History of German Literature Georg Lukacs 1947
The defeat of the 1848 revolution ended all attempts to free Germany and to shake off the German misery. The German bourgeoisie, always fearful, always inclined to compromise with the old powers, took refuge, after the June uprising of the Parisian proletariat, under the protective wings of the Austrian and Prussian eagles and other equally noble heraldic animals. The democratic forces have been far too weak, immature and undecided to take the lead themselves. The general hopelessness that arose after the defeat contributes to the ideological capitulation that is now taking place. The democrats before 1848 still understood, more or less clearly, that the right way to bring about the national unity of the German people was through their political liberation, through the democratization of Germany. Already in the course of the revolution, but especially after its defeat, the principle of unity triumphed over that of freedom in their souls, which means: more and more of them want a unified, powerful Germany, although they became more and more indifferent to how far this unity is based on a liberal internal conversion. “Through unity to freedom” is still being proclaimed, but illusion, self-deception, even lies, are gaining the upper hand within the new objective. German liberalism, from democratic-liberal, becomes national-liberal.
The defeat buries all hopes of a liberal renewal in Germany, and all the literary and ideological preliminary work has thus proved useless. For this defeat means a turning point in German history in a completely different way than the political failure of the wars of liberation. In both cases one usually speaks of reaction periods that followed the failure; but in both cases we are dealing with fundamentally different things. Only now did Prussia and later all of Germany begin to grow into a “Bonapartist monarchy”, to use Friedrich Engels’ apt expression. Now the “national mission” of the Hohenzollerns showed itself in all its glory. Only now does the real Prussianization of Germany begin. In addition, the social function of the monarchy changes, in that its de facto absolute power no longer establishes the “balance” between the nobility and the bourgeoisie, but rather that between the bourgeois-noble “above” and the “below” of the “lower people”.
In France, however, the storms of the 1848 revolution also brought Bonapartism to power. But firstly, the French people had already swept out the feudal remnants half a century earlier, while the “Bonapartist monarchy” in Germany took on the task of either simply preserving them in a contemporary adaptation to capitalism or painlessly converting them into modern, bourgeois ones without harm to the nobility. Secondly, Bonapartism in the French development is a clear setback after the republican line was resumed some difficult decades later, after the collapse of the Napoleonic reaction in 1870, while it is characteristic of Germany’s unfortunate path that Friedrich Engels saw the transition from the old Prussian absolutism into the “Bonapartist monarchy” as progress.
This paradoxical situation makes clear scholarly knowledge of German literature after 1848 difficult. The undoubted economic progress, the gradual economic unification of the German people through the expansion of the Customs Union, and the gradual development of a modern bourgeois society, led to the literature of this period being given a false, exaggeratedly favorable assessment. The ideology of the “silver age” of German literature emerges, propagated by Adolf Barteis, Paul Ernst and later by the neo-Hegelian Glockner. The aim is to emphasize the distance from the “golden age” of the Goethe era, but at the same time emphasize that German literature has taken on a new upswing, despite or without prejudice to or even because of the defeat of the democratic aspirations of the 1840s. In this literary-historical legend, the only fact that corresponds to the facts is that between 1848 and 1870 a large number of the great talents who had already emerged before the revolution or at least had formed ideologically and artistically at that time, continued to develop their poetic activity. But to what extent can one speak of poetic progress in their case and thus of an upswing in German literature as a whole? The facts here speak a completely different language than the legends of the reactionary historians.
Let us start with the simplest example. Otto Ludwig’s Erbfoerster was written immediately after the defeat of the revolution. The drama is dramatically and intellectually strongly influenced by Hebbel’s Maria Magdalena, which, like the latter, deals with the narrowness of German petty-bourgeois life. Intellectually, however, it represents the sharpest contrast to Hebbel’s tragedy, in that Ludwig is striving to construct a “tragic guilt” that must necessarily arise when the German petty bourgeois, insisting on real or imaginary “old rights”, rebelled against his employer, against the authorities. In this Ludwigian theory of “tragic guilt” the clear echo of the defeat of the 1848 revolution can be heard in those masses of the German people and their leading intelligentsia who would have been called upon to carry out the democratic restructuring of the united nation, and to do so in a purely aesthetic form. The falsity of Ludwig’s conception of the tragic corresponds to the arbitrariness of the fable and its structure. Hettner calls the Erbfoerster the “most miserable of all dramas of fate”.
The figure and career of Otto Ludwig have a tragic character, mainly because of his significant talent as a writer, because of his unusual ability to bring people and situations to life, which could only flourish in a few stories to relative success, and because of his literary destiny. In the search for “tragic guilt” as an Archimedean point for the dramatic structure, Ludwig gets lost in a labyrinth of bottomless psychologism. His theoretical works and dramatic fragments contain essential technical insights into epic and drama, but working on them has decomposed his creative power. Ludwig has completely detached himself from the aesthetics of the art period (above all from Schiller’s); a modern psychologism develops in him, which stands in an inorganic contrast to his material, which is at home in the darkest German misery. The tragic fate of the writer Ludwig proves his real honesty as a writer; a less conscientious author could have exploited an economic success like that of the Erbfoerster to become the dominator of the stage in counter-revolutionary Germany.
The tragedy of Otto Ludwig is not psychological, as it is presented in German literary histories. Above all, it has a general European basis. The 1850s are the time of the general transition of western literature to Modernism in the narrower sense. The middle of the century is the time of a general European stylistic crisis (think of Flaubert, of the intellectual anticipation of the principles of the crisis in Balzac’s artistic novellas, etc.). Given the unfavorability of developed capitalism as a material for art and the artistic perception that sprouted on its soil for literary form, the struggle for a modern and yet genuinely artistic form with a modern content arose.
This general crisis is also complicated in France by the ideological depression that the reign of Napoleon III caused. All of these motives are particularly acute in Germany. The fate of other playwrights, above all Hebbel, who have looked for the way out (on the surface) in the opposite direction shows that Otto Ludwig’s literary straying can neither be explained psychologically nor stem from the wrong starting point of his individual artistic attempts at a solution.
We have already shown the contradictory foundations of Hebbel’s conception of tragedy. The contradiction intensified after the defeat of the 1848 revolution. Aesthetically and ideologically consistent, the young Hebbel denies any reconciliation in tragedy (albeit in contradiction to the political-social mission he ascribes to the drama) and his youthful works invariably end in shrill discord. While he is now striving to overcome his inner turmoil with increasing artistic maturity, the political experiences of the 1848 revolution meet his literary aspirations. The tragic reconciliation that now becomes the aesthetic-ideological basis of his newly awakened search for beauty is such a reconciliation with the reactionary misery of the time after 1848, its aesthetic affirmation in the form of tragedy.
The conception of the tragic underlying here has some new features in comparison with its mode of appearance in German Classicism. Above all, a new tragic insight is that the individual has no right to shake the status quo. It is not the tragic outcome in itself that pronounces the prohibition. Goethe and Hegel knew very well that the individual fighting against the status quo can take the path to his tragic downfall. But they knew just as well that the inexorable progress of the human race, in the form of an unbroken chain of such individual tragedies, has an untragic character.
Hebbel’s “pan-propositionism”, his conception of the tragic as the ultimate principle of the world, removes the fact that individual tragedy is embedded in the idea of human progress. With Hebbel, this development is related to his moving away from Hegelian philosophy and his approach to that of Schopenhauer. At the same time, and more importantly, what is shown here is that the opposite conceptions of the tragic in Hebbel and Ludwig in their ultimate foundations, in their definition of the relationship between man and history, of human activity and social institutions, amount to the same thing.
But even in his particular conception of the tragic, Hebbel is far less of a loner than is generally assumed. Already during the revolution, during the course of the debate on Poland in the Paulskirche, the Hegelian Arnold Ruge, who was a friend of Hebbel at times, and the poet Wilhelm Jordan, came up with the historical-philosophical theory that the fate of Poland represents a tragedy. It is therefore also shallow, a sin against the tragic spirit of world history, to strive for its restoration. In his Uhland essay, the aesthetician Friedrich Theodor Vischer, who was also close to Hebbel, gives a similar tragic interpretation of the dismemberment of the Stuttgart rump parliament before 1849. He sees a tragic situation here for both the parliamentarians and the counter-revolutionary government: “if the ministers found themselves in a tragic conflict, the state of affairs was no less tragic for the other part: the members of parliament, if they did not want to appear cowardly, could just as little go backwards as the ministers were allowed to remain undecided and inactive. For my part, I understand that if I could have separated into two people, if I had been in the train and been a minister at the same time, I would have summoned the military against myself, as a member of the train.” In this “sublime In its objective”, in reality miserable, cowardly liberal view of the events of 1848, we can easily find the key to the tragic conception of Hebbel’s Agnes Bernauer, to the famous speech of his king Kandaules about the “sleep of the world” in Gyges and his Ring.
Of course, Hebbel never became a Schopenhauerian to the same extent as the earlier revolutionary Feuerbach follower Richard Wagner. After the defeat of 1848, after Wagner’s conversion to Schopenhauer, his anti-capitalist, rebellious Ring des Nibelungen was recast in a timeless mood of doom and gloom, in which the metaphysical atmosphere of the absolute negation of life makes the failure of every human endeavor a tragic matter of course. Nietzsche, in matters of decadence, an expert of the first rank, describes this process after his disappointment in Wagner with bitter and apt irony: “Finally a way out dawned on him: the riff on which he failed, how? if he used it as a goal, as an ulterior motive, as... interpreted the actual meaning of his journey? To fail here, that was also a goal. Bene navigavi, cum naufragium feci. And he translated the Ring into Schopenhauerianism. Everything goes wrong, everything perishes, the new world is as bad as that old: the nothing, the Indian Circe beckons.”
This reworking is deeply characteristic of the time and at the same time signifies the fulfillment of Romantic aspirations. Romanticism’s predilection for night and death, for sickness and decay, its devaluation of the healthy, of what is active in broad daylight, celebrates the greatest triumphs here. What Novalis dreamed, what Goerres and Creuzer darkly proclaimed, only became a suggestive myth in Wagner’s Goetterdaemmerung, in his Tristan and, finally becoming ecclesiastical, in his Parsifal, into a social power that affected all strata of the German people and German society, which seized the most ordinary philistine as well as the young Thomas Mann. This is the fulfillment of the Romantic intentions also in the aesthetic sense; because Wagner’s “total work of art” is the practical realization of the Romantic mixture of genres, the “progressive universal poetry” of the Athenaeum.
Hebbel never went as far as Wagner in any of these directions. But for that very reason his work has become less effective. With him, the great world-historical contexts remain, only they are now exclusively of a metaphysical, historical-philosophical nature; they hover entirely above the dramatic action and cannot be organically developed from it. And the means by which Hebbel establishes the connection between the tragic individual and world history disrupt the real connection even more. For all the motives indicated here (which have different meanings in different writers) tend to give the hero a full awareness of his tragic situation, a full insight into the necessity of his tragic downfall, indeed to emphasize his agreement with it. The metaphysical (political-reactionary) false objectivism in the conception of the tragic corresponds to a pathologically exaggerated false subjectivism that lyrically and psychologically explodes the drama.
With all this, Wagner and Hebbel are still figures of world literature. The philosophical, psychological, and moral problematic that is alive in their works, albeit against a background distorted into the mythical, is that of the most important of their European contemporaries. Wagner is as closely related to Flaubert as Hebbel is to Ibsen and Dostoyevsky. But while they were struggling for a great modern-realistic style, Wagner and Hebbel remained German transitional figures, since their modern content got stuck in mystifyingly deepened old formal traditions. (The value of Wagner’s musical innovations cannot be dealt with in this context.) The result is a distance between content and form which is neither an organic artistic harmony in the sense of the art period nor an enabling of the discovery of the grandiose disharmony and ugliness of modern life.
The fate of the most important German writers who survived the crisis of 1848 proves that they have to endure all the disadvantages of modern bourgeois development without being able to take advantage of its advantages. Perhaps even more blatantly, because their designs lack the grandeur of Hebbel and Wagner, this fate is evident in the post-revolutionary Gutzkow. Gutzkow is aiming for a modern novel that encompasses all the problems of the new society. In his search for a form corresponding to this prose, he discovered the “novel of juxtaposition”: an attempt at form which, in its ultimate intentions, is related to French naturalism, with its broad descriptions of milieu, with the dissolution of the “outdated” plot into such descriptions and in fact contains all artistically problematic traits of this direction in concentrated form. However, what made Zola part of world literature was not accessible to the German Gutzkow. Socially, the objective-economic unity of a fully capitalized society is missing, the still petty, geographically-politically divided, socially inorganic-heterogeneous German life has not yet really allowed new artistic means to emerge from itself for its reproduction. What Gutzkow wanted to overcome above all, the false Romanticism of German narrative art, also overgrew his dreams of a new social epic. Added to this is the artistic backwardness of the German writer; here the anachronistic aspect of German development can be clearly seen. Balzac was then already dead, and yet already active and fruitful all over the world, when Eugene Sue was still working in Germany as a model or chilling example of the very latest French realism. This genuinely German anachronism is one of the main reasons why Gutzkow’s plans for a great German social novel were doomed to failure.
These novels have long been and rightly forgotten. But one must see their importance (no matter how problematic) as a start in this period if one wants to judge them historically fairly. The standard is provided on the one hand by contemporary French realism and on the other hand by the main line of the prevailing bourgeois literature in Germany at the time, which we find expressed in the most influential critic and literary historian of the 1850s, Julian Schmidt, whose ignorance and lack of taste were exposed in his characterization of two otherwise opposite writers such as Hebbel and Lassalle. In his critique of Gutzkow’s novels, Schmidt explains: “The times are better than their reputation.” What, according to Schmidt, is the good of the present? “The democratic tendency to place decisions on political matters in the hands of the masses is increasingly stepping into the background.” This view, which was popular in liberal circles at the time, corresponds to a superior looking down on the time of the classics: “One could not blame the poets of the classical time if, with complete disregard for the so-called philistines, i.e. the real life, art fled into the realm of shadows.” Only from this point of view can we understand why Gustav Freytag became the representative poet of the time for Schmidt, which is what his famous slogan means that the German writer has to visit the people at work.
Schmidt’s demands on a modern German literature are fulfilled in Freytag’s Soll und haben. Despite all his weaknesses, Freytag is of course something completely different from his critic: he is not without literary culture. The connection with the old times is far more vivid in him, he is a thorough knower of German history; he is even able to draw attention to important contemporaries such as Dickens. Nevertheless, his connection with Julian Schmidt is not accidental. With Schmidt, German criticism and literary history sink to an improbable low; they become cultureless, which even the worst Romantic reactionaries were not. And although Freytag is not without historical and literary culture, the break with the great development of German culture is also evident in his work. He puts the German philistine most effectively at the center of a transfiguring portrayal, not the Romantic who has sunk into philistinism, but the real, mass, vulgar, industrious, submissive petty-bourgeois German philistine, who, despite all liberal sentiments, kowtows to the nobility. What was a “hollow intestine” for Goethe has become the gold mine of poetry for Freytag.
With Freytag, the Gutzkowian failure steers into popular German paths. It is not worth listing names and directions here. Spielhagen is closer to Gutzkow’s modern, universalist striving than most of his contemporaries, and as a socially critical realist is more radical than Freytag; but neither socially nor aesthetically is the basis of his realism strong enough to prevent an ever greater decline, in parallel with the “fulfillment” of the time, about 1870 and after. And what was appropriate to the German citizen after the victories of the empire, is the worst entertainment literature or uninteresting sensational novel a la Paul Lindau.
In the case of Gutzkow and Freytag, the break with the classic traditions is underlined. This is a sign of the times. Of course, this is by no means generally known; on the contrary: it was only in these decades that the actual cult of the German classics, above all of Goethe, began. However, precisely this enthusiasm reveals the chasm that separates, for it is purely academic. When Friedrich Schlegel, Wolfgang Menzel, Boerne and others attacked Goethe from the most varied of sides, and mostly in the same unreasonable way, it was nevertheless expressed that they were dealing with a living literary power, while the most enthusiastic praise of this time always remains non-binding for the present. Only now has German Classicism become a thing of the past, one that has already ceased to be an effective force of the day. Thomas Mann correctly described a poll about whether Schiller was still alive as genuinely German, because “no Frenchman would think of asking himself or others whether Racine and Corneille were still alive”.
Academism in science corresponds to epigonism in poetry. From the outset, the ancient ideal of beauty in German Classicism suffered from the weakness that the polis citizen had less of a say, not only less than in antiquity, but also less than in its Romanesque or Slavic Renaissances. Platen is a lonely exception here, and it is a tragicomedy in the history of literature that Geibel, the head of lyrical epigonism, follows him directly in all formal questions. People are accustomed to comparing Geibel and his Munich circle with the French Parnasse. Wrongly so, because one overlooks the passionate, if not political, at least cultural opposition, which occasionally turned social, behind the “impossible” of the best representatives of Parnassism. The German epigonism of the classics parodied the alleged lack of participation of their role models in the great questions of the day, just as the academic cult of Goethe falsified historical truth in this direction. A modest subjective authenticity of the best among the poetic academics is expressed now and then in elegiac self-awareness, as in Geibel’s Sculptor of Hadrian:
Wohl baend’gen wir den Stein und kueren,
Bewusst berechnend, jede Zier –
Doch, wie wir glatt den Meissel fuehren,
Nur vom Vergangnen zehren wir.
O trostlos kluges Auserlesen,
Dabei kein Blitz die Brust durchzueckt!
Was schoen wird, ist schon dagewesen,
Und nachgeahmt ist, was uns glueckt.
(Well we tame the stone and choose,
Consciously calculating, every ornament –
But as smoothly as we guide the chisel,
We only feed on the past.
O desolately wise choice,
And no lightning flashes through the chest!
What will be beautiful has already happened
And what we succeed in is imitated.)
Is there no real opposition in this German literature from 1850 to 1890? Strange as it sounds, there is hardly any outspoken opposition literature that could be taken seriously as a writer. The democratic current of the pre-revolutionary period, which was never too strong, did not produce any new generation of genuine talents, and even the by no means old representatives of the pre-revolutionary period have fallen silent, for example Freiligrath and Herwegh. Only Heine’s poems from the “mattress grave” allow a powerful, albeit deeply desperate, voice of opposition to be heard. Politically, the small group of democrats around Johann Jacoby became smaller and less influential, also in all areas of literature.
However, it would be wrong to interpret the lack of opposition as meaning that everyone was extremely satisfied with Germany’s development. On the contrary: after the defeat of the 1848 revolution, large sections of the German population experienced a deep depression. Their political and social hopelessness expressed itself almost ideologically. The broad mass impact of Schopenhauerian philosophy is just as much an expression of this movement as the influence of vulgar materialism on equally large sections of the bourgeoisie ideologically reflected its economic upswing.
Both movements, as well as the (mostly neo-Kantian) positivism that emerged in the second half of our period, essentially represent a break with the ideological development of the time before 1848. To be sure, classical German philosophy collapsed immediately after the July Revolution. But the dissolution of Hegelianism in this respect did not mean a complete break in the historical sequence. The process of dissolution was originally aimed at freeing the progressiveness of the dialectical method that had been suppressed and distorted by the Hegelian system. The materialistic world-view that grew out of the process of dissolution broke sharply with the Hegelian system in the decisive philosophical questions, but in the major problems of world-view everything that was really valuable in classical German philosophy was raised to a higher level of progress.
The rupture after 1848 was quite different. It referred above all to the most progressive element of classical philosophy, to dialectics, which all these otherwise so different and conflicting schools of thought were unanimously tossing to the scrap heap. In German materialism and positivism such a vulgar concept of progress prevailed that with its help the preservation of the German misery in the Prussian Reich could be viewed in a thoroughly optimistic manner. Schopenhauer, for his part, purged Romantic obscurantism of all its philosophical connections to the successors of Kant, fought every conception of progress and historicity, led the Romantic preference for illness, death and decay to victory in a modernized form, gave the German bourgeois renunciation of public life the haughty allure of standing above things. Since Marxism (mostly in a more than simplified, often downright distorted form) only began to grasp a relatively small vanguard of the working class in the 1860s and 1870s, since Feuerbach had completely disappeared and Hegel was treated as a “dead dog”, the existing currents of uneasiness, of intellectual rebellion, had every ideological support. The remaining leftovers of the democratic opposition were accordingly also ideologically isolated.
Thus the writer’s uneasiness usually takes on the character of a flight from reality, a flight into the past, or a flight into individualistic eccentricity. It is certainly no coincidence that the realists of the time of real talent and importance were also geographically remote figures, such as Theodor Storm from Holstein and Conrad Ferdinand Meyer from Switzerland. If in Germany one can speak of a parallel to the important art for art’s sake movements of the West, then only in the case of these writers, whose artistic form has on the one hand a genuine, strong and original aesthetic pathos, on the other hand from a deeper dissatisfaction with the petty ugliness of the present, a “realm of shadows” is erected, which for that very reason bears not only epigonal traits, intellectually and formally, but also those that point to the literary future.
The disappointment is clearly visible in Meyer’s development. His Hutten cycle of poems (1871) and his first major historical novel, Juerg Jenatsch (1876), are closely linked intellectually and thematically to current developments in Germany, and deal with present-day moral problems in historical form. Later, Meyer turns away from the present more and more abruptly. A new conception of the Renaissance, interspersed with many reactionary-Romantic motifs, a Romantic-mystical conception of the genuine and great human being, who necessarily roams the historical world alone and misunderstood, forms the basis for a shaping of historical reality in which, despite all the painterly abundance of life of individual scenes, despite all the depth of the individual psychology, the historical part of the story is destroyed.
Theodor Storm’s flight into the past is softer, more lyrical, more moody. The ambivalence of the German development in the second half of the nineteenth century is most clearly recognizable in his poetry and short stories. In the individual emotional life, the shaping of thoroughly modern people, an art of mood that anticipates much of the works of the later Scandinavians; in him, on the other hand, the provincial man appears from a politically and socially backward country. Storm himself clearly recognized his poetic uniqueness and his place in literature. He writes about himself: “It is part of classicism that the works of a poet reflect the essential intellectual content of his time in an artistically perfect form ... and in any case I will have to be content with a side box.” The commemorative poetry of his novellas is the rescue of bare life from a shipwreck.
The resurgence of humor in German literature is also connected with such moods. Socially, the German humor of this time moves between the poles of a deeply desperate attitude towards life and an allegedly mature and glorified settlement with the poverty of the German development. Already after the defeat of the revolution, Gottfried Keller saw the emerging danger for German literature. He thinks that a folk writer should not write in the style of Sterne or Jean Paul, and adds: “It was an unfortunate and gloomy time when one had to seek consolation from them, and the gods forbid that they ... blossom again.” Wilhelm Busch hits the pole of honest despair with the following verse:
Es sitzt ein Vogel auf dem Leim,
Er flattert sehr und kann nicht heim.
Ein schwarzer Kater schleicht herzu,
Die Krallen scharf, die Augen gluh.
Am Baum hinauf und immer hoeher
Kommt er dem armen Vogel naeher.
Der Vogel denkt: Weil das so ist
Und weil mich doch der Kater frisst,
So will ich keine Zeit verlieren,
Will noch ein wenig quinquilieren
Und lustig pfeifen wie zuvor.
Der Vogel, scheint mir, hat Humor.
(A birdling, trapped by birdlime, sat
and flapped in vain. A bold black cat,
sharp-clawed, bright-eyed, sneaked up and neared,
little by little, the luckless bird.
The bird considered: Well, that’s that:
I’ll soon be eaten by the cat!
No time to waste, I’ll trill some more,
and pipe as gaily as before.
...A bird – here’s how I look at it –
of spirit, character, and wit!)
Here, too, as generally human as the tone is, the German philistinism is strongly palpable. But Wilhelm Busch is a passionate opponent of philistinism, while the humor of the other pole promotes its humorous transfiguration. The famous aesthetician Friedrich Theodor Vischer pursued this intention most clearly with his novel Another One and its theoretical defense list of the so-called little evils of life, in order to dissolve the pain “half comic, half tragic, half in laughter, half in pity for the fate of man, for general human suffering leading straight to the dreadful truth that the Spirit, the Son of Heaven, is banished to the dusty body, to the raw thumping of the physical world!” The concrete, historical-political-social misery of Germany is thus humorously sublimated into the “eternal” opposition of ideal and reality, of spirit and body. Just as Vischer’s theory of the “tragedy” of the counter-revolution had to suffocate the historical necessity of progress, so too does his theory of humor preach a reconciliation with the philistinism in German misery.
Fritz Reuter, perhaps the greatest, or at any rate the most original, humorous talent in Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century, moves between the two poles, only that with him the reconciliation is more comfortable, more spontaneous, not immersed in ideology, i.e. less dangerous. But it is there. One may find it humanly beautiful that Reuter, on whom a disgraceful judicial crime was committed during the persecution of demagogues, finds in his Festungtid almost only comfortable and humorous colors for the description of this horrible time of cruel torture of the soul; but he thereby destroys the great ideological background that gave depth to the works of the old humorists. In his most important work (Ut mine Stromtid), the ravishingly sensual realism of the main characters and the comic situations masks this lack. But it is also present in this work and has the effect that much of what could be significantly humorous in nature slides down into the merely comical, ridiculous or sentimental. From the point of view of ideological development, the unprecedented popularity of the work, which really made it a German chapbook, is a two-sided and quite ambiguous fact.
With Wilhelm Raabe there is no compromise, either the comfortable one or the fundamentally ideological one. His humor grows out of a deep political and social despair. He sees the irresistible rise of the new Germany, both capitalist and Hohenzollern Prussian; he sees more clearly than many of his contemporaries that all spiritual and moral values of old Germany will inevitably perish. Raabe does not want to blindly and stubbornly oppose the development; he is not a Romantic reactionary, but despite his primal democratic feelings he has no idea how to give a new twist to Germany’s destiny. His sense of humor is based on this perplexity. It is the sad-moving, lyrical-grotesque comedy of the Don Quixotes of old German humanity in the struggle with the trampling herds of the new-Prussian-capitalist, self-satisfied, bloated philistinism. Genuine humanity finds just as little air to breathe here as it used to in petty, fragmented Germany. Raabe’s heroes are therefore invariably declassed, either externally or internally: soldiers of the wars of liberation who, despairing of their consequences, become international fighters for freedom in Polish uprisings or in South America, or oddballs who have fled to some oddity in order to be able to endure their new life at all. Because Raabe not only sees the ridiculous in the smug philistinism of small and enlarged Germany, but at the same time sees the funny (philistine-like funny) of the flight of his most loved characters into eccentricity, he becomes a real humorist.
The novel is the genre that corresponds best to developed bourgeois society; its originality, level of creativity and depth of reception are the best indicators of modern literary development. Now we have seen two lines in the new Germany. One wants, like the French novel, to shape social wholeness from the social-spiritual center. In Germany it falls from the not very significant and thoroughly questionable level of Gutzkow’s experiments to the bad entertainment novels of the Berlin writers in the 1880s. The other shows the effort to pave the way to universality out of German provincial narrowness. At the beginning there is the deep problem of Immermann, at its end the no less deep problem of Raabe. If one adds that since the deaths of Hebbel and Wagner there has been no German drama of artistic importance (because the so-called German social play or the historical drama of Wildenbruch are out of the question from a literary point of view) and that German poetry, if one speaks of those on the sidelines, such as Meyer and Storm, aside, has become purely epigonal, the picture of the decline that began after 1848 and assumed very large dimensions after the founding of the Reich is completed.
In all this time, only one writer with a German tongue has lived, whose work none of the many forms of adversity in German development since 1848 can even come close to, a popular classic of the democratic world-view, in whom the best traditions of Goethean realism have come to new, contemporary life, whose content and form are on a par with the best contemporary world literature: Gottfried Keller.
For a long time, German literary history has seen Keller as the main poetic figure of the second half of the nineteenth century. However, it overlooks or conceals the fact that this statement does not constitute a counterweight to the literary decline since 1848, but only shows its deep movement more clearly. Keller’s greatness is the most burning reproach that degraded literature can raise against the path of development of the German nation.
Because (despite his important Swiss roots) the career of the writer Keller until 1848 is typically German. He follows the path from Jean Paul to Goethe, he competes with the German political poetry of the 1840s and educates himself on it; Above all, however, the last top figure of bourgeois philosophy in Germany, Ludwig Feuerbach, determined his world view. But if he lives in Berlin immediately after the defeat of the revolution, his stay is already an emigrant existence. His return to Zurich is not an escape into a provincially idyllic narrowness (as with Storm or Raabe), but the frightening surge of strength through contact with Swiss democracy, which not only gives him the material, but also the emotional possibility for citoyen pathos, for the plebeian-democratic continuation of the poetic problems of classical German humanism. So if something has come into being here in Germany that can be compared to Flaubert or Dickens, Turgenev or Tolstoy, one must always be aware that in order to develop his literary potential, Keller does not only live geographically and politically outside of Germany but also had to break with its entire ideological and literary development since 1848. His Swiss work shows what could have become of German literature if the democratic revolution had triumphed in 1848; it would also have meant victory over the ideological diseases of the German spirit and thus of German literature. Of course, this victory would have presupposed the widespread dissemination of those insights into the German misery that were alive in literature only in a few leading figures before the revolution and only in Gottfried Keller after it. Thomas Mann clearly saw the contrast between German and Swiss development that had become effective and fruitful with Keller:
“Before our eyes there lives a variety of German nationality which, politically separated from the main tribe at an early stage, only shared its intellectual and moral destiny to a certain extent, never lost touch with Western European thinking, and has not experienced the degeneration of Romanticism, which has made us lonely and outlaws. It is an illness they did not have. But one thing the sight of the Swiss character can teach us: a stage in German destiny that we erred to cross, not to be confused with Germanness itself.”
Only in such a context can Keller be understood as the pinnacle of German literature: as a warning and reproach, as a tempting target in the event of a complete turning point by the German people.