by Ian Buruma
The aesthetic approach was typical of Herder, the man who introduced Goethe to Shakespeare. Art, in his view, grew naturally from the histories, traditions, prejudices, morals, religions, and languages of nations. He was a great gatherer of folk songs and popular tales. His goal was to find the authentic voice of the German Volk. The classic text about this subject, On German Character and Art, was published in 1773. Goethe wrote a chapter on the Strasbourg Cathedral. Herder’s contribution is one of the great documents of Shakespearomania. It begins with a wonderful image of the bard sitting on a throne of rocks with his head up in the light of heaven and the stormy seas at his feet. Down below, in those churning waters, are crowds of people, explaining, damning, worshiping, translating, excusing, and slandering his works. The great man is of course magnificently above it all, oblivious to the clamor of his critics.
Herder then explains how God’s gift of genius can flourish only in its natural locality, and how Shakespeare caught the Geist of his place and time. Since Elizabethan England was a place and time of fantastic diversity, Shakespeare’s Geist reflected this luxuriance, this wild growth of spontaneous life. Shakespeare, in Herder’s view, did not find a simple national character but a variety of social classes, ways of life, beliefs, and patterns of speech. Out of these multicolored building blocks he created his own inimitable Gothic edifice, with gargoyles and arches, bell chambers and spires, growing this way and that, as though dictated by nature alone, but encrusted with the ancient markings of history and tradition.
But if genius could flourish only in its native milieu, how could Shakespeare speak to the Germans? Here Herder had to use a broader brush. Just as the Greeks represented, instructed, and moved other Greeks, he said, Shakespeare “instructs, creates and moves the Nordic people.” He was the Nordic genius Germans had been waiting for. Such Nordic plays as Macbeth, Hamlet, and King Lear would inspire the German Geist, just as James Macpherson’s dubious compilation of ancient Scottish poems by Ossian had done. Ossianismus was the word given to this type of thing: it suggests misty mountain peaks, French horns, and singing peasants. Herder’s translations of Shakespeare have more than a whiff of Ossianismus. Shakespeare’s genius was Nordic, but it was universal too. Again Herder finds a suitably organic image: “… the barbaric, Gothic Shakespeare managed to penetrate all the strata and subsoils of the earth to arrive at the clay from which man is bred.”
But Herder was not a political thinker. Poetry, religion, and art were his main interests. Saxon sincerity was, for him, an aesthetic issue, an expression of folkish authenticity. There were others who looked at the same thing from a more political angle. The economist Adam Müller, for example. He was an Anglophile to the point of posing as a rich Englishman in Göttingen, while in fact being an impoverished Prussian. Müller saw Shakespeare’s histories as political lessons about “the decline of English feudalism.” Shakespeare’s plays showed the road from feudalism to the modern state. Shakespeare had mapped the future of Europe. (Müller later changed his mind about this.)
A more famous figure than Müller was Justus Möser. His idea of England was a typically Anglophile combination of liberalism and conservatism, with a strong racial element thrown in. He was a historian and administrator from Osnabrück, a principality ruled by Frederick, duke of York. When George III acted as the duke’s regent, Moser was the middleman between the Osnabrück aristocracy and the English king. He made several trips to England and was impressed by the status and power of the aristocracy. Möser, and no doubt his noble clients, thought England was ideal: a land of aristocratic, racially inherited Germanic liberties, grown, like sturdy oaks, from ancient soil. England had an “organic” social order, where aristocratic privileges were balanced by political duties. Society was like a natural English garden, with animals darting about freely on sweeping hills and vast swards, so different from France, whose absolute monarchy was like the geometric garden of Versailles, mechanical, artificial, tyrannical, an abomination of nature. The garden imagery is telling. Möser, too, took an aesthetic view of politics. And he was of course a worshiper of Shakespeare, the Nordic genius.*
But Möser’s Anglomania was more than a desire to mimic the British ideal. His idea, like Herder’s, was to create a German nation, true to its racial roots. Since art and presentation were crucial, Germany would need its own national theater. “Everything,” Möser said in 1774, “that is staged over here is still provincial. Neither Vienna, nor Berlin, nor Leipzig has raised its tone to something truly national.” When Goethe and Schiller both settled in Weimar in the 1770s, the creation of a national theater was one of their chief aims.
Goethe expressed this ambition in his Wilhelm Meister novels. An actress named Aurelie tells Wilhelm how she sees the theater audience as the nation. What, after all, is the public but a mass of people with a variety of interests? It is the task of the theater to give them a common goal. Then you might have a nation, instead of a collection of states.
By the time he came to Weimar, Goethe’s novel Werther, about a young man pining for his own death, had made him famous all over Europe. Werther’s English look—blue coat, yellow waistcoat, top boots—was adopted by pale young men everywhere. Werther was written very much in the yearning, straining, romantic English mode that had infected Continental sensibilities—a variation of Ossianismus, really. Werther was indeed a keen reader of Ossian’s poems. While working on the book, Goethe had tried to seduce Herder’s wife by sitting her down in the garden and singing her own husband’s translation of Shakespeare’s “Under the Greenwood Tree.” He was also given to singing songs about melancholy ruins and dressing up à la Werther. “Wertherism” made suicide fashionable. But Goethe himself was shocked to hear of a young German woman who had drowned herself while clutching a copy of his book.
Goethe’s patron in Weimar, Karl August, the duke of Weimar, ordered his friends to adopt the Werther look. But that was the only aspect of Wertherism to find its way to Weimar. For it was a hearty court to which Goethe had attached himself as an administrator: the duke’s pleasures were hunting and drinking, practical jokes, and picking up local girls. Goethe conformed as always and took part in the feasting with gusto. For serious conversation about art, science, and philosophy, he turned to Charlotte von Stein, wife of Baron von Stein, master of the horse. The baron, so far as we know, preferred the company of horses to that of his wife, but Goethe was deeply in love. Even though the baroness never allowed her relations with Goethe to be anything but platonic, she was for eleven years the source of his greatest happiness, even as “William” (Shakespeare) remained the “brightest star in Heaven.”
Life with the duke must have been exhausting: every night another party, every day another prank. On occasion, Goethe slept off the effects of nocturnal partying in the duke’s bedroom. He was wild, but there were limits to his wildness. Indeed, self-control was one of his deepest preoccupations. His goal, socially, aesthetically, psychologically, was to master himself, to find the right balance, to harmonize his life. As with his hero, Wilhelm Meister, this was linked to the other aim, of building a national theater. In both cases, Goethe turned more and more to the classical ideal, which had always attracted him, despite his intense Gothic interlude: Germany would be the new Greece, and Goethe and Schiller its main tragedians. Harmony in life would be matched by a harmonious classical theater.
With such thoughts in mind he set off on his Italian journey in 1786. He admired Palladio’s theater in Vicenza. Venice bored him. He spent only three hours in Florence. He loved Rome, but he adored Naples, where he saw Lady Hamilton rehearsing her Greek postures, and also Pompeii, which prompted his remark that “many calamities have happened to mankind, but few have given so much pleasure to posterity.” Goethe’s taste was now so thoroughly classical that he dismissed the cathedral in Milan as a Gothic gewgaw. And so, back in Weimar, he classicized Shakespeare too. From a liberating Elizabethan, Shakespeare would be turned into a Weimar Greek.
The result was a
complete reversal of what had attracted Goethe to Shakespeare in the beginning. The original idea of England, as an exuberant marketplace, a bubbling source of irrepressible truth and freedom, had faded behind the Greco-Roman ideal. “First beauty, then the truth” was Goethe’s motto now. To ennoble Shakespeare, to make him conform to a classical ideal, Goethe drilled his actors and actresses as though they were puppets or dancers. The actor playing Hamlet was told precisely how to stand when declaiming “To be or not to be”: the right hand on his chin, and the left supporting his elbow, with the two middle fingers together, and the thumb and other two fingers kept apart. The witches in Macbeth were staged as a Greek chorus, played by beautiful young women in white robes. Minor characters, such as Fortinbras, were cut from Hamlet, as was the graveyard scene, which was now seen as vulgar. The ghost scenes and other peripheral scenes, he argued, should really not be shown at all.
In fact, Goethe seemed rather to despise the theater altogether, as something plebeian. Shakespeare, he said, was a poet who only happened to write for the theater. “The stage was not worthy of his genius.…” The only reason to stage his poetry as plays, thought Goethe, was that people were not yet cultivated enough to appreciate the text on its own. But he had no doubt that the “highest pleasure” was to “listen with closed eyes” to “a fine voice reciting” Shakespeare’s words.
That Goethe and Schiller put on the plays at all was a concession to the public as part of their aim to cultivate the German nation. But it is clear from their correspondence what these cultivated men thought of the German public. The Germans, Goethe wrote, “travel with platitudes, just as Englishmen are never without their pot of tea.” They were humorless, moralistic, and banal. It was the task of the theater managers to “control” this public, to show people not what they wanted but what they ought to see. No wonder, then, that the German public stayed away from Goethe and Schiller’s static, stylized theater productions in Weimar. As one visitor to Weimar recalled: “Germany has two national theatres—Vienna with a public of 50,000, and Weimar with a public of 50.” Not that this mattered much, for Goethe’s theater was subsidized by the ducal court.
Goethe’s Weimar was an enlightened place in many respects. Goethe himself was a humane and able administrator who did much to improve the lives of the poor. As privy councillor he had roads built, bridges repaired, waterways constructed, and schools founded. And as long as the duke was able to have his parties, his girls, and enough boars to kill, he allowed Goethe to carry out these projects. But so far as the theater was concerned, Goethe’s Weimar was the precise opposite of Shakespeare’s London. Shakespeare’s art emerged from the metropolitan marketplace, catering to popular taste without aiming to improve or control. That is what gave it life and a universal appeal. Goethe’s theater in Weimar was a highly exclusive affair, more like a private club for aristocrats than a place of entertainment. The duke and his entourage would sit in their marked boxes, silently submitting to the lofty expressions of beauty and harmony and enlightenment. Once in a while a group of students, in leather riding trousers and tall caps, would arrive from Jena to liven up the house, but Goethe would have them removed by the hussars if they livened things up too much. “There will be no laughing!” was one of his famous exclamations.
In the end, even the duke grew impatient with the high-mindedness he sponsored, and he allowed an invitation to go out to a popular comedian whose main attraction was his performing poodle. The duke was fond of dogs. And this remarkable poodle was to perform the leading role in a well-known melodrama entitled The Dog of Aubry de Mont Didier. Goethe was so outraged that he stormed out of the theater after the first rehearsal. Upon which the duke wrote a letter, saying that since Goethe obviously wished to be relieved of his theatrical duties, the duke would be happy to grant his wish. But this was in 1817, some years after Schlegel’s new translations had turned Shakespeare into a German playwright.
The sad thing about Goethe’s theater projects in Weimar is not that he did not produce anything good. He did. Among other things, he wrote Faust. The sad thing is that a mania that began with a promise of artistic and political freedom ended up as an exercise in pedagogy and cultivation of the self. Goethe’s Shakespeare had become a form of aesthetic idealism, of schöngeisterei, a refined retreat from the messy world of politics and commerce, a tendency that would be a mark of the educated German bourgeoisie for a long time to come. Schlegel’s translation was a reflection of this tendency and at the same time a reaction against Goethe’s classicism.
August Wilhelm von Schlegel, born in Bonn in 1767, was a generation younger than Goethe. He and his fellow romantics, including his brother, Friedrich, were repelled by the enthusiasms that had fired the young Goethe. They had been scared away from politics by the aftermath of the French Revolution. A. W. Schlegel became a conservative Catholic. He and his friends withdrew from public life into a circle of scholars, critics, and aesthetes, writing for small literary magazines, such as Athenäum, started by the Schlegel brothers. They worshiped art for its own sake, as though it were a religion. They yearned for the Geist of the Middle Ages, loved the dark mystery of German forests, worshiped genius, dismissed cool reason, and loathed the classicism of Goethe’s Weimar. Some wrote good poetry, others were great scholars and critics. Schlegel was a Sanskritist, among other things, but his genius went into translation. The romantics believed that the literatures of the world were all part of a single universe of pure art. In this way they were as universalist as Voltaire. As the fabulist Clemens von Brentano said: “Translation is all.”
Schlegel hated what his predecessors had done to Shakespeare. One famous translation (by Wieland) was dismissed as “poetic manslaughter.” Tampering with Shakespeare’s texts was like a house-painter attempting to “improve a Raphael by making the nose a bit longer here, and displacing an arm there.” The only Shakespeare translations Schlegel approved of were Herder’s, for like Herder, Schlegel loved Shakespeare’s art for its sheer intricacy, its filigreed construction, its tangled Gothic genius. And Schlegel, too, regarded Shakespeare as a Nordic bard. But Schlegel never thought he could improve Shakespeare. He told Wieland that no matter how much he, Schlegel, worshiped Shakespeare’s plays, and no matter how hard he worked on them, he knew “how much [Shakespeare’s] genius would lose in my translation.”
Schlegel believed that a translator had to erase himself, to allow the translation to remain as close as possible to the original. Nowhere should the sensibility of the translator intrude; his language should be Shakespeare’s German, as though the English playwright had written it himself. This was of course an impossible ideal. Schlegel wrote in the German of his time, and you don’t have to be a mystic of the national soul to see that his language reflected the literary style, the historical associations, the romantic sensibilities of the early nineteenth century in Germany. His brilliant translation may have been the most accurate version of Shakespeare in German to date, but it also contained echoes of Goethe’s classicism and Herder’s poetry. It was, in short, a German text. A famous German Shakespeare (and Goethe) scholar tried to explain this in the following rather tortured formulation: the universal genius of Shakespeare could be reborn in Germany only after the universal genius of Goethe had infused the German language with a German Geist equal to the English spirit of Shakespeare.
Through the great Schlegel, then, a popular sixteenth-century English theater about politics and violence, money and sex, jealousy and love became a monument of nineteenth-century German bourgeois culture: elevated, high-minded, romantic. It was a culture that reached the summit of European civilization, that spoke of the finest sensibility and the highest degree of personal cultivation, but one that was unequipped in the end to resist the darker forces already evident in the first waves of Shakespearomania. For Voltaire’s seeds of constitutional liberty fell on less fertile soil in Germany than the “Saxon” racialism and the pull of the dark forest. The main legacy of Shakespearomanie was not political, but a
esthetic: a taste, a Kultur, a mania, and a literary language of incomparable beauty.
THE ODDEST EPISODE in the entire history of Shakespearomania came a little over a hundred years after Schlegel’s translation. Shakespeare was performed more often during Hitler’s Third Reich than Goethe or Schiller. Goethe was too humanistic and Schiller too revolutionary for Nazi taste. But Shakespeare remained the Nordic genius, and Hitler, who had always hoped for a Nordic alliance with Britain, was proud that German theaters paid more tribute to Shakespeare’s Nordic spirit than the British did themselves. In September 1939, the Reichsdramaturg, Rainer Schlösser, officially declared that Shakespeare, in German translation, was to be regarded as a “German classic.” So even as German troops were preparing for an invasion of Britain in the spring of 1940, the Nazi elite gathered in Weimar to remember Shakespeare’s birthday.*
Of course the Nazis had their favorites. Tragic heroes, such as Hamlet and Macbeth, playing out their fates in the cold and misty north, were popular. Othello, because he broke the racial laws, and Shylock, because he wasn’t evil enough, were banned—even though Werner Krauss was praised in the early 1930s for his Shylock, which displayed “the external and internal uncleanliness” of the “eastern Jewish racial type.” The Nazi paper, Der Stürmer, revived an old analogy between Hamlet and the German nation. Hamlet was deprived of his rightful inheritance, just as Germany had been at Versailles. Weak, treacherous Gertrude was like the politicians of the Weimar Republic, and like Hamlet, Germany would have its revenge. Also like Hamlet, the Third Reich would die—but Der Stürmer did not say that.