German Literature

by Nicholas Boyle

  preferred relationship to their inheritance was to accept it but to reverse what they took to be its own understanding of its achievements.

  The doubly ambivalent relationship to the past is crisply clear in the case of philosophy. The philosophers who dominated the new age in Germany were materialist where their predecessors had been idealist, and socially autonomous where their predecessors had been dependent. The new leaders of thought made their way outside the institutions of state. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) led a life of permanent semi-retirement on the proceeds of his father’s commercial career, reinvested in banking concerns. Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72) was supported for the greater part of his career by a porcelain factory owned by his wife.

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  Karl Marx (1818–83) in his later years could rely on the assistance of Friedrich Engels’ (1820–95) family money, derived from the Manchester textile industry. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) erialism (1832–1914)

  also had the support of a family inheritance originally made in England, and not forfeited when his brother-in-law was bankrupted by a bizarre colonial adventure in Paraguay. Moreover, as literacy rose, the great expansion of publishing and journalism (the number of bookshops in Berlin, Leipzig, and Stuttgart more than doubled between 1831 and 1855) gave to Marx, and especially to the radical religious writer David Friedrich Strauss (1808–74), the opportunity of being a literary freelance which had been denied to Hölderlin and Kleist. From 1830 to 1914, as neither before nor since, Germany possessed a recognizably bourgeois intellectual class, comparable with that of contemporary France and England. Recognizably bourgeois, but not always willingly so.

  Every one of these thinkers began with the ambition of becoming a university professor but turned away, or was prevented, from realizing it. Schopenhauer abandoned university life with relief after an unsuccessful attempt at direct competition with Hegel’s lectures in Berlin, but he never forgave the academic philosophers ( Kathederphilosophen) their popularity and their infl uence.

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  Strauss was dismissed from his teaching post in Tübingen on the publication of his deconstructive Life of Jesus in 1835, and the civil war (literally) that broke out in Zurich when he was proposed for the chair of theology there put him on every university’s blacklist for good. In 1842, Bruno Bauer (1809–82) lost his post at Bonn for publishing critical works on the New Testament. His young protégé, Karl Marx, had in consequence to give up his academic ambitions as well and found himself launched into journalism.

  For years Feuerbach hoped for a chair of philosophy but had to recognize it was impossible after the publication and explosive success of his scandalous The Essence of Christianity ( Das Wesen des Christentums) in 1841. Nietzsche savaged Strauss, who by the 1870s was the grand old man of German letters, but shared his scorn for the academic world, from which Nietzsche decisively alienated himself by his fi rst publication as Basle professor of classics, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music ( Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik, 1872). Like Schopenhauer, ature er whom by then he also despised, Nietzsche fi nally retired from the university into pensioned isolation.

  German Lit

  The philosophers of this generation did not therefore simply reject what they had inherited – dismiss it with indifference as irrelevant to a changed world. Their reaction was tinged with bitterness and pervaded by a combative desire to achieve the old aims in a new context, sometimes reluctantly chosen. It was not so much a rejection as a conscious inversion of the past. The major fi gures were emphatic in subordinating the human power of thought to some prior principle: in Schopenhauer the will, in Feuerbach the senses, in Marx class interest, in Nietzsche, in one form or another, all three. These very different writers had in common that they were deliberately overthrowing the primacy given to thought, or ‘reason’, by German philosophy from Leibniz to Hegel, and this act of regicide they all presented as a reversal of a relationship seen as prevalent in classical German philosophy. The pithiest formulation of the principle happens to stand in Marx’ and Engels’ German Ideology 82

  ( Die deutsche Ideologie), a manuscript of 1845–7 (published 1932), but it could as easily have been written by Schopenhauer, Feuerbach, or Nietzsche:

  It is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness.

  Since, however, it was not true that classical German philosophy thought ‘consciousness determines life’, the belief of its successors that they were reversing what had gone before was not true either. But the idea of a reversal had a great emotional charge for all of them and the rhetoric of inversion is everywhere in their works. As usual, behind the appearance of parricide lay feelings of love as well as of anger. The claim to reversal The age of mat

  was really a claim to continuity, but it also expressed an angry recognition that historical change had made mere continuity impossible.

  erialism (1832–1914)

  A more subtly ambivalent relation to the past runs through the literature of these years. The poetry and prose of Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) was dominated by the conviction that he had lived through the ‘ending of the “Goethean aesthetic period” ’ into an age of industrialism, communism, and a German revolution to come. Yet his fi rst and most lasting success as a poet was achieved with collections of verse which seem at fi rst sight a limpid distillation of the lyrical and folk-song manner of Goethe and, especially, The Boy’s Magic Horn ( Book of Songs [ Buch der Lieder], 1827–39, New Poems [ Neue Gedichte], 1844). Seen more closely, they prove to be shot through with an ironical – and Byronical – astonishment that a modern man can be such a fool as to be taken in by idealist or Romantic notions of the beauty of love, Nature, and poetry:

  Teurer Freund, du bist verliebt,

  Und du willst es nicht bekennen,

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  Und ich seh des Herzens Glut Schon durch deine Weste brennen.

  [Dear friend, you are in love and will not admit it, and I can already see the fi re in your heart glowing through your waistcoat.]

  But perhaps to be modern (at any rate, in Heine’s circumstances) is to be a fool, and to live with divided loyalties. A life is no less real, and certainly no less painful, for being divided: Ach Gott! Im Scherz und unbewußt

  Sprach ich, was ich gefühlet;

  Ich hab mit dem Tod in der eignen Brust

  ature er

  Den sterbenden Fechter gespielet.

  [Oh God, in jest, and without knowing it, I uttered what I really German Lit

  felt; I played the dying gladiator with death in my own breast.]

  Coming from a Jewish banking family, Heine had no love for Restoration Germany in which, after the repeal of Napoleon’s emancipatory legislation, he had to convert to Christianity if he was to become, as originally intended, either a lawyer or an academic. The revolution of 1830 attracted him to Paris, and from there he sent German newspapers reports on French art, literature, and politics while settling accounts with his own traditions in two pyrotechnically unfl attering studies, On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany ( Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland, 1834) and The Romantic School ( Die romantische Schule, 1831–2). In 1835 the Germanic Federation prohibited his writings, along with those of a number of other radical authors, collectively known as ‘Young Germany’ ( Junges Deutschland). Despite the reduction in his 84

  literary earnings Heine survived on a French state pension and occasional subsidies from his family and was able to marry his mistress, an uneducated French woman, about whom he wrote some of his warmest poems. In the 1840s, when he met the young Marx, also in exile in Paris, and contributed to his journal, his poetry turned to political satire ( Germany. A Winter’s Tale

  [ Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen], 1844: ‘The Customs Union

  […] will give us the “material” unity, the spiritual will be provided by the censorship offi ce’) and then to historical and Jewish themes, taking on a darker colou
ring.

  The failure of the German ‘revolution’ in 1848 coincided for Heine with the onset of spinal tuberculosis which for the next eight years confi ned him to his bed. As he faced pain and death The age of mat

  in this ‘mattress-grave’, his sense of the irony of history grew bitterly personal, but, though Heine mocks everything else, he never mocks his relationship with his audience. If his readers erialism (1832–1914)

  are involved in an absurdity – such as the attempt to see the world of waistcoats and customs unions through the spectacles of Romanticism – he ensures that they know he is involved in it too. He writes with a journalist’s respect for his public, and his confi dence that he has a public marks him off from the tragically isolated intellectuals and elite offi cials who had given him and the Germany he wrote for a literary and philosophical tradition.

  I have just come from the Christmas market. Everywhere groups of freezing children in rags standing wide-eyed and sad-faced in front of marvels made of water and fl our, rubbish and tinsel. The thought that for most people even the most pitiful joys and pleasures are unattainable riches made me very bitter.

  Compassion for Germany’s poor and excluded drove Georg Büchner (1813–37) to an angry rejection of the tradition of idealism. He looked instead to the realism of the Storm and Stress movement that had preceded it, to Goethe’s early works and the Gretchen story in Faust, and to the plays of Lenz. Yet his writings, 85

  most of which became known only after the publication of a collected edition in 1875, are haunted by a sense of lost wholeness and a search for the meaning of suffering that seems to require a religious answer, though it is left unformulated. In 1834 he published an insurrectionary pamphlet with the slogan ‘Peace to the cottages! War on the palaces!’, he was denounced to the police and in 1835 had to fl ee to France though he was too obscure to be named in the prohibition of Young Germany later that year. To raise money for his escape he wrote, in fi ve weeks, a play of great originality. Thematically, The Death of Danton ( Dantons Tod), owes much to Goethe’s Egmont and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, but its open form is deliberately opposed to the purposeful ethical structure of Schiller’s historical tragedies and looks back to Lenz’s The Soldiers. (The fi rst publisher of the complete text felt he had to explain its apparent lack of structure by adding the subtitle: Scenes from France’s Reign of Terror.) Set in March and April 1794

  it draws on verbatim extracts from revolutionary speeches to show ature er Danton drifting towards arrest, arraignment, and execution out of lethargy, complacency (‘they will never dare’), disgust with the continuing pointless slaughter, and guilt over his own involvement German Lit

  in the September Massacres of 1792. Gradually, though, Danton recognizes that his weariness of life, his cynicism about human motives, his easy egotism, perhaps even his atheism, are all a pose and that for the sake of love he must fi ght to survive – but it is too late and history goes on its way. The play’s language is overwrought. But its emphatically recurrent image of burial alive is justifi ed by its essentially religious insight: that there is no escape from existence into freedom or nothingness, and that to exist is both to suffer and to love.

  Büchner came of a medical family and in exile was made an anatomy lecturer in the University of Zurich. He gave up politics, but not literature. His short story, Lenz, which like The Death of Danton draws on and cites authentic materials – in this case, the diary of Pastor Oberlin, with whom Lenz stayed in 1778 –, has the complete formal assurance which the play lacks. There is no 86

  precedent in German prose, not even in Goethe or Kleist, for its dispassionate but deeply sympathetic third-person narration.

  In a style free from irony and artifi ce, the narrator voices the agony of Lenz’s mental derangement but never colludes with it. Enactments of Lenz’s consciousness, through metaphor or the disruption of syntax, are continuous with the cool, medical registration of his behaviour; the internal and the external are equally open to view but they are not confused: he could feel in himself a stirring and wriggling towards an abyss into which an implacable force was dragging him. He was now burrowing into himself. He ate little; half the nights in prayer and feverish dreams.

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  In a conversation with a visiting intellectual Lenz expresses his artistic principles: ‘You must love humanity in order to penetrate into the particular essence of every individual’. Such love – an erialism (1832–1914)

  understanding too deep and broad to be mere identifi cation with what is loved – is shown by Büchner in Lenz and in his dramatic masterpiece, Woyzeck. Woyzeck is incomplete and there is no single defi nitive version of it, but that hardly matters.

  Büchner structured the play as a series of short, discrete, strongly drawn scenes, whose effect is cumulative rather than sequential.

  Once again Büchner based his story on documentary material: the medical reports on a private soldier executed in 1824 for the murder of his mistress after the fi rst plea in Germany of diminished responsibility due to insanity. Literature can have no higher aim, Büchner’s Lenz says, than to reproduce a little of the life that is in God’s creation, and in his Woyzeck Büchner gave life to a fi gure who would have been beneath the notice of all previous tragic writers, the fi rst proletarian ‘hero’ in German – perhaps in any – non-comic literature. Woyzeck appears as everybody’s victim, at the bottom of every hierarchy, military, social, economic, sexual; even physically he is humiliated in a fi ght, and he is treated as lower than a guinea-pig by the regimental doctor who uses him in his dietetic experiments. Yet he retains his humanity in 87

  the little household that he makes up with his Marie and their child, until even this is taken away from him by her adultery with the Drum-Major and in his madness he kills her. The bitter satire of Woyzeck’s superiors, particularly the Doctor, the lurid scenes at a fair, a drunken parody of a sermon on man’s origins in dirt, and a bleak parable of cosmic meaninglessness which sounds more like Beckett than Dickens (who began Oliver Twist in 1837), might seem to amount to a hopeless nihilism. But the play has a quite opposite effect. Because of its structural focus on its central character, its precision in locating his speech, and his speechlessness, in relation to the language of those around him, its insistence, against all the hierarchies that degrade and ignore him, that his suffering, and that of Marie, is worth attention, is perhaps the only thing worth attention, it is a deeply moving expression and vindication of the power of love. Büchner’s death from typhus at the age of 23 robbed 19th-century Germany not just of a literary genius but of a moral genius too.

  ature er

  In the 1830s and 1840s the German economy was still largely agricultural, and in its rural areas and small towns, where Paris German Lit

  and the urban masses seemed far away, the social structures of the 18th century were little affected by the slow onset of modernity.

  But the growth in population, in literacy, and in the book market, was the harbinger of changes to come, and the most perceptive spirits could sense that what was making the literary life easier for them was also detaching them from the world inhabited by Goethe’s contemporaries, which their outward circumstances continued to resemble. Eduard Mörike (1804–75) was educated at the Tübingen seminary as Hölderlin was, and became a Swabian country pastor, as Hölderlin might have done, though when his doubts – possibly fostered by his fellow-seminarian Strauss – became too much for him he was able, as Hölderlin was not, to become a teacher of German literature at a girl’s school in Stuttgart – neither the subject nor the school (founded in 1818) existed when Hölderlin needed them. Mörike’s poems, both in rhymed German and unrhymed classical metres, became widely 88

  known only towards the end of the 19th century in their settings by Hugo Wolf. With delicacy, sobriety, and gentle humour Mörike writes within the formal repertoire of Goethe, Brentano, and Eichendorff, and like them, though he also enjoys narratives and genre scenes, he favours the the
me of the self in a landscape, often recognizably the landscape of southwest Germany. But Mörike’s self, like Heine’s, though more subtly, is divided, both against itself and from the world beyond it. It does not penetrate the landscape with symbolic meaning, not even the meaning of distance or strangeness. Instead it is self-consciously aware of its surroundings, familiar and loved though they are, as its own outer boundary, the knowable threshold of an inner mystery which cannot be known or represented. The poet drowses on a hillside in the spring sunshine, vaguely aware of warmth and light and an The age of mat

  indefi nite longing, his only distinct sensation the drone of a bee: Mein Herz, o sage,

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  Was webst du für Erinnerung

  In golden grüner Zweige Dämmerung?

  Alte unnennbare Tage!

  [O say, my heart, what memory are you weaving in the twilight of golden green branches? (‘green is the golden tree of life’ says Goethe’s Mephistopheles to Faust) – Ancient, unnameable days!]

  The unity asserted in the classical age of idealism is no more.

  In the age of materialism the impressions of the senses are all that can be known, and they are dissociated from a heart which is known only as the locus of unquietness and of a memory that remembers nothing.

  A similar inner detachment from imagery and poetic resources which she none the less continued to use makes for the distinctive 89

  ature er 9. The Poor Poet (1839) by Carl Spitzweg (1808–85), a painter of humorous scenes of middle-class life. This would-be ‘Romantic’

  outsider, scanning his hexameters to the scheme scratched on the wall German Lit