Worlds Elsewhere

by Andrew Dickson

  For all that the theatre had been rebuilt almost entirely since Goethe and Schiller’s day, when Susann, the press officer, offered to show me the building, I said yes. As a writer on theatre with a strong aversion ever to get involved in making it, I took a tourist’s naive pleasure in sneaking backstage: the clutter of discarded props; the way the stage itself, a piece of glistening doll’s-house perfection when seen front of house, was in fact a sordid tangle of duct tape and trailing wires and signs screaming ACHTUNG! in exciting colours.

  Leaning against the wall of the paint shop there was a huge picture of Goethe, several metres high, a blown-up reproduction of the famous portrait by Joseph Karl Stieler. Completed in 1828, it depicts the poet near the end of his life, in a sleek black silk jacket and expensively embroidered waistcoat: the very model of the artist-courtier in well-fed prosperity. But Goethe’s dark eyes – sidelong, distracted, even plaintive – told a different story, more haunted and ambivalent: a man of frustrated ideas and ambitions, tortured by doubts that any of it had been worthwhile.

  Goethe’s distinctly Hamletish approach to Shakespeare lasted long beyond the publication of the last part of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre in 1796. He’d stayed on at the court theatre after Schiller’s death, but the fizz had gone out of it: yet another tiresome administrative appointment that kept him from his writing.

  Although his own dramas drifted away from Shakespearian models – notably Faust, the first part of which was drafted by 1806 – Goethe did try every so often to produce the plays. In 1811, he put on a long-desired staging of Romeo and Juliet, which though based on Schlegel’s translation had lost half of the text and acquired 488 lines of Goethe’s own. Goethe regarded it as a mixed success: ‘I have probably never looked more deeply into Shakespeare’s talent, but he, like all ultimate things, remains after all unfathomable.’ In 1817, shaken by the death of his wife Christiane the year before and sick of backstage bickering – which culminated in Karl August pressuring him to stage a French melodrama with a poodle in a leading role – he resigned.

  An essay he began work on during his last years at the theatre, ‘Shakespeare und kein Ende!’ (‘No End to Shakespeare!’), written over a three-year period from 1813 to 1816, rehearsed these agonised questions once again. Earlier in the day I had spent a few hours in the Goethe-Schiller Archive, a statuesque classical building high on the brow of a hill overlooking Weimar. One of the curators had shown me a scribal copy of the essay: the size of a small pamphlet, in tidy copperplate that gave little hint of its protracted gestation.

  Its paradoxes were typically late-Goethean. It argued that Shakespeare was pre-eminently a man of the theatre, but also that the plays were best read aloud rather than acted; he was a modern poet but also ‘naive’ as per Schiller’s scheme, and simultaneously – somehow – both. Niggling away was the question of whether it was even possible to stage his plays:

  Shakespeare’s works are not for our physical eyes … Shakespeare works through the living word and this – the word – is best transmitted by reading aloud; for then the listener is not distracted as he is by a performance, be it a fitting one or not. There is no greater pleasure and none more pure than to listen with closed eyes to a reciting (not a declaiming) of a Shakespeare play that is right for it.

  Was this ambivalence a hard-won lesson from the experience of staging Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet, or a demonstration that Goethe was congenitally unsuited to the job of theatre director? It was hard to say.

  Wilhelm Meister refused to be banished. In 1821 Goethe published what would be his last major work, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (‘Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years’), which he would continue tinkering with until a few years before his death in 1832. An experimental, proto-Joycean novel built up from many years of jottings, it sends Wilhelm – who has long since abandoned the theatre – on a cascade of adventures featuring magic boxes and hidden caves through territory that more closely resembles the world of medieval quests or magical realism than any realistic European setting.

  Critics are still divided as to whether Wanderjahre is in a finished state, or even whether it counts as a novel at all. One bitter little line caught my eye, right at the end of the book. It comes amid a collection of aphorisms supposedly composed by Makarie, a mystic seer-like figure whom Wilhelm encounters on his wanderings:

  How much falsehood Shakespeare and particularly Calderón have subjected us to, how these two great lights of the poetic firmament have become ignes fatui of us, let the writers of the future note in retrospect.

  From the great illuminator of ‘Zum Shakespeares Tag’ who had given the young writer the ‘gift of sight’ to an ignis fatuus or false fire … if these were Goethe’s own sentiments too, even a hint of them, it was a bleak conclusion.

  Even so, Shakespeare stayed in Goethe’s thoughts to the end. According to his first biographer Johann Peter Eckermann, among the poet’s final words was a paean to the writer who had meant so much to him over fifty years: ‘Just let someone try, with human desire and human strength, to produce something that one could set alongside the creations that bear the name of Mozart, Raphael or Shakespeare.’

  A few days later in March 1832, as Goethe lay dying, language failing him, it was said he had tried to write words in the air. Only one letter was discernible: ‘W’. I had a strong hunch it stood for Wilhelm.

  Die Zauberflöte didn’t entirely live up to the excitements of being backstage: saying the production, over a decade old, was past its sell-by date was putting it kindly. But for once it wasn’t having Shakespeare on the brain that made me glimpse him in the theatre that night. The wrangles between the Queen of the Night and the magician Sarastro in Die Zauberflöte had obvious echoes of Oberon and Titania, but all the intimate resemblances were to The Tempest, itself a free extemporisation on themes of magic, illusion, power, love.

  Much has been made of the bizarreness of the librettist Emanuel Schikaneder’s symbolism-heavy plot, with its love quest, imprisonments, trials of virtue and abstinence – including the well-supported theory that it was based on his and the composer’s interest in Freemasonry. Watching it, I wondered if the story made more sense if one saw it through a Shakespearian lens. The virtuous young lovers Tamino and Pamina were plausible stand-ins for Ferdinand and Miranda; Sarastro was a double for Prospero; Monostatos, the ‘blackamoor’ and chief of Sarastro’s team of slaves, for Caliban.

  None of these similarities is surprising, if one accepts the theory that Zauberflöte was partly inspired by The Enchanted Island, John Dryden and William Davenant’s 1667 adaptation of The Tempest. And there are more alluring connections too. According to a single account, a dramatist called Friedrich Wilhelm Gotter had made a ‘marvellous free adaptation’ of Shakespeare’s The Tempest under the title Die Zauberinsel (‘The Enchanted Island’) and sent it to Mozart soon after Zauberflöte’s premiere in October 1791. Desperate for money and by then gravely ill, Mozart had agreed to write the music (having, confusingly, already contributed to yet another opera by Schikaneder with a remarkably similar title). Less than three months later, however, he would be dead, the work incomplete.

  Mozart’s The Tempest was one of the great operatic might-have-beens. But then Zauberflöte contained enough magic of its own, I thought as I walked back through the darkened, silent streets of Weimar. For all the silliness of Schikaneder’s plot, the music was transcendent, grave and mystical, filled with an exultant sense of joy but also the strange youthful gravity Mozart summoned without apparent effort. Listening, I felt the philosophical tangles of Goethe and Weimar classicism and nostrification slipping away: Mozart had the measure of me.

  He certainly had a way with recognition scenes. When Pamina and Tamino were reunited in the final act, it was via a duet of heart-stopping simplicity and grace, their vocal lines winding ecstatically around each other while strings pulsed mesmerically underneath. Forget airy sprites and frolicking masquers: the transposition that introduced it, from a lambent A-flat maj
or to a shimmering F major, was a conjuring trick that rivalled anything written by Shakespeare.

  AS I BOARDED THE TRAIN, my head was full of everything I’d seen. For all the ardent, sometimes alarming zealousness of German Shakespearians – unser Shakespeare, divine Wilhelm and the rest – it was possible to explain away their obsession as Roland Petersohn had done: as an exaggerated symptom of the nationalistic fervour that swept through many new European states in the revolutionary years of the mid-nineteenth century.

  Shakespeare had been essential to the renaissance of German literature and drama for the German Romantics; from there, particularly once Germany had an authorised translation, it wasn’t the craziest leap to declare him an honorary German. Many countries had tried to plant a flag in Shakespeare, whether it was fables about his supposed Sicilian origins or recent Canadian attempts to claim that a seventeenth-century oil painting now kept in a vault in Ontario, the Sanders portrait, is the only surviving portrait done from life (and thus a more authentic relic than anything owned by Canada’s two ancient rivals, America and Britain). Such nationalistic appropriations were a touch naive; but they testified, if little else, to Shakespeare’s global reach and the intensity of devotion he inspired worldwide.

  Another period of the Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft’s past was infinitely more troubling. While at the Goethe-Schiller Archive, I’d glanced at the society’s papers, ordering a couple of box files on the off chance they might throw up something. One box was from the 1930s and included a colourful copy of the magazine Die Woche commemorating a Weimar performance of Was Ihr Wollt (Twelfth Night, translated under its playful alternative title What You Will). The issue was published in 1932. I didn’t have the time – or the German – to dig deeper, but it fired a question: what had happened to the Gesellschaft the year following, once the National Socialists had seized power?

  The answer wasn’t hard to find. The English-language history printed on the Gesellschaft’s website restricted itself to a taut and legalistic paragraph, but was at least clear: the DSG had fallen squarely under the influence of the Nazi regime. Party officials had infiltrated the board, Jewish subscribers been forced to resign. The annual Shakespeare-Tage were remodelled to accommodate Nazi interests and ideologies.

  There was barely an academic or literary institution that had not been forced into some ghastly accommodation with Hitler’s regime, but it was conspicuous that the Party had shown such interest in Shakespeare. Could it be related to those nineteenth-century attempts to claim him for German culture? And what happened once the second world war had begun, when Germany and the country of Shakespeare’s birth were officially at war?

  The website article had been written by an academic from Hanover, Ruth von Ledebur, who had researched the Gesellschaft’s history and was coming to the conference in Munich. I emailed, asking if we could meet. In the meantime, I downloaded a slew of journal articles to my laptop to read on the train.

  What I read made my head throb even more. The early years aside, the DSG had done its best to keep out of the political intrigues that overtook Germany during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It prided itself on its internationalist reputation, boasting that by 1911 its members included Theodore Roosevelt and King George V of England, alongside the emperors of Austria and Germany.

  Such amity did not last. One flashpoint was the first world war, when Shakespeare had – like so much else – been drawn into the conflict. As in 1864, an anniversary was responsible: 1916 was three hundred years since Shakespeare’s death, the cue for events in various cities around the world, among them Prague, New York, Madrid and Copenhagen.

  The story went something like this. Hearing that German Shakespearians intended to plough ahead with their celebrations despite the fact that there was a war on, an elderly British playwright called Henry Arthur Jones had written a pamphlet pouring caustic scorn on the idea that Germany could find anything at all to celebrate in Shakespeare. Jones had made a name on the late-Victorian stage with society dramas, to great commercial but little critical success. (Oscar Wilde once quipped that ‘there are three rules for writing plays. The first rule is not to write like Henry Arthur Jones; the second and third rules are the same.’) Now sixty-five, a semi-invalid, Jones was crabbed and cantankerous, devoted to defending his country’s honour with a mania that verged on lunacy.

  In Shakespeare and Germany, published in 1916, Jones turned his fire on German claims to own Shakespeare, which by that stage had hardened into a trope:

  It will be well for England to be prepared for the characteristic official announcement which will doubtless be made in Berlin on 23rd April for the final and complete annexation by Germany of William Shakespeare, with all his literary, poetical, philosophical, and stage appurtenances, effects, traditions, and associations, and all the demesnes that there adjacent lie. […] Meantime we may ask by what insolence and egotism, what lust of plunder, or what madness of pride Germany dares add to the hideous roll of her thieveries and rapes this topping impudence and crime of vaunting to herself the allegiance of Shakespeare?

  It was not incidental that Jones’s title page stated that Shakespeare and Germany had been ‘written during the Battle of Verdun’.

  The pamphlet may have been deranged, but in one respect it was dead right – caught up in its own brand of nationalistic fervour, the Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft had indeed convinced itself that 1916 should be a bellicose celebration of the Germanness of Shakespeare. When president Alois Brandl addressed his colleagues in Weimar in April 1914, even before hostilities formally commenced, he insisted that ‘Shakespeare belongs to our spiritual armament’, and ended quoting the words of Henry V before Agincourt:

  O God of battles, steel my soldiers’ hearts.

  Possess them not with fear. Take from them now

  The sense of reck’ning, ere th’opposèd numbers

  Pluck their hearts from them.

  Brandl would not be the first to reach for Henry V during wartime – and was certainly not the last – but the effect was to entrench divisions between British and German academics. When an erstwhile colleague of Brandl’s, the Anglo-Jewish scholar Israel Gollancz, was assembling a Book of Homage to Shakespeare for 1916, asking representatives from countries worldwide to send in tributes to the plays and poems, Germany and Austria were pointedly uninvited. Another DSG stalwart, the dramatist Ludwig Fulda, suggested that if the Kaiser’s army were to win the war, a clause should be inserted into the peace treaty ‘stipulating the formal surrender of William Shakespeare to Germany’ (it was a ‘mistake’ that he had been born in England in the first place). It seems unlikely that Fulda knew of Henry Arthur Jones’s pamphlet, which suggested the Germans would try to do exactly this. And it was apparently not a joke.

  In March 1933, once the Nazis had seized power, the Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft was even more eager to conform. Nervous about the newly passed legislation concerning Gleichschaltung (‘falling-into-line’), the society hurriedly recast its Shakespeare-Tag celebrations to remove any taint of opposition. Echoing Freiligrath the century before, the new keynote speaker, Max Deutschbein, enlisted none other than Hamlet to this new Völkisch cause, ‘not only the most powerful revelation of the poet himself, but … at the same time the most striking embodiment of the heroic-Germanic man’.

  The Party repaid the compliment handsomely. Within the year, the DSG was receiving funds from the foreign office. Fervent right-wingers soon thronged its ranks. Rainer Schlösser, a journalist and favourite of Goebbels, became a committed member, as did Joachim von Ribbentrop, later Germany’s ambassador to Britain. A rubicon loomed in 1936, when the translator Hans Rothe, whose muscular, modernist versions of Shakespeare had been popular during the Weimar era, found himself under attack. Remarkably, the dispute made headlines: the SS house magazine Der Schwarze Korps weighed in, and in May 1936 none other than Goebbels gave a speech proclaiming that ‘literary experiments’ on writers such as Shakespeare w
ere not to be tolerated. (Rothe had already fled the country.) Invited to offer scholarly judgement, the Gesellschaft dithered before eventually ruling that Rothe’s translations were inferior to Schlegel-Tieck.

  Things became stranger, and more sinister. Otherwise innocuous Jahrbuch articles began to bristle with terms such as Kampf (‘struggle’) and Streben (‘striving’). A lowpoint came in that same year of 1936, when Professor Hans F. K. Günther, whose eugenic research had made him an object of veneration for many senior Nazis, joined the board. The author of such works as A Racial Typology of the Jewish People, Günther was not selected, needless to say, for his expertise in literary criticism. On Shakespeare-Tag that April, he gave a talk. Its full title was ‘Shakespeare’s Girls and Women from a Biological Perspective’, an ominous nod to an essay on the heroines by the Jewish poet Heinrich Heine.

  Even by the surreal standards of National Socialism, the talk makes for bewildering reading. Günther argued that Shakespeare was a fervent eugenicist, committed throughout his works to ideals of racial purity, whether in Sonnet 1’s claim that ‘from fairest creatures we desire increase’ (to breed) or the way in which, at the close of Twelfth Night, Viola and Sebastian recognise each other because of their ‘noble’ ancestry.

  ‘Some of you might be somewhat shocked at my attempt to connect Shakespeare with questions of heredity, selection, eradication and birth statistics,’ Günther announced: