beside him, betrays his bourgeois character by his nightcap character of the writing of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff (1797 – 1848). As a member of an established Westphalian noble family she would seem socially to belong to the ancien régime as much as Mörike. But she no more fi tted the 18th-century model of the writer than he, though for different reasons: she was a Catholic, and a woman, the fi rst great woman poet of modern German literature. Unlike Mörike, who seems to receive passively the mystery of experience, she fi ghts to gain control of memory, pain, and guilt, but cannot be sure of victory. For her the ancient days may conceal an unnameable menace. Familiar images take on a quite new connotation: the distant sound of a horn in the valley recalls the lost courage of youth; the shadowy mountains before moonrise seem a sinister circle of judges. Some of the most famous motifs in poems of Goethe and Schiller – Prometheus, 90
the lake, the cup of life cast into the waves – are reinterpreted in one of her last poems as symbols of moral nemesis. In an extraordinary – no doubt unconscious – parallel to Blake, precisely based on botanical fact, she then asks if she has to be destroyed in order that her poetry should preserve this corrective to the tradition she has inherited, as the thistle fl ower is consumed by the larva of the gall-fl y, which reputedly has medicinal properties:
Flüstern oft hör’ich dein Würmlein klein,
Das dir heilend im Schoß mag weilen,
Ach, soll ich denn die Rose sein,
The age of mat
Die zernagte, um andre zu heilen?
erialism (1832–1914)
[I often hear the whispering of that little worm of yours, that perhaps lingers healing in your womb. Alas, am I then to be the rose, gnawed apart to heal others?]
Romantic motifs – the doppelgänger, hints of devilry, a tree associated with both crime and retribution – run through Droste-Hülshoff ’s best-known prose narrative, The Jew’s Beech ( Die Judenbuche, 1842, not her own title). But they point not to some other level of existence but to the moral meaning of a story in which four, partly unexplained, violent deaths are shown to originate in the neglect of basic principles of humility, honesty, charity, and Catholic religious practice. The Jewish community, though treated with brutal contempt by their Christian neighbours, appear as the guardians of the moral law fundamental to Christianity but they remain mysterious and hardly knowable. Even the identity of the principal character is fractured and indeterminate. The centre of Droste’s life, as of Mörike’s, lies outside any world that she can depict with the literary resources she has inherited, dependent as 91
they ultimately are on a post-Lutheran theology that equates personal identity with an omnipotent state to which she owed no allegiance.
The subjection of women to male purposes became, perhaps unwittingly, the main theme and symbol in the poetry and drama of Friedrich Hebbel (1813–63), one of the last representatives of aesthetic idealism trying to give voice to the new spirit of social and material determinism, who was supported through his early struggle to write his way out of poverty by a mistress whom he discarded, and then by his wife, one of the foremost actresses in Vienna. Maria Magdalena (1844), Hebbel’s only drama with a contemporary setting, captures the transformation of small-town Germany as literacy spreads and urbanization begins, but mores are not changing fast enough to save an unmarried mother-to-be from committing suicide for fear of scandal. ‘I don’t understand the world any more’ her bear of a father confesses in the last line ature er of a play which anticipates the social drama of a later age and had a great success in Germany’s many theatres. Hebbel had met Heine and the German communists in Paris, but politically he German Lit
inclined to Hegelian constitutional monarchism. After the crisis of 1848 his refl ections on the changing world became more explicitly and systematically a continuation of Hegel’s theologically tinged philosophy of history, but the women remained the victims. In Agnes Bernauer (1852), a woman who, through no fault of her own, has become a casus belli is sacrifi ced for the greater good of the people. Agnes Bernauer appealed equally to the radicals of 1848, who liked the speeches of revolutionary protest, and to the conservatives, who liked the counter-affi rmation of reason of state. But it was reason of state that had the last word, despite the statesman’s crocodile tears: Hebbel had again caught the mood of an age, the new age of nation-building ( Gründerzeit), in which unscrupulousness, whether political or economic, was elevated to a moral principle. ‘Only one thing is necessary’, he had once written to his mistress, ‘– that the world should exist; how individuals fare in it is a matter of indifference’.
92
In his last years, at the height of his fame, Hebbel met the ageing Schopenhauer and discovered in his combination of relentless determinism with outrage at the scandal of universal suffering a philosophy that matched his own long-held convictions. Hebbel was not alone in his discovery. In the 1850s, after decades of neglect, a Schopenhauer revival began among German intellectuals, while Hegelianism waned, or metamorphosed into Marxism. Schopenhauer’s rejection of all historical and social theorizing appealed to the individualism encouraged by Germany’s most sustained period of liberal economic expansion.
However, his belief that Art was – short of annihilation – the only possible redemption of a material world totally enslaved to the cruel logic of cause and effect also offered comfort to those who had reservations about the process by which they or others were The age of mat
enriching themselves, but who did not want to give up the riches.
But not everyone wanted to be comforted, or to be tied like Hebbel erialism (1832–1914) to the philosophy and aesthetics of an earlier and less affl uent age. Between 1848 and the proclamation of the Second German Empire in 1871 the German bourgeoisie fi nally emerged from the shadow of German offi cialdom and, full of the confi dence of new money and prestige, threw off the leading-strings of the inherited culture. In 1855 Ludwig Büchner (1824–99) published a hugely successful summary of the new science, Energy and Matter ( Kraft und Stoff), which dismissed as turgid nonsense the entire edifi ce of idealist philosophy. With none of the theological and ethical subtlety, or literary sensitivity, of his elder brother, Georg (whose literary remains he had edited), Büchner, the Richard Dawkins of his day, asserted the eternity of matter, the development of life out of inorganic particles, and of human beings out of lower animals, and the unscientifi c redundancy of any such hypotheses as God or immortality. Gone were the anguished compromises on which a hundred years of literature and philosophy had been built.
True, Energy and Matter cost Büchner his chair in Tübingen, but as a medical practitioner and prolifi c journalist he could afford to enjoy independence. After the publication of The Origin of 93
Species in 1859, Büchner became an earnest propagator of the Darwinian ideas that were thought to validate the free-market principles of which they were an expression. The work of Wilhelm Busch (1832–1908), commercially one of the most successful of German poets, was Darwinian too in its way. A freelance artist and draughtsman of genius, Busch took up the format of Heinrich Hoffmann’s Struwwelpeter (1846) and combined a telling economy of line with equally lethal epigrammatic couplets in a series of early comic strips (e.g. Max and Moritz, 1865).
Busch’s satires on pretentious poets, religious hypocrites, and the nastiness of little boys, in an amoral world where only the fi ttest survive, have become part of German folk memory.
The economic basis of the new intellectual freedom was the theme of another great publishing success of 1855, Debit and Credit ( Soll und Haben) by Gustav Freytag (1816–95), which remained the bestselling German novel until the end of the ature er century. Set in Freytag’s homeland, Silesia, by then one of the power-houses of Prussian industry, it follows the lives of two school contemporaries, both bourgeois, both in confl ict with German Lit
the aristocracy, both out to make their fortune, one honest, upright, and hard-working, the other deceitful, usurious, and Jewish. The
anti-Semitism – of which this is the fi rst clearly non-religious example in German literature – is a consequence of the economic and social revolution that made the book possible in the fi rst place. As Germany’s Jews came out of their ghettoes their most lasting disability remained, by law or in practice, the prohibition on their employment by the state (including the central institution of traditional German culture, the university).
They therefore came to represent in the collective psyche a pure form of the forces combining to challenge the dominance of offi cialdom in German political and cultural life: money, business, and laissez-faire. In the great 19th-century upheaval, hostility to Jews expressed the German bourgeoisie’s fear of itself, of its power to destroy the autocratic and bureaucratic state which had 94
10. Wilhelm Busch: scenes from Hans Huckebein (1867), the story of a malevolent raven. The text reads: ‘Auntie comes out of her door. “Oh, my”, she says, “what a nice creature”. Scarcely have the words left her mouth when – snap! – he’s got her fi nger’
95
given it its (subordinate) identity for over 300 years. Because the hostility was fundamentally an irrational self-hatred (the two main characters in Debit and Credit have the same background) it tended from the start to take on grotesque or nightmarish qualities, though in 1855 the true nightmare still lay in the distant future.
If the image of ‘the Jew’ was a representation of the German bourgeois as the enemy of the German offi cial, a counter-image of the two as identical was provided in the Gründerzeit by the new concept of the ‘ Bildungsbürger’ – the citizen of the new Germany who was defi ned as middle class not by his economic role but by his (rather than her) education or culture. In 1867, a year after the Seven Weeks War had fi nally excluded Austria from the political defi nition of Germany, the cultural nation received legal recognition when the copyright which now secured the livelihood of contemporary writers was abolished in respect ature er of a dozen ‘classical’ German authors – Goethe foremost among them – whose works were held to be so important that all publishers should be free to distribute them. Although Goethe’s German Lit
private papers were still inaccessible, a vast new fi eld was thereby opened up for the universities. As independent writing became a sustainable commercial activity, the bureaucracy withdrew into the editing and philological study of the national literature.
In 1872, after Bismarck had united the German states in a war against France and left them no alternative but accession to his new Empire, David Friedrich Strauss, fi rst a critic of Bismarck but now an enthusiastic supporter, proposed that the cultivation of ‘our great poets’ (Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller) and ‘our great musicians’ (Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven) had more value for the new Germany than a Christianity that was both incredible and obsolete. In The Old Faith and the New ( Der alte und der neue Glaube), he argued that the historical basis of Christianity had been destroyed by his own researches and that its philosophical claims were refuted by modern science, particularly astronomy and Darwinian biology. What remained of spiritual needs could 96
be satisfi ed in ‘Art’. Strauss uttered with lumbering frankness the truth about the accommodation between the bourgeoisie and the state in the newly united Germany: that with the passing of the princes national ‘culture’ had now taken the place of Lutheran religion.
If there was any single contemporary who embodied modern German culture as Strauss understood it, it was Richard Wagner (1813–83), whose operas (rather than the plays of Hebbel) were the true successors to Schiller’s drama and the true fulfi lment of the 18th century’s dream of a German national theatre. Wagner himself saw his work as the crowning synthesis of German literature, philosophy, and music, and he brought together in his personal career most of the contradictory elements that The age of mat
Bismarck had fused into a nation. In his twenties Wagner was closely associated with the Young Germany movement, and in his unhappy apprenticeship years in Paris from 1839 to 1842 he made erialism (1832–1914)
the acquaintance of Heine and the Russian anarchist Bakunin, of the socialist ideas of Marx and Proudhon, and of Feuerbach’s radical secularization of religion. While conductor at the Dresden opera-house in the 1840s he wrote revolutionary journalism and in 1849 took an active part in the unsuccessful local uprising.
Exiled to Switzerland for the next 16 years by fear of the German police and of his creditors he gave up politics and even, for a while, composing, in favour of the written word. Drawing on his German predecessors from Winckelmann to Romanticism, who had seen the perfection of Greek art as expressing the perfection of Greek society, and modern art as the means of educating and transforming modern society, he elaborated a theory of opera as the successor to Greek tragedy and the true instrument of social revolution. In 1853 he published his libretto, in pseudo-archaic alliterative verse, of an operatic tetralogy, The Ring of the Nibelung ( Der Ring des Nibelungen) – drawing more on Norse than on German material – which represented the development of society in terms of a much modifi ed Hegelianism: from an initial fall away from a state of nature into institutions of power and property, 97
through the growth of individualism and so of the counter-power of love, which, however, increasingly engenders confl icts of its own, until it makes all things new in the confl agration of universal revolution. Wagner’s composition of the score for this colossal project was interrupted in 1854, however, by his discovery of the philosophy of Schopenhauer, which completed his conversion from political radicalism by its demonstration of the metaphysical priority of ‘Art’ over society, and of music over all other arts. He turned therefore to Tristan and Isolde (completed 1860), which shows individuals as transient, suffering manifestations of the endlessly yearning Will, and then to an opera about opera, or at least about words and music, The Mastersingers of Nuremberg (written 1861–7). Hans Sachs here appears as a Schopenhauerian philosopher-artist (Wagner?) whose wise guidance brings together the two lovers, Walther von Stolzing and Eva Pogner. He thus reconciles the nobility, represented by the initially arrogant ( stolz) Walther, with the stubbornly bourgeois artisans of ature er Nuremberg, into whose guild Walther has sought admittance.
All parties can then join Sachs in his fi nal hymn of praise to the
‘sacred German art’, presumably of opera, which is said to be German Lit
a surer bond of national unity even than the German Empire.
The union of Walther with the burghers of Nuremberg precisely parallels the union Bismarck achieved in the course of the 1860s between an autocratic and hierarchical state structure and the newly wealthy middle classes, weaned away from the parliamentarianism of 1848. It also paralleled the fairy-tale turn taken by Wagner’s own life in 1864 when Ludwig II, the 19-year-old king of Bavaria, announced his intention of freeing Wagner of all practical worries and enabling him to concentrate on composition, so transforming the self-made, and nearly self-ruined, artist into a state institution.
The Ring was completed (with a Schopenhauerian infl ection of the conclusion into universal pessimism), but Wagner’s last 18
years became a weirdly anachronistic reprise of Goethe’s time in Weimar as favourite of a minor monarch in a pre-revolutionary 98
11. Ludwig II’s Wagnerian dream-world under construction at Neuschwanstein in the 1870s
99
age. That, however, was only the mirror-image of the role Strauss had equally weirdly assigned to the literary and musical culture of late 18th-century agricultural and absolutist Germany and Austria: to provide spiritual sustenance to an industrial, urban, late 19th-century mass society too modern for religion. The incongruity between the circumstances in which this literature and music had been produced and the purposes which they were now expected to serve, like the incongruity between Wagner’s apparently medieval themes (which were what appealed to King Ludwig) and the hyper-modernity of his music, could be concealed by dubbing them ‘classical’, ‘timeless’, or ‘sacred�
� ‘Art’.
As such they could in turn conceal the incongruous hybridity of the ‘ Bildungsbürger’ who consumed them, the middle classes of the new nation, united only by ‘culture’. Ludwig’s patronage allowed Wagner to build a temple to sacred German art, the opera house at Bayreuth, which was inaugurated in 1876 with the fi rst complete performance of The Ring. To ‘consecrate’ (his own word) ature er his temple, Wagner then wrote his last opera Parsifal (1882) in which Christian symbols and rituals, their original function being explicitly declared to be obsolete, are deployed in the service of German Lit
Schopenhauer’s ethics. Strauss’s favourite composer was Haydn, and he thought Schopenhauer ‘unhealthy’, but in Parsifal his programme for a new faith for modern Germany was fulfi lled.
(ii) ‘Power protecting interiority’ (1872–1914)
‘It can only be a confusion to speak of a victory of German
“Bildung” and culture’, Nietzsche wrote in the middle of the nationalist euphoria that followed on the Franco-Prussian War and the proclamation of Bismarck’s Empire, ‘a confusion that rests on the fact that in Germany the pure concept of culture has been lost’. In the military victory he saw rather the potential for ‘the defeat, indeed the extirpation, of the German spirit (“Geist”) in favour of the German Empire’. ‘Culture’ for Nietzsche required ‘unity of artistic style in all the expressions of a people’s life’ and German culture he saw as hopelessly disharmonious, 100
though he did not recognize that this disharmony resulted from forcing together the commercially successful literature and materialist philosophy of the new bourgeoisie with the elitist and idealist inheritance of the old bureaucracy. Nietzsche’s was the bitterest, though not the last, expression of the resentment of Germany’s cultural offi cials at being cheated of power by the rise of capital ( ressentiment was the term he later made his own for the emotional revenge of history’s losers on those who conquered them). In the ideal society he envisaged in The Antichrist (1888, published 1895), one of the last works he wrote before collapsing into incurable insanity, the dominant class, superior even to the king and the military, are the intellectuals,
German Literature Page 11