Worlds Elsewhere

by Andrew Dickson

  There was a mischievous hint of subversion at work, too. Whereas Vining’s thesis about Hamlet’s gender was a misogynistic attempt to pathologise the Prince’s fears of action (‘in very deed a woman, desperately striving to fill a place for which she was by nature unfitted’), Nielsen placed herself in a much bolder and braver tradition, making herself the star attraction in the mode of nineteenth-century leading ladies such as Charlotte Cushman and Sarah Bernhardt, both of whom played the Dane. Athletic yet gamine, both androgynous and tantalisingly bisexual, she caught the character’s flitting, gossamer contradictions more fully than any other actor I’d seen.

  There was another reason it felt appropriate to watch the film in the city that gave its name to the Weimar Republic. During the 1920s, when Nielsen’s fame was at its zenith, Germany and its cabaret scene had been the crucible of exactly the kind of avant-garde drama Hamlet: Ein Rachedrama put on screen – gender-bending, quizzically exploratory in its examination of sensual and sexual identities. I wondered if any of the straighter-backed members of the Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft had seen the movie when it first came out, and if so what they thought. Alas, I could find no mention of it in their yearbook.

  Morning was perfect: crisp and clear and still, a sky of powder-blue with clouds as fluffy as poached egg white. As I crunched along the footpath next to the River Ilm, early leaves were starting to show on the linden trees, pointillist dots of pale yellowish-green. The birds were loud, the scent of wet grass and earth strong on the breeze. I felt in a dangerously good mood.

  For once, I knew exactly where I was going. It was the morning of 23 April, Shakespeare’s birthday: a year since I’d begun plotting my travels. A few minutes’ walk from my guesthouse was the most famous Shakespeare monument in Germany, the Shakespeare statue in the Park an der Ilm. I’d been holding off seeing it until now.

  The park was begun in the late 1770s by Duke Karl August, who, weary with Frenchified formal gardens (as everyone else was wearying of Frenchified literature), wanted something in the style becoming fashionable in England. Goethe – who else? – happily complied, busying himself with studying botany and drawing inspiration from a visit to Wörlitz near Dessau, one of the first English-style parks to be created in Germany. In Weimar, Goethe created a rugged, proto-Romantic scheme, groves of maple, ash, linden, chestnut and hornbeam draped around the river with a rough patchwork of lawns and paths leading up the hill to the other side. Goethe was careful to ensure that the Gartenhaus – the small dwelling where he had first taken up residence – was a central feature. Both writer’s retreat and picturesque adornment to the landscape, it effectively made the genius loci Goethe himself. I could just about glimpse the Gartenhaus through the trees, a modest grey cottage with a sharply sloping roof like a witch’s hat.

  Into this artfully curated piece of artlessness the Shakespeare-Gesellschaft inserted their statue in 1904, a fortieth birthday present to themselves. The site was on the opposite bank of the river, giving it a generous view over the Gartenhaus and ensuring that – lindens permitting – Shakespeare would forever be facing Goethe (and vice versa). The sculptor was chosen with similar care: he was Otto Lessing, a descendant of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the man who had made many Germans aware of this miraculous English poet. Like the society, the monument was a first: the first statue to the poet raised in continental Europe.

  I rounded the corner and there he was: bone-white, a little larger than human size, on a grey stone dais. For a man just turning 449, he wasn’t looking so bad. Lessing had caught Shakespeare as a decisive-looking forty-something, perched casually, one leg lifted, on what might have been a country wall. Tucked under his loose gown, his right hand crooked against his waist, was a scroll – Hamlet, perhaps, freshly revised and about to be sent to the compositor. His left hand toyed with a single rose, his left foot resting on a fool’s cap within which there was a skull (Yorick’s?). The overriding impression was of a seasoned, somewhat blokeish member of the literati shortly to be interviewed for a late-night arts programme.

  His expression was trickier to gauge. Lessing had sculpted it so that, as one circumnavigated the statue clockwise, Shakespeare’s countenance brightened: an effect achieved by shaping the left side of his face into a stern frown while the right side bore a soft smile. It was a clever device – comedy and tragedy, I supposed – but, viewed from some angles, it had the unfortunate result of giving him a condescending leer.

  I decided not to be too hard on Lessing’s work: I was journeying in search of Shakespeare translated, reinterpreted, reconfigured; of Shakespeares that looked different from the British version. Leer notwithstanding, this was what difference looked like.

  Normally the Gesellschaft held a ceremony here on the morning of 23 April: a short speech at the statue, then the laying of roses. This year, however, I was on my own. The annual Shakespeare-Tage festival was being held in Munich, my next destination, and the Weimar tradition was on ice. Apart from the fluting of the birds and an occasional jogger scuffing along the gravel, it was deathly quiet. The only person who’d come to bid Shakespeare happy birthday, apparently, was me.

  I settled down nearby and tried to get further into Wilhelm Meister, hacking my way through the thickets of its prose. It had seemed somewhat inauspicious that the elegant cloth-bound 1894 edition I’d brought with me from England had only half its pages cut; its previous owner had obviously given up halfway. I’d gone at the rest with a vegetable knife I’d borrowed from the guesthouse.

  ‘Wilhelm had already been for some time busied with translating Hamlet … What in Wieland’s work had been omitted he replaced; and he had at length procured himself a complete version, at the very time when Serlo and he finally agreed about the way of treating it …’

  Serlo and Wilhelm were about to get stuck into a thorny debate about the ethics of translation; what should be preserved and what changed, whether there was any such thing as the original. The subject was entirely pertinent to my travels, but, try as I might, I couldn’t focus. I kept drifting to birdsong, the scent of wet stone, the sun creeping slowly between the trees, the sound of the breeze crackling in the grass. Indistinctly, I wondered how Goethe had coped with the same distractions in the Gartenhaus. Maybe that was why he left so many unfinished projects.

  I heard voices on the path nearby, and started: I’d been dozing. Shamefacedly I stood up and made a show of fussing with my notebook and placing a bookmark in Wilhelm Meister. I hadn’t even brought roses. In lieu of a birthday party, a spot of improvisation was required. Professor Tobias Döring, the president of the Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, was based in Munich (hence the venue for this year’s conference), but he put me in touch with one of his Weimar colleagues. Roland Petersohn was a DSG stalwart, the principal at a school near Jena. He could tell me more of the society’s backstory, including its history in the former East Germany.

  At precisely 4 p.m. Petersohn and I solemnly toasted 449 years since the birth of William Shakespeare – and 149 years since the founding of the society – in the only way that seemed appropriate, with bitter black coffee and kirschtorte at the Residenz Café near the Schloss Belevedere, where Marlene Dietrich once sang.

  With his dark green jacket, tufting moustache and spade-like handshake, one could picture Petersohn leading his charges on hearty expeditions through the Thuringian forests. As well as having been vice-president of the Gesellschaft in the 1990s, he had published academic studies of Heiner Müller, the GDR’s most celebrated playwright, another German heavily influenced by Shakespeare.

  Through mouthfuls of torte, Petersohn told me his own history. He had first joined in the early 1980s as a student of English and German literature in Jena. Germany was then buried beneath the permafrost of the cold war; Weimar, of course, lay on the eastern side of the border. In the early 1960s, relations had broken down between members based in the East and their erstwhile colleagues in the West. The crunch came in 1963, when instead of celebrating the forthcoming
400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth and the society’s centennial, the decision was taken to divide it. The Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft (West) would be based in Bochum on the outskirts of Dortmund, while the Ossies retained their historic home in Weimar. As with almost everything else in postwar Germany, the two wings had eyed each other with disdainful suspicion.

  The penny dropped: I’d been wondering why the Jahrbuchs on the shelves of the DSG offices had multiplied between the 1960s and 1990s, one set in Prussian blue, the other scarlet. For nearly forty years there were two different Jahrbuchs, West and East, commissioned by two societies with two competing ideologies.

  It was the cold war in Shakespearian miniature. For thirty years, each Shakespeare-Tag there were rival celebrations, with theatre companies from the Soviet bloc making their way to Weimar and those from the west appearing in Bochum. At one stage, among a coterie of radical Anglo-American scholars, it was a badge of honour to receive an invitation to the DSG (Ost) and peep behind the Iron Curtain.

  ‘Stephen Greenblatt came to talk to us,’ Petersohn said, waving his cake fork triumphantly. ‘He did not go to West Germany. They couldn’t afford him.’

  The two societies had formally rejoined in April 1993, three years after the reunification of Germany itself. The process had been every bit as protracted and painful as it was at federal level. Rival negotiating teams were sent to thrash out terms on neutral ground, including in Stratford-upon-Avon (which, given the events of 1864, struck me as an irony worth cherishing).

  It sounded like something from a spy novel, I said.

  Petersohn gave me a long look. ‘It was the strangest of times.’

  It was in this period that he had been vice president, attempting to heal the divisions. ‘It wasn’t easy. There were strong feelings on both sides – a lot of cold warriors, hardliners, ja? There had to be a lot of agreements not to talk about the things that happened in the 1960s.’

  I was curious about his perspective on the DSG’s origins. What did he think lay behind Oechelhäuser’s determination to set up a society in Shakespeare’s name?

  ‘I think popularisation, most of all. He admired Shakespeare, he wanted people to watch Shakespeare in the theatre and read Shakespeare’s plays. He was a man of business, and he was looking for a project. Shakespeare was the project.’

  I said I found it striking how rapidly the Gesellschaft had attempted to claim Shakespeare as a German classic.

  He chewed thoughtfully. ‘What you have to understand is German history. In 1864 Germany was still in the process of becoming one country. In 1871 the Deutsches Reich is founded under Bismarck, the first time there is a specific German state, German national thinking. That is partly why you get the founding of the other literary societies in Germany at this point – the idea of uniting Germany through culture. You have Goethe, you have Schiller and then you have this English writer also, who is almost more ours than theirs.’

  So in his view there was definitely a political impetus?

  ‘Ja. I think so. A few people think of nothing else. They say, “OK, Shakespeare must be German.” It is a way of owning him.’

  But why Shakespeare, of all writers?

  ‘Of course there are Goethe and Schiller; by paying tribute to him you are also paying tribute to them. Then there’s an admiration for the complexity of his plays, this envy – a kind of positive envy, if that is a concept, for Englishness and what it means. Maybe if Shakespeare was French, or Serbo-Croatian, it wouldn’t be quite the same.’

  He leaned forward, his voice low. ‘This is my private opinion, but I do think there is the German character trait of being fascinated by something that works perfectly, like in engineering. You see something that is so smooth, so fascinating, that can’t be destroyed by time or ideology. This sense of perfectionism, you know.’ His green-grey eyes were wide. ‘Wow!’

  Vorsprung durch Technik, almost?

  ‘Vorsprung durch Kunst! Ha, ha.’ He leaned back in his chair, patting his stomach. ‘Ja, there is something about that. I really think so!’

  One major obstacle barred the path of the Gesellschaft’s founders: until that point, there had not been an agreed translation of the all-important Shakespearian text. Borck’s severe alexandrines, Christoph Martin Wieland’s cumbrous prose versions, Goethe and Schiller’s invasive rewritings: the history of adapting Shakespeare’s work in Germany had been chequered, to say the least. An authorised text of the complete works in modern German was a major priority. But how was this to be achieved?

  Some recommended commissioning a fresh translation, but to do so would be time-consuming and expensive – and the society was humiliatingly short of money (so much so that it failed to produce a Jahrbuch in its second year). Others suggested patching up an old version and issuing it under the aegis of the DSG. Even if the issue were resolved, what sort of translation should this be? Aimed at academics and students, or actors? With expansive critical apparatus, befitting a noble literary institution, or something cheap and portable enough to make Shakespeare a household name in Germany? The businesslike Oechelhäuser insisted it should be the latter. His more high-minded colleagues disagreed.

  Fortunately, an answer was at hand – and like so much in German culture, its origins lay in the Romantic period. In the generation immediately following Herder and Goethe, two of the brightest stars in the critical firmament were August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1767–1845) and Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853). Schlegel, the son of a Hanoverian pastor who had become a professor at the University of Jena, shot to prominence in 1798 when he co-founded the periodical Athenäum, a home for Romantic criticism and philosophy. Tieck, a Berliner whose father was a ropemaker, made his name as a popular playwright and novelist at almost exactly the same time.

  As might be expected given their age, Shakespeare was a preoccupation for both. Tieck, a man of the theatre whose later experiments in Elizabethan staging would lay groundwork for reconstructions of the Globe and Blackfriars, became fascinated with questions of translation, publishing in 1799 a version of The Tempest. Schlegel, schooled in aesthetics and philology, fostered more academic interests, finely represented in his lectures Über dramatische Kunst und Literatur (‘On Dramatic Art and Literature’, 1808–11), which had foreshadowed Coleridge. They argued forcefully – and controversially – that Shakespeare was not an untutored genius but a supreme craftsman.

  In 1798, after reading Wilhelm Meister, Schlegel set his sights on a project that had never yet been attempted in Germany: the systematic verse translation of Shakespeare’s complete plays. His intention, Schlegel wrote, was to ‘reproduce [the text] faithfully and at the same time poetically, following step by step the literal meaning and yet catching at least a part of the innumerable, indescribable beauties which do not lie in the letters but hang about it like a ghostly bloom’. Tieck acted as intermittent advisor.

  For the next three years Schlegel slogged away, translating sixteen plays, mainly comedies and histories, outdoing previous efforts (so much so that rival translators at first avoided working on the same texts) and helping initiate a minor Shakespeare boom. But despite the unstinting support and assistance of his wife, Caroline, he began to lose both patience and steam. After 1801, he completed only one more script, Richard III (1810). Hamlet was complete, naturally, but Schlegel left twenty plays untranslated, among them some of the heftiest works in the canon: King Lear, Othello, Macbeth.

  Wary of being overtaken by other translations then in progress – at least three – Schlegel’s publisher, Georg Reimer, attempted to persuade his disillusioned author back to the grindstone, but without success. In desperation, he turned to Tieck. The arrangement proved a nightmare. Schlegel, despite being cussedly unwilling to do anything more, was scornful of attempts to tamper with his artistry, while Tieck, an incorrigible over-promiser, focused on the project only fitfully, subcontracting much of the work to his talented daughter Dorothea and a team of other translators.

  Nonetheless – l
argely because of Reimer’s doggedness – the work was eventually completed, and in 1833 the nine-volume Shakespeare’s Dramatische Werke was finally complete. Schlegel-Tieck was rapidly acclaimed as the greatest translation of its time, a cult in its own right. (The poet Ferdinand Freiligrath wrote that ‘it has permeated the marrow and blood of the German people’; one critic described it as being ‘as important as Luther’s translation of the Bible’). For all that her name appeared nowhere in the printed text, Dorothea’s translations were particularly praised, notably her Macbeth.

  Aware of the valuable links with Goethe and the Romantics and eager to bolster their own Shakespeare cult, the DSG concluded that only one version should have their blessing – Schlegel-Tieck. After a degree of scholarly wrangling, they published an updated version (1867–71), following it in 1891 with the book Oechelhäuser had wanted all along: a cheap single-volume edition. Anointed as the long-awaited urtext, it sold more copies than every other German translation combined.

  I had one final appointment before I left Weimar. Given the role the Weimar court theatre had played in the revival of Shakespeare in Germany – not just in Goethe and Schiller’s day but much later, with a ground-breaking cycle of the history plays in 1864 – I felt I should at least get past the statue of the two Dioskuren and nose around the place itself.

  The diary was against me: a new The Merchant of Venice wasn’t opening for another month, and the theatre was dark every night I was in Weimar save my last. But there was a production of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte on 24 April; not a new staging, but well-received. The opera had been performed here in 1794, three years after its premiere in Vienna, and was now considered a local classic. Goethe had laboured on a sequel; like so much else, it had remained incomplete. It was enough of a connection, and anyway I reasoned that I had earned a restorative evening of Mozart. I booked a ticket.