Chapter 4: The age of materialism (1832-1914)
(i) Mind and matter (1832-72)
Between the two French revolutions of 1830 and 1848, German writers had to battle to defi ne themselves on two different fronts.
They had to resist (or accept) the repression and censorship with which their rulers sought to prevent the French contagion from spreading eastwards. And they had to accept (or repudiate)
the inheritance of the great period of cultural achievement which had come to an end with the deaths of Beethoven, Hegel, and Goethe. But in this battle who was the enemy? Was it the repressive monarchy and bureaucracy, to which, after all, the great minds of two previous generations had accommodated themselves? To say that would be to align yourself with the bourgeoisie whom the age of absolutism had excluded both from political power and from signifi cant literary activity.
Or was the enemy the bourgeois themselves who, as chronic non-participants, deserved to be ridiculed as ‘philistines’ (a student slang term which, with the sense of ‘impervious to the Art of the elite’ came into general currency at this time)? That would be to cut yourself off from the class which in France and England was most obviously the instrument of economic, technological, and political modernization. It was an age therefore of reluctant bourgeois, and disaffected or failed officials, whose preferred relationship to their inheritance was to accept it but to reverse what they took to be its own understanding of its achievements.
The doubly ambivalent relationship to the past is crisply clear in the case of philosophy. The philosophers who dominated the new age in Germany were materialist where their predecessors had been idealist, and socially autonomous where their predecessors had been dependent. The new leaders of thought made their way outside the institutions of state. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) led a life of permanent semi-retirement on the proceeds of his father’s commercial career, reinvested in banking concerns. Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-72) was supported for the greater part of his career by a porcelain factory owned by his wife.
Karl Marx (1818-83) in his later years could rely on the assistance of Friedrich Engels’ (1820-95) family money, derived from the Manchester textile industry. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) also had the support of a family inheritance originally made in England, and not forfeited when his brother-in-law was bankrupted by a bizarre colonial adventure in Paraguay. Moreover, as literacy rose, the great expansion of publishing and journalism (the number of bookshops in Berlin, Leipzig, and Stuttgart more than doubled between 1831 and 1855) gave to Marx, and especially to the radical religious writer David Friedrich Strauss (1808-74), the opportunity of being a literary freelance which had been denied to Hölderlin and Kleist. From 1830 to 1914, as neither before nor since, Germany possessed a recognizably bourgeois intellectual class, comparable with that of contemporary France and England. Recognizably bourgeois, but not always willingly so.
Every one of these thinkers began with the ambition of becoming a university professor but turned away, or was prevented, from realizing it. Schopenhauer abandoned university life with relief after an unsuccessful attempt at direct competition with Hegel’s lectures in Berlin, but he never forgave the academic philosophers (Kathederphilosophen) their popularity and their infl uence.
Strauss was dismissed from his teaching post in Tübingen on the publication of his deconstructive Life of Jesus in 1835, and the civil war (literally) that broke out in Zurich when he was proposed for the chair of theology there put him on every university’s blacklist for good. In 1842, Bruno Bauer (1809-82) lost his post at Bonn for publishing critical works on the New Testament. His young protégé, Karl Marx, had in consequence to give up his academic ambitions as well and found himself launched into journalism.
For years Feuerbach hoped for a chair of philosophy but had to recognize it was impossible after the publication and explosive success of his scandalous The Essence of Christianity (Das Wesen des Christentums) in 1841. Nietzsche savaged Strauss, who by the 1870s was the grand old man of German letters, but shared his scorn for the academic world, from which Nietzsche decisively alienated himself by his fi rst publication as Basle professor of classics, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik, 1872). Like Schopenhauer, whom by then he also despised, Nietzsche fi nally retired from the university into pensioned isolation.
The philosophers of this generation did not therefore simply reject what they had inherited - dismiss it with indifference as irrelevant to a changed world. Their reaction was tinged with bitterness and pervaded by a combative desire to achieve the old aims in a new context, sometimes reluctantly chosen. It was not so much a rejection as a conscious inversion of the past. The major fi gures were emphatic in subordinating the human power of thought to some prior principle: in Schopenhauer the will, in Feuerbach the senses, in Marx class interest, in Nietzsche, in one form or another, all three. These very different writers had in common that they were deliberately overthrowing the primacy given to thought, or ‘reason’, by German philosophy from Leibniz to Hegel, and this act of regicide they all presented as a reversal of a relationship seen as prevalent in classical German philosophy. The pithiest formulation of the principle happens to stand in Marx’ and Engels’ German Ideology
(Die deutsche Ideologie), a manuscript of 1845-7 (published 1932), but it could as easily have been written by Schopenhauer, Feuerbach, or Nietzsche:
It is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness.
Since, however, it was not true that classical German philosophy thought ‘consciousness determines life’, the belief of its successors that they were reversing what had gone before was not true either. But the idea of a reversal had a great emotional charge for all of them and the rhetoric of inversion is everywhere in their works. As usual, behind the appearance of parricide lay feelings of love as well as of anger. The claim to reversal was really a claim to continuity, but it also expressed an angry recognition that historical change had made mere continuity impossible.
A more subtly ambivalent relation to the past runs through the literature of these years. The poetry and prose of Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) was dominated by the conviction that he had lived through the ‘ending of the “Goethean aesthetic period” ’ into an age of industrialism, communism, and a German revolution to come. Yet his fi rst and most lasting success as a poet was achieved with collections of verse which seem at fi rst sight a limpid distillation of the lyrical and folk-song manner of Goethe and, especially, The Boy’s Magic Horn (Book of Songs [Buch der Lieder], 1827-39, New Poems [Neue Gedichte], 1844). Seen more closely, they prove to be shot through with an ironical - and Byronical - astonishment that a modern man can be such a fool as to be taken in by idealist or Romantic notions of the beauty of love, Nature, and poetry:
Teurer Freund, du bist verliebt, Und du willst es nicht bekennen, Und ich seh des Herzens Glut Schon durch deine Weste brennen.
[Dear friend, you are in love and will not admit it, and I can already see the fi re in your heart glowing through your waistcoat.]
But perhaps to be modern (at any rate, in Heine’s circumstances)
is to be a fool, and to live with divided loyalties. A life is no less real, and certainly no less painful, for being divided:
Ach Gott! Im Scherz und unbewußt Sprach ich, was ich gefühlet;
Ich hab mit dem Tod in der eignen Brust Den sterbenden Fechter gespielet.
[Oh God, in jest, and without knowing it, I uttered what I really felt; I played the dying gladiator with death in my own breast.]
Coming from a Jewish banking family, Heine had no love for Restoration Germany in which, after the repeal of Napoleon’s emancipatory legislation, he had to convert to Christianity if he was to become, as originally intended, either a lawyer or an academic. The revolution of 1830 attracted him to Paris, and from there he sent German newspapers reports on French art, literature, and politics while settling accounts with his own traditions in two pyrotechnically unfl attering studies, On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany (Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland, 1834) and The Romantic School (Die romantische Schule, 1831-2). In 1835 the Germanic Federation prohibited his writings, along with those of a number of other radical authors, collectively known as ‘Young Germany’ (Junges Deutschland). Despite the reduction in his literary earnings Heine survived on a French state pension and occasional subsidies from his family and was able to marry his mistress, an uneducated French woman, about whom he wrote some of his warmest poems. In the 1840s, when he met the young Marx, also in exile in Paris, and contributed to his journal, his poetry turned to political satire (Germany. A Winter’s Tale [Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen], 1844: ‘The Customs Union […] will give us the “material” unity, the spiritual will be provided by the censorship offi ce’) and then to historical and Jewish themes, taking on a darker colouring.
The failure of the German ‘revolution’ in 1848 coincided for Heine with the onset of spinal tuberculosis which for the next eight years confi ned him to his bed. As he faced pain and death in this ‘mattress-grave’, his sense of the irony of history grew bitterly personal, but, though Heine mocks everything else, he never mocks his relationship with his audience. If his readers are involved in an absurdity - such as the attempt to see the world of waistcoats and customs unions through the spectacles of Romanticism - he ensures that they know he is involved in it too. He writes with a journalist’s respect for his public, and his confi dence that he has a public marks him off from the tragically isolated intellectuals and elite officials who had given him and the Germany he wrote for a literary and philosophical tradition.
I have just come from the Christmas market. Everywhere groups of freezing children in rags standing wide-eyed and sad-faced in front of marvels made of water and fl our, rubbish and tinsel. The thought that for most people even the most pitiful joys and pleasures are unattainable riches made me very bitter.
Compassion for Germany’s poor and excluded drove Georg Büchner (1813-37) to an angry rejection of the tradition of idealism. He looked instead to the realism of the Storm and Stress movement that had preceded it, to Goethe’s early works and the Gretchen story in Faust, and to the plays of Lenz. Yet his writings, most of which became known only after the publication of a collected edition in 1875, are haunted by a sense of lost wholeness and a search for the meaning of suffering that seems to require a religious answer, though it is left unformulated. In 1834 he published an insurrectionary pamphlet with the slogan ‘Peace to the cottages! War on the palaces!’, he was denounced to the police and in 1835 had to fl ee to France though he was too obscure to be named in the prohibition of Young Germany later that year. To raise money for his escape he wrote, in fi ve weeks, a play of great originality. Thematically, The Death of Danton (Dantons Tod), owes much to Goethe’s Egmont and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, but its open form is deliberately opposed to the purposeful ethical structure of Schiller’s historical tragedies and looks back to Lenz’s The Soldiers. (The fi rst publisher of the complete text felt he had to explain its apparent lack of structure by adding the subtitle:
Scenes from France’s Reign of Terror.) Set in March and April 1794 it draws on verbatim extracts from revolutionary speeches to show Danton drifting towards arrest, arraignment, and execution out of lethargy, complacency (‘they will never dare’), disgust with the continuing pointless slaughter, and guilt over his own involvement in the September Massacres of 1792. Gradually, though, Danton recognizes that his weariness of life, his cynicism about human motives, his easy egotism, perhaps even his atheism, are all a pose and that for the sake of love he must fi ght to survive - but it is too late and history goes on its way. The play’s language is overwrought. But its emphatically recurrent image of burial alive is justifi ed by its essentially religious insight: that there is no escape from existence into freedom or nothingness, and that to exist is both to suffer and to love.
Büchner came of a medical family and in exile was made an anatomy lecturer in the University of Zurich. He gave up politics, but not literature. His short story, Lenz, which like The Death of Danton draws on and cites authentic materials - in this case, the diary of Pastor Oberlin, with whom Lenz stayed in 1778 -, has the complete formal assurance which the play lacks. There is no precedent in German prose, not even in Goethe or Kleist, for its dispassionate but deeply sympathetic third-person narration.
In a style free from irony and artifi ce, the narrator voices the agony of Lenz’s mental derangement but never colludes with it. Enactments of Lenz’s consciousness, through metaphor or the disruption of syntax, are continuous with the cool, medical registration of his behaviour; the internal and the external are equally open to view but they are not confused:
he could feel in himself a stirring and wriggling towards an abyss into which an implacable force was dragging him. He was now burrowing into himself. He ate little; half the nights in prayer and feverish dreams.
In a conversation with a visiting intellectual Lenz expresses his artistic principles: ‘You must love humanity in order to penetrate into the particular essence of every individual’. Such love - an understanding too deep and broad to be mere identifi cation with what is loved - is shown by Büchner in Lenz and in his dramatic masterpiece, Woyzeck. Woyzeck is incomplete and there is no single defi nitive version of it, but that hardly matters.
Büchner structured the play as a series of short, discrete, strongly drawn scenes, whose effect is cumulative rather than sequential.
Once again Büchner based his story on documentary material:
the medical reports on a private soldier executed in 1824 for the murder of his mistress after the fi rst plea in Germany of diminished responsibility due to insanity. Literature can have no higher aim, Büchner’s Lenz says, than to reproduce a little of the life that is in God’s creation, and in his Woyzeck Büchner gave life to a fi gure who would have been beneath the notice of all previous tragic writers, the fi rst proletarian ‘hero’ in German - perhaps in any - non-comic literature. Woyzeck appears as everybody’s victim, at the bottom of every hierarchy, military, social, economic, sexual; even physically he is humiliated in a fi ght, and he is treated as lower than a guinea-pig by the regimental doctor who uses him in his dietetic experiments. Yet he retains his humanity in the little household that he makes up with his Marie and their child, until even this is taken away from him by her adultery with the Drum-Major and in his madness he kills her. The bitter satire of Woyzeck’s superiors, particularly the Doctor, the lurid scenes at a fair, a drunken parody of a sermon on man’s origins in dirt, and a bleak parable of cosmic meaninglessness which sounds more like Beckett than Dickens (who began Oliver Twist in 1837), might seem to amount to a hopeless nihilism. But the play has a quite opposite effect. Because of its structural focus on its central character, its precision in locating his speech, and his speechlessness, in relation to the language of those around him, its insistence, against all the hierarchies that degrade and ignore him, that his suffering, and that of Marie, is worth attention, is perhaps the only thing worth attention, it is a deeply moving expression and vindication of the power of love. Büchner’s death from typhus at the age of 23 robbed 19th-century Germany not just of a literary genius but of a moral genius too.
In the 1830s and 1840s the German economy was still largely agricultural, and in its rural areas and small towns, where Paris and the urban masses seemed far away, the social structures of the 18th century were little affected by the slow onset of modernity.
But the growth in population, in literacy, and in the book market, was the harbinger of changes to come, and the most perceptive spirits could sense that what was making the literary life easier for them was also detaching them from the world inhabited by Goethe’s contemporaries, which their outward circumstances continued to resemble. Eduard Mörike (1804-75) was educated at the Tübingen seminary as Hölderlin was, and became a Swabian country pastor, as Hölderlin might have done, though when his doubts - possibly fostered by his fellow-seminarian Strauss - became too much for him he was able, as Hölderlin was not, to become a teacher of German literature at a girl’s school in Stuttgart - neither the subject nor the school (founded in 1818) existed when Hölderlin needed them. Mörike’s poems, both in rhymed German and unrhymed classical metres, became widely known only towards the end of the 19th century in their settings by Hugo Wolf. With delicacy, sobriety, and gentle humour Mörike writes within the formal repertoire of Goethe, Brentano, and Eichendorff, and like them, though he also enjoys narratives and genre scenes, he favours the theme of the self in a landscape, often recognizably the landscape of southwest Germany. But Mörike’s self, like Heine’s, though more subtly, is divided, both against itself and from the world beyond it. It does not penetrate the landscape with symbolic meaning, not even the meaning of distance or strangeness. Instead it is self-consciously aware of its surroundings, familiar and loved though they are, as its own outer boundary, the knowable threshold of an inner mystery which cannot be known or represented. The poet drowses on a hillside in the spring sunshine, vaguely aware of warmth and light and an indefi nite longing, his only distinct sensation the drone of a bee:
Mein Herz, o sage, Was webst du für Erinnerung In golden grüner Zweige Dämmerung?
Alte unnennbare Tage!
[O say, my heart, what memory are you weaving in the twilight of golden green branches? (‘green is the golden tree of life’ says Goethe’s Mephistopheles to Faust) - Ancient, unnameable days!]
The unity asserted in the classical age of idealism is no more.
In the age of materialism the impressions of the senses are all that can be known, and they are dissociated from a heart which is known only as the locus of unquietness and of a memory that remembers nothing.
A similar inner detachment from imagery and poetic resources which she none the less continued to use makes for the distinctive
character of the writing of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff (1797 - 1848). As a member of an established Westphalian noble family she would seem socially to belong to the ancien régime as much as Mörike. But she no more fi tted the 18th-century model of the writer than he, though for different reasons: she was a Catholic, and a woman, the fi rst great woman poet of modern German literature. Unlike Mörike, who seems to receive passively the mystery of experience, she fi ghts to gain control of memory, pain, and guilt, but cannot be sure of victory. For her the ancient days may conceal an unnameable menace. Familiar images take on a quite new connotation: the distant sound of a horn in the valley recalls the lost courage of youth; the shadowy mountains before moonrise seem a sinister circle of judges. Some of the most famous motifs in poems of Goethe and Schiller - Prometheus, the lake, the cup of life cast into the waves - are reinterpreted in one of her last poems as symbols of moral nemesis. In an extraordinary - no doubt unconscious - parallel to Blake, precisely based on botanical fact, she then asks if she has to be destroyed in order that her poetry should preserve this corrective to the tradition she has inherited, as the thistle fl ower is consumed by the larva of the gall-fl y, which reputedly has medicinal properties:
Flüstern oft hör’ich dein Würmlein klein, Das dir heilend im Schoß mag weilen, Ach, soll ich denn die Rose sein, Die zernagte, um andre zu heilen?
[I often hear the whispering of that little worm of yours, that perhaps lingers healing in your womb. Alas, am I then to be the rose, gnawed apart to heal others?]
Romantic motifs - the doppelgänger, hints of devilry, a tree associated with both crime and retribution - run through Droste-Hülshoff ’s best-known prose narrative, The Jew’s Beech (Die Judenbuche, 1842, not her own title). But they point not to some other level of existence but to the moral meaning of a story in which four, partly unexplained, violent deaths are shown to originate in the neglect of basic principles of humility, honesty, charity, and Catholic religious practice. The Jewish community, though treated with brutal contempt by their Christian neighbours, appear as the guardians of the moral law fundamental to Christianity but they remain mysterious and hardly knowable. Even the identity of the principal character is fractured and indeterminate. The centre of Droste’s life, as of Mörike’s, lies outside any world that she can depict with the literary resources she has inherited, dependent as they ultimately are on a post-Lutheran theology that equates personal identity with an omnipotent state to which she owed no allegiance.
The subjection of women to male purposes became, perhaps unwittingly, the main theme and symbol in the poetry and drama of Friedrich Hebbel (1813-63), one of the last representatives of aesthetic idealism trying to give voice to the new spirit of social and material determinism, who was supported through his early struggle to write his way out of poverty by a mistress whom he discarded, and then by his wife, one of the foremost actresses in Vienna. Maria Magdalena (1844), Hebbel’s only drama with a contemporary setting, captures the transformation of small-town Germany as literacy spreads and urbanization begins, but mores are not changing fast enough to save an unmarried mother-to-be from committing suicide for fear of scandal. ‘I don’t understand the world any more’ her bear of a father confesses in the last line of a play which anticipates the social drama of a later age and had a great success in Germany’s many theatres. Hebbel had met Heine and the German communists in Paris, but politically he inclined to Hegelian constitutional monarchism. After the crisis of 1848 his reflections on the changing world became more explicitly and systematically a continuation of Hegel’s theologically tinged philosophy of history, but the women remained the victims. In Agnes Bernauer (1852), a woman who, through no fault of her own, has become a casus belli is sacrifi ced for the greater good of the people. Agnes Bernauer appealed equally to the radicals of 1848, who liked the speeches of revolutionary protest, and to the conservatives, who liked the counter-affi rmation of reason of state. But it was reason of state that had the last word, despite the statesman’s crocodile tears: Hebbel had again caught the mood of an age, the new age of nation-building (Gründerzeit), in which unscrupulousness, whether political or economic, was elevated to a moral principle. ‘Only one thing is necessary’, he had once written to his mistress, ‘- that the world should exist; how individuals fare in it is a matter of indifference’.
In his last years, at the height of his fame, Hebbel met the ageing Schopenhauer and discovered in his combination of relentless determinism with outrage at the scandal of universal suffering a philosophy that matched his own long-held convictions. Hebbel was not alone in his discovery. In the 1850s, after decades of neglect, a Schopenhauer revival began among German intellectuals, while Hegelianism waned, or metamorphosed into Marxism. Schopenhauer’s rejection of all historical and social theorizing appealed to the individualism encouraged by Germany’s most sustained period of liberal economic expansion.
However, his belief that Art was - short of annihilation - the only possible redemption of a material world totally enslaved to the cruel logic of cause and effect also offered comfort to those who had reservations about the process by which they or others were enriching themselves, but who did not want to give up the riches.
But not everyone wanted to be comforted, or to be tied like Hebbel to the philosophy and aesthetics of an earlier and less affl uent age. Between 1848 and the proclamation of the Second German Empire in 1871 the German bourgeoisie fi nally emerged from the shadow of German officialdom and, full of the confi dence of new money and prestige, threw off the leading-strings of the inherited culture. In 1855 Ludwig Büchner (1824-99) published a hugely successful summary of the new science, Energy and Matter (Kraft und Stoff), which dismissed as turgid nonsense the entire edifi ce of idealist philosophy. With none of the theological and ethical subtlety, or literary sensitivity, of his elder brother, Georg (whose literary remains he had edited), Büchner, the Richard Dawkins of his day, asserted the eternity of matter, the development of life out of inorganic particles, and of human beings out of lower animals, and the unscientifi c redundancy of any such hypotheses as God or immortality. Gone were the anguished compromises on which a hundred years of literature and philosophy had been built.
True, Energy and Matter cost Büchner his chair in Tübingen, but as a medical practitioner and prolifi c journalist he could afford to enjoy independence. After the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859, Büchner became an earnest propagator of the Darwinian ideas that were thought to validate the free-market principles of which they were an expression. The work of Wilhelm Busch (1832-1908), commercially one of the most successful of German poets, was Darwinian too in its way. A freelance artist and draughtsman of genius, Busch took up the format of Heinrich Hoffmann’s Struwwelpeter (1846) and combined a telling economy of line with equally lethal epigrammatic couplets in a series of early comic strips (e.g. Max and Moritz, 1865).
Busch’s satires on pretentious poets, religious hypocrites, and the nastiness of little boys, in an amoral world where only the fi ttest survive, have become part of German folk memory.
The economic basis of the new intellectual freedom was the theme of another great publishing success of 1855, Debit and Credit (Soll und Haben) by Gustav Freytag (1816-95), which remained the bestselling German novel until the end of the century. Set in Freytag’s homeland, Silesia, by then one of the power-houses of Prussian industry, it follows the lives of two school contemporaries, both bourgeois, both in confl ict with the aristocracy, both out to make their fortune, one honest, upright, and hard-working, the other deceitful, usurious, and Jewish. The anti-Semitism - of which this is the fi rst clearly non-religious example in German literature - is a consequence of the economic and social revolution that made the book possible in the fi rst place. As Germany’s Jews came out of their ghettoes their most lasting disability remained, by law or in practice, the prohibition on their employment by the state (including the central institution of traditional German culture, the university).
They therefore came to represent in the collective psyche a pure form of the forces combining to challenge the dominance of officialdom in German political and cultural life: money, business, and laissez-faire. In the great 19th-century upheaval, hostility to Jews expressed the German bourgeoisie’s fear of itself, of its power to destroy the autocratic and bureaucratic state which had
given it its (subordinate) identity for over 300 years. Because the hostility was fundamentally an irrational self-hatred (the two main characters in Debit and Credit have the same background) it tended from the start to take on grotesque or nightmarish qualities, though in 1855 the true nightmare still lay in the distant future.
If the image of ‘the Jew’ was a representation of the German bourgeois as the enemy of the German official, a counter-image of the two as identical was provided in the Gründerzeit by the new concept of the ‘Bildungsbürger’ - the citizen of the new Germany who was defi ned as middle class not by his economic role but by his (rather than her) education or culture. In 1867, a year after the Seven Weeks War had fi nally excluded Austria from the political defi nition of Germany, the cultural nation received legal recognition when the copyright which now secured the livelihood of contemporary writers was abolished in respect of a dozen ‘classical’ German authors - Goethe foremost among them - whose works were held to be so important that all publishers should be free to distribute them. Although Goethe’s private papers were still inaccessible, a vast new fi eld was thereby opened up for the universities. As independent writing became a sustainable commercial activity, the bureaucracy withdrew into the editing and philological study of the national literature.
In 1872, after Bismarck had united the German states in a war against France and left them no alternative but accession to his new Empire, David Friedrich Strauss, fi rst a critic of Bismarck but now an enthusiastic supporter, proposed that the cultivation of ‘our great poets’ (Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller) and ‘our great musicians’ (Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven) had more value for the new Germany than a Christianity that was both incredible and obsolete. In The Old Faith and the New (Der alte und der neue Glaube), he argued that the historical basis of Christianity had been destroyed by his own researches and that its philosophical claims were refuted by modern science, particularly astronomy and Darwinian biology. What remained of spiritual needs could
be satisfi ed in ‘Art’. Strauss uttered with lumbering frankness the truth about the accommodation between the bourgeoisie and the state in the newly united Germany: that with the passing of the princes national ‘culture’ had now taken the place of Lutheran religion.
If there was any single contemporary who embodied modern German culture as Strauss understood it, it was Richard Wagner (1813-83), whose operas (rather than the plays of Hebbel) were the true successors to Schiller’s drama and the true fulfi lment of the 18th century’s dream of a German national theatre. Wagner himself saw his work as the crowning synthesis of German literature, philosophy, and music, and he brought together in his personal career most of the contradictory elements that Bismarck had fused into a nation. In his twenties Wagner was closely associated with the Young Germany movement, and in his unhappy apprenticeship years in Paris from 1839 to 1842 he made the acquaintance of Heine and the Russian anarchist Bakunin, of the socialist ideas of Marx and Proudhon, and of Feuerbach’s radical secularization of religion. While conductor at the Dresden opera-house in the 1840s he wrote revolutionary journalism and in 1849 took an active part in the unsuccessful local uprising.
Exiled to Switzerland for the next 16 years by fear of the German police and of his creditors he gave up politics and even, for a while, composing, in favour of the written word. Drawing on his German predecessors from Winckelmann to Romanticism, who had seen the perfection of Greek art as expressing the perfection of Greek society, and modern art as the means of educating and transforming modern society, he elaborated a theory of opera as the successor to Greek tragedy and the true instrument of social revolution. In 1853 he published his libretto, in pseudo-archaic alliterative verse, of an operatic tetralogy, The Ring of the Nibelung (Der Ring des Nibelungen) - drawing more on Norse than on German material - which represented the development of society in terms of a much modifi ed Hegelianism: from an initial fall away from a state of nature into institutions of power and property, through the growth of individualism and so of the counter-power of love, which, however, increasingly engenders confl icts of its own, until it makes all things new in the confl agration of universal revolution. Wagner’s composition of the score for this colossal project was interrupted in 1854, however, by his discovery of the philosophy of Schopenhauer, which completed his conversion from political radicalism by its demonstration of the metaphysical priority of ‘Art’ over society, and of music over all other arts. He turned therefore to Tristan and Isolde (completed 1860), which shows individuals as transient, suffering manifestations of the endlessly yearning Will, and then to an opera about opera, or at least about words and music, The Mastersingers of Nuremberg (written 1861-7). Hans Sachs here appears as a Schopenhauerian philosopher-artist (Wagner?) whose wise guidance brings together the two lovers, Walther von Stolzing and Eva Pogner. He thus reconciles the nobility, represented by the initially arrogant (stolz) Walther, with the stubbornly bourgeois artisans of Nuremberg, into whose guild Walther has sought admittance.
All parties can then join Sachs in his fi nal hymn of praise to the ‘sacred German art’, presumably of opera, which is said to be a surer bond of national unity even than the German Empire.
The union of Walther with the burghers of Nuremberg precisely parallels the union Bismarck achieved in the course of the 1860s between an autocratic and hierarchical state structure and the newly wealthy middle classes, weaned away from the parliamentarianism of 1848. It also paralleled the fairy-tale turn taken by Wagner’s own life in 1864 when Ludwig II, the 19-year-old king of Bavaria, announced his intention of freeing Wagner of all practical worries and enabling him to concentrate on composition, so transforming the self-made, and nearly self-ruined, artist into a state institution.
The Ring was completed (with a Schopenhauerian infl ection of the conclusion into universal pessimism), but Wagner’s last 18 years became a weirdly anachronistic reprise of Goethe’s time in Weimar as favourite of a minor monarch in a pre-revolutionary
age. That, however, was only the mirror-image of the role Strauss had equally weirdly assigned to the literary and musical culture of late 18th-century agricultural and absolutist Germany and Austria: to provide spiritual sustenance to an industrial, urban, late 19th-century mass society too modern for religion. The incongruity between the circumstances in which this literature and music had been produced and the purposes which they were now expected to serve, like the incongruity between Wagner’s apparently medieval themes (which were what appealed to King Ludwig) and the hyper-modernity of his music, could be concealed by dubbing them ‘classical’, ‘timeless’, or ‘sacred’ ‘Art’.
As such they could in turn conceal the incongruous hybridity of the ‘Bildungsbürger’ who consumed them, the middle classes of the new nation, united only by ‘culture’. Ludwig’s patronage allowed Wagner to build a temple to sacred German art, the opera house at Bayreuth, which was inaugurated in 1876 with the fi rst complete performance of The Ring. To ‘consecrate’ (his own word) his temple, Wagner then wrote his last opera Parsifal (1882) in which Christian symbols and rituals, their original function being explicitly declared to be obsolete, are deployed in the service of Schopenhauer’s ethics. Strauss’s favourite composer was Haydn, and he thought Schopenhauer ‘unhealthy’, but in Parsifal his programme for a new faith for modern Germany was fulfi lled.
(ii) ‘Power protecting interiority’ (1872-1914)
‘It can only be a confusion to speak of a victory of German “Bildung” and culture’, Nietzsche wrote in the middle of the nationalist euphoria that followed on the Franco-Prussian War and the proclamation of Bismarck’s Empire, ‘a confusion that rests on the fact that in Germany the pure concept of culture has been lost’. In the military victory he saw rather the potential for ‘the defeat, indeed the extirpation, of the German spirit (“Geist”) in favour of the German Empire’. ‘Culture’ for Nietzsche required ‘unity of artistic style in all the expressions of a people’s life’ and German culture he saw as hopelessly disharmonious, though he did not recognize that this disharmony resulted from forcing together the commercially successful literature and materialist philosophy of the new bourgeoisie with the elitist and idealist inheritance of the old bureaucracy. Nietzsche’s was the bitterest, though not the last, expression of the resentment of Germany’s cultural officials at being cheated of power by the rise of capital (ressentiment was the term he later made his own for the emotional revenge of history’s losers on those who conquered them). In the ideal society he envisaged in The Antichrist (1888, published 1895), one of the last works he wrote before collapsing into incurable insanity, the dominant class, superior even to the king and the military, are the intellectuals, ‘die geistigsten Menschen’. His matchless powers of destructive, and self-destructive, criticism were directed at any attempt to reconcile the principles which underlay Germany’s new success - determinist science, mass production, competitive economic individualism - with the secularized theology that had been the basis of old Germany’s culture. Sometimes he criticized the old - its enlightened rationalism, its humanitarianism, and especially its more overtly religious survivals - in the name of the new. Sometimes he criticized the new - its egalitarianism, socialism, feminism, anti-Semitism - from the standpoint of the old, and now dispossessed, elite. The detachment of thought from any real social object or context became the purpose of his writing and of his solitary, wandering way of life. From any contemporary who might have seemed to personify what he stood for he distanced himself in an often violent act of self-redefi nition: Strauss earned Nietzsche’s virulent hostility through being a more effective critic of religion than he was; Schopenhauer, whose metaphysics were the foundation on which The Birth of Tragedy was built, and Wagner whose music-dramas it represented as the summit of modern culture, were later rejected for the crypto-Christianity of their ethics. Nietzsche was incapable of constructing a book-length, or even an essay-length, argument and his attempt at a magnum opus, his biblical pastiche, Thus Spake Zarathustra (Also sprach Zarathustra, 1883-5) suffers from the stylistic inauthenticity that he diagnosed in his contemporaries. But in his collections of aphorisms and short reflections - the best are probably Human, All Too Human (Menschliches Allzumenschliches, 1878-80) and Beyond Good and Evil (Jenseits von Gut und Böse, 1886) - Nietzsche’s brilliance could show itself untrammelled by any need for sustained coherence and he became one of the most variously and subversively fruitful thinkers for the 20th century:
‘Knowledge for its own sake’ - that is the fi nal snare that morality lays: with that you are completely entangled in it once again.
‘I did that’, says my memory. ‘I cannot have done that’ - says my pride, and is implacable. Eventually - memory gives in.
He who fi ghts with monsters should take care that he does not turn into a monster himself. And if you look long into an abyss, the abyss too will look into you.
In 1885 the Empire on which Nietzsche had declared intellectual war won one of its greatest victories. Goethe’s papers were opened to the nation, on the death of his last grandchild, and Weimar became once again the city of Goethe and Schiller. A network of Goethe Societies, centred on Weimar, sprang up around Germany and the world, the houses of the poets were turned into museums, their papers were transferred into a purpose-built archive, and professors and their assistants immediately began to labour on a historical-critical edition of Goethe’s works which eventually ran to over 150 volumes and was not completed until 1919. The writings of Goethe and his fellow ‘classics’, and the scholarship of the academic bureaucracy which edited them all, became the twin pillars of a German national literature, the common property, and tribal totem, of both wings of the ‘Bildungsbürgertum’ and of the new political nation that held that strange class together. Praised or damned or played off one against the other they have retained that status in all subsequent Germanies down to the present day.
Even as the process of institutionalization was beginning, Nietzsche pointed to the false premiss on which it was based:
that the ‘classics’ defi ned in 1867 were fi nders and builders of a national culture, when in reality they were seekers for a culture who sought in vain. In 1896, however, Nietzsche’s sister moved her now famous but slowly dying brother to Weimar with all his papers, and in 1953 these literary remains of another ‘classic’ were fi nally interred in the Goethe-Schiller Archive.
Nietzsche’s revulsion from the hybrid culture of Bismarck’s Reich was shared, notably in Munich, the capital of the largest and most reluctant new member of the Empire. The patronage of the Bavarian kings extended beyond Wagner to a group of mostly second-rate writers and poets who saw themselves as keeping alive the spirit of aesthetic idealism in a hostile age - bourgeois men of means who did not have the courage of the materialism proper to their class and took refuge in the Art they owed to Germany’s officials. Among them Paul Heyse (1830-1914), eventually a Nobel prizewinner, contributed more by a single idea than by his over a hundred works of fi ction. With his anthology, A German Treasury of Tales (Deutscher Novellenschatz, 1871), and the theoretical musings that accompanied it, he created a literary concept that had the necessary multivalency to appeal to both the commercial and the academic factions in the cultural life of the Second Empire. Novella (Novelle in German) was a long-established term for a short story in prose, and there had already been some speculation (for example, by Tieck) about the characteristics of the genre. But Heyse created the idea of the ‘Novelle’ as a prose form which, by its consciously self-enclosed structure and symbolic coherence, could bring the undisciplined energies of realistic narrative, springing up all over Europe and reflecting the lives and concerns of a mass readership, under the control of the German concept of ‘Art’. If late 18th-century poetic drama had been elite culture morphing into the book, the late 19th-century ‘Novelle’ was the book morphing into elite culture. ‘Sister of the drama’ the ‘Novelle’ was called by one of its most serious practitioners, the North German lyrical poet (and state official) Theodor Storm (1817-88) for whom isolation in Schleswig-Holstein was his own form of protest against the new order.
Throughout the Second Empire Munich remained the centre of the aesthetic opposition to the Prussian commercial and industrial powerhouse that stretched from Silesia to the Ruhr. Southern, Catholic, within reach of the Alpine passes to the Mediterranean lands, and blessed both with a largely functionless monarchy happy to build temples to art and music and with a stock of cheap apartments, vacated by those who had gone to seek their fortune in the North, it was a magnet for writers, painters, anarchists, and secular prophets. In Munich, the fantasy could be maintained that the combination of Hellenism and idealism achieved by poets and philosophers in Goethe’s lifetime represented a true Germany opposed to the economic and political forces that had in fact brought the nation into being. ‘Munich is the only city on the earth without “the bourgeois”’, wrote Stefan George (1868- 1933) ‘… a thousand times better than [the] Berlin mish-mash of petty bureaucrats jews and whores.’ George, a Rhinelander who lived on private means inherited from his bourgeois parents, originally wanted to be a Catholic priest, but instead founded his own religion of poetry and male friendship.
Having met Verlaine and Mallarmé in Paris, he tried to give his German verse the qualities and even (by the elimination of capital letters) the physical appearance of French. Cultivating elusiveness, George moved from house to house of his acquaintances, but for a while in the 1890s he settled in Munich where he could be seen ‘striding’ through the cafés, ‘like a bishop through the middle of Saint Peter’s’. In his privately circulated journal Leaves for Art (Blätter für die Kunst), printed on choice paper, with carefully selected coloured inks, and decorated with Art Nouveau vignettes and calligraphy and the Indian mystical symbol of the swastika, he published poems marked by esoteric content, exquisite purity of diction, and an unfailing perfection of rhyme. The Year of the Soul (Das Jahr der Seele, 1895) - a title taken from Hölderlin whom George, like Nietzsche, saw as a personifi cation of the nobility of German poetry, disregarded by Germany itself - recounts, in a progression through the seasons, the failure of love for a woman and the ‘new adventure’ of love for a man. George ruthlessly terminates the compromises of Mörike and Droste-Hülshoff. In his poems, the self is not so much unknowable as absent: they focus, with commanding single-mindedness, on a ‘you’ (du)
who has no features of his own beyond the shared experience of the symbolic landscape, which in turn is more of an erotic dreamscape. Poetry has become the vehicle of a pure will to power, untrammelled by the opposition of independent personalities or a material world. After the turn of the century, as nationalism intensifi ed but materialism showed no signs of losing its grip, George’s writing took on a more prophetic and apocalyptic tone (The Seventh Ring [Der Siebente Ring], 1907). He devoted himself to building a circle of disciples who would look up to him as ‘the Master’ and would establish a spiritual kingdom within a world whose corruption, he now felt, could be cleansed only by war (The Star of the Covenant [Der Stern des Bundes], 1914).
If in the Second Empire Munich was the capital of Art, Berlin was the capital of Reality. In rapidly expanding Berlin Germany at last had the context and opportunity for a metropolitan and realist literature, to compare with that of 19th-century Paris, London, or St Petersburg. There is nothing reluctant or unsophisticated about the modernity of Theodor Fontane (1810-1989), a professional journalist and poet, who after periods of residence in England and France settled in Berlin and wrote 14 novels about the new Prussia in the last 20 years of his life. During the 1880s, Fontane advanced from historical themes to the life of his own time.
Comedies of Errors (Irrungen, Wirrungen, 1888), so concise it could be called a Novelle, is the fi rst masterpiece of his mature style which, with its rich texture of unobtrusive leitmotifs and its plot largely driven forward by the apparent contingencies of closely observed conversation, suggests the contemporary manner of the much younger Henry James. If the central theme - the doomed love between Botho, a nobleman, and Lene, a woman of the lower middle class - seems to hark back to mid-18th-century literature, to Intrigue and Love, and Storm and Stress, that reflects the historical signifi cance of Fontane’s achievement.
As a pronounced Anglophile he had recovered the ambition of those earlier, and defeated, revolutionaries to create a German equivalent to the English novel of contemporary society, and he was fulfi lling it. The class difference that separates the lovers, and the political repression that sustains it, are symbolized in Lene’s inability to understand the English inscriptions on two pictures - which otherwise appeal to her - on the wall of the hotel room where she and Botho are happy together, two icons of the Anglo-Saxon tradition of resistance to autocracy: ‘Washington crossing the Delaware’ and ‘The last hour at Trafalgar’. England, and a reminiscence of Trafalgar, in the person of a visiting Mr Nelson, also provide a measure of Germany’s internal discords in Frau Jenny Treibel (1893), which is devoted to the comic discrepancy between the two forms of the ‘Bildungsbürger’, the bourgeois and the academic. But Fontane was more than a satirist, he was a moralist with a penetrating sense of political and historical realities. He could not be content with merely criticizing his society: he had to use the representation of it to reflect on ultimate questions of right and wrong and human purpose. In 1892 he began a series of novels which achieve something almost without precedent in German literature: presenting lives which are as independent, responsible, and free of political oppression as it is possible for human lives to be, because they are lived by members of a ruling class. In Beyond Recall (Unwiederbringlich, 1892), Effi Briest (1895), and Der Stechlin (1898), Fontane did what his 18th-century predecessors were unable to do. He brought the resources of literary realism to bear on a class which was its own master: the landowning Prussian nobility, for the sake of which Bismarck had constructed his Empire, and which was charged by him with restraining the political ambitions of Germany’s bourgeoisie. But the issues of meaning and conscience, of deeds and consequences and the passing of time, that Fontane’s characters have to face transcend their historical circumstances and they know it. Effi Briest in particular stands out for the tautness of its psychological and symbolic structure. It is not just about the drift into adultery of its lively heroine, caught in a loveless marriage to an older husband, ambitiously climbing the ladder of promotion in one of Bismarck’s ministries, but about the consequences of the accidental discovery of the adultery years later. Effi ’s husband, von Innstetten, allows himself to be constrained by the code of honour of his caste to kill his rival in a duel, to divorce his wife, and to separate her from her only daughter, thus destroying four lives, including his own. Why he does this, he does not know, and neither do we. Is there in him a streak of cruelty? Does he just lack the human sympathy of the novel’s narrator, or of Effi ’s faithful Catholic maidservant, or even of her dog? Or is he a victim of some fate greater than himself, as unavoidable as social existence yet as arbitrary as the seeming chance that we live in one time rather than another? ‘You are right!’ says the friend in whom Innstetten confi des. ‘The world
just is the way it is, and things don’t happen the way we want but the way other people want … Our cult of honour is idolatry, but we have to submit to it as long as the idol is believed in.’ Because von Innstetten belongs to the class of those who have power, the compulsion to which he and the other characters think they have to submit is shown to us as something whose form might change with a redistribution of power but which would not then itself be eliminated. In bowing to it they are not deluded, and their human worth depends on the spirit in which they perform the obligations imposed by their transient but inescapable time and place. And so they seem proper objects of the narrator’s tactful and understated compassion as well as of his irony. Fontane knew intimately the class he made central to his three greatest novels, but he did not himself belong to it. His realism therefore always hints at another perspective from that of his principals, at the historical certainty that one day the insubstantial pageant will all fade and another idol in another temple demand submission. ‘Our old families are all victims of the idea that “things won’t work without them”, which is quite wrong’, says a thoughtful character in Fontane’s last novel, Stechlin. ‘Wherever we look we are in a world of democratic attitudes. A new age is dawning.’
In the new century the old Prussian families, and Prussia itself, did indeed pass away. For Berlin’s younger generation of writers they were already an irrelevance in a technological and industrial age. Literature needed to concentrate not on the landed but on the monied classes, and on those out of whom they made their money, the new class of industrial workers. The Naturalist movement of the 1880s and 1890s, led by Arno Holz (1863-1929) and Johannes Schlaf (1862-1944), was partly an enthusiastic response to the work of Zola and Ibsen, but it was also a recovery of the native German tradition of radical bourgeois realism which had last surfaced in the mid-18th century and then in the work of Büchner (whose Woyzeck, its title mistranscribed as Wozzeck, was fi rst published in 1878). To that extent its aims were allied to those of Fontane, who reviewed some of its productions favourably. The affl uence that made it possible to live as a professional novelist had a similar effect on drama, particularly since princely Germany continued to maintain the extensive network of subsidized theatres. Censorship might be strict, but in a centre of wealth such as Berlin it could be evaded. The impresario Otto Brahm (1856-1912) founded a private (and so uncensored) theatre club, where the fi rst production, in 1889, was of Ibsen’s Ghosts, banned for its discussion of syphilis, and the second the even more scandalous Before Sunrise (Vor Sonnenaufgang), the fi rst mature work of Gerhart Hauptmann (1862-1946), on the theme of hereditary alcoholism (a typical fantasy of the age of eugenics).
Hauptmann, a Silesian who, supported at fi rst by his wife, took up a writing career in Berlin, had like Heine an ambiguous attitude to the modern age which he was introducing into literature: in an early poem about a train journey by night his reverie occasioned by the moonlit landscape outside the carriage is interrupted by thoughts of the impoverished and angry workers who built the line for his comfort. Inspired not by theory but by a hugely generous sympathy, he was willing for a while to be dubbed a Naturalist by Holz and Schlaf, but it was not long before he showed the more subjective side of his versatile talent.
The family devastated by drink in Before Sunrise is an archetype of Bismarck’s Germany: Silesian farmers transformed overnight by mineral wealth into industrial capitalists. Into their brutish milieu intrudes a journalist full of the materialist and determinist ideas of the time, who seems to their Werther-reading daughter to offer a hope of escape. But as a good Darwinian he cannot bring himself to marry her for fear of the family’s supposed hereditary taint and, like Werther, she kills herself. The weak-willed intellectual, a lineal descendant of the theologian with doubts to whom 18th-century literature owed so much, is a constant feature of Hauptmann’s works with a contemporary setting. The fi gure personifi es Hauptmann’s reluctance to follow Fontane and extend the scope of his realism to the classes which were the locus of political power: a passive acceptance of necessity can be made to
seem an adequate response to suffering if you do not include in the world you represent people who are free to act.
Disguised, such a spokesman for myopia even appears in Hauptmann’s masterpiece The Weavers (Die Weber, 1892). The Weavers is a triumph of the manner pioneered by the young Goethe, Lenz, and Büchner, a drama with many strands and no hero, which lives from the energy of the language of the workers (Hauptmann fi rst drafted it in his native dialect). Its theme, the uprising of the starving Silesian cottage-weavers against the factory owners in 1844 and its suppression by military force, led to repeated attempts to prohibit its performance (and the new Emperor, Wilhelm II, cancelled his subscription to Brahm’s theatre in disgust). But, as Fontane remarked in his review, it is a revolutionary play with an anti-revolutionary conclusion. In the last act an elderly weaver emerges as the play’s moral centre, urging non-violence, and is killed in the closing moments by a stray bullet. Fontane tellingly pointed to the parallels with Schiller. Unlike the novel, the drama was in Germany still too implicated in the princely past to reflect the realities of power in the new society. Hauptmann revived not only the realism of Lenz’s era but its self-emasculating submission to autocracy and eventually its diversion into idealism. In 1896, his fi ve act ‘fairy drama’, The Sunken Bell (Die versunkene Glocke) showed he was himself still an obstinate dreamer in the moonlight. In 1912 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Looking back on the career of Richard Wagner in 1933, Thomas Mann (1875-1955) saw in it the typical progression of the entire German middle class from the disappointed revolution of 1848 to resigned cultivation of ‘interiority protected by power’ (machtgeschützte Innerlichkeit) in Bismarck’s Empire: an inner world of art and culture could fl ourish provided the authoritarian, and ultimately military, structure that protected it was not questioned. Mann was clearly thinking of himself as much as of Wagner. Few writers were as typical as he of the Second Empire middle class: in his own person he united both the bourgeoisie and the intellectuals, both Berlin and Munich. His family circumstances could not have been more bourgeois: born in what had until 1871 been the Free City of Lübeck, he was the son of a wealthy corn-merchant who married a colonial German Brazilian.
After his father’s death in 1891 he lived on inherited money and, later, his literary earnings: he was never, even indirectly, dependent on the state. Yet all his work was, more or less overtly, dominated by the concept of disinterested Art, the centrepiece in the ideology of 18th and 19th-century officialdom, and the bridge between the two wings of the ‘Bildungsbürgertum’. In the early 1890s the Mann family moved to Munich where, following in the footsteps of his older brother Heinrich (1871-1950), Thomas began to make a name for himself as a writer of unashamedly cynical short stories. Looking back from this new perspective on the world in which he had grown up he had his fi rst great success with the novel Buddenbrooks, begun when he was only 22.
Buddenbrooks. Decline of a Family (Buddenbrooks. Verfall einer Familie, 1901) is Germany’s greatest, perhaps only, contribution to the European 19th-century tradition of the realistic novel of bourgeois life. Its greatness, and its European status, is partly due to its being a specifi cally German contribution. Not just because it tells the story of four generations of a commercial family in Lübeck from 1835 to 1877, against a densely visualized backcloth of North German domestic architecture, dinner parties, and linguistic habits, of holidays by the North Sea, of schoolroom practices some of which still survive, of the strangely transient impact of public events in 1848 and the advent of street lighting.
That gives a specifi cally German cast to the marriages, divorces, and love-affairs, the black sheep and the gossip, the social friction with commercial rivals and the deals that go awry which mark the decline of the Buddenbrook fi rm and the eventual extinction of the family’s male line. But what makes Buddenbrooks more than just Galsworthy or Arnold Bennett in a German setting is a feature of its structure that only Germany could provide. Beneath the comedy, tragedy, and irony of individual lives sacrifi ced on the altar of the family business there is the implication of the working out of some more general principle or destiny. We seem to be pointed towards Nietzsche’s critique of Schopenhauer, and his variant of the Darwinists’ theory of degeneracy, of which Hauptmann had made cruder use in Before Sunrise. In Nietzsche’s view - at times at least - the intellectual and artistic insight which for Schopenhauer offered some escape from the hideous struggle for existence was itself a symptom of failure in the struggle. As the Buddenbrook family decays, so ethical qualms, philosophical puzzlement, and artistic sensibility gain more of a hold over its will to survive. But these hints of a philosophical meaning or substructure to the story have a double effect. They open up, it is true, the possibility that the book should be read as showing that human lives are ineluctably determined and ultimately meaningless. But by raising the question of the eternal value, or valuelessness, of the characters’ lives they make those lives into more than just sad or comic examples of the distortion of humanity by the power of money or social conformism: the characters and their gestures towards freedom and signifi cance, however doomed or feeble, acquire an importance - one might call it a religious importance - which it transcends the capacity of their milieu to express. By thus uniting the novelistic realism of the European bourgeoisie with the philosophical introspection of the German official tradition Thomas Mann provided the Second Empire with its greatest literary monument. There is a price. Buddenbrooks is Germany without Prussia, and without the universities. Mann’s early narratives (unlike the last works of Fontane, their virtual contemporary) give us society without the state. The social and economic origins of moral and personal judgements are shown, but not of the notions of ‘art’ and ‘spirit’, ‘life’, and ‘will’, which underpin the novel, and especially the short stories.
The supposed opposition between ‘life’ and ‘art’, ‘the bourgeois’ and ‘the artist’, is central to the stories Mann wrote in the next phase of his career, notably Tristan and Tonio Kröger (1903) and Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig, 1912). The opposition was unreal in so far as both ‘bourgeois’ and ‘artist’
were ‘Bildungsbürger’, but it could appear as a real and deep opposition of metaphysical principles in so far as Mann’s writing left unrepresented the ruling, ‘protective’ power that unifi ed the disparate elements of German society in the service of the new German state. Instead, the unifying principle in these early narratives was Mann’s writing itself. Tonio Kröger, though he becomes an ‘artist’ in Munich, remains in love with the North German ‘bourgeois’ world he has left, even when it treats him with indifference or suspicion. ‘You are a bourgeois who has lost his way’, a friend tells him. But he replies: ‘If anything is capable of making a littérateur [i.e. one who writes for money] into a poet [‘Dichter’, i.e. one who writes out of dedication to ‘Art’], it is this bourgeois love of mine for what is human, alive and ordinary’.
In Buddenbrooks, Mann made something that Germany’s high
cultural tradition could recognize as ‘Art’ and ‘poetry’ out of a loving representation of the bourgeois world that had previously been excluded from it. Only gradually did he recognize that it was necessary also to give an account of the dependence of high culture on collaboration with political authority. As the European centre of the global economy drifted towards crisis, it became generally apparent that Germany’s future would be determined more by power, political and military, than by bourgeois decency and ordinariness. Mann’s literary response to the crisis, the most famous of all his stories, was overwhelmingly artful but it shows the beginnings of a willingness to present German culture in a political context. ‘The realm of Art is growing, and that of health and innocence is shrinking on earth’ Tonio Kröger says, and in Death in Venice Art displaces Life everywhere. Gustav von Aschenbach, an acclaimed and mature writer, is tempted to linger too long in a cholera-ridden Venice by a homoerotic obsession with the young son of a Polish aristocratic family staying at his hotel, and succumbs to the disease. It might seem that this is another tale of Art falling in love with the Life from which it is separated and to which it pays homage. But von Aschenbach’s title of nobility shows he is no Kröger: he is the offspring of a long line of servants of the Prussian state. The Art to which he has dedicated a career of self-abnegation is not the ‘lively, intellectually undemanding concreteness of depiction’ which entertains ‘the bourgeois masses’, but, we are told, philosophical, moralistic, classicizing, and highly formal. And the love to which Aschenbach surrenders is not the healthy innocence and unproblematic eros, indifferent to things of the mind, that captivates Tonio Kröger but is already aestheticized, and knowing, and explicitly not ‘ordinary’. Aschenbach in his thoughts clothes it in the language of classical mythology and Nietzschean philosophy, but its true name is death - the death that in the story, in the form of a plague, is beginning to seep through the canals and squares of Venice and threatens the breakdown of all civilized order; the death that in Europe, in 1912, was marshalling its agents for the coming catastrophe, among them the Prussian soldiers and officials whose ethos Aschenbach had made his own.
The irony with which Aschenbach is treated in the richly physical, but always symbolically signifi cant, narrative medium - an art wholly different from that which is said to have made the story’s hero famous - shows that Mann could express in literature a far subtler understanding of German realities than we fi nd in the bellicose essays in which he spoke out for his country’s cause after 1914.
The earth creaked before it quaked. By the early years of the 20th century prescient writers could sense that the identity of the nation, collective and individual, was threatened by the growth of global industrial mass society. Heinrich Mann recognized long before his brother that protectionist nationalism was no substitute for internationalism and could lead only to war and, in his own novels, satirized the pillars of the German state that scarcely fi gured in Buddenbrooks: academic culture in Professor Unrat (1905) and monarchist ideology in His Majesty’s Subject (Der Untertan, 1914). Personal identity is dissolved into the interface between social role and sexual desire in the plays of Frank Wedekind (1864-1918), an unstable character, uncertain both of his national roots (he was an American citizen, and ‘Frank’ was short for ‘Benjamin Franklin’) and of his social position (after running through an inheritance he worked in Munich for Maggi Soup, and then as a cabaret artist, before he could live from his writings in a respectable marriage). Spring’s Awakening (Frühlings Erwachen, 1891) was fi rst produced in 1906 in Brahm’s theatre in Berlin, by then directed by Max Reinhart, but it was not performed in full until the 1960s thanks to its scenes of fl agellation, sexual intercourse, homosexual kissing, and competitive masturbation. Its fragmented manner owes much to Büchner, and its diction, combining naturalism, satirical caricature and somewhat overheated romanticism, proved very infl uential. Between the adult world of grotesque puppets and the unformed adolescents whose burgeoning sexuality they punish, suppress, or deny, there lies no area of mature or integral personality. Sexuality, after all, is prior to personality, and so is very close to the violence which destroys it. Lulu, the central character in Wedekind’s two-part drama (1895, 1904), which gave Alban Berg the plot and title of his second opera (his fi rst was Wozzeck), is more a personifi cation of sex than a sex-driven person, and she ends as a victim of Jack the Ripper - a role which Wedekind played himself. As military confrontations such as the Moroccan crisis of 1911 showed, the power of violence that for 40 years had protected interiority was about to shake itself free. Violence fi gures prominently in the work of the generation of young writers who around 1910 founded journals with titles such as Action and Storm. It seems a premonition when Georg Heym (1887-1912), who died young in an accident, writes a poem about the maggots on the face of a dead soldier in a forest, but the bodies dissolving back into nature, which are the main theme of Morgue (1912), the fi rst collection published by the Berlin doctor Gottfried Benn (1886-1956), are simply the material of a professional’s daily work. Benn’s inability to believe in personalities, let alone in relationships between them, is already apparent in his description of his affair with the Jewish poet Else Lasker-Schüler (1869-1945)
as ‘dark, sweet onanism’. Lasker-Schüler herself wrote, in a different vein, some of the best poetry of the period. Often gently, or eccentrically, rhymed, her poems draw on a restricted range of images - jewellery, stars, fl owers, primary colours, her Jewish traditions - to explore the love of others, the world, and God. She too could sense the approach of Nietzschean apocalypse, but her poem ‘World’s End’ (‘Weltende’) is free of any savage or cynical heroics:
Es ist ein Weinen in der Welt, Als ob der liebe Gott gestorben wär, […]
Du! wir wollen uns tief küssen -
Es pocht eine Sehnsucht an die Welt An der wir sterben müssen.
[There is a weeping in the world as if the good Lord had died […]
Come let us kiss each other deeply - there is a desire knocking at the world and we must die of it.]
A similar sense that even amid the confl icts and absurdities of the Second Empire a humane and compassionate life is possible informs the most delicately humorous poetry of the period, the ‘nonsense verse’ of Christian Morgenstern (1871-1914). The principal fi gures in his Gallows Songs (Galgenlieder, 1905, and subsequent collections), which despite their title are rarely macabre, are the hyper-sensitive Professor Palmström and his friend von Korf, who to the consternation of bureaucracy has no physical existence. In territory situated somewhat between Edward Lear and Heath Robinson they meet the ‘moonsheep’
and the ‘nasobeme’ (which strides around on its many noses) and relieve stress by reading the day after tomorrow’s newspaper or inventing watches that go backwards on request.
Schoolmaster’s German is parodied, dead metaphors come back to tangible life, Palmström plays Korf ’s Sneezewort Sonata on the Olfactory Organ (Geruchsorgel) and, decorated with various metaphysical grace-notes, the ingenuity of the little man cheerfully evades the constraints of a reality administered by officials and intellectuals:
Ein fi nstrer Esel sprach einmal zu seinem ehlichen Gemahl:
“Ich bin so dumm, du bist so dumm, wir wollen sterben gehen, kumm!”
Doch wie es kommt so öfter eben:
Die beiden blieben fröhlich leben.
[A gloomy donkey once said to his wedded wife: ‘I am so thick, you are so thick, let’s go and die, come on’. But as tends to happen - the two stayed happily alive.]
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Author: Nicholas Boyle
