was subtly different in the nineteenth century from its meaning today—it meant a class of people without political representation, meaning that “mass culture” was likewise denied the standing it was entitled to. “The battle for the mind of the masses as the central drama of modernity had begun and it developed in Germany with particular ferocity.”40

  The central problem—culturally speaking—was how to create a cohesive identity of the masses in the new growing industrial conurbations, which were living entities never seen before. Germany lacked unifying symbols more than did other European nations, which made its industrial areas more disparate, more disaggregated than anywhere else. The result was a divide into “a majority which saw culture as serving the greater glory of the nation and a minority which cherished critical independence from authority, both secular and ecclesiastical.”41

  In time, this division would come to matter. Volkskultur would acquire a mystical quality, which sustained and enriched the masses. Whereas for Herder and the Grimm brothers, culture had defined and unified Germany and helped explain her to herself, as the nineteenth century progressed, and as “Volk” and “Masse” more and more came to mean the same thing, the alternative quality of Volkskultur, the alternative to the classical Latin culture, acquired increasingly triumphal overtones. In the latter half of the century, as we shall see, Germany’s industrial achievements—involving the masses—inherited this understanding and this attitude. Germans thought of themselves (as they were) as leading the way in both high culture and mass culture, which was an expression of Volkskultur. That form of self-understanding first emerged in the Biedermeier period.

  15.

  “German Fever” in France, Britain, and the United States

  “THE TEMPEST IN PETTICOATS”

  The raft of changes in Germany that have been the subject of the opening chapters did not go unnoticed, or unremarked, in the world outside. The first—and in many ways still the most remarkable—observer of Germany of that time was Germaine de Staël, a French-speaking Swiss writer who spent most of her time in Paris, becoming the most famous woman of her day. Rich and independent, Madame de Staël suffered the misfortune of being unattractive—an unpardonable sin in Paris. All this, plus her uncompromising intellectual brilliance and her determination to be involved actively in the affairs of her day, meant that she clashed repeatedly with Napoleon.1 She was also a Protestant and therefore a
lways something of an outsider. Her book De l’Allemagne (On Germany; published only with much difficulty in 1810), is nonetheless an impressive tour d’horizon of German culture, which introduced the new literature and Romantic philosophy to the attention of the French (and then to the rest of Europe).2

  During the Revolution, she had been enthusiastic about its aims, if not all of its methods. She left Paris during the Terror but returned and, during the 1790s, became famous for her salon and her so-called duel with Napoleon. In her several novels, she championed the role of women such as herself, which the first consul/emperor objected to, and she was directed to live forty leagues from Paris. This was what provoked her visit to Germany.

  Before she left Paris, she took German lessons with Wilhelm von Humboldt, then the Prussian ambassador in France (it was he who had convinced her of the renaissance in German culture). She traveled quickly to reach Weimar. Weimar itself, for all its achievements, “trembled” at the news of her imminent arrival. It was, we should never forget, a society “which both copied and despised French culture,” and her arrival could not help but be a major event.

  To the surprise of all concerned, the grand duke and his wife hit it off with their exotic visitor, this “Tempest in Petticoats.” They were alternately charmed and intrigued by her outlandish turbans and revealing gowns, the “whiff of Parisian chic” that such clothes brought with them. Goethe had been a bit standoffish at first. He had been friendly enough at a distance, helping to arrange the German translations of Madame de Staël’s books. But now, he said, if they were to meet, she must come to him—at Jena. The duke, however, was so enjoying her company that he instructed Goethe to return to Weimar. At first, Madame de Staël wasn’t sure the author was worth the trouble. “Goethe ruins my ideal image of Werther; he is a fat man without distinction to look at, who likes to think he is a man of the world but only half succeeds.” She never rid herself of the criticism that, despite its eminence, Weimar was provincial, that neither Wieland, nor Schiller, nor Goethe ever read a newspaper.