by Tim Blanning
This collection became known as the “Královédorský Manuscript.” Of even greater importance was “The Judgment of Libuše” (later known as the “Zelenohorský Manuscript”), sent anonymously the following year, 1818, to Count Kolovrat.144 That they were both forgeries concocted by Hanka did not prevent them winning general acceptance. Indeed they spawned a number of lesser forgeries, composed specifically to lend them greater authority.145 Hanka, who successfully sued a newspaper unwise enough to question their authenticity, achieved the status of a national hero. When he died, his funeral was attended by twenty thousand people, four hundred torchbearers, and prominent Czechs from every walk of life.146 As his fellow forger brazenly asserted, the creators of “pious lies” did “far more to contribute to our culture than men who depopulate centuries of our history with excessive criticism.”147
In the meantime, Hanka’s forgeries had proved to be “a pivotal event in the history of Czech nationalism.”148 Among those who followed his coffin was the most important Czech leader of the first half of the nineteenth century, František Palacký who had noted in his diary in 1819: “With inexpressible joy I read the KM [Královédorský Manuscript] for the first time early this summer.… How you have been transformed in your glory, O Motherland! Once more you have held high your noble head, and nations look to you with admiration.” Age did not dim this emotion. Forty years later he wrote: “We, the older contemporaries who had witnessed and participated in the effort to forge and cultivate a literary Czech language prior to 1817, can tell you how the discovery of the KM opened a new world before us at a stroke, an unsuspected world.”149
The manuscripts provided material for painters and musicians as well as poets and novelists. When the National Theatre in Prague was opened on June 11, 1881, the work chosen to celebrate the occasion was Smetana’s Libuše with a libretto by Josef Wenzig, who had been heavily influenced by the forged manuscripts. It was less an opera than a musical pageant celebrating the Czech foundation myth of the ninth century, when the eponymous heroine finds a husband in the sturdy peasant Přemysl, thus founding the great Czech dynasty that was to rule the Bohemian Lands for the next four centuries. In the final scene, Libuše recounts a series of visions in which the glorious, if troubled, future of the Czechs is revealed. When she reaches the era of the Hussite persecutions, mists begin to rise and her eyes grow dim, but she concludes: “This much I feel and know in the depths of my heart: my dear Czech people will never perish, they will be able to resist all the horrors of hell!”—“including the beastly Germans and their Austrian Habsburg masters,” the audience may well have added to themselves as they rose to their feet to cheer.150
The Germans had their own myths, of course, and it was no coincidence that it was during the romantic era that they flourished. Of the rich abundance available (the Grimm brothers collected more than five hundred), three were especially popular. The first concerned the great medieval emperor Frederick Barbarossa (1122–90). He had not really drowned while on the Third Crusade, it was maintained. He had been transported miraculously to a cave under the Kyffhäuser mountain in Thuringia, where he sat sleeping, waiting until the German nation called on him in its hour of need.151 Although Germany was eventually united without the visible assistance of Barbarossa, a grateful Veterans’ Association raised a colossal monument eighty meters high to him on the mountain.
More dynamic was the myth of Hermann (Arminius in Latin) the Cheruscan, leader of the Germanic tribes that had inflicted a shattering defeat on the Roman legions led by Varus in the Teutoburg Forest in AD 9. It was a myth that had enjoyed an initial burst of fame during the early sixteenth century, not coincidentally another period of nationalist excitement. In 1529 the Lutheran patriot and humanist Ulrich von Hutten wrote a dialogue titled Arminius in which the hero argues his case in the court of the dead, winning a place of honor as “Brutus Germanicus,” a freedom fighter against foreign domination.152 Interest then waned during the confessional and civil strife that afflicted the Holy Roman Empire for most of the following century and more and did not revive until the middle of the eighteenth century. Inspired by Ossian, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock composed a major trilogy: Hermann’s Battle (1769), Hermann and the Princes (1784), and Hermann’s Death (1787). Among the German virtues to which Klopstock gave poetic form were modesty, chastity, piety, humanity, morality, and devotion to justice, duty, and self-sacrifice.153 This combination of martial glory and ethical self-congratulation proved irresistible, making Klopstock’s version of the myth an immediate and durable influence. Extracts found their way into almost all anthologies of the late eighteenth century and were still being used to inspire enthusiasm for the patriotic cause in the War of Liberation of 1813.154
Klopstock and the other Hermann-authors also constructed a set of semiotic references to characterize German national identity. Against the urban order and sophistication of the Romans, they opposed the rough, untamed wilderness of the German forests. In Klopstock’s Hermann’s Battle, nature itself joined in on the German side, sending torrential rain and a thunderstorm to impede the Romans’ advance, before hemming them in with river and forest as carrion crows swept down from the sky, shrieking for blood, and the eagles sang the song of revenge.155 The most popular of these natural images was the oak tree, symbol of German strength, antiquity, and durability:
O Fatherland! O Fatherland!
You are like the greatest,
All-encompassing oak,
In the deepest grove of the forest,
The tallest, oldest, most sacred oak,
O Fatherland!156
This topographical association was frequently employed. Writing to his future wife in 1772 during a visit to the Teutoburg Forest, Herder linked geography, history, and national character:
I am now in the country, in the most beautiful, the most rugged, the most German, the most romantic region of the world. The very same field on which Hermann fought and Varus was defeated; still an awful, rugged, romantic valley surrounded by singular mountains. However much of the German valour and of the Klopstockian ideal of morality and greatness may be lost, the soul is nevertheless disposed by the daring singular demeanour of this Germany to believe that there is a beautiful, rugged German nature.157
Experience of the French Revolution and Napoleon, especially the humiliating defeat inflicted on the Prussians at Jena and Auerstedt in 1806, led to a radicalization of the Hermann myth. The most extreme statement was made by Heinrich von Kleist in his play Hermann’s Battle in 1808. He took all the elements from earlier versions—liberty, hatred, revanchism, bloodthirstiness, the contrast between Germanic virtue and Roman vice—and intensified them to a pitch that can only be called pathological. As the Roman legions approach through Cheruscan territory, reports are brought in of looting, burning, and horrendous atrocities. For example, a Roman soldier who became involved in a dispute with a woman who had just given birth tore the baby from the mother’s breast and used it to club her to death; when told, his commander simply shrugged his shoulders. Another eyewitness reported that the Romans had felled a thousand-year-old sacred oak dedicated to Wotan. The Cheruscans who tried to resist had their villages burned down. Far from being appalled, Hermann is delighted and adds to the horror stories, insisting that it be spread around, that the Romans also made the Cheruscans get down on their knees to worship Roman gods. Indeed, he then gives orders that Cheruscans disguised as Romans should go out and burn and plunder where the Romans had not been.
As this suggests, Kleist’s Hermann will stop at nothing to achieve the total defeat and annihilation of the enemy. On hearing that a Cheruscan maiden has been gang-raped by a group of Roman soldiers and has then been killed by her own father, he commands the latter:
Take your violated virgin daughter to your hut!
There are fifteen German tribes
So take your sharp sword and
Cut her body into fifteen pieces.
Send with fifteen envoys a piece
&nbs
p; To each of Germany’s fifteen tribes.
I shall give you fifteen horses.
For your revenge this will recruit
Throughout Germany and
The storm-winds that blow through the forests
Will cry out: insurrection!
And the waves that beat the shore
Will roar: Liberty!
The Cheruscan People
Insurrection! Revenge! Liberty!158
At the other end of the scale in terms of stridency lay Caspar David Friedrich’s painting of 1812, Tombs of Ancient Heroes. It depicts a remote, overgrown ravine in which a number of tombs appear to have been placed at random. The inscriptions on the sarcophagi convey a patriotic message—“Peace be on your grave, Saviour in time of need”; “Noble youth, Saviour of the Fatherland”; and “Noble Sacrifice for Liberty and Justice.” Coiled around the broken gravestone in the foreground, which is marked “ARMINIUS,” is a snake in the colors of the French tricolor. Whether Hermann’s tomb has been vandalized or whether he himself has broken out, the message is clear: The French chasseurs, to be seen in the background at the entrance to the cave, are doomed.159 When Friedrich painted the picture in 1812, he could not have known that Napoleon was about to suffer the catastrophe in Russia that led to the collapse of his empire. Yet even after he had been defeated by the allied powers at Leipzig in October 1813, Friedrich did not change his allusive style. In The Chasseur in the Woods of 1814, he simply depicts the French chasseur standing lost in the middle of a forest, dwarfed by the pine trees that symbolize death, as a raven on a tree stump croaks out his doom.160
The third great German myth and, as it turned out, artistically the most productive was The Song of the Nibelungs. Written down by an anonymous poet in the Danube region between Passau and Vienna in the late twelfth century, it drew on a much older oral tradition. Indeed, the very lack of an identifiable author commended itself to the romantics, for, as Jakob Grimm put it in his essay on the work, this absence “is usual with all national poems and must be the case, because they belong to the whole people.”161 Rediscovered in an Austrian library in 1755 and translated from Middle High German into modern German almost at once, it took a generation or so to win acceptance. At least there was no dispute as to its authenticity, as thirty-five different manuscripts surfaced eventually, eleven of them essentially complete. With his habitual contempt for his native literature, Frederick the Great dismissed it “as not worth a shot of gunpowder,” but by the 1790s it was being hailed as the German Iliad.162 It went through countless editions, in both verse and prose forms, and was even published in a pocket edition so that soldiers could take it with them on campaign.163 It soon became the most illustrated of all literary works, with the sole exception of the Bible, attracting, among others, Henry Fuseli, Peter Cornelius, Carl Philipp Fohr, and Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld.164
Peter Cornelius, Hagen Sinks the Hoard of the Nibelungen in the Rhine (1859) National Gallery, Berlin (AKG)
Of all the creative artists to be inspired by The Song of the Nibelungs, the most ambitious was, of course, Richard Wagner. His four-part music-drama The Ring of the Nibelung, written and composed between 1848 and 1874 and performed in its entirety for the first time at Bayreuth in 1876, stands as one of the towering achievements of European culture. One does not have to agree with W. H. Auden that Wagner was “one of the greatest musical geniuses who ever lived”165 to appreciate its power. Wagner’s The Ring is emphatically not a musical setting of The Song. As he told Princess Marie Wittgenstein with engaging candor in 1857: “What happens with me is that I seldom actually read what’s in front of me, but rather what I want to read into it.”166 In fact, he took even more from the Icelandic sagas, most notably the Edda, in both verse and prose forms, and the Volsunga Saga. But what emerged was unmistakably all Wagner.
It was not so much the plot or the characters of the sagas that caught his attention as their mythic status. Myth, he came to believe, “is true for all time, and its content, however compressed, is inexhaustible throughout the ages.”167 Myth alone, because of its symbolic nature, was able to deal with past, present, and future and remain eternally and universally valid: “What is incomparable in myth is the fact that it is always true and, in its most concentrated compression, is inexhaustible for all ages. It is the task of the poet just to interpret it.”168 In myth, “the conventional form of human relations, only explicable by abstract reasoning, disappears almost completely. Instead, only that which is eternally comprehensible and purely human appears in an inimitable concrete form.”169 In effect, in The Ring Wagner was seeking to fulfill the hope of Novalis (from whom he took a great deal) that one day there would come a time “when the world will be returned to a life free unto itself … and man will recognize in myth and poem the true eternal world history.”170
CONSERVATIVES AND REVOLUTIONARIES
Many if not most romantics liked myth because it was profound, particularist, populist, and simultaneously national and universal. As usual, Wordsworth found the perfect poetic expression when writing about the Prometheus myth in The Excursion:
Fictions in form, but in their substance truths,
Tremendous truths! familiar to the men
Of long-past times, nor obsolete in ours.171
This affinity with history and myth was often conducive to a conservative attitude toward the affairs of the day. The romantic reaction against the rationalism of the Enlightenment could only be intensified by the excesses of the French revolutionaries. Georg Forster, the admirer of Cologne Cathedral, was also an enthusiastic supporter of the French Revolution—in principle. It was with the slogan Ubi bene ibi patria that he rallied to the new regime when the French conquered Mainz in October 1792. The rigors inseparable from military occupation began his disillusionment; a visit to Paris completed it. Shortly before his death there in January 1794, he wrote: “The world is facing the tyranny of reason, of all kinds perhaps the most remorseless.… The nobler and more excellent the cause, the more devilish is its abuse. Fire and flood, every kind of damage inflicted by fire and water, are nothing compared with the havoc that reason will wreak.”172
Of all the visual depictions of the gulf that opened up between the rhetoric of the French Revolution and its practice, none were more eloquent than those produced by Goya. As we have seen, his attitude toward the Enlightenment was not at all clear. Firsthand experience of occupation by the armies of Napoleon gave him both the subject matter and the passion to create two of the most violent images of war ever created—The Second of May 1808 and The Third of May 1808—to celebrate the rising against the French and its brutal repression. Goya himself wrote that his intention was “to perpetuate with my brush the most notable and heroic actions or events of our glorious revolution against the tyrant of Europe.”173 In the first, a group of insurgents are shown attacking French soldiers on the Puerta del Sol in Madrid. In the foreground one insurgent stabs a Mamluk as he pulls him from his horse, as another thrusts his sword into the horse’s shoulder. In the second and better-known painting, on the following day a French firing squad executes a group of insurgents. To the left sprawls a heap of bodies already dispatched, to the right another group waits its turn. The religious element is accentuated by the outstretched arms of the central victim, the friar kneeling by his side, and the great monastery that dominates the dark skyline. There is no stoic heroism here, only anguish, despair, anger, and the fear of death. The contrast with Jacques-Louis David’s contemporary glorification of Napoleon and his wars could not be more stark.174 Even more brutally unequivocal were the etchings known collectively as The Disasters of War, in which Goya shows terrible scenes of mutilation, murder, and rape.
For those denied the opportunity to witness the effects of the Revolution at first hand, it was possible to maintain support for its principles. Secure in his comfortable bachelor existence at the University of Königsberg on the easternmost edge of the German-speaking world, Kant never ceased to maintain that revolut
ionary France had acted on behalf of all mankind in seeking to emerge from self-incurred immaturity—but equally never ceased to be a loyal subject of his employer, the king of Prussia. Hegel was closer to the action, but he too had no difficulty in separating his philosophy from his politics. In 1822, at the same time that he was asking the Prussian authorities to take action against a periodical in which his philosophy had been criticized, he was praising the French Revolution for marking the moment when man realized he could reshape reality in accordance with thought. Every July 14 without fail, he drank a glass of red wine to celebrate the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille.175
Neither philosopher, of course, can be assigned to romanticism, despite Kant’s emphasis on self-determination and Hegel’s remarkable ability to articulate its goals. Most German romantics rejected the Revolution and all its works. Among the most flamboyant were the “Nazarenes,” a group of painters who formed a self-consciously backward-looking “Brotherhood of St. Luke” in Vienna in 1809. In the following year they moved to Rome—not to the Rome of classical civilization, but to the Rome that was the world capital of Christianity. Indeed, they moved into an abandoned monastery, San Isidoro, and lived a communal life. The conversion of their leader, Johann Friedrich Overbeck, to Catholicism in 1813 dramatized their rejection of the modern world.176 His paintings and drawings included The Raising of Lazarus, Christ and His Disciples at Emmaus, The Entry of Christ to Jerusalem, Self-Portrait with Bible, Christ with Mary and Martha, Dürer and Raphael Clasp Hands Before the Throne of the Church, The Triumph of Religion in the Arts, and so on.177 The contrast with the major painters of neoclassicism could hardly be greater. Representative of the Nazarene approach to art and life was Franz Pforr’s Count Habsburg and the Priest, symbolizing the unity of throne and altar, as the ruler offers his horse to the priest seeking to cross the swollen river to bring the last sacrament to a dying parishioner.178