A Place in the Country

by W. G. Sebald

  The story of the beautiful Lau is, of course, a story within a story, built into another tale about Seppe, a shoemaker’s journeyman apprentice from Stuttgart who one day leaves his hometown and goes “at first,” as it says, “as far as Ulm.” The story revolves around the fact that Seppe mixes up the two pairs of magic shoes given to him by the Hutzelmännlein—the eponymous “cobbler-goblin”—one of which, the narrator reveals, “is blessed and destined for a girl,” with the result that on his journey he has great difficulty in walking. Only when he arrives back home in Stuttgart are the mismatched shoes reunited of their own accord with the feet that they are meant for, one happy pair on his own feet and the other on those of the girl Vrone, so that at the Stuttgart Fastnacht celebrations these two Swabian protégés of the Hutzelmännlein, without any rehearsal, are able to perform acrobatic feats high above the heads of the crowd, so daring that “it was as if they had been tightrope walking all their lives.” All their actions, the narrator relates, “seemed like a lovely web which they wove in time to the music.” “Seppe,” so the story continues, “as he danced did not look at the narrow rope beneath his feet, still less at the people below; he had eyes only for the girl—and when they both met in the middle he took her by the hands, they stood still and gazed fondly upon one another; and he was seen secretly to exchange a word with her. Then he suddenly leapt behind her and, turning their backs to each other, they stepped out in opposite directions. When he reached the crossing rod he stopped, waved his cap in the air, and cried out heartily, ‘Long live all the ladies and gentlemen.’ Then the whole market cried out as one, Vivat! three times, to each in turn. Amid all the noise and confusion and the fanfare of the trumpets, pipes, and drums, Seppe ran across to Vrone, who was standing at the opposite end, caught her in his arms, and kissed her for all the world to see.” In this fantasy of erotic wish fulfillment in the dance of two beings high above the earthly sphere, risen above the abyss in which society cowers, a man who has long since given up on the idea of reciprocal love rather late in life imagines one last time how different things might have been if, at the time, he had run off with the by all accounts unusually beautiful and mysterious vagabonde, Maria Meyer, and pursued a different kind of mountebank career from that of writing—that rather

  vicarious vice whose clutches those who have once embarked upon it rarely succeed in escaping. And so we see Mörike at the last sitting in the garden surrounded by his wife’s relations on a hot summer’s day, the only one with a book in his hand, and in the end not very content in his role as a poet, from which—unlike his clerical calling—he can no longer retire. Still he has to torment himself with his novel and other such literary matters. But for years now the work has not really been going anywhere. The painter Friedrich Pecht, in a reminiscence from this time, relates how on several occasions he observed Mörike noting down things which came into his head on special scraps and pieces of paper, only soon afterward to take these notes and “tear them up again into little pieces and bury them in the pockets of his dressing gown.”

  DEATH DRAWS NIGH, TIME MARCHES ON

  Some remarks on Gottfried Keller

  In no other literary work of the nineteenth century can the developments that have determined our lives even down to the present day be traced as clearly as in that of Gottfried Keller. When he started writing in the Vormärz, hopes for a social contract were beginning to blossom, there was the governing of the people by the people still to be looked forward to, and everything could still have turned out differently from the way it actually did. True, republicanism was already starting to lose something of its former heroic character, and in many places those of a freethinking disposition were beginning to succumb to the narrow-minded provincialism and petty parochial concerns which Nestroy pilloried so mercilessly in his dramas. Johannes Ruff’s hand-colored caricature of 1849 showing a well-organized Freischar, a troop of volunteers setting out on patrol, is, after all, scarcely a testament to political radicalism. Only two of the doughty men portrayed here have brought their weapons along; one, probably to help keep up his courage, is carrying a bottle of schnapps, while the mouselike standard-bearer carries a ledger under his arm, and embroidered on his flag, as a fitting emblem for the entire movement, is a brimming jug of ale. The short man beating the drum in the center is the poet himself, in the guise of an oddly civilian drum major wearing

  a top hat. Indeed, the whole scene has something distinctly unmilitary and buttoned-up about it. It is difficult to imagine that these five heroes are off to storm the barricades. Nor can it be a coincidence that the motto inscribed in the upper-left-hand corner of the picture reads “By the right, quick marrrrch!” The comic aspect of this scene, then, in a sense already anticipates the failure of the revolution. When Keller was working on the first version of Der grüne Heinrich [Green Henry] in Berlin in 1850, progress and freethinking had not been part of the Prussian agenda for quite some time. The bourgeoisie had relinquished their political aspirations, and from then on concentrated exclusively on their business interests, only engaging with the struggles for independence of other nations in their leisure time—if at all. Nevertheless, as Adolf Muschg has noted, from this north German perspective Switzerland could still be seen as “the last bastion of European progress” and as “the home of democracy, everywhere else misappropriated, betrayed and driven into exile.” Here in Switzerland, according to Muschg, “March had been followed by a constitutional May, and economic and political liberalism (otherwise to be found only in the United States and in England) had successfully become established as guiding principles of the State.” When Keller returned to Zurich in the mid-1850s and was able to study this exemplary society at first hand, despite unreservedly identifying with the principle of the sovereignty of the people, he occasionally—and as time went on increasingly—began to have doubts about the direction events were taking, even in a state in which personal and political freedoms were guaranteed as of right. Among the outstanding German writers of the nineteenth century, Keller—along with the young Büchner—is perhaps the only one who had any grasp of political ideals and political pragmatism and was therefore able to see that the gap between self-interest and the common good was growing ever wider, the emerging class of salaried workers was de facto excluded from the newly won rights and freedoms of the bourgeoisie, the term “republic,” as it says in Martin Salander, had become nothing more than “a stone given to the people in lieu of bread,” and even the middle classes were being dealt a poor hand; inasmuch as the more political disillusionment increased, so, too, in this phase of unregulated capitalism, did the constant anxiety as to the means of existence. Keller summarizes the history of the bourgeoisie synoptically, so to speak—from its fairy-tale and martial origins, via the age of Enlightenment, philanthropy, and the self-confident citoyen, right down to the bourgeoisie concerned first and foremost with the preservation of their material possessions—in the well-known passage in which the tailor Wenzel Strapinski, wandering around the streets of Goldach, reads in amazement the names on the houses. The Pilgrim’s Staff, The Bird of Paradise, The Water Nymph, The Pomegranate Tree, The Unicorn, The Iron Helmet, The Suit of Armor, The Crossbow, The Blue Shield, The Swiss Dagger: thus read the inscriptions on the oldest houses. Then, in beautiful gold lettering, come the names Eintracht [Harmony], Redlichkeit [Honesty], Liebe [Charity], Hoffnung [Hope], Recht [Law], and Landeswohl [National Prosperity], while the more recent villas of the factory owners and bankers bear whimsical names straight out of an autograph album, such as Rosental [Rose Valley], Veilchenberg [Violet Hill], and Jugendgarten [Garden of Youth], or names which seem to hint at a substantial dowry, like Henriettental or Wilhelminenburg. Our tailor with his pinpricked fingers feels very much a stranger in this small town, which the narrator describes as a kind of moral Utopia where the process of reification of our higher ideals and aspirations may literally be read from the walls and door frames of the buildings. The obverse of such prosperity, with its promise of
happiness and enjoyment, so Wenzel Strapinski realizes as he stands at the crossroads looking back at the golden orbs on the towers gleaming enticingly through the trees, is freedom—so easily lost—but also work, privation, poverty, and obscurity. Specters such as these are everywhere in Keller’s work. Acquainted with hardship from an early age through the death of his father, in retrospect his mother’s meager housekeeping, essentially consisting of almost nothing save frugality, becomes the epitome of an existence reduced to the barest minimum. “The day after my departure, more than three years ago now,” writes the eponymous protagonist in Der grüne Heinrich, “my mother had immediately altered her domestic arrangements and very nearly reduced them to the art of living on nothing. She invented a peculiar dish of her own, a species of black soup, which she made at midday, year in, year out, day after day the same, over a tiny fire, which likewise burnt practically nothing, and made one load of wood last an eternity. She did not set the table anymore on weekdays, as she only ate alone now, to save not the trouble but the cost of washing the linen, and she placed her little dish upon a simple straw mat which always stayed clean, and while she dipped her worn three-quarters spoon into the soup, she regularly invoked the Almighty, asking him to give their daily bread to all, but particularly to her son.” The art of making do with nothing which Keller describes here seems halfway to saintliness, and almost has the makings of a legend. Nevertheless, as the subtle ironic tone indicates, it does not so much present an alternative to the now all-pervasive principle of the accumulation of capital as serve precisely to exemplify it, albeit on the most modest of levels. Keller’s critique of the economic system of laissez-faire was kindled by the fact that he was obliged to experience at first hand how what has been painstakingly saved up by means of self-denial is carried over to the next generation as debt, but it goes far beyond any personal sense of resentment and is, rather, directed at the dangers—growing ever greater in proportion to the rapid increase in money in circulation—of a universal state of corruption. The Ackerbürger [city farmer] leaves his inherited property and comes to grief in the city, where—as one can read in Martin Salander—land and stock market speculation, mortgages and swindling are rife, like vine weevil and cholera, and every day clever folk are made fools of by the dozen and fools made into scoundrels. The semiallegorical characters of Weidelich, Wohlwend, and Schadenmüller stand for an entire class which now, hovering between rapidly acquired wealth and sudden ruin, threatens to sink wholesale into a hitherto unknown form of criminality. Toward the end of the novel, Martin Salander tells the story of a man sitting in a barbershop who claims that while he was having his beard trimmed, no fewer than four good acquaintances passed by on the street outside, “each of whom at the present time had a relative in prison. That,” continued the barbered one, “was rather too many during a single shave. And yet he had not, by far, seen all the people who passed by because the barber had pulled his face, by his nose-tip or chin, to one side every moment. He had perhaps overlooked several or had not recognized them because the blue screen on the window obscured the figures somewhat.” Looking at this episode, we can begin to form an idea of the dubious state of affairs prevailing in Zurich at the time. The benightedness of the citizens alluded to here, like the grating in front of the windows, is ominous enough. If anything more sinister, though, are the effects of such rampant capitalism on the natural environment. The very first page of Martin Salander informs us of “the relentless building over of the earth,” so that one now seeks in vain “the traces of the old shady friendly paths which earlier had led upward between gently rolling meadows and gardens.” A little farther on in the text we learn that of the great trees which used to stand on the land adjoining the Salanders’ house, only a single plane tree remains. “What’s become of the many fine trees which used to stand around the house?” Martin Salander, returning after a long absence, asks his wife. “Did the owner have them cut down to be sold? The fool!” and she explains the matter to him as follows: “Someone had taken the land away from him, or rather forced him to make building sites of it since several other landowners had had an unnecessary street laid. There it is, every green shade has disappeared and the ground changed into a sand and gravel surface. But no one comes to buy the lots.” Whereupon Salander comments: “They are really scoundrels to wreck the climate for themselves like that.” It is almost as if one were reading a report from yesterday’s newspaper. Not the least of Keller’s achievements is that he was one of the first to recognize the havoc which the proliferation of capital inevitably unleashes upon the natural world, upon society, and upon the emotional life of mankind.

  Friedrich Engels, in The Origin of Private Property, published in 1884, put forward the view that the transition—long predating our historical memory, in an era shrouded in myth—from a matriarchal and polygamous society to a patriarchal and monogamous one was determined by the acquisition of property whose inheritance could only be assured with certainty by means of a system of monogamy. In accordance with this theory, in many ways still extremely plausible today, one might say that even as high capitalism was spreading like wildfire in the second half of the nineteenth century, Keller in his work presents a counterimage of an earlier age in which the relationships between human beings were not yet regulated by money. In one of his childhood reminiscences, Heinrich Lee recalls how, as a boy, he often used to spend time in a dark hall or warehouse filled with every kind of junk and bric-a-brac imaginable. And, as always when Keller has the opportunity of indulging his love for all things antique, there follows an incomparable description of all the outmoded, useless, and arcane objects piled high on top of and in front of each other, beds and tables and all kinds of assorted implements, and how sometimes on the upper planes and slopes, and sometimes on the perilous lonely peaks of this bric-a-brac mountain, here an ornate rococo clock and there a waxen angel lead a quiet and as it may be posthumous existence. In contrast to the continuous circulation of capital, these evanescent objects have been withdrawn from currency, having long since served their time as traded goods, and have, in some sense, entered eternity. The sovereign and soul of this empire of junk is a stout, elderly woman in an old-fashioned costume who always sits in the same spot in her ill-lit emporium and from there oversees a white-haired old man and a whole host of other underlings coming and going around the hall. She always wears snow-white sleeves pleated in the most artful way, after a fashion no longer seen. Not only in this does she somewhat resemble a priestess: the to-ings and fro-ings before her armchair throne on the part of the male assistants and of the customers suggest that law and order are invested in her very person. As to a governor or to an abbess, we read, “the people … would bring the most diverse gifts … field produce and tree fruit of every kind, milk, honey, grapes, ham, and sausages are brought to her … and these stores are the foundation of a life of dignified ease.” Wonderful, too, is the passage in which Keller describes how Frau Margret, who is scarcely able to decipher the printed word and has never learned to reckon in Arabic numbers, using no more than four Roman numerals does her nonexistent books with a piece of soft chalk on a large tabletop by setting up long columns and, by means of a complicated series of transmutations, converts large sums of small amounts into smaller sums of larger denominations. Her system of signs and symbols, so the narrator tells us, would have appeared to any other observer like ancient heathen runes, and in truth Frau Margret, who is interested in the Christian religion only for its intercalated apocrypha and the speculations of the sectarians, seems to embody a much earlier stage of social development than that which had already been attained in her day. For this reason, the concept of capital is entirely alien to her. Any surplus she accumulates and does not need for immediate outgoings is taken out of the current purse, changed into gold, and put away in the treasure chest. It never occurs to her to let the capital work for her. It is true that she sometimes gives credit, but she does not lend money for interest. In the vaults of her emporium, then, we
are a long way from the effects, so lamented by Keller, of the money market on the economic and moral constitution of his compatriots. The preference Keller shows here, in his portrait of Frau Margret, for a system of barter over trading for profit reveals the extent of his aversion to the pace of developments taking place pell-mell all around him. It is, too, a particularly attractive trait in Keller’s work that he should afford the Jews—whom Christianity has for centuries reproached with the invention of moneylending—pride of place in a story intended to evoke the memory of a precapitalist era. In the evening, when the warehouse is closed, Frau Margret’s house becomes a kind of hostelry, offering shelter not just to favored local people but to itinerant traders, for example the Jewish peddlers, like nomads still traveling with their wares from place to place, who, after setting down their heavy packs, without a word being spoken or a written pledge exchanged, entrust their purses to the landlady for safekeeping and stand at the stove brewing a coffee or baking a piece of fish. If then talk should turn among those present to the misdemeanors of the Hebrew peoples, to the abduction of children or the poisoning of wells, or if even Frau Margret herself should claim that she once saw the restless Ahasaver in person leaving the Black Bear where he had spent the night, the Jews merely listen to these scaremongering tales, smile good-humoredly and politely, and refuse to be provoked. This good-natured smile on the part of the Jewish traders at the credulity and foolishness of the unenlightened Christian folk, which Keller captures here, is the epitome of true tolerance: the tolerance of the oppressed, barely endured minority toward those who control the vagaries of their fate. The idea of tolerance, much vaunted in the wake of the Enlightenment but in practice always diluted, pales into insignificance beside the forbearance of the Jewish people. Nor do the Jews in Keller’s works have any dealings with the evils of capitalism. What money they earn in their arduous passage from village to village is not immediately returned to circulation but is for the time being set to one side, thus becoming, like the treasure hoarded by Frau Margret, as insubstantial as gold in a fairy tale. True gold, for Keller, is always that which is spun with great effort from next to nothing, or which glistens as a reflection above the shimmering landscape. False gold, meanwhile, is the rampant proliferation of capital constantly reinvested, the perverter of all good instincts. Keller warned early on against its temptations, and one can only speculate as to what he might have had to say about the shady deals perpetrated by the Swiss banks a mere two generations after his death, let alone about the gold, purchased at the expense of the immeasurable suffering of the Jews, which was to serve as a christening present for the generation of Swiss children born after the Second World War.