German Literature

by Nicholas Boyle

  ‘ die geistigsten Menschen’. His matchless powers of destructive, and self-destructive, criticism were directed at any attempt The age of mat

  to reconcile the principles which underlay Germany’s new success – determinist science, mass production, competitive economic individualism – with the secularized theology that had erialism (1832–1914)

  been the basis of old Germany’s culture. Sometimes he criticized the old – its enlightened rationalism, its humanitarianism, and especially its more overtly religious survivals – in the name of the new. Sometimes he criticized the new – its egalitarianism, socialism, feminism, anti-Semitism – from the standpoint of the old, and now dispossessed, elite. The detachment of thought from any real social object or context became the purpose of his writing and of his solitary, wandering way of life. From any contemporary who might have seemed to personify what he stood for he distanced himself in an often violent act of self-redefi nition: Strauss earned Nietzsche’s virulent hostility through being a more effective critic of religion than he was; Schopenhauer, whose metaphysics were the foundation on which The Birth of Tragedy was built, and Wagner whose music-dramas it represented as the summit of modern culture, were later rejected for the crypto-Christianity of their ethics. Nietzsche was incapable of constructing a book-length, or even an essay-length, argument and his attempt at a magnum opus, his biblical pastiche, Thus Spake Zarathustra ( Also sprach Zarathustra, 101

  1883–5) suffers from the stylistic inauthenticity that he diagnosed in his contemporaries. But in his collections of aphorisms and short refl ections – the best are probably Human, All Too Human ( Menschliches Allzumenschliches, 1878–80) and Beyond Good and Evil ( Jenseits von Gut und Böse, 1886) – Nietzsche’s brilliance could show itself untrammelled by any need for sustained coherence and he became one of the most variously and subversively fruitful thinkers for the 20th century:

  ‘Knowledge for its own sake’ – that is the fi nal snare that morality lays: with that you are completely entangled in it once again.

  ‘I did that’, says my memory. ‘I cannot have done that’ – says my pride, and is implacable. Eventually – memory gives in.

  He who fi ghts with monsters should take care that he does not turn into a monster himself. And if you look long into an abyss, the abyss ature er

  too will look into you.

  In 1885 the Empire on which Nietzsche had declared intellectual German Lit

  war won one of its greatest victories. Goethe’s papers were opened to the nation, on the death of his last grandchild, and Weimar became once again the city of Goethe and Schiller. A network of Goethe Societies, centred on Weimar, sprang up around Germany and the world, the houses of the poets were turned into museums, their papers were transferred into a purpose-built archive, and professors and their assistants immediately began to labour on a historical-critical edition of Goethe’s works which eventually ran to over 150 volumes and was not completed until 1919. The writings of Goethe and his fellow ‘classics’, and the scholarship of the academic bureaucracy which edited them all, became the twin pillars of a German national literature, the common property, and tribal totem, of both wings of the ‘ Bildungsbürgertum’ and of the new political nation that held that strange class together. Praised or damned or played off one against the other they have retained that status in all subsequent Germanies down to the present day.

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  12. Nietzsche (right) and his friend, Paul Rée, rivals for the affection of Lou Andreas-Salome (left, with whip), later to have relations with Sigmund Freud and the poet R. M. Rilke. The scene was staged by Nietzsche in 1882, and entitled by him ‘The Holy Trinity’

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  Even as the process of institutionalization was beginning, Nietzsche pointed to the false premiss on which it was based: that the ‘classics’ defi ned in 1867 were fi nders and builders of a national culture, when in reality they were seekers for a culture who sought in vain. In 1896, however, Nietzsche’s sister moved her now famous but slowly dying brother to Weimar with all his papers, and in 1953 these literary remains of another ‘classic’ were fi nally interred in the Goethe-Schiller Archive.

  Nietzsche’s revulsion from the hybrid culture of Bismarck’s Reich was shared, notably in Munich, the capital of the largest and most reluctant new member of the Empire. The patronage of the Bavarian kings extended beyond Wagner to a group of mostly second-rate writers and poets who saw themselves as keeping alive the spirit of aesthetic idealism in a hostile age – bourgeois men of means who did not have the courage of the materialism proper to their class and took refuge in the Art they owed to Germany’s ature er offi cials. Among them Paul Heyse (1830–1914), eventually a Nobel prizewinner, contributed more by a single idea than by his over a hundred works of fi ction. With his anthology, A German Treasury German Lit

  of Tales ( Deutscher Novellenschatz, 1871), and the theoretical musings that accompanied it, he created a literary concept that had the necessary multivalency to appeal to both the commercial and the academic factions in the cultural life of the Second Empire. Novella ( Novelle in German) was a long-established term for a short story in prose, and there had already been some speculation (for example, by Tieck) about the characteristics of the genre. But Heyse created the idea of the ‘Novelle’ as a prose form which, by its consciously self-enclosed structure and symbolic coherence, could bring the undisciplined energies of realistic narrative, springing up all over Europe and refl ecting the lives and concerns of a mass readership, under the control of the German concept of ‘Art’. If late 18th-century poetic drama had been elite culture morphing into the book, the late 19th-century ‘Novelle’

  was the book morphing into elite culture. ‘Sister of the drama’

  the ‘Novelle’ was called by one of its most serious practitioners, 104

  the North German lyrical poet (and state offi cial) Theodor Storm (1817–88) for whom isolation in Schleswig-Holstein was his own form of protest against the new order.

  Throughout the Second Empire Munich remained the centre of the aesthetic opposition to the Prussian commercial and industrial powerhouse that stretched from Silesia to the Ruhr. Southern, Catholic, within reach of the Alpine passes to the Mediterranean lands, and blessed both with a largely functionless monarchy happy to build temples to art and music and with a stock of cheap apartments, vacated by those who had gone to seek their fortune in the North, it was a magnet for writers, painters, anarchists, and secular prophets. In Munich, the fantasy could be maintained that the combination of Hellenism and idealism achieved by The age of mat

  poets and philosophers in Goethe’s lifetime represented a true Germany opposed to the economic and political forces that had in fact brought the nation into being. ‘Munich is the only erialism (1832–1914)

  city on the earth without “the bourgeois”’, wrote Stefan George (1868– 1933) ‘… a thousand times better than [the] Berlin mish-mash of petty bureaucrats jews and whores.’ George, a Rhinelander who lived on private means inherited from his bourgeois parents, originally wanted to be a Catholic priest, but instead founded his own religion of poetry and male friendship.

  Having met Verlaine and Mallarmé in Paris, he tried to give his German verse the qualities and even (by the elimination of capital letters) the physical appearance of French. Cultivating elusiveness, George moved from house to house of his acquaintances, but for a while in the 1890s he settled in Munich where he could be seen

  ‘striding’ through the cafés, ‘like a bishop through the middle of Saint Peter’s’. In his privately circulated journal Leaves for Art ( Blätter für die Kunst), printed on choice paper, with carefully selected coloured inks, and decorated with Art Nouveau vignettes and calligraphy and the Indian mystical symbol of the swastika, he published poems marked by esoteric content, exquisite purity of diction, and an unfailing perfection of rhyme. The Year of the Soul ( Das Jahr der Seele, 1895) – a title taken from Hölderlin whom 105

  George, like Nietzsche, saw
as a personifi cation of the nobility of German poetry, disregarded by Germany itself – recounts, in a progression through the seasons, the failure of love for a woman and the ‘new adventure’ of love for a man. George ruthlessly terminates the compromises of Mörike and Droste-Hülshoff. In his poems, the self is not so much unknowable as absent: they focus, with commanding single-mindedness, on a ‘you’ ( du) who has no features of his own beyond the shared experience of the symbolic landscape, which in turn is more of an erotic dreamscape. Poetry has become the vehicle of a pure will to power, untrammelled by the opposition of independent personalities or a material world. After the turn of the century, as nationalism intensifi ed but materialism showed no signs of losing its grip, George’s writing took on a more prophetic and apocalyptic tone ( The Seventh Ring [ Der Siebente Ring], 1907). He devoted himself to building a circle of disciples who would look up to him as ‘the Master’ and would establish a spiritual kingdom within a world ature er whose corruption, he now felt, could be cleansed only by war ( The Star of the Covenant [ Der Stern des Bundes], 1914).

  German Lit

  13. Title spread of the fi rst edition of The Seventh Ring (1907) by Stefan George; design by Melchior Lechter (1865–1937) 106

  If in the Second Empire Munich was the capital of Art, Berlin was the capital of Reality. In rapidly expanding Berlin Germany at last had the context and opportunity for a metropolitan and realist literature, to compare with that of 19th-century Paris, London, or St Petersburg. There is nothing reluctant or unsophisticated about the modernity of Theodor Fontane (1810–1989), a professional journalist and poet, who after periods of residence in England and France settled in Berlin and wrote 14 novels about the new Prussia in the last 20 years of his life. During the 1880s, Fontane advanced from historical themes to the life of his own time.

  Comedies of Errors ( Irrungen, Wirrungen, 1888), so concise it could be called a Novelle, is the fi rst masterpiece of his mature style which, with its rich texture of unobtrusive leitmotifs and its plot largely driven forward by the apparent contingencies of The age of mat

  closely observed conversation, suggests the contemporary manner of the much younger Henry James. If the central theme – the doomed love between Botho, a nobleman, and Lene, a woman of erialism (1832–1914)

  the lower middle class – seems to hark back to mid-18th-century literature, to Intrigue and Love, and Storm and Stress, that refl ects the historical signifi cance of Fontane’s achievement.

  As a pronounced Anglophile he had recovered the ambition of those earlier, and defeated, revolutionaries to create a German equivalent to the English novel of contemporary society, and he was fulfi lling it. The class difference that separates the lovers, and the political repression that sustains it, are symbolized in Lene’s inability to understand the English inscriptions on two pictures – which otherwise appeal to her – on the wall of the hotel room where she and Botho are happy together, two icons of the Anglo-Saxon tradition of resistance to autocracy: ‘Washington crossing the Delaware’ and ‘The last hour at Trafalgar’. England, and a reminiscence of Trafalgar, in the person of a visiting Mr Nelson, also provide a measure of Germany’s internal discords in Frau Jenny Treibel (1893), which is devoted to the comic discrepancy between the two forms of the ‘ Bildungsbürger’, the bourgeois and the academic. But Fontane was more than a 107

  satirist, he was a moralist with a penetrating sense of political and historical realities. He could not be content with merely criticizing his society: he had to use the representation of it to refl ect on ultimate questions of right and wrong and human purpose. In 1892 he began a series of novels which achieve something almost without precedent in German literature: presenting lives which are as independent, responsible, and free of political oppression as it is possible for human lives to be, because they are lived by members of a ruling class. In Beyond Recall ( Unwiederbringlich, 1892), Effi Briest (1895), and Der Stechlin (1898), Fontane did what his 18th-century predecessors were unable to do. He brought the resources of literary realism to bear on a class which was its own master: the landowning Prussian nobility, for the sake of which Bismarck had constructed his Empire, and which was charged by him with restraining the political ambitions of Germany’s bourgeoisie. But the issues of meaning and conscience, of deeds and consequences and the passing of time, that Fontane’s ature er characters have to face transcend their historical circumstances and they know it. Effi Briest in particular stands out for the tautness of its psychological and symbolic structure. It is not German Lit

  just about the drift into adultery of its lively heroine, caught in a loveless marriage to an older husband, ambitiously climbing the ladder of promotion in one of Bismarck’s ministries, but about the consequences of the accidental discovery of the adultery years later. Effi ’s husband, von Innstetten, allows himself to be constrained by the code of honour of his caste to kill his rival in a duel, to divorce his wife, and to separate her from her only daughter, thus destroying four lives, including his own. Why he does this, he does not know, and neither do we. Is there in him a streak of cruelty? Does he just lack the human sympathy of the novel’s narrator, or of Effi ’s faithful Catholic maidservant, or even of her dog? Or is he a victim of some fate greater than himself, as unavoidable as social existence yet as arbitrary as the seeming chance that we live in one time rather than another? ‘You are right!’ says the friend in whom Innstetten confi des. ‘The world 108

  just is the way it is, and things don’t happen the way we want but the way other people want … Our cult of honour is idolatry, but we have to submit to it as long as the idol is believed in.’ Because von Innstetten belongs to the class of those who have power, the compulsion to which he and the other characters think they have to submit is shown to us as something whose form might change with a redistribution of power but which would not then itself be eliminated. In bowing to it they are not deluded, and their human worth depends on the spirit in which they perform the obligations imposed by their transient but inescapable time and place. And so they seem proper objects of the narrator’s tactful and understated compassion as well as of his irony. Fontane knew intimately the class he made central to his three greatest novels, but he did not himself belong to it. His realism therefore always hints at another The age of mat

  perspective from that of his principals, at the historical certainty that one day the insubstantial pageant will all fade and another idol in another temple demand submission. ‘Our old families erialism (1832–1914)

  are all victims of the idea that “things won’t work without them”, which is quite wrong’, says a thoughtful character in Fontane’s last novel, Stechlin. ‘Wherever we look we are in a world of democratic attitudes. A new age is dawning.’

  In the new century the old Prussian families, and Prussia itself, did indeed pass away. For Berlin’s younger generation of writers they were already an irrelevance in a technological and industrial age. Literature needed to concentrate not on the landed but on the monied classes, and on those out of whom they made their money, the new class of industrial workers. The Naturalist movement of the 1880s and 1890s, led by Arno Holz (1863–1929) and Johannes Schlaf (1862–1944), was partly an enthusiastic response to the work of Zola and Ibsen, but it was also a recovery of the native German tradition of radical bourgeois realism which had last surfaced in the mid-18th century and then in the work of Büchner (whose Woyzeck, its title mistranscribed as Wozzeck, was fi rst published in 1878). To that extent its aims were allied to those of Fontane, who reviewed some of its productions favourably. The 109

  affl uence that made it possible to live as a professional novelist had a similar effect on drama, particularly since princely Germany continued to maintain the extensive network of subsidized theatres. Censorship might be strict, but in a centre of wealth such as Berlin it could be evaded. The impresario Otto Brahm (1856–1912) founded a private (and so uncensored) theatre club, where the fi rst production, in 1889, was of Ibsen’s Ghosts, banned f
or its discussion of syphilis, and the second the even more scandalous Before Sunrise ( Vor Sonnenaufgang), the fi rst mature work of Gerhart Hauptmann (1862–1946), on the theme of hereditary alcoholism (a typical fantasy of the age of eugenics).

  Hauptmann, a Silesian who, supported at fi rst by his wife, took up a writing career in Berlin, had like Heine an ambiguous attitude to the modern age which he was introducing into literature: in an early poem about a train journey by night his reverie occasioned by the moonlit landscape outside the carriage is interrupted by thoughts of the impoverished and angry workers who built ature er the line for his comfort. Inspired not by theory but by a hugely generous sympathy, he was willing for a while to be dubbed a Naturalist by Holz and Schlaf, but it was not long before he German Lit

  showed the more subjective side of his versatile talent.

  The family devastated by drink in Before Sunrise is an archetype of Bismarck’s Germany: Silesian farmers transformed overnight by mineral wealth into industrial capitalists. Into their brutish milieu intrudes a journalist full of the materialist and determinist ideas of the time, who seems to their Werther-reading daughter to offer a hope of escape. But as a good Darwinian he cannot bring himself to marry her for fear of the family’s supposed hereditary taint and, like Werther, she kills herself. The weak-willed intellectual, a lineal descendant of the theologian with doubts to whom 18th-century literature owed so much, is a constant feature of Hauptmann’s works with a contemporary setting. The fi gure personifi es Hauptmann’s reluctance to follow Fontane and extend the scope of his realism to the classes which were the locus of political power: a passive acceptance of necessity can be made to 110