German Literature

by Nicholas Boyle

  The age of mat

  14. Emil Orlik (1870–1932): poster for a performance of The Weavers

  in 1897

  erialism (1832–1914)

  seem an adequate response to suffering if you do not include in the world you represent people who are free to act.

  Disguised, such a spokesman for myopia even appears in Hauptmann’s masterpiece The Weavers ( Die Weber, 1892). The Weavers is a triumph of the manner pioneered by the young Goethe, Lenz, and Büchner, a drama with many strands and no hero, which lives from the energy of the language of the workers (Hauptmann fi rst drafted it in his native dialect). Its theme, the uprising of the starving Silesian cottage-weavers against the factory owners in 1844 and its suppression by military force, led to repeated attempts to prohibit its performance (and the new Emperor, Wilhelm II, cancelled his subscription to Brahm’s theatre in disgust). But, as Fontane remarked in his review, it is a revolutionary play with an anti-revolutionary conclusion. In the last act an elderly weaver emerges as the play’s moral centre, urging non-violence, and is killed in the closing moments by a stray bullet. Fontane tellingly pointed to the parallels with 111

  Schiller. Unlike the novel, the drama was in Germany still too implicated in the princely past to refl ect the realities of power in the new society. Hauptmann revived not only the realism of Lenz’s era but its self-emasculating submission to autocracy and eventually its diversion into idealism. In 1896, his fi ve act ‘fairy drama’, The Sunken Bell ( Die versunkene Glocke) showed he was himself still an obstinate dreamer in the moonlight. In 1912 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

  Looking back on the career of Richard Wagner in 1933, Thomas Mann (1875–1955) saw in it the typical progression of the entire German middle class from the disappointed revolution of 1848 to resigned cultivation of ‘interiority protected by power’

  ( machtgeschützte Innerlichkeit) in Bismarck’s Empire: an inner world of art and culture could fl ourish provided the authoritarian, and ultimately military, structure that protected it was not questioned. Mann was clearly thinking of himself as much as of ature er Wagner. Few writers were as typical as he of the Second Empire middle class: in his own person he united both the bourgeoisie and the intellectuals, both Berlin and Munich. His family German Lit

  circumstances could not have been more bourgeois: born in what had until 1871 been the Free City of Lübeck, he was the son of a wealthy corn-merchant who married a colonial German Brazilian.

  After his father’s death in 1891 he lived on inherited money and, later, his literary earnings: he was never, even indirectly, dependent on the state. Yet all his work was, more or less overtly, dominated by the concept of disinterested Art, the centrepiece in the ideology of 18th and 19th-century offi cialdom, and the bridge between the two wings of the ‘ Bildungsbürgertum’. In the early 1890s the Mann family moved to Munich where, following in the footsteps of his older brother Heinrich (1871–1950), Thomas began to make a name for himself as a writer of unashamedly cynical short stories. Looking back from this new perspective on the world in which he had grown up he had his fi rst great success with the novel Buddenbrooks, begun when he was only 22.

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  Buddenbrooks. Decline of a Family ( Buddenbrooks. Verfall einer Familie, 1901) is Germany’s greatest, perhaps only, contribution to the European 19th-century tradition of the realistic novel of bourgeois life. Its greatness, and its European status, is partly due to its being a specifi cally German contribution. Not just because it tells the story of four generations of a commercial family in Lübeck from 1835 to 1877, against a densely visualized backcloth of North German domestic architecture, dinner parties, and linguistic habits, of holidays by the North Sea, of schoolroom practices some of which still survive, of the strangely transient impact of public events in 1848 and the advent of street lighting.

  That gives a specifi cally German cast to the marriages, divorces, and love-affairs, the black sheep and the gossip, the social friction with commercial rivals and the deals that go awry which mark The age of mat

  the decline of the Buddenbrook fi rm and the eventual extinction of the family’s male line. But what makes Buddenbrooks more than just Galsworthy or Arnold Bennett in a German setting is a erialism (1832–1914)

  feature of its structure that only Germany could provide. Beneath the comedy, tragedy, and irony of individual lives sacrifi ced on the altar of the family business there is the implication of the working out of some more general principle or destiny. We seem to be pointed towards Nietzsche’s critique of Schopenhauer, and his variant of the Darwinists’ theory of degeneracy, of which Hauptmann had made cruder use in Before Sunrise. In Nietzsche’s view – at times at least – the intellectual and artistic insight which for Schopenhauer offered some escape from the hideous struggle for existence was itself a symptom of failure in the struggle. As the Buddenbrook family decays, so ethical qualms, philosophical puzzlement, and artistic sensibility gain more of a hold over its will to survive. But these hints of a philosophical meaning or substructure to the story have a double effect. They open up, it is true, the possibility that the book should be read as showing that human lives are ineluctably determined and ultimately meaningless. But by raising the question of the eternal value, or valuelessness, of the characters’ lives they make those 113

  lives into more than just sad or comic examples of the distortion of humanity by the power of money or social conformism: the characters and their gestures towards freedom and signifi cance, however doomed or feeble, acquire an importance – one might call it a religious importance – which it transcends the capacity of their milieu to express. By thus uniting the novelistic realism of the European bourgeoisie with the philosophical introspection of the German offi cial tradition Thomas Mann provided the Second Empire with its greatest literary monument. There is a price. Buddenbrooks is Germany without Prussia, and without the universities. Mann’s early narratives (unlike the last works of Fontane, their virtual contemporary) give us society without the state. The social and economic origins of moral and personal judgements are shown, but not of the notions of ‘art’ and ‘spirit’,

  ‘life’, and ‘will’, which underpin the novel, and especially the short stories.

  ature er The supposed opposition between ‘life’ and ‘art’, ‘the bourgeois’

  and ‘the artist’, is central to the stories Mann wrote in the next phase of his career, notably Tristan and Tonio Kröger German Lit

  (1903) and Death in Venice ( Der Tod in Venedig, 1912). The opposition was unreal in so far as both ‘bourgeois’ and ‘artist’

  were ‘ Bildungsbürger’, but it could appear as a real and deep opposition of metaphysical principles in so far as Mann’s writing left unrepresented the ruling, ‘protective’ power that unifi ed the disparate elements of German society in the service of the new German state. Instead, the unifying principle in these early narratives was Mann’s writing itself. Tonio Kröger, though he becomes an ‘artist’ in Munich, remains in love with the North German ‘bourgeois’ world he has left, even when it treats him with indifference or suspicion. ‘You are a bourgeois who has lost his way’, a friend tells him. But he replies: ‘If anything is capable of making a littérateur [i.e. one who writes for money] into a poet

  [‘Dichter’, i.e. one who writes out of dedication to ‘Art’], it is this bourgeois love of mine for what is human, alive and ordinary’.

  In Buddenbrooks, Mann made something that Germany’s high 114

  cultural tradition could recognize as ‘Art’ and ‘poetry’ out of a loving representation of the bourgeois world that had previously been excluded from it. Only gradually did he recognize that it was necessary also to give an account of the dependence of high culture on collaboration with political authority. As the European centre of the global economy drifted towards crisis, it became generally apparent that Germany’s future would be determined more by power, political and military, than by bourgeois decency and ordinariness. Ma
nn’s literary response to the crisis, the most famous of all his stories, was overwhelmingly artful but it shows the beginnings of a willingness to present German culture in a political context. ‘The realm of Art is growing, and that of health and innocence is shrinking on earth’ Tonio Kröger says, and in Death in Venice Art displaces Life everywhere. Gustav von The age of mat

  Aschenbach, an acclaimed and mature writer, is tempted to linger too long in a cholera-ridden Venice by a homoerotic obsession with the young son of a Polish aristocratic family staying at his erialism (1832–1914)

  hotel, and succumbs to the disease. It might seem that this is another tale of Art falling in love with the Life from which it is separated and to which it pays homage. But von Aschenbach’s title of nobility shows he is no Kröger: he is the offspring of a long line of servants of the Prussian state. The Art to which he has dedicated a career of self-abnegation is not the ‘lively, intellectually undemanding concreteness of depiction’ which entertains ‘the bourgeois masses’, but, we are told, philosophical, moralistic, classicizing, and highly formal. And the love to which Aschenbach surrenders is not the healthy innocence and unproblematic eros, indifferent to things of the mind, that captivates Tonio Kröger but is already aestheticized, and knowing, and explicitly not ‘ordinary’. Aschenbach in his thoughts clothes it in the language of classical mythology and Nietzschean philosophy, but its true name is death – the death that in the story, in the form of a plague, is beginning to seep through the canals and squares of Venice and threatens the breakdown of all civilized order; the death that in Europe, in 1912, was marshalling its agents for the coming catastrophe, among them the Prussian 115

  soldiers and offi cials whose ethos Aschenbach had made his own.

  The irony with which Aschenbach is treated in the richly physical, but always symbolically signifi cant, narrative medium – an art wholly different from that which is said to have made the story’s hero famous – shows that Mann could express in literature a far subtler understanding of German realities than we fi nd in the bellicose essays in which he spoke out for his country’s cause after 1914.

  The earth creaked before it quaked. By the early years of the 20th century prescient writers could sense that the identity of the nation, collective and individual, was threatened by the growth of global industrial mass society. Heinrich Mann recognized long before his brother that protectionist nationalism was no substitute for internationalism and could lead only to war and, in his own novels, satirized the pillars of the German state that scarcely fi gured in Buddenbrooks: academic culture in Professor ature er Unrat (1905) and monarchist ideology in His Majesty’s Subject ( Der Untertan, 1914). Personal identity is dissolved into the interface between social role and sexual desire in the plays of German Lit

  Frank Wedekind (1864–1918), an unstable character, uncertain both of his national roots (he was an American citizen, and ‘Frank’

  was short for ‘Benjamin Franklin’) and of his social position (after running through an inheritance he worked in Munich for Maggi Soup, and then as a cabaret artist, before he could live from his writings in a respectable marriage). Spring’s Awakening ( Frühlings Erwachen, 1891) was fi rst produced in 1906 in Brahm’s theatre in Berlin, by then directed by Max Reinhart, but it was not performed in full until the 1960s thanks to its scenes of fl agellation, sexual intercourse, homosexual kissing, and competitive masturbation. Its fragmented manner owes much to Büchner, and its diction, combining naturalism, satirical caricature and somewhat overheated romanticism, proved very infl uential. Between the adult world of grotesque puppets and the unformed adolescents whose burgeoning sexuality they 116

  punish, suppress, or deny, there lies no area of mature or integral personality. Sexuality, after all, is prior to personality, and so is very close to the violence which destroys it. Lulu, the central character in Wedekind’s two-part drama (1895, 1904), which gave Alban Berg the plot and title of his second opera (his fi rst was Wozzeck), is more a personifi cation of sex than a sex-driven person, and she ends as a victim of Jack the Ripper – a role which Wedekind played himself. As military confrontations such as the Moroccan crisis of 1911 showed, the power of violence that for 40 years had protected interiority was about to shake itself free.

  Violence fi gures prominently in the work of the generation of young writers who around 1910 founded journals with titles such as Action and Storm. It seems a premonition when Georg Heym (1887–1912), who died young in an accident, writes a poem about The age of mat

  the maggots on the face of a dead soldier in a forest, but the bodies dissolving back into nature, which are the main theme of Morgue (1912), the fi rst collection published by the Berlin doctor Gottfried erialism (1832–1914)

  Benn (1886–1956), are simply the material of a professional’s daily work. Benn’s inability to believe in personalities, let alone in relationships between them, is already apparent in his description of his affair with the Jewish poet Else Lasker-Schüler (1869–1945) as ‘dark, sweet onanism’. Lasker-Schüler herself wrote, in a different vein, some of the best poetry of the period. Often gently, or eccentrically, rhymed, her poems draw on a restricted range of images – jewellery, stars, fl owers, primary colours, her Jewish traditions – to explore the love of others, the world, and God. She too could sense the approach of Nietzschean apocalypse, but her poem ‘World’s End’ (‘ Weltende’) is free of any savage or cynical heroics:

  Es ist ein Weinen in der Welt,

  Als ob der liebe Gott gestorben wär, […]

  Du! wir wollen uns tief küssen –

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  Es pocht eine Sehnsucht an die Welt An der wir sterben müssen.

  [There is a weeping in the world as if the good Lord had died […]

  Come let us kiss each other deeply – there is a desire knocking at the world and we must die of it.]

  A similar sense that even amid the confl icts and absurdities of the Second Empire a humane and compassionate life is possible informs the most delicately humorous poetry of the period, the

  ‘nonsense verse’ of Christian Morgenstern (1871–1914). The principal fi gures in his Gallows Songs ( Galgenlieder, 1905, and subsequent collections), which despite their title are rarely macabre, are the hyper-sensitive Professor Palmström and his friend von Korf, who to the consternation of bureaucracy has no physical existence. In territory situated somewhat between ature er Edward Lear and Heath Robinson they meet the ‘moonsheep’

  and the ‘nasobeme’ (which strides around on its many noses) and relieve stress by reading the day after tomorrow’s German Lit

  newspaper or inventing watches that go backwards on request.

  Schoolmaster’s German is parodied, dead metaphors come back to tangible life, Palmström plays Korf ’s Sneezewort Sonata on the Olfactory Organ ( Geruchsorgel) and, decorated with various metaphysical grace-notes, the ingenuity of the little man cheerfully evades the constraints of a reality administered by offi cials and intellectuals:

  Ein fi nstrer Esel sprach einmal

  zu seinem ehlichen Gemahl:

  “Ich bin so dumm, du bist so dumm,

  wir wollen sterben gehen, kumm!”

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  Doch wie es kommt so öfter eben: Die beiden blieben fröhlich leben.

  [A gloomy donkey once said to his wedded wife: ‘I am so thick, you are so thick, let’s go and die, come on’. But as tends to happen – the two stayed happily alive.]

  The age of mat

  erialism (1832–1914)

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  Chapter 5

  Traumas and memories

  (1914– )

  (i) The nemesis of ‘culture’ (1914–45)

  The war that broke out in 1914 began the long collapse of the 19th-century attempt to organize the global economy into separate political empires. For most of the Germans who welcomed the release it brought from over a decade of increasingly ill-tempered rivalry, it was a battle against encirclement by the Triple Entente of Britain, France, and Rus
sia. For Thomas Mann it was a battle of

  ‘culture’ against ‘civilization’, and of himself against his brother.

  All that was truly German – he said in his two volumes of Unpolitical Meditations ( Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, 1918) which he spent the war writing – was ‘culture, soul, freedom, art, and not civilization, society, the right to vote, and literature’.

  ‘Civilization’ was an Anglo-French superfi ciality, the illusion entertained by left-wing intellectuals generally, and Heinrich Mann in particular, that the life of the mind amounted to the political agitation and social ‘engagement’ of journalists who thought the point of writing was to change the world. Germany, by contrast, knew that ‘Art’ was a deeper affair than literary chatter, and that true freedom was not a matter of parliaments and free presses but of personal, moral, duty. The Western powers, while claiming to fi ght for their ‘freedom’ against German ‘militarism’

  were, in this view, uniting to impose their commercial mass 120

  15. Heinrich (left) and Thomas Mann in 1927

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  society on Germans devoted to individual self-cultivation.

  Mann therefore correctly perceived the association that linked the concepts of ‘Art’, ‘spirit’, ‘ Bildung’, and interior Kantian

  ‘freedom’, with the hostility of the German class of offi cials, servants of an autocratic state, to such instruments of bourgeois self-assertion as parliamentarianism, free enterprise, and commercialized mass media. When in November 1918 the Emperor and his generals were no longer able to defend, or even to feed, the German population and handed over their responsibilities to the majority socialist party, the bureaucrats remained in offi ce and maintained the attitudes of autocracy into the new era of parliamentary government. In Prussia, the largest state within the republic that agreed its constitution at Weimar in 1919, a socialist administration fi tted seamlessly into the old structure. Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) argued in Prussianism and Socialism ( Preußentum und Sozialismus, 1920) for the identity of the two systems, since both aimed to turn all workers ature er into state offi cials and thereby to answer ‘the decisive question, not only for Germany but for the world […]: is commerce in future to govern the state, or the state to govern commerce?’