German Literature

by Nicholas Boyle

  What Schiller made dramatic, Hölderlin made fully tragic.

  His odes, elegies, and Pindaric ‘hymns’, his novel Hyperion (1797–9), his unfi nished drama, The Death of Empedocles ( Der Tod des Empedokles, 1798–9), and his translations of Sophocles together make up one of the lonely summits of modern European ature er literature. Hölderlin belonged to a generation of young people whose formative experience was the fi rst fl ush of excitement at the outbreak of the French Revolution: a vision of the possibility German Lit

  of human transformation which remained with them even when the Revolution itself faded away into Realpolitik and imperialist wars and the hope of transplanting it into Germany was repeatedly disappointed. At the same time he and his fellow students of theology experienced the fi rst impact of the Kantian moral philosophy. After its aesthetic reinterpretation by Schiller, they combined it with Winckelmann’s Hellenism to create an image of ancient Greek religion as the liberated and humanist alternative to the joyless and authoritarian Lutheranism imparted in the seminaries. But Hölderlin had too deep an understanding of Christianity to be able to detach himself from it completely.

  And in 18th-century Germany there were no jobs for priests of Apollo. Schelling and Hegel broke into university philosophy but Hölderlin’s attempts at an academic career were ineffectual, he could earn little from publication, and for as long as his sanity lasted, he had to earn his living as a private tutor. He fi nally 70

  succumbed to schizophrenia in 1806 but by then he had had the ‘one summer … and one autumn for ripe song’ that he asked the fates to grant him. The poetry of his few years of maturity is marked by a uniquely powerful sense of an imminent – though never actual – divine epiphany:

  Nah ist

  Und schwer zu fassen der Gott.

  Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst

  Das Rettende auch.

  The age of ide

  [Near is,/And hard to grasp, the God./Where though there is danger grows/The means of rescue also.]

  alism (1781–1832)

  The modernity of this sense of the divine lies partly in its historicity: in Hölderlin’s conviction that God has been incarnated in human time, in the culture of Periclean Athens and in the life of Jesus Christ, and could or should have become fl esh again in his own revolutionary age, possibly in a German aesthetic republic. But the modernity also lies in the overwhelming integrity of the poetry which is the vehicle of the conviction.

  Hölderlin summoned an objective divine presence out of the depth of his faith and remained its prophet even when it turned into divine absence. He lived by his vocation, even when it seemed to condemn him to failure and madness. The sense of exposure to an inscrutable and impersonal fate grows in his later verse but it is matched by an extraordinary fortitude that continues to trust in the power of the word, or even of single words, to catch the sunlight of meaning. His fi nest poems – such as Bread and Wine ( Brod und Wein), Patmos, Midway through Life ( Hälfte des Lebens) – are the supreme achievement of the Idealist age in German literature. But the achievement was dearly purchased.

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  (ii) The birth of nationalism (1806–32) The course and character of German nationalism was largely determined by Napoleon. By replacing the Holy Roman Empire with a collection of nominally sovereign, client states he deprived Germans of the federal identity they had possessed for centuries.

  By his decision, which he came to regret, not to suppress the kingdom of Prussia after his defeat of its armies at Jena and Auerstädt in 1806, he virtually guaranteed that Prussia would be the focus of any attempt to defi ne a new unity, at least by Protestants. The symbol of Prussia’s determination to reform itself after defeat was already a symbol of its new awareness of its political and cultural centrality: the University of Berlin, founded in 1810 at the instigation of Wilhelm von Humboldt, with Fichte as its rector, clearly aspired to succeed Jena as a university for all Germany (and both Hegel and Schelling eventually taught there), but its location in the capital city (unique ature er in Germany at the time) proclaimed that the life of the mind was henceforth fully integrated into the life of the centralized sovereign state.

  German Lit

  In literature the transition from the cosmopolitan idealism of the Jena period to recognition of the determining role of the nation-state can be traced in the career of a lonely genius.

  Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811), sprung from an illustrious Prussian military family, was in philosophical and literary matters self-taught. Desperate to escape his hereditary destiny to be a soldier he tried to earn his living as a writer and journalist.

  He discovered Kant for himself but, unaware of post-Kantian developments, was more affected by Kant’s critical questions than by his constructive answers, and in his plays and stories mounted a searing assault on the moral psychology on which Schiller’s mature work was based. In both his tragedy Penthesilea (1808), for example, which shows a Greece totally lacking in the nobility and calm that Winckelmann prized, and in his enigmatic story The Marchioness of O … ( Die Marquise von O. , 1808), the 72

  heroine attempts in Schillerian fashion to defy the world and rely on the certainty of her own self-knowledge, only to discover that the self is fallible. Kleist’s later work, such as the story Trial by Combat ( Der Zweikampf, 1811) and the drama Prinz Friedrich von Homburg (1809–10), begins to suggest a way out of the dilemma: after suffering a breakdown like one of Kleist’s earlier fi gures, the Prince of Homburg recovers his identity by acknowledging that it depends on his membership of a human community, in his case the embryonic state of Prussia. The new insight came too late to save Kleist, however. Unable to make a living from his writing, and reduced to begging for any sort of an offi cial position, he committed suicide in a pact with a woman with incurable cancer.

  The age of ide

  With the exception of Kleist, Prussian writers of the early 19th century had diffi culty in establishing any organic continuity with the idealist literary culture of the small courts that had alism (1781–1832)

  borne so much fruit in the last years of the Holy Roman Empire.

  It is unfortunate that the term ‘Romanticism’ is used to refer both to the work of Friedrich Schlegel, Schelling and Novalis in linking the new philosophy of subjectivity with ideas about

  ‘Art’, religion, and the state, and to the Prussian literature of escape that refl ected the condition of the monarchy’s oppressed bourgeoisie, and was in effect the emerging intellectual end of the commercial literature of entertainment. (Between 1770

  and 1840 adult literacy rose from 15% to 50% of the German population, and by 1800 secular literature accounted for four times as many new titles as popular theology, so reversing a historic relationship which had held good until the middle of the 18th century.) Johann Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853), a Berliner who discovered the charms of the old Empire, residing in Jena in its great days and editing the literary remains of Novalis, followed Jean Paul as one of the fi rst fully professional German men of letters who was not a mere hack. But he was a literary jackdaw, appropriating whatever was fashionable and could be made to sell without always appreciating its worth – his The Wanderings 73

  of Franz Sternbald ( Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen, 1798), for example, imitated Wilhelm Meister while stripping out the analysis of identity that made Goethe’s novel both signifi cant and inaccessible. Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann (1776–1822) was a more considerable talent, a gifted musician, a highly placed legal offi cial, and a true disciple of Jean Paul. He both exaggerated his master’s contrast between reality and fantasy and made it a more explicit expression of the contrast between the corralled bourgeoisie and the free-fl oating intellectuals to whom Germany owed its new conception of culture ( Life and Opinions of Murr the Tom-Cat [ Lebens-Ansichten des Katers Murr], 1820–2). The nightmarish element in the fantasy, which he shares with Tieck, hints none the less at the bourgeoisie’s deeply buried aggression against the bureaucratic, purportedly rational, political
order ( The Sandman [ Der Sandmann], 1815). Cut off by his Catholicism from the aesthetic idealism of Weimar and Jena, which was by origin entirely Protestant, and exiled from his Silesian homeland ature er to the civil service in Berlin, Joseph von Eichendorff (1788–1857) turned a similar sense of alienation into melodious and nostalgic poems, still widely popular, on Goethean landscapes – hills, German Lit

  forests, warm summer moonlight – in which, however, the charm of an impersonal distance is substituted for Goethe’s ever-present and ever-reactive self.

  It was Fichte who found a way to link the Jena philosophy of subjectivity with the political imperative to defi ne German life in terms of the new concept of the nation-state and who thus made it possible for a unifi ed Germany to seem a compelling intellectual necessity. In 1807–8, in a Berlin still garrisoned by the French, he delivered a series of Addresses to the German Nation ( Reden an die deutsche Nation) in which he claimed that idealist philosophy necessarily gave a unique place in European history to Germany, since Germany had given birth to idealist philosophy, and called on Germans to identify themselves with this historical mission by identifying themselves with the state that was its 74

  embodiment. The apex of the conceptual pyramid, which in Jena had been occupied by Art, was in Berlin to be occupied by the historical life of the nation. A new wave of enthusiasm for the German past swept across intellectual Germany, but unlike the historical turn of the Storm and Stress years it was motivated, not by the search for cultural resources that pre-dated absolutism, but by the search for a nationhood that could be opposed to that of the occupying French. It was both more escapist and more professionally purposeful than the movement of the previous generation and was principally directed not towards the 16th century, when the federal Empire was still relatively strong and the bourgeoisie was still in the ascendant, but towards an earlier Middle Ages, and chivalrous and pious myths that disguised military and state power rather than responding to economic The age of ide

  realities. The Prussian Ludwig Achim von Arnim (1781–1831) joined forces with Clemens Brentano (1778–1842) from Frankfurt, who was the son of an early fl ame of Goethe’s and whose sister alism (1781–1832)

  Arnim eventually married, to collect (mainly southwest) German folk songs as Goethe and Herder had done. But the nostalgic tone of their highly successful anthology, The Boy’s Magic Horn ( Des Knaben Wunderhorn, 1806–8), betrayed that it was the voice of a Germany that was a past or future, not a present reality. Serious medieval philology was already beginning, however; the Lay of the Nibelungs was translated in 1807 by a future professor of German literature at the University of Berlin; and the scholars Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm (1785–1863, 1786–1859) collected Hessian ‘fairy’

  tales and launched the fi rst historical dictionary of the German language (which took well over a hundred years to complete).

  The universities were, as Fichte envisaged, a focus of the more political forms of nationalism, and students – and student-poets not otherwise of literary signifi cance – were prominent among the volunteers who, as a historical mirror-image of the French popular armies in the early Revolutionary days, and in black, red, and gold uniform, helped to sweep away the invaders in the ‘Wars of Liberation’ of 1812–14.

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  Germany’s federal tradition continued, however, to be of cultural importance. While Prussia grew towards a bureaucratic model of the nation-state and Austria turned its attention south and east, the smaller German territories kept alive something of the spirit of the old Empire, its cosmopolitanism, and its belief in a literary and intellectual community larger than the local political unit.

  Hegel, though often misrepresented as a Prussian nationalist, saw the model of political life in the constitutional monarchies which briefl y, between 1815 and the Carlsbad decrees of 1819, looked like Germany’s future, and in his maturity he regarded contemporary Germany as a structure of interrelated sovereign states, not, even potentially, as a single polity. His encyclopaedic interest in world history was typical of the curiosity that could fl ourish in German courts and universities, uncompromised by any imperialist designs of their own, about the wider world being opened up to Europe by its newly expanding empires. Wilhelm von Humboldt and the Schlegels made themselves expert in the ature er languages of ancient India, while Alexander von Humboldt, after years of exploration in the Americas, began to see the world as a single biological system ( Cosmos, 1845–62). A different kind of German Lit

  desire to transcend incipient nationalism was shown by a number of intellectuals who converted to Catholicism and thereby opted out of offi cial idealist culture altogether: Friedrich Schlegel, who converted in 1808, and Zacharias Werner (1768–1823), an able dramatist, whom Goethe briefl y considered a possible successor to Schiller in Weimar, but who ended life as a priest in Vienna.

  Goethe held his own course through these troubled waters. The death of Schiller and the battle of Jena, which nearly led to the extinction of the duchy of Weimar, were traumatically decisive events for him, and after his experiment with Werner he took a public stand against ‘Romanticism’ and especially Romantic religiosity. His subtle and complex novel, Elective Affi nities ( Die Wahlverwandschaften, 1809), based on an episode in the career of the Schlegels, structured around one of the supreme examples of the device of the unreliable narrator, and set in a country house 76

  8. Life mask (1807) of Goethe at 58 – the nearest we have to a photograph of him

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  and parkland whose symbolic implications only gradually become apparent, shows the tragically destructive effects of Romantic attitudes on the lives and feelings of four contemporary people.

  Goethe also found it easier than many of his fellow Germans to reconcile himself to the rule of Napoleon, who seemed to him an almost legitimate successor to the Holy Roman Emperor and a continuator of the Enlightenment tradition of fi rm but rational government. In the later years of the Napoleonic Empire, he felt suffi ciently at ease with himself and his public to embark on an extensive autobiography, an avowed and often misleading stylization of a literary career which he now thought was largely in the past, Truth and Fiction from my Life ( Aus meinem Leben Dichtung und Wahrheit, 1811–33). But the turmoil of Napoleon’s overthrow, and the reactionary and churchy atmosphere of the Restoration, isolated him once more and provoked a new outburst of poetic activity as he fl ed in his imagination into the sceptical, non-Christian, wine-bibbing, and erotically relaxed atmosphere of ature er medieval Iran. The Parliament of East and West ( West-Östlicher Divan, 1819), the collection of poems which he wrote in an extraordinary conversation across the centuries with the Persian German Lit

  poet Hafi z, found few admirers at the time – though Hegel was among them – but it anticipated an orientalizing strand in poetry which lasted for most of the 19th century. In the last third of his life, Goethe turned defi nitively to print as the focus of his activity and to three increasingly weighty editions of his collected works.

  For the last of these, intended to secure the fi nancial future of his family, he obtained the fi rst grant of an effective copyright for all the German-speaking territories: Germany had fi nally become a nation, if only in literature. But Goethe was not moved by nationalist fervour and was suspicious of the nation-state, especially Prussia. He thought of himself as writing for the like-minded, wherever they might be, and increasingly as writing for the future, reserving the publication of the second part of his life’s work, Faust, until after his death. Faust. Part Two (1832) is Goethe’s last word on the age he had lived through, a poetic and symbolic panorama taking in the misrule and frustrations of the 78

  last years of the ancien régime, the quixotic cultural endeavours of the great age of idealism (symbolized in Faust’s brief marriage to Helen of Troy), the explosion of violence in revolution and war, and the advance of capital and industry, empire, and undisguised state power, in the post-Napoleonic era. Through it all Faust threads his way, his fateful wag
er now virtually a symbol of the moral ambivalence of modernity, as destructive as it is creative.

  Goethe’s fi nal judgement on Faust is correspondingly ambiguous, poised between an annihilating, but realistic, dismissal by Mephistopheles and a triumphant, but ironical, expression of hope by the hosts of heaven: a permanent challenge to us who come after to reassess the play, and ourselves.

  The age of ide

  alism (1781–1832)

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  Chapter 4

  The age of materialism

  (1832–1914)

  (i) Mind and matter (1832–72)

  Between the two French revolutions of 1830 and 1848, German writers had to battle to defi ne themselves on two different fronts.

  They had to resist (or accept) the repression and censorship with which their rulers sought to prevent the French contagion from spreading eastwards. And they had to accept (or repudiate) the inheritance of the great period of cultural achievement which had come to an end with the deaths of Beethoven, Hegel, and Goethe. But in this battle who was the enemy? Was it the repressive monarchy and bureaucracy, to which, after all, the great minds of two previous generations had accommodated themselves? To say that would be to align yourself with the bourgeoisie whom the age of absolutism had excluded both from political power and from signifi cant literary activity.

  Or was the enemy the bourgeois themselves who, as chronic non-participants, deserved to be ridiculed as ‘philistines’ (a student slang term which, with the sense of ‘impervious to the Art of the elite’ came into general currency at this time)? That would be to cut yourself off from the class which in France and England was most obviously the instrument of economic, technological, and political modernization. It was an age therefore of reluctant bourgeois, and disaffected or failed offi cials, whose 80