A Place in the Country

by W. G. Sebald

  the artist and his friends “drinking and smoking in a Tübingen summerhouse which he had furnished as a kind of buen retiro.” In this picture, which gives a clear idea of the way the atmosphere of those years oscillated between the impulses of political awakening and retreat from the world, we see, gathered together in the lamplight, five young men dressed in the kind of fanciful costume fashionable at the time as a gesture of rebellion against authority, part olde-worlde German, part modishly rakish: open-necked shirts with wide flowing sleeves, Renaissance berets and suchlike extravagant headgear, sideburns and unkempt locks and those strange small steel-rimmed spectacles which have clearly been the hallmark of the conspiratorial intelligentsia since time immemorial. It is not immediately apparent whether this subversive style, which was all the rage at the time, was actually an expression of militant liberalism or whether it was mere playacting and fancy dress, but one would not be far wrong in assuming that the revolutionary impulse of the Wars of Independence was, from 1820 onward, beginning to dissolve in a fug of tobacco smoke and Biergarten bravado. For almost the whole of the nineteenth century, indeed, one could say that the Stammtisch took the place of parliament in Germany. Perhaps this is why, at barely eighteen, Mörike already detects the false notes in the enthusiastic eulogies held by the would-be avant-garde in praise of Kotzebue’s murderer, Sand. Admittedly Mörike was, from the outset, even more inclined to resignation than most. In this he is a true representative of a generation which, still just touched by the breath of a heroic age, is preparing to enter upon the becalmed waters of the Biedermeier, in which bourgeois domesticity takes precedence over public life and the garden fence becomes the boundary of a life en famille which conceives of itself as a universe in its own right.

  The calm of the domestic interior and the projection of an image of peaceable domesticity onto the surrounding landscape is one of the recurring motifs of Biedermeier painting. A sparsely furnished study, pale green walls, scrubbed floors of bleached pine, children playing table skittles, a parrot or parakeet in a cage, a young woman at the window, a sailing ship outside in the harbor, or in the far distance, beyond fields and hedgerows, the foothills of the Vienna Woods—Nature domesticated. The view of Salzburg painted by Julius Schoppe in 1817 shows a small group of men gathered on a bench in the foreground—the artist and his comrades, like Lohbauer’s Tübingen friends, recognizable by their apparel as sympathizers of the progressive national cause. Yet what could possibly be improved upon in this perfectly ordered prospect? Framed by greenery, overarched by a radiant blue sky, it is the very image of perfection.

  A light veil of shadow lies across a field smooth as an English lawn below the terrace on which they are gathered to admire the view, and two tiny figures are walking along the path leading to Schloss Aigen, with the plains beyond gleaming in the sunlight; neatly clipped round trees line a long avenue, and beneath the castle the towers and houses of the city, surrounded by the wide blue arc of the mountains, shimmer in the sun. Exactly so, in Mörike’s work Das Stuttgarter Hutzelmännlein [The Cobbler-Goblin of Stuttgart], the Schwäbische Alb appears, seen from the Bempflinger Höhe, as the wondrous glass-blue wall beyond which “as he was told as a child, lie the cockleshell gardens of the Queen of Sheba.” If we gaze into this safely bounded orbis pictus for long enough, we can easily imagine that here someone has stopped the clock and said: this is how it should be forever after. The ideal world of the Biedermeier imagination is like a perfect world in miniature, a still life preserved under a glass dome. Everything in it seems to be holding its breath. If we turn it upside down, it begins to snow a little. Then all at once it becomes spring and summer again. It is impossible to imagine a more perfect order. And yet on either side of this apparently eternal calm there lurks the fear of the chaos of time spinning ever more rapidly out of control. When the young Mörike begins writing, he has at his back the revolutionary upheavals of the end of the eighteenth century, while the terrors which herald the new age of industrialization are already silhouetted on the horizon, the turmoil unleashed by the accumulation of capital and the moves toward centralization of a new, cast-iron state authority. The Swabian quietism Mörike subscribed to is—like all the Biedermeier arts—a kind of instinctive defense mechanism in the face of the calamity to come. In actual fact the everyday life of the time was far less secure than today’s envious observer might imagine. Everywhere in the work of Grillparzer, Lenau, and Stifter, dark abysses open up in their tales of family life: fear of bankruptcy, ruin, disgrace, and déclassement. There are children who drown themselves in the Danube, brothers in prison or in the asylum, suicide and syphilis. Mörike, never far from the brink of financial ruin after he resigned his living as a vicar, knew from at least the age of thirteen—when his father died following a stroke—how precarious life in bourgeois society could be. His hypochondria, the mood swings he was constantly prone to, his feelings of faintheartedness, and the weariness of which he so often speaks; unspecified depressions, symptoms of paralysis, sudden weakness, vertigo, headaches, the terrors of uncertainty which he continually experiences—all these are symptoms not only of his melancholic disposition, but also the spiritual effects of a society increasingly determined by a work ethic and the spirit of competition. Things are sometimes so bad that he goes around “like a frightened chicken” or “a stupid child who cries at everything.” In his request to be released from his duties addressed to King Wilhelm I in 1843, he describes how at his last christening—after he had already had to call upon the assistance of a neighboring cleric during the morning sermon—he suddenly felt so unwell that “the congregation as well as I myself expected me to fall unconscious.” Mörike’s fainting fits, and the impotence they express, are not least responses to the increasing consolidation of power in Germany, in the face of which he finds it ever more difficult to maintain his position in office, let alone hold his own as a poet in the new nation. Throughout his life he progressively retreats further and further from the exertions of artistic production, occupying himself with the revision of his novel, translating, busying himself with the composition of humorous poems and a long tail of occasional verses—engraved on a plant pot from Lorch for Wolff’s wife; with the famous Schöntal recipe for pickled cucumbers for Constanze Hartlaub; on the occasion of the dedication of the Stuttgart Liederhalle, and suchlike—and he doubtless often fears amid all this that he has lost sight of the true thread of his writing, and that quite possibly he will soon be sitting up in bed, like his father after the stroke, with his pen in his trembling hand, searching for the right expression and completely incapable of finding it.

  Plagued by inner anxieties and constrained economically—as he had been from the outset, and continued to be during his more than three decades as a retired minister—apart from two trips to Lake Constance and an excursion across the border into Bavaria, Mörike never, so far as I am aware, ventured beyond the narrow confines of his native Württemberg. Ludwigsburg, Urach, Tübingen, Pflummern, Plattenhardt, Ochsenwang, Cleversulzbach, Schwäbisch Hall, Nürtingen, Stuttgart, and Fellbach—these were his staging posts in an age otherwise in the grip of railway mania, stock market speculation, risky credit deals, and general expansionism. The peaceful backwater of the Biedermeier age resembled a wishful utopia erected against progress, a painted screen disguising a world radically changing from the very foundations and opening up to new influences on all sides. Only once, as a young man, did Mörike venture beyond the limits of the Kingdom of Württemberg, when he composed his South Sea fantasy—perfect for opera—of the land of Orplid. The inspiration for this draws less on the idea, by then almost forgotten, of the Noble Savage than it anticipates the era which Mörike almost lived to see, in which, in the new imperial capital of Berlin, allotment settlements are created with names like Frohe Eintracht [Cheerful Harmony], Ostelbien [East of Elbe], Alpenland [Alpine Lands], and Burenfarm [Boer Farm], names that owe their origins not only to the expansion of the Vaterland from the Adige to the Belt, but also to
the colonialist aspirations to a German Africa and a German Tahiti. While Mörike was busy writing in Cleversulzbach or Schwäbisch Hall, the scale and proportions of the world were shifting in unpredictable ways. The Texan Consul

  had a villa built for himself among the Stuttgart vineyards, and the Kingdom of Württemberg became an anachronism; it became necessary to think on a grand scale, and work en miniature was abandoned in favor of a monumentalism enacted ever more recklessly from decade to decade. Nor was Mörike’s own writing unaffected by this development. His novel Maler Nolten [Nolten the Painter] is an experiment on a grand scale, in which over the course of several hundred pages an extraordinarily complex plot is unfolded. The young artist Theobald Nolten, as Birgit Mayer writes in her introductory book on Mörike, “makes the acquaintance, via his former servant Wispel, of the newly successful artist Tillsen and sees his career advanced by the latter. Through Tillsen, Nolten is introduced to the society of Count Zerlin, and, believing himself deceived by the—alleged—infidelity of his fiancée, Agnes, falls in love with the Count’s sister, Constanze. From this point on, fate takes its course. His relationship with Agnes had been on the one hand undermined by an intrigue on the part of the gypsy girl Elisabeth, yet on the other sustained—or so it appears—by a counterintrigue in Nolten’s name by his friend, the actor Larkens. The negative climax of the novel is reached when Constanze breaks with Nolten after finding out how things really stand. Verse interludes, a magic lantern show, and idyllic interpolations form a precarious counterbalance to the looming threat but cannot avert it. In the further course of the action all the characters become ever more deeply enmeshed in secretive and tragic mutual dependencies, which in the end none of them survives.” From this deliberately abbreviated summary, which can scarcely begin to do justice to the emotional and social complexities involved, one may deduce that Mörike was beginning to lose his way in this ambitious undertaking, freighted as it was with subsidiary characters and episodes, interludes and subplots, and all manner of digressions and diversions. If his myopic eyes are often able to detect hidden wonders in the smallest detail, his eye grows dim if it falls on a wider panorama, and the twists and turns of fate which he invents for his characters soon dissolve into melodrama: “The clock was just striking eleven. In the Zerlin household all had grown still, only in the bedroom of the Countess do we still find the lights burning. Constanze, in her white nightclothes, sitting alone at a small table near her bed, is busy letting down her beautiful hair, taking off her earrings and her delicate string of pearls, which always adorned her neck with such simple charm. Lost in thought, she held the necklace on her little finger up to the light, and if we rightly read her brow, it is Theobald of whom she is thinking.… Restlessly she arose, restlessly she stepped to the window and let the magnificently bright heavens with all their portent, with all their splendor, act upon her. Her love for that man, from its first imperceptible stirrings to the astonishing state of her full awareness of it, from that moment in which her feelings had already become yearning and even desire to the pinnacle of the most powerful passion—that whole range she now traversed in her mind and found it all beyond comprehension.” Immediately after this somewhat dubious passage we learn of Nolten’s “irresistible ardor,” of the “full sweet ferment” of love which “enveloped the senses” of the Countess in her remembered scene in the grotto; of “the womb of an all-knowing fate,” of “ardent gratitude” and “most heartfelt pleas.” The inflamed passion of elective affinities Mörike may have had in mind has inadvertently evolved into something precariously close to a better class of sensationalist romance, and among the vistas of parks and gardens which he has erected on the narrative stage, our Swabian vicar—who unfortunately is by no means at home in this aristocratic milieu—wanders around rather gloomily and just as aimlessly as poor Schubert in Rosamunde or in Berté’s Dreimäderlhaus. Like those of Mörike, Schubert’s theatrical and operatic ambitions—which he hoped would lead to rapid success and at least a temporary relief from his financial dependence on his friends—often misfired, and, as on occasion in Mörike’s poetry, so, too, in Schubert’s works the most masterful strokes of genius are most readily to be found in the hidden shifts of his chamber music, for example the opening of the second movement of his last piano sonata, or in the song “Die liebe Farbe” from Die schöne Müllerin; in those true moments musicaux where the iridescent chromatics begin to shimmer into dissonance and an unexpected, even false change of key suddenly signals the abandoning of all hope, or, alternatively, grief gives way to consolation. Mainly it is the Moravian Dorfmusikanten [village musicians] whom one sees Schubert accompanying on their travels from village to village. He is more at home with them than he is toiling away at the high art which bourgeois notions of culture demand. Indeed, there is a portrait of Mörike in which he looks almost exactly

  like the twin brother of the Viennese composer. Both were working at the same time, one looking out onto a Swabian apple orchard, the other in Himmelpfortgrund, both attempting a form of composition which seeks to re-create, in a snatch of half-vanished melody, that authentic Volkston which in fact has never existed as such.

  So ist mein scheuer Blick,

  Den schon die Ferne drängt,

  Noch in das Schmerzensglück

  Der Abschiedsnacht versenkt.

  Dein blaues Auge steht

  Ein dunkler See vor mir,

  Dein Kuß, dein Hauch umweht

  Dein Flüstern mich noch hier.

  An deinem Hals begräbt

  Sich weinend mein Gesicht,

  Und Purpurschwärze webt

  Mir vor den Augen dicht.

  [Thus, while the distant view

  Now claims my timid sight,

  It dwells on leaving you:

  That bitter joy, last night.

  The dark lake of your eye

  Still glimmers for me here,

  Your kiss endures, your sigh,

  Your whisper at my ear.

  My weeping face still grieves

  As on your breast it lies;

  A purple blackness weaves

  Its skein across my eyes.]

  The mistake we always make as listeners is to imagine that these miracles of composition, language, and music are drawing directly upon their natural heritage, whereas in fact they are the most artificial thing about it. What it takes to produce these effects remains, now as then, an undisclosed mystery. Certainly a rare adeptness at their craft, permitting the most minute adjustments and nuances; and then, or so I imagine, a very long memory and, possibly, a certain unluckiness in love, which appears to have been precisely the lot of those who, like Mörike and Schubert, Keller and Walser, have bequeathed to us some few of the most beautiful lines ever written.

  Not for nothing is Mörike’s work haunted by the spirit of the Swiss vagabonde Peregrina, whom at the time the young poet did not dare to stay with and whom he sent on her way “in silence,” as he remorsefully writes, “into the wide gray world.” For this enforced sacrifice of true love for the sake of the conventions of bourgeois society, which is the subject of the “Peregrina” cycle and the echoes of which resonate now here, now there, in his work, Mörike pays for the rest of his life by the fact that he is surrounded by his mother, his sister, her friend his wife, and his daughters, trapped within an allfemale household which is nothing more nor less than a travesty of the matriarchal order to which, at heart, all men long to return. This, it seems to me, is the subject of the Historie der schönen Lau [Story of the Beautiful Lau], a water nymph with long flowing hair from the Danube delta exiled to the Blautopf near Ulm, whose body resembles in all ways that of a natural woman save that “between her fingers and toes she has webbing white as blossom and more delicate than the petal of a poppy.” This fairy tale, sprinkled with a number of obscure, almost surreal Swabian dialect words, such as Schachzagel, Bartzefant, Lichtkarz, Habergeis, and Alfanz, has as its matriarchal protagonist Frau Bertha Seysolffin, the stout landlady of the Nonn
enhof, the inn at the former convent next to the Blautopf, who “also is a true foster mother to poor traveling journeymen.” In her garden “the great golden pumpkins hang in autumn all the way down the slope to the pool.” Just next door is the monastery, where the men keep their own company. Sometimes it so happens that the abbot comes out for a walk and takes a look to see if the landlady happens to be in her garden. On one such occasion in the story he also surprises her bathing in the Blautopf, greeting her with “such a smacker of a kiss that it echoed off the church tower,” reverberating all around, from the refectory, the stables, the fish house, and the laundry, where it dingdongs back and forth between bucket and tub. Here, clearly, the right people have come together. At any rate one can easily imagine what act is being rung in by the great dingdong Mörike describes, even if, for the sake of decency, he glosses over the main action, noting only that the abbot, alarmed at the noise, rapidly waddled off. The fairy-tale happiness experienced by the two stout folk by the water’s edge in Ulm harks back to a time when men and women were not bound to each other two by two, but merely appeared from time to time on the other’s horizon, rather like the moon, which one doesn’t see all the time either.