Hey, Nietzsche! Leave them kids alone

by Craig Schuftan

But for the romantics, this mood of dull conservatism only made the image of Napoleon’s reign blaze all the more brightly by contrast. New heroes started to appear in the literature and art of this period. Eric Hobsbawm describes them as:

  Dashing young men in guards or hussar uniforms leaving operas, soirees, assignments with duchesses or highly ritualised lodge-meetings to make a military coup or place themselves at the head of a struggling nation…7

  The hussars were a cavalry force in the Napoleonic wars — the armies of France, Austria and Prussia all included hussar regiments. They were notorious for their reckless behaviour, and instantly recognisable for their jackets — double-breasted affairs with horizontal stripes of gold braid across the front, inspired by Hungarian fashions of the late eighteenth century. Napoleon himself was known to wear them — some accounts of his last farewell before being exiled have him wearing a hussar guard’s jacket as he made his way down the marble staircase and bid his officers adieu.

  If Napoleon was often intentionally confused with Christ by his mythographers, then this departure scene, as Norman Davies has observed, was his Last Supper. It came to symbolise the end of an era, and did much to popularise the idea of Napoleon as a martyr — an idea the emperor himself had already succumbed to by the time he wrote this letter to his first wife, Josephine, on the weekend before he sailed for Elba:

  They’ve betrayed me one and all…adieu, ma bonne Josephine. Learn resignation as I have learned it, and never banish from your memory the one who has never forgotten you, and will never forget you.8

  Napoleon was always seen to be a different kind of military hero. The poets and artists who admired him during his reign ‘did not depict him as a victor’, as art historian William Vaughn observes:

  But as a man of emotion, anxious in mid-battle, compassionately visiting the plague-stricken, or expressing horror at the consequences of war.9

  And despite the exaggerated nature of some of these portrayals, Napoleon, as his letters show, was an emotional man — as a young man, especially so. In 1785 the seventeen-year-old army recruit confided thoughts of loneliness to his journal:

  Always alone among people, I return home to dream by myself, and submit to the liveliness of my own melancholy.10

  In these moments, when the teenaged Napoleon felt most isolated from his fellow human beings, he found solace in a small book called The Sorrows of Young Werther. He wasn’t the only one — Werther had, since its publication in 1774, become a runaway bestseller. Its readership was mostly made up of moody young men, and the key to its appeal lay in the fact that the book’s protagonist, the young Werther of the title, was, like them, solitary, introspective and over-emotional. The book purports to be a series of letters written by this sensitive young man to a close friend, telling the story of his unhappy love affair, his descent into despair, and his eventual decision to end his life. The preface explains that the author’s purpose in presenting these letters is to provide consolation for those similarly afflicted:

  And thou, good soul, who sufferest the same distress as he endured once, draw comfort from his sorrows; and let this little book be thy friend, if, owing to fortune or through thine own fault, thou canst not find a dearer companion.11

  Napoleon read it seven times.

  Twenty years later, no longer just a lonely young man, but a lonely young master of the Continent, Napoleon finally got to meet the author, J W von Goethe. In fact, he’d just invaded and conquered Goethe’s country, so there was not much chance of the writer refusing the invitation. On 2 October 1808 Goethe and the emperor met over a large round table while the latter was eating his breakfast. Napoleon told the fifty-seven-year-old author that he looked young for his age.

  Having got the small talk out of the way, the Emperor owned up to how many times he’d read Goethe’s novella. Werther being a tragedy, the talk then moved on to tragedy in general, which, in Thomas Carlyle’s account, Napoleon told Goethe, ‘ought to be the school of kings and peoples’.12 He declared that there was no greater subject for a tragedy than the death of Caesar, and complained that Voltaire had not really done the story justice. ‘A great poet’, Napoleon insisted, ‘would have given prominence to Caesar’s plans for the regeneration of the world, and shown what a loss mankind had suffered by his murder.’13

  That Goethe and Napoleon should have started out discussing the story of an emotional young artist who commits suicide on account of a hopeless love (Werther) and ended up talking about the assassination of one of the most powerful men in history (Caesar) might seem incongruous. But Caesar, Werther and — as he seems to have known himself — Napoleon are all, in the romantic imagination, tragic heroes. They have earned their place in the pantheon — alongside Hamlet, Don Giovanni and Lord Byron — because they are all, as Eric Hobsbawm puts it, ‘trespassers beyond the limits of ordinary life’.14

  The romantic hero is solitary. He retreats into himself because the world has failed to satisfy him, to live up to his dreams. A ‘weak’ romantic figure like Werther dies through inaction, because he can no longer cope with the divide between himself and the world. A ‘strong’ romantic hero like Caesar goes out into the world and tries to reshape it according to his vision, but he, too, is inevitably crushed by reality. This conflict between the individual and society, as Napoleon correctly guessed, was to be the basis of tragedy in this new century. Because no matter how hard the hero fights, and no matter how brave his heart is, in any contest between the self and the world, the self will come off second best. The romantic hero is always doomed, because his adversary is reality itself.

  This Tragic Affair

  IN THE VIDEO for ‘Welcome to the Black Parade’, the patient lies dying in a hospital bed. His life has been full of struggle and heartbreak, yet he clings to it as though it might still have something to offer him. Suddenly he looks up and sees the salvation he’s been waiting for. If this were a religious painting from the Middle Ages, an angel would be hovering over his deathbed. But this is America in the twenty-first century, so the light beaming down on him from above comes from a TV. On the screen, the patient sees Gerard Way in his black parade uniform, singing the story of his life. He reaches up to touch the vision, the real world disappears, and he finds himself on a frozen road, with the black parade marching toward him.

  The Black Parade contains a dangerous idea. It suggests that life might be a struggle for which there is no reward, a bad joke at best. In this world, where dreams are made to be broken, and the promise of happiness is an illusion, our only possible salvation lies in death. Which is not the same thing as writing a song that says; kill yourself. The Black Parade is, as Gerard and the band have pointed out many times, a very life-affirming record. It accepts that living is impossible, but insists that we must be brave enough to do it anyway. On the album’s final song, ‘Famous Last Words’, Gerard recoils from ‘a life that’s so demanding’, but refuses to give up the fight — which of course is the old romantic stand-off between the solitary hero and the cruel, cruel world:

  I am not afraid to keep on living

  I am not afraid to walk this world alone1

  The Black Parade is a complex work, full of contradictions. Like any great work of art, it refuses to lie still and play the part of an illustration for a single idea. But the mass media has a way of flattening out the subtleties in art so it can be more easily squeezed into the grid of the six o’clock news bulletin. Sometime in 2007, having been put through this process, My Chemical Romance became a band who dressed like zombies, wrote songs about death and played them for a fan base primarily made up of your children. They also became, much to their dismay, an emo band — which in the UK was already tabloid code for ‘suicide cult’. When thirteen-year-old My Chem fan Hannah Bond took her own life early in 2008, the band, and their album, had no hope of a fair trial. The Black Parade’s complex array of meanings was reduced to a series of wildly inaccurate sound bites — it was, according to one journalist, ‘the place where emos believe
they go when they die’.2 Fans organised a day of action, holding up banners displaying the lyrics from ‘Famous Last Words’ and testifying to the power of the band’s music to save lives. But it was too late. In the eyes of the British public, Gerard Way was a cult leader, a glamouriser of death, and a very bad influence on the youth of today.

  In 1774, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe found himself in a similar position to Gerard Way. Goethe’s novella, The Sorrows of Young Werther, was a runaway bestseller — Germany’s first, in fact. More than that, it was a novel that seemed to speak for its age, to articulate the feelings of confusion and hopelessness that lurked beneath the surface of eighteenth-century life. It was the kind of book, as Goethe himself had predicted with his short introductory note, that people took to heart — young people especially. It gave rise to new behaviours — the emotional, death-obsessed youths who loved it became more emotional and more obsessed with death. They were easy to spot — Werther fans had Werther faces — they were dreamy, gloomy, cut off from the world, in love with their own misery. But Wertherism wasn’t just a lifestyle — if taken to its logical conclusion it became a death-style. Werther, it was said, triggered a kind of suicide epidemic in the late 1770s. Of these, the most disturbing for Goethe was the case of a woman who drowned herself in a river not far from where he lived. When her body was dragged out of the water, she was found to have a copy of The Sorrows of Young Werther in her pocket.3

  Even after this initial panic died down Werther continued to generate trouble for its author. Goethe was pestered on and off for the rest of his life about this little book — partly because of its shocking content, and partly because its story was rumoured to have come directly from Goethe’s own life. This was true. In 1772 the author, then still a student, had moved from Frankfurt to a country town named Wetzlar. Here he pursued his legal studies by sitting in on sessions of the Court of Justice. He also became involved in the social life of the students and court administrators, and it was in this company that the young Goethe fell deeply in love for the second time.

  Goethe met Lotte Buff, the twenty-year-old daughter of a court official and surrogate mother to her many brothers and sisters, at a ball at Wolpertshausen. They danced, she gave him flowers, and the two stared into each others eyes on the carriage ride back to town. Goethe was convinced that Lotte was the love of his life, and his subsequent discovery that she was more or less engaged to a secretary in the Hanoverian Legation did not deter him in the slightest. Even when Lotte’s fiancé, Kestner, returned from his posting abroad, the smitten young poet continued to hang around the house — even going so far as to strike up a close friendship with Kestner. This arrangement worked out for a little while but eventually the situation became intolerable for Goethe — and as a result of his increasingly hysterical behaviour, he began to frighten Lotte and alienate himself from Kestner. Seeing no way out of the impasse, Goethe left the house for good on 10 September.

  Back at home, and in a truly disturbed state of mind, he heard news of a fellow student of his from the University of Leipzig:

  Of a moody temperament, disheartened by failure in his profession, and soured by a hopeless passion for the wife of another, he had borrowed a pair of pistols under pretense of a journey, and had shot himself on the night of October 29.4

  The news of this young man’s lonely suicide had an electrifying effect on Goethe — for obvious reasons. He soon wedded the story of his unhappy affair with Lotte to the grim tale of his acquaintance from Leipzig, and within four weeks, The Sorrows of Young Werther was complete. Goethe had become Werther, (an artist now, not a poet), Lotte had become Charlotte, and Kestner had become Albert, but in most other respects the story of the romantic young man and his impossible love affair was the same.

  Young Werther, like Rousseau, Wordsworth, and Goethe himself, is a student of nature:

  She alone is inexhaustible, and capable of forming the greatest masters. Much may be alleged in favour of rules, as much may be likewise advanced in favour of the laws of society: an artist formed upon them will never produce anything absolutely bad or disgusting; as a man who observes the laws, and obeys decorum, can never be an absolutely intolerable neighbour, nor a decided villain: but yet, say what you will of rules, they destroy the genuine feeling of nature, as well as its true expression.5

  At the start of the book, nature is for Werther a source of sublime joy. He longs to disappear into the tranquil scenes before his eyes, and, like Conor Oberst, he finds himself dreaming dreams of insect bliss:

  Every tree, every bush, is full of flowers; and one might wish himself transformed into a butterfly, to float about in this ocean of perfume, and find his whole existence in it.6

  The next day, he floats further into raptures. Walking through the valley at sunset, he flings himself to the ground and presses his ear to the soil:

  …as I lie close to the earth, a thousand unknown plants are noticed by me: when I hear the buzz of the little world among the stalks, and grow familiar with the countless indescribable forms of the insects and flies, then I feel the presence of the Almighty, who formed us in his own image, and the breath of that universal love which bears and sustains us, as it floats around us in an eternity of bliss…7

  Werther has a hard time getting all this down on paper. He has ‘a heart that watches and receives’ but it has no filter, no way of limiting or controlling the sensations that come his way. He feels overwhelmed, and finds it difficult to draw:

  Oh, would I could describe these conceptions, could impress upon paper all that is living so full and warm within me, that it might be the mirror of my soul, as my soul is the mirror of the infinite God! O my friend — but it is too much for my strength — I sink under the weight of the splendour of these visions!8

  And this is the carefree, happy Werther! Clearly he’s an excitable young man. His problem, as he admits to his penfriend, is that he is too sensitive. ‘I treat my heart like a sick child,’ he writes, ‘and indulge its every whim.’ Later, staring at another scene of birds, beetles and rolling green hills, Werther is completely overcome, and begins to hallucinate:

  Stupendous mountains encompassed me, abysses yawned at my feet, and cataracts fell headlong down before me; impetuous rivers rolled through the plain, and rocks and mountains resounded from afar… Everything around is alive with an infinite number of forms; while mankind fly for security to their petty houses, from the shelter of which they rule in their imaginations over the wide-extended universe. Poor fool!9

  By this point, as you might have guessed from the apocalyptic tone he’s adopted, Werther’s heart has begun to break. It’s become perfectly clear to him that Charlotte will never leave Albert for him, and that his love is hopeless. And because everything — from the Homer he reads in the garden to the garden itself — is a big deal to Werther, this is a really big deal. As he sinks into despair, his relationship to the natural world undergoes a remarkable change. He’s just as alive with sensitivity to the life of nature as he ever was; only now, if he steps on an ant, he immediately spirals into thoughts of cosmic despair, and begins to see nature as ‘a monster, devouring her own offspring’. Universal love has become universal chaos.

  Werther still sees the landscape as a mirror for his soul. It’s just that now Werther’s soul is clouded over with misery, and he’s begun to find that rolling green hills and pretty butterflies just don’t do it for him anymore. He doesn’t go out early in the morning or at sunset anymore — he waits until it’s dark — and if the weather has turned bad, so much the better to suit his foul mood. Here Werther is in luck, as the book moves to its grim conclusion the leaves begin to fall from the trees and autumn gives way to winter.

  It is even so! As nature puts on her autumn tints it becomes autumn with me and around me.10

  Then in mid-December there comes an unexpected thaw, and the river bursts its banks. The town is plunged into chaos, and Werther, on the stroke of midnight, sets out into the freezing dark to survey the devastat
ion.

  And when the moon shone forth, and tinged the black clouds with silver, and the impetuous torrent at my feet foamed and resounded with awful and grand impetuosity, I was overcome by a mingled sensation of apprehension and delight. With extended arms I looked down into the yawning abyss, and cried, ‘Plunge!’ For a moment my senses forsook me, in the intense delight of ending my sorrows and my sufferings by a plunge into that gulf!11

  It’s around this time that Werther becomes convinced that the only course of action left open to him is to ‘quit his prison’ once and for all. ‘Yes, I feel certain, Wilhelm,’ he writes, ‘and every day I become more certain, that the existence of any being whatever is of very little consequence.’12

  As he hangs around Charlotte’s household moping and pining, he contemplates all sorts of crazy ideas. He wonders what would happen if he just swept Charlotte off her feet and kissed her; he wonders if he might have to kill Albert; he wonders, in his darkest moments, if he might have to kill Charlotte. But somehow he can’t bring himself to do any of these things. He just wants to disappear.

  I am ill; and yet I am well — I wish for nothing — I have no desires — it were better I were gone.13

  Young Werther is not very old, but he’s already seen enough of life to know what’s in store: more pain, more misery, and above all, more disappointment.

  What is the destiny of man, but to fill up the measure of his sufferings, and to drink his allotted cup of bitterness?14

  Charlotte implores Werther to be more reasonable — his love is hopeless — why wallow in misery? Werther agrees that his love is hopeless, but rejects Charlotte’s conclusions — he refuses to get over it because this implies a walling off from feeling, a denial of his emotions, that he cannot accept. Instead, he has chosen to see his love to its grim conclusion — he has begun to see that he must die. Frustrated at every turn, Charlotte feels there is nothing more she can offer Werther but her pity — but he already knows there is one more thing she can do for him. He wants her, in short, to finish him off. After his final confrontation with Charlotte, he has his servant visit her house with a request to borrow Albert’s hunting-pistols ‘for a journey’: