by W. G. Sebald
Hebel’s cosmographical observations are an attempt, in the clear light of reason, to lift the veil which separates us from the world beyond. Weltfrömmigkeit [secular piety] and the study of nature take the place of faith and metaphysics. The perfect mechanism of the spheres is, for the Almanac author, proof of the existence of a realm of light which we may at the last enter upon. Hebel permitted himself no doubts on this matter; indeed, his office clearly precluded such a possibility. But in his dreams—beyond the reach of the controlling authority of consciousness—which for a while he was in the habit of writing down, we find not a few indications that he, too, was prey to troubling fears and insecurities. “I was lying,” he notes on the fifth of November 1805, “in my old bedroom in my mother’s house. There was an oak tree growing in the middle of the room. The room had no ceiling, and the tree reached up into the rafters. In places the tree was aflame, which was most lovely to look at. Finally the flames reached the uppermost branches and the roof beams began to catch fire. After the fire had been extinguished, a greenish resinlike substance, which later became gelatinous, was found at the seat of the fire, as well as a great number of ugly dirty-green beetles gnawing greedily at it.” Just as alarming as this transformation of the nursery with its glowing Christmas tree into a place teeming with horror is the dream image of the damned souls in hell, where in the shape of hot fishes and other sea creatures they lie among beech leaves in a warm room. Indeed, for Hebel the animal kingdom in general appears rather disturbing: whether it is the tiny mouse with a sky-blue patch on its back which hops around under his feet, or the African lion which enters his room and places its forepaws, disfigured by mange, on his shoulders—not to mention the pair of angels, one a pregnant female, who are kept in a chicken run together with the other domestic fowl. Proving his identity is something which also variously troubles Hebel in his dreams; one night he is seated at table with Christ and the Apostles and fears that they will notice that he is not quite kosher in his beliefs, and on another occasion he is unmasked as a spy in Paris and denies his origins. The surreal world of dreams, then, is far from the star-strewn Elysian Fields which Hebel creates by day in his imagination, pen in hand. The random and arbitrary way in which the most incongruous things are combined there may be seen as a reaction to an era when the last remnants of the medieval view of a divinely ordered universe were being torn asunder, while at the same time secular history, in the form of endless wars and revolutions, was beginning everywhere to extend its violent reach. The superstition that the appearance of a comet in the heavens was a portent of impending disaster our Almanac author, characteristically, dismisses lightly with the remark that unfortunately the number of calamitous events occurring between 1789 and 1810 exceeded by far the occurrence of stars with tails. “You, gentle reader,” he writes, “need only look back at the last twenty years, at all the revolutions and trees of liberty, the sudden death of Emperor Leopold, the death met by King Louis XVI, the assassination of the Turkish Emperor, the bloody wars in Germany, the Netherlands, in Switzerland, Italy, Poland, Spain, the battles of Austerlitz and Eylau, at Esslingen and Wagram; at the outbreaks of yellow fever, typhus and cattle plagues, the conflagrations in Copenhagen, Stockholm and Constantinople, and the rising cost of coffee and sugar” in order to understand that one can never know, first thing in the morning, what will happen by nightfall. The prime example of this is Das Unglück der Stadt Leiden [The Catastrophe of the City of Leiden], where life is going on as usual despite the fact that a ship laden with seventy barrels of gunpowder is lying at anchor in the harbor: “People were having their midday meal, enjoying it as they do every day, even though the ship was still there. But in the afternoon when the clock on the big tower stood at four-thirty—industrious people were sitting at home working, devout mothers were cradling their infants, merchants were going about their business, children were gathered for their evening lessons, people of leisure had time on their hands and were sitting in the inn with a game of cards and a jug of wine, a man full of care was worrying about the morrow, how he would eat, drink, clothe himself, and a thief was maybe just inserting a counterfeit key into someone else’s door—and suddenly there was an almighty bang. The ship with its seventy barrels of gunpowder caught fire and exploded, and in one instant whole long streets of houses with all that lived and dwelled in them were blown to pieces and collapsed into a pile of rubble or were damaged most terribly. Many hundreds of people were buried dead and alive under these ruins or gravely injured. Three schools and all the children in them were destroyed, people and animals who were outdoors in the vicinity of the disaster were thrown into the air by the force of the blast and came down to earth in a pitiable state. To make matters worse a conflagration broke out which was soon raging everywhere and could scarcely be extinguished, as many warehouses full of oil and blubber also went up in flames. Eight hundred beautiful buildings collapsed or had to be demolished.” In his evocation of the destruction of the city of Leiden, Hebel as it were sums up the experience of an entire epoch. Born in 1760, he lived through the collapse of the ancien régime just across the border in France, the outbreak of the Revolution, the years of the Terror, and the pan-European wars which followed, as a catastrophic escalation and headlong precipitation of history. Nowhere in Hebel’s work—not in the story of the disaster visited upon the Dutch city of Leiden, nor anywhere else in his writing—is there any evidence to suggest that he sympathized with the endemic political violence erupting everywhere in Europe between 1789 and 1814. Walter Benjamin’s wishful conjecture, that Hebel might have seen the French Revolution as an act of divine reason intervening in human history, is based—as Hannelore Schlaffer shows in the Afterword to her beautifully illustrated edition of the Schatzkästlein [Treasure Chest]—on an imprecise historical perspective which “confused the revolutionary turmoils on the Upper Rhine in the 1790s with the reforms of the early years of the nineteenth century.” Robert Minder, too—the most reliable witness in these matters—points out that Hebel only supported the Revolution, if at all, in its most restrained and liberal form. And the Hausfreund himself, in 1815, once the upheavals finally appear to have died down, tells his readers expressis verbis that he has never yet sported a cockade. Although hedged about with all kinds of ironies, this retrospective declaration on Hebel’s part is surely not to be ascribed to opportunistic motives, since at no point were his hopes and philosophy directed at a violent and bloody reversal of the status quo. His concern was only ever for the practical improvement of the living conditions of the people, such as was promoted by Karl Friedrich, Grand Duke of Baden, beginning with his abolition of serfdom in a decree of the twenty-third of July 1783, in the consequent reforms in education and health provision, of agriculture and administration, as well as by the local Baden adaptation of the Napoleonic Code Civil. Karl Friedrich was a follower of the French physio crats, whose principal advocates, François Quesnay and Jean Claude Marie Vincent, sought, in the face of the far-reaching changes affecting collective life in the eighteenth century, to achieve a lasting basis for a harmonization of society based upon natural law. Accordingly, the centerpiece of their economic philosophy was agriculture, which they saw as the only true form of production and of decisive importance for the common good. The processing of raw materials in manufacture, trade, and industry represented, for them, enterprises of a secondary nature. Simultaneously progressive and conservative, the physiocrats’ philosophy was determined by the attempt as it were to inculcate a bourgeois sense of rationality in the prevailing aristocratic régime, and by this means to protect it from precisely that end which was already inevitable, should it fail to replace the more or less ruthless exploitation of its inherited resources by a more enlightened practice. The ideal the physiocrats had in mind was of a country resembling a large and flourishing garden. Hannelore Schlaffer quotes a Zurich city doctor of the mid-eighteenth century who was of the opinion that there would be no deceit and no violence, and everywhere peace and satisfaction would
reign, “if only all men would cultivate the fields and provide for themselves by the work of their hands.” In such nostalgic utopian views was the educated middle class wont to articulate its discomfiture at the rapid spread of the economy of goods and capital it had itself created, and which was now proliferating year on year. The adherents of the physiocratic school believed that the realization of their “natural” order of society could most readily be achieved within a state ruled by means of a so-called loyal despotism, which would enable their ideas for reform to be put directly into practice. Besides concurring with the substance of their ideas, it was this political line which meant that it made sense for a ruler like Karl Friedrich to follow the precepts of the physiocrats. As far as Hebel is concerned, it was in the benevolent régime of Karl Friedrich—and certainly not in the Revolution, transforming as it did a process of reform into a calamity—that he saw the blueprint for realizing a better future for human society. In the manner of a wise and benevolent monarch, so, too, the Hausfreund performs his office of narrator. The stories and reports he presents, the lessons he imparts, and all the other things he elaborates on in the all-embracing natural order, taken together add up to a kind of Solomonic manual for the lower orders, as well as a treatise on statecraft in which the local ruler may see himself reflected in role models intended not least as a guide to the proper fulfillment of the task entrusted to him by the grace of God. In this respect, Hebel’s political position is closely related to the one Goethe adopts in his Novelle, which of course is concerned with averting the dangers of fire (in other words, revolution) by means of a feudal system of government, which is nevertheless imbued with a bourgeois work ethic and sense of duty. Whereas Goethe, though, very nearly makes his young prince into a shining example of the new spirit of enterprise, whose main principle is “that one receives more than one gives,” Hebel, when talking of Kaiser Joseph, Frederick the Great, the clever Sultan, or the Tsar of Russia, prefers to hold fast to the tried and tested paternalistic system where any intervention on the part of the Landesväter or local sovereigns in the lives of their subjects invariably turns out to be a blessing. Nowhere in Hebel do we detect even the slightest hint of irreverence. Goodness and justice are the lodestars of the paternalistic order, the unquestioning acceptance of which is nowhere better illustrated than in the many variations on the set pieces in which the ruling prince goes unrecognized as he mingles amongst the people. Our Almanac author, too, presents us with a number of these, perhaps most strikingly in the story from 1809 which relates how Napoleon did not neglect to discharge his longstanding debt to the fruit woman in Brienne. In order that the reader may see the matter in its proper perspective, the Hausfreund merely sketches in the stages of Napoleon’s career since his time as a cadet in the military school at Brienne. “Soon,” he writes, “Napoleon was made a general and conquered Italy. Napoleon went to Egypt where the children of Israel once made bricks and he fought a battle near Nazareth where the blessed virgin lived eighteen hundred years ago. Napoleon sailed straight back to France over a sea swarming with enemy ships, arrived in Paris and became First Consul. Napoleon restored peace and law and order to the troubled country and became French Emperor.” And a few lines after the recapitulation of this meteoric career we see the Emperor, incognito like one of these legendary righteous souls who hold the world in equilibrium, stepping through a narrow door into the room in which the fruit woman is just preparing her frugal supper. One thousand two hundred francs’ capital and interest are counted out onto his creditor’s table, so that henceforth she will be provided for, and her children, too, whom one might now almost say he thought of as his own.
If the Emperor’s visit to the fruit woman as evening falls already has about it something of an echo of the Annunciation, then the description of his astonishing ascent is even richer in biblical associations. There is talk of the exile of the children of Israel, of the Holy Land and the blessed Virgin, and, perhaps most important of all, of the return of a youthful hero across a sea full of enemy ships, bringing with him peace and a new order. The messianic calling is unmistakable, and clearly takes precedence over the claims of the ancient ruling houses, to whom Napoleon, as is well known, gave somewhat short shrift. For a while at least, then, Hebel’s political hopes, too, were pinned on the French Emperor. Among the progressively minded conservatives of his day, this view was by no means unusual. The battles fought by Napoleon appeared initially, even in Germany, in a different light from the horrifying bloodbath of the Revolution. They were not tainted by the stigma of civil war and irrational violence, but appeared almost as if suffused in the light of a higher reason, and served, so it was believed, to promote the dissemination of the ideas of equality and tolerance. It is not wholly without irony, though, that our Almanac author reports that when the call went out for the Great Sanhedrin in Paris, there were some among the Jewish population in France who believed that the Emperor intended “to send the Jews back to their old homeland on the great mountain of Lebanon, by the river of Egypt and by the sea.” The longer the Napoleonic wars continue, however, the more Hebel’s optimism fades. In a short piece omitted from the Almanac of 1811, the Hausfreund, who is after all good with figures, calculates matter-of-factly how many hundred thousand men and x thousand horses Napoleon has got through each year, and how many hundred millions the mustering and equipping of his armies continue to swallow up. In another piece, also not included in the Almanac, he illustrates the madness of warfare in terms of what it takes to build a single one of the ships which are, on the whole, destined before long to be sunk in a naval battle: “1,000 mighty oak trees, as one might say a whole forest; further 200,000 pounds of iron. For the sails it takes 6,500 ells of canvas; the weight of the ropes and rigging is 164,000 pounds, and once they have been coated in tar, as they need to be, they would weigh 200,000 pounds. The total weight of the whole ship amounts to 5 million pounds or 50,000 hundredweight, without the crew and provisions, not counting the powder and lead for the ammunition.” The Almanac author, accustomed to thrift and good housekeeping, is aghast at the idea of such wastefulness, the mere thought of which “makes his hair stand on end.” In 1814, when the tide has finally turned, he declares his horror at the pointless destruction, under the heading “World Events” [Weltbegebenheiten], in a report on the conflagration in Moscow, at that time the greatest city in the world: “Four districts of the inner city and thirty suburbs with all the houses, palaces, churches, chapels, taverns, shops, factories, schools, and government offices went up in flames. Previously, the city had four hundred thousand inhabitants and was over twelve leagues across,” writes the Hausfreund, and continues, “If one stood and looked down from a height, as far as the eye could see there was nothing but sky and Moscow. Thereafter, nothing but sky and flames. For hardly had the French occupied the city than the Russians themselves set fire on all sides. A steady wind quickly spread the flames into every quarter of the city. In three days the greater part of the latter was reduced to rubble and ashes, and for anyone passing that way, there was nothing left to see but sky and desolation.” Later on in his report on these epoch-making world events, Hebel reminds his Almanac readers of the order issued in Berlin on the sixth of May 1813, according to which, should the Battle of the Nations go against them, all men under the age of sixty were to arm themselves, all women, children, and official persons, surgeons, civil servants, and so on to conceal themselves from the enemy, and all livestock and provisions to be disposed of. “All the fruits of the field, all ships and bridges, all villages and mills are to be burned, all wells blocked up, so that the enemy may nowhere find either abode or succor. Never before,” writes the Hausfreund, “has such a dreadful and drastic measure been taken for the destruction of one’s own country.” In our own times we can get a sense of something of the horror which befell the Almanac author as he gazed down into the already gaping maw of history if we remind ourselves how, toward the end of the 1920s, the German Wehrmacht, under the direction of Colonel S
tülpnagel, drew up a plan for a war of revenge against the French which—as Karl-Heinz Janßen reports, in an article* about the files discovered by the Hamburg historian Carl Dirks in the American National Archives—in a curious mixture of revolutionary idealism à la 1813 and hardheaded pragmatism, stipulated that the ur-enemy was to be provoked into invading Germany, there enmeshed in an endless series of partisan battles, and finally defeated by a strategy of scorched earth. To facilitate the action, writes Janßen, special maps of destruction were drawn up expressly for this purpose for the whole area of the Reich, and were called to mind again in 1945 in the final, suicidal weeks of the war. Possibly Hebel already had a sense, in 1812/13, that the fall of Napoleon and the rise of the German peoples signaled the beginning of a downward path which, once embarked upon, would not be easy to halt, and that history, from that point on, would amount to nothing other than the martyrology of mankind. At any rate, I can imagine that the Almanac author felt somewhat ill at ease when, in January 1814, he composed a six-page Patriotisches Mahnwort [patriotic exhortation] in which he—otherwise apt to observe matters with a certain detachment—adopts the impassioned martial tones which were everywhere in vogue at the time. “Behold,” it says there, “here arises and has already arisen—fully armed—all Germany from the sea to the mountains. All the noble tribes of German blood, the Prussians, the Saxons, the people of Hessen, the Franks, the Bavarians, the Swabians, all who speak and are German, along the length of the Rhine and far away on the Danube, all are one man, one courage, one Bund and one oath: Deutschland shall be free from foreign yoke and curse!” Hebel then goes on to describe the protection of the Heimat and the rebirth of the nation, the five million muskets, axes, pikes, and scythes which shall rise up in Germany, the vagaries of fate, blood sacrifice, and sacred sites, and exhorts his cousin, to whom this epistle is addressed as his brother, fellow countryman, and German comrade-in-arms, to enlist in the ranks of the defenders of the Fatherland and thus enter into God’s salvation. The chauvinistic registers Hebel draws on here are those of the new nationalist rhetoric, whose resonance, growing ever stronger over the course of the following hundred years, so distracted German society that it would eventually seek to replicate the Napoleonic experiment of the reorganization of Europe under the leadership of another dictator obsessed with the unconditional will to power. In 1996, Jean Dutourd of the Académie Française published a deliberately politically incorrect essai about the era 1789—1815, written from the viewpoint of an unreformed monarchist. Entitled Le Feld-maréchal von Bonaparte, it starts from the premise that during the pre-1789 monarchic order of Europe, in which the ruling houses were, without exception, all interrelated through marriage and family ties, armed conflicts had as a rule to be kept within limits, and that while these confrontations served the pursuit of particular territorial or other concrete advantages, they were never governed by one overarching abstract idea. Only with the invention of revolutionary patriotism (thus Dutourd) did history get caught up in an ever-accelerating maelstrom of destruction. For that reason, Dutourd writes, it would have been more sensible if the garrison at the Bastille had opened fire on the insurgents, thus aborting from the outset the transformation—during the Revolution—of a population of honest and hardworking subjects into a nation of savages, and consequently also preventing the rise of the parvenu from Corsica. The latter, says Dutourd, was indeed possessed of all the necessary at tributes for the model of a successful usurper—ambition, genius, willpower, covetousness, obsession with fame and order, and a complete and utter lack of sensitivity—but in order truly to become Emperor of the Western world, “il lui fallait tomber dans une société éclatée.” The blood shed in this era between 1789 and 1815, Dutourd claims, not only changed the nature of the French themselves, as well as the face of their country; from its smouldering ruins there also arose the new and terrifying Deutschland. In the earlier, innocent Germania, Dutourd believes, no philosopher would ever have had the idea of exclaiming Allemagne, réveille-toi! “Pour la tirer de sa léthargie, il ne fallait pas moins que les canons de l’empéreur des Français. Cette Allemagne qui est devenue si formidable au XXe siècle, c’est bien nous, hélas! qui l’avons faite, qui l’avons tirée du néant.” Perhaps the violence of the historical currents which Dutourd discusses in his unorthodox treatise can most readily be measured if one remembers that they moved the Almanac author to compose not only his unfortunate patriotic exhortation of 1814, but also an eschatological vision unparalleled in German literature. The scene we must imagine is the Basel road between Steinen and Brombach at night. The father—der Ätti—and his young son are traveling in the slow oxcart pulled by the faithful oxen Merz and Laubi—“Hörsch, wie der Laubi schnuuft?” [“Listen, how Laubi snorts”] says the boy at one point—and their conversation turns to the transience of earthly existence, of all human endeavor, the houses and villages in which we live, the great cities, Nature in all her greenery, and of the whole world. When the boy asks whether their own house, up there on the hill with the lights glinting in its windowpanes, will meet the same fate as the castle of Rötteln, which is now nothing but a dark and dismal ruin, the father answers: