German Literature

by Nicholas Boyle

  of emasculation. It tells two stories, one of Götz, who spends his life fi ghting to arrest the course of history and defend the old freedoms of the Holy Roman Empire, and one of his alter ego, Weislingen, who throws in his lot with the rising power of princely absolutism. But the zestful energy of the story-telling, by a poet in love with his subject matter, conceals that both life-plans end in a cul-de-sac: Götz fades away into admonitory irrelevance; Weislingen succumbs to his own inner divisions. Götz was one of the fi rst consciously ‘historical’ works of imaginative literature and it was an important model for Walter Scott, who translated it. But its themes of political confl ict and personal destiny belonged to Goethe’s own time and generation, and in his next major work he succeeded in incorporating those themes into a realistic depiction of contemporary life, not in the compromise form of a virtually unstageable drama, but in the modern form par excellence, in a novel.

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  The Sorrows of Young Werther ( Die Leiden des jungen Werther,

  1774) made Goethe a European name, though the novel’s tragic plot depends on specifi cally German circumstances (and was based on a real event). It is a novel in letters, but since the letters all come from Werther and say nothing about their addressees they appear to be written to the book’s readers, who are thereby invited to see themselves as a circle of correspondents and Werther as one of their own. Even now the novel has an extraordinary power to draw its readers into the intoxicating logic of Werther’s hyperactive sensibility: the swings of mood in his response to the natural world; his obsessive love for Lotte, engaged, and then married, to another man; the disintegration of his mind as an ‘Editor’ steps in to piece together the evidence The la

  for the last days and hours before he shoots himself. What might make the book seem dated is actually the reason for its ying of the f

  continuing modernity: for all the importance in it of the idea of

  ‘Nature’, it represents feelings not simply as spontaneous but as o

  furnished to its characters, and to its readers too, by culture – by undations (t

  books and fashions. Its realism is social, even in matters of the mind. Werther wears the clothes and boots of an English country gentleman to demonstrate both his personal integrity and his o 1781)

  independence of court and university and he and Lotte know they are soulmates because they both react to a thunderstorm with a reminiscence of the same ode by Klopstock. Werther’s story is therefore not simply the story of the self-destruction of a pathological individual, but like Emilia Galotti – and Lessing’s play is open beside him when he dies – he is driven to his death by social and political constraints as well. Halfway through his

  ‘affair’ with Lotte he attempts to escape from his emotions by taking a job as a state offi cial. However, he has enough money – he is enough of a true bourgeois – not to be kept in the job by fi nancial necessity and he soon feels driven out of it, and back to his obsession with Lotte, by the exclusivism of the ruling nobility, who see in him a representative of the new class of upstart intellectual. With a specifi city the brilliance of which has faded little with time, Werther recounts the failure, in hostile economic 51

  and political conditions, of the bid from that class to establish a culture of its own on an English model. But the novel also shows the consequences of failure: the danger that the Sentimentalism which was the only alternative to revolt would run out of control and feeling would become detached from any external reality, even from life.

  Werther destroys only himself. But the revolt of the ‘geniuses’, as those around Goethe were soon called, could extract a price from others too. At the same time as he was writing Werther Goethe was thinking about the 16th century again. But the version of the Faust legend that he was drafting was far from being a historical drama like Götz. He envisaged a ‘new’ Faust in which a light historical varnish would ease the introduction of a few unavoidable supernatural elements into an essentially modern plot. Apart from its fi rst three scenes, which show Faust as a magician who, in some unexplained way, acquires a ature er diabolical companion, Mephistopheles, Goethe’s fi rst draft of his life’s work – usually called Urfaust (‘the original Faust’) – is an 18th-century seduction narrative which owes much to Richardson German Lit

  and little to the original chap-books and plays. There is no warrant in the tradition for the story of Faust’s liaison with a town-girl, Margarete (‘Gretchen’ is an affectionate diminutive), unless she is seen as this modern Faust’s modern Helen, as Goethe at one time probably intended. Goethe’s play is quite different, however, from other seduction stories of the time – Miss Sara Sampson, for example. The difference lies, fi rstly, in the character and motivation of the seducer. The fi rst scenes are not detachable from the rest of the action: Faust is no philanderer, his love-affair with Gretchen is a fulfi lment of the passionate urge he expresses in his opening monologue to leave behind the cerebral world of mere thought and embrace with all his senses the full human lot. He turns his back on the university – the only trace of princely Germany in the play’s social setting – and seeks reality in the life of the town, fi rst in its taverns and then in the little world of its hard-working but contented, Catholic, 52

  inhabitants who seem untroubled by the yearnings that torment him, a free thinker, and probably a (former) Protestant. Yet his disquiet echoes their deeper needs too: because Gretchen can recognize in Faust the promise of some unknown, but not unreal, fulfi lment she can respond to him in desire, while Faust’s desire for her, at fi rst simply sensual, turns to love. The sympathetic realism with which her relatively lowly milieu is depicted – her sparsely furnished room, her homely turns of phrase, the gossip of her neighbours – has few parallels in contemporary literature (Goldsmith perhaps); the stark tragedy of her desperation in pregnancy, her alienation from her family, her infanticide, madness, and condemnation to a death she still fears, has none.

  The malignant presence of Mephistopheles, who rejoices in her The la

  undoing, extends her tragedy to Faust. Her end seems to be her lover’s too and the revolt of this modern Faust seems, like that of ying of the f

  his original, to lead him down to Hell, cast out even by the world with which he has fallen in love. But the signifi cance of this simple o

  story, simply told, is enlarged and transfi gured as Goethe pours undations (t

  into it all the resources of the poems he was writing at the time.

  Each of the concise, individual, almost disconnected scenes has its own mood, and most have their own time of day. The feeling o 1781)

  soul, whose insistent longing for reality is imperiously articulated by Faust, enters into the texture of the play. The powerful visual themes around which the scenes are built up – Faust’s magic book, Gretchen combing her hair or offering fl owers to the Madonna – are enhanced by the rich imagery and rhythmic variety of Faust’s visions and Gretchen’s haunting songs, and by the terrible plausibility of her fi nal ramblings in prose. A bitter story of cultural defeat is transformed by Goethe’s poetry into a true tragedy of love and betrayal, ambition and guilt.

  Lenz and Wagner, who both also treated the theme of the infanticide mother, shared Goethe’s empathy for popular speech, though without his ability to turn it into poetry. Lenz, however, achieved something almost as remarkable: his plays The Tutor ( Der Hofmeister, 1774) and The Soldiers ( Die Soldaten, 1776 ) are 53

  virtually novels about contemporary Germany. Dramatic structure is dissolved into a kaleidoscope of plots and snapshot scenes, but the dramatic form is used to create an extraordinary objectivity.

  Lenz ruthlessly strips out any compromise with Sentimentalism and the monadic tradition: his characters have no inner life but are shown as functioning social mechanisms, manipulating each other through language. They may appear to be grotesques but they are still capable of suffering, and Lenz was as aware as Goethe of the tragic potential in his society. Läuffer, the tutor, in his
play of that name, is an exemplar of the class of unemployed ex-theologians (Lenz himself was one) out of which German literature, and the Storm and Stress, emerged. But Läuffer is no Faust. He falls in love with his charge and caught between inescapable desire and equally inescapable oppression he gives up the struggle and emasculates himself. The failed revolt, a theme of many works of the Storm and Stress, was a historical reality though no one represented its true character as directly and ature er painfully as Lenz. Lenz himself succumbed to mental illness, and most of his fellow-writers emigrated or otherwise fell silent.

  German Lit

  Goethe, however, did not give up, though he considered emigration to Switzerland. In 1775 he did transplant himself, but within Germany. He broke off his work on Egmont, a play he had started to write on the 16th-century Dutch revolt against Spanish absolute rule, followed Wieland’s example, and settled in Weimar at the invitation of Duke Karl August, now 18 years old. At his suggestion Herder was summoned shortly afterwards to become the spiritual head of the duchy’s Lutheran Church. Goethe’s move from bourgeois Frankfurt was an acceptance of reality, of the primacy of princely Germany, and it both coincided with the peak of Storm and Stress and marked its passing. 1776 anyway put an end to the mid-century outburst of Anglophilia. Once England was at war with its American colonies it could no longer be represented simply as the land of the free. There was no longer an obvious external model for those who felt oppressed by conditions at home, and no longer an easy choice between the culture of the 54

  towns and the culture of the princes or between the empiricist and the rationalist Enlightenment. Germany would have to fi nd its own way out of its internal confl icts. In 1776 two high-voltage plays – The Twins ( Die Zwillinge) by Friedrich Maximilian Klinger (1752–1831) and the more nuanced Julius von Tarent by Johann Anton Leisewitz (1752–1806) – gave expression to this new, or newly acute, dilemma, by means of the same dramatic motif: the murderous strife of two brothers. At the same time a rebellious schoolboy in Stuttgart, Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), began drafting the defi nitive treatment of the theme, his fi rst play, The Robbers ( Die Räuber), which took the reading public by storm on its publication in 1781, and reduced its audience to sobs and swoons when it was fi rst performed the following year.

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  Like the two wings of the German middle class, the bourgeois and ying of the f

  the offi cials, Schiller’s two brothers are united by what divides them: they are both potential successors to the ancien régime o

  represented by their father, the almost permanently moribund undations (t

  Count von Moor. Karl, the legitimate heir, has a high ethical sense but while at university is tricked into revolt by his younger brother, Franz. Franz, a materialist, determinist, and would-be o 1781)

  atheist, puts on an appearance of subservience but is plotting not only to supplant his brother but to kill their father. Karl’s crimes as leader of a robber band, however, prove more real and more numerous than those of Franz and when the Count fi nally dies both brothers are equally responsible. But the succession falls to neither, for both have committed suicide – Franz literally, and Karl in effect, by surrendering himself to the power of the law, in order to expiate his wrongdoing. The moral authority of the dead father is the sole survivor of two collapsed insurrections, though it is unclear in what form that authority can now be embodied, since all existing legal institutions have been denounced as hopelessly corrupt. A modern, international audience can still be gripped by the story of Karl and his band, a prescient analysis of the logic of self-righteous terrorism in a moral void. The huge success of the play in Germany in its own time and subsequently was no 55

  6. August Wilhelm Iffl and (1759–1814), playwright and actor-director, as Franz Moor in the fi rst performance of Schiller’s The Robbers

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  doubt due to the ferocity with which it dramatized the confl ict between the two value-systems available to the middle class in its struggle against princely rule – self-interested materialism or university-educated idealism – while it left prudently unassailed the structure of power itself. The future seemed to lie with a suitably chastened Karl rather than the rapaciously individualist Franz. Schiller’s late version of Storm and Stress was free of any hankerings after England and largely unaffected by Herder’s and Goethe’s desire to revive older German culture, especially that of the towns. Instead Schiller focussed, with the penetrating clarity of a born dramatist, on the political and moral fault-lines in his contemporary society. With The Robbers an independent modern German literary tradition begins.

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  ying of the f

  oundations (t

  o 1781)

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  Chapter 3

  The age of idealism

  (1781–1832)

  (i) A republic of letters (1781–1806)

  1781 was a remarkable year. It saw the publication not only of The Robbers but of another work destined to have an even deeper and wider effect on German culture, Critique of Pure Reason ( Kritik der reinen Vernunft) by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804).

  ‘No man of learning’, Goethe later wrote, ‘has with impunity rejected, opposed, or disdained the great philosophical movement begun by Kant’. Kant had been through his own version of the crisis that in literature culminated in Storm and Stress, but unlike the poets he had spent the 1770s publishing nothing, just thinking and writing. He was free to do so because in 1770, after 15 years as a private teacher of Wolffi anism, he had at last been appointed to a salaried professorial chair in the university of Königsberg. But at about the same time he was confronted with the challenge of the radically sceptical empiricism of David Hume, which seemed to put into question his life’s work so far.

  In the ten years of thought that followed Kant endeavoured to reconcile the empiricist Enlightenment of the bourgeoisie with the rationalist Enlightenment of the offi cials in a new fusion to which he gave the name of Idealism. Kant believed he had shown that something like the Leibniz-Wolffi an rational order of things is implied or presupposed by what we can know of the world through our senses: we cannot know that order directly, because it 58

  is the precondition of our knowing anything at all, but it furnishes the ideal, or pattern, to which we have to approximate what we do know. Knowledge has to have both an empirical content and a rational form. Kant achieves this result by a re-examination of the relation in our experience between the subjective and the objective (terms that acquired their modern sense in German academic philosophy in his lifetime), which he compares to the Copernican revolution in astronomy. Just as Copernicus argued that we saw movement in the sky not because the stars move but because the earth moves, so, Kant implies, he has shown, without changing the appearance of the natural or moral world, that some of its basic features are to be attributed to the observer, not to the observed, to the subject, not to the object. We cannot know things as they are in themselves, we can know them only as The age of ide

  they appear to us, mediated through our perceptual and mental apparatus, and acquiring on the way an aspiration to a necessary and rational structure. In his theory of knowledge Kant carefully alism (1781–1832)

  balances the claims of the sensuous and the particular against the claims of the rational and universal. In his moral theory, similarly, he balances the – apparently radically individualist – assertion that only the free actions of a self-determining agent, unaffected by external infl uences, can count as moral against the equally emphatic assertion that freedom is not freedom to do what you like but freedom to impose on yourself a universal law. This subtle compromise between two different Enlightenments provided an ideological basis on which the German offi cial class could claim to represent and harmonize the interests both of the economically productive middle class and of the absolute monarch, or state, which they served. By the mid-1790s, Kantians had completely displaced Wolffi ans in the chairs of philosophy in German universities. The peri
od of offi cialdom’s cultural hegemony – the age of philosophical idealism – was the period in which German literature bore its most distinctive fruits, its classical age.

  The year 1781 was also marked by another milestone: the death of Lessing. His life after he settled in Wolfenbüttel foreshadowed 59

  what was to come. His publication of an exhaustive critique of the New Testament left in manuscript by the previous librarian led to a virulent controversy with the Lutheran hierarchy, which expanded from theological issues to include the freedom of the press and was abruptly terminated by the fi at of the Duke of Brunswick, his sovereign and employer. Lessing’s response was to shift the confl ict on to less exposed terrain. He returned to the drama to create an altogether new kind of play in Nathan the Wise ( Nathan der Weise, 1779), which he called a ‘dramatic poem’

  because it was written in blank verse and was to be published as a book, since he did not expect it to be produced in a theatre. Set in Jerusalem at the time of the Crusades, Nathan is a comedy which purports to show the achievement of mutual tolerance between representatives of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In fact they recognize rather that they all share a fourth, rational, religion, which refrains from judging the truth of any of the acknowledged faiths and constitutes a kind of secret freemasonry ature er of those ‘for whom it is enough to be called human’. Nathan the Wise is the prototype of the German ‘classical’ drama of the next hundred years: a play in verse, written to be read as much as to be German Lit

  performed, on a philosophical or moral theme that reinterprets or secularizes a theological issue, and with an elite rather than a popular appeal – Nathan is, among other things, about elitism and represents, in its principal characters, the audience for the genre that it founds.