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  German Literature: A Very Short Introduction

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  SCHIZOPHRENIA

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  SCHOPENHAUER Christopher Janaway

  POSTCOLONIALISM Robert Young

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  Nicholas Boyle

  German

  Literature

  A Very Short Introduction

  1

  1

  Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP

  Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.

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  by Oxford University Press Inc., New York

   Nicholas Boyle 2008

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2008

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available

  ISBN 978–0–19–920659–9

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain by

  Ashford Colour Press Ltd, Gosport, Hampshire

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  ix

  List of illustrations xi

  Introduction

  1

  1 The bourgeois and the offi cial: a historical overview 5

  2 The laying of the foundations (to 1781) 27

  3 The age of idealism (1781–1832) 58

  4 The age of materialism (1832–1914) 80

  5 Traumas and memories (1914– ) 120

  Further

  reading

  160

  Index

  163

  This page intentionally left blank

  Acknowledgements

  I am grateful to students and colleagues in the Department of German in the University of Cambridge for their discussions of this project with me, and particularly to Chris Young for his advice about my account of the earlier period. Discussions with Raymond Geuss enabled me to understand Paul Celan better. I should also like to express my thanks to Andrea Keegan and her colleagues at Oxford University Press for their helpful and understanding treatment of a fond author in love with too bulky a manuscript.

  My wife, Rosemary, was, as usual, an indispensable support in what turned out be – again, as usual – a bigger undertaking than I originally imagined. I am especially grateful to Susan Few for her help in preparing the typescript.

  The intellectual debts incurred in writing a book of this kind are many, and some of them of very long standing. I could not have conceived it without the inspiration and example of my teachers and I dedicate it therefore to Ronald Gray and the late Peter Stern.

  This page intentionally left blank

  List of illustrations

  1 Map of Germany, 1871 to

  8 Life mask of Goethe (1807) 77

  1918 3

  Deutsches Literatur-Archiv,

  Marbach

  2 Wilhelm I proclaimed as

  German Emperor, Versailles,

  9 The Poor Poet (1839), by Carl

  1871 16

  Spitzweg 90

  bpk

  bpk/Nationalgalerie SMB/

  Jörg P. Anders

  3 Apostles, by Tilman

  10 Wilhelm Busch, scenes from

  Riemenschneider 29

  Hans Huckebein (1867) 95

  akg-images

  11 Ludwig II’s Wagnerian

  4 Luther as an Augustinian

  dream-world at

  friar, 1520 31

  Neuschwanstein, 1870s 99

  akg-images

  akg-images

  5 Christoph Martin Wieland,

  12 Nietzsche, with his

  1806 43

  friend, Paul Rée, and Lou

  akg-images

  Andreas-Salome 103

  6 August Wilhelm Iffl and, in

  akg-images

  Schiller’s The Robbers 56

  13 Title of the fi rst edition of The

  akg-images

  Seventh Ring (1907) by Stefan

  George 106

  7 A Glimpse of Greece at its

  Zenith (1825), by Karl

  Stefan-George-Stiftung, Stuttgart

  Friedrich Schinkel 69

  14 Emil Orlik, poster for The

  bpk/Nationalgalerie SMB/

  Jörg P. Anders

  Weavers, 1897 111

  15 Heinrich and Thomas Mann, 18 Paul Celan, 1967 146

  1927 121

  akg-images/ullstein bild

  © World History Archive/Topfoto

  19 The Tin Drum: Günter Grass,

  16 Bertolt Brecht, 1927 127

  with David Bennent and

  Mary Evans Picture Library/Interfoto

  Volker Schlöndorff, 1979 153

  Picture-alliance/dpa/

  17 Martin Heidegger, 1933 135

  © dpa-Bilderdienst

  akg-images

  The publisher and the author apologize for any errors or omissions in the above list. If contacted they will be pleased to rectify these at the earliest opportunity.

  Introduction

  Literature is not just texts, because texts
are not just texts. Texts are always turned, and turn their readers, to something other than texts and readers, something the texts are about. An introduction, even a very short introduction, to a national literature cannot be just an introduction to texts, it is also an introduction to a nation. To ask what German literature is like is to ask what – from a literary point of view – Germany is like. Since the foundation in the 18th century of the two distinctively modern literary genres, the book of subjective lyrical poems and the objective realistic novel, there have been two voices of literary modernity, and Germany has spoken, supremely, with one of them: poetic, tragic, resolutely refl ective, and subliminally religious. The other voice – novelistic, realistic, sometimes comic, sometimes morally earnest – has in the German tradition been more muted, though by no means mute. This book is concerned with the character of Germany’s literary contribution to our modern self-understanding, and so with the character of the community to and about which, and in whose language, its writers primarily expressed themselves. The fi rst thing to say about that community is that, for all the centrality of Germany in European geography, history, and culture, it is not unifi ed, and never has been.

  From a British point of view, ‘Central Europe’ probably means somewhere unreliable north of Transylvania. But ‘ Mitteleuropa’

  1

  (‘Central Europe’) is how contemporary Germans describe the area in which they live, and with justifi cation. Since the fall of Rome, Europe’s trade routes from North to South and East to West have intersected on German territory. Forms of the modern German language have been spoken from the Rhine to the Volga and from the borders of Finland to the southern slopes of the Italian Alps. Language, culture, and genes have been exchanged, over the centuries, in peace and war, with French, Italian, Hungarian, Slavonic, and Scandinavian neighbours. (In addition to Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, German is an offi cial language in part or all of Belgium, Hungary, Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Namibia, and Poland.) Lacking clear geographical boundaries, however, Germany has been a point of reference for the European identities grouped around it without establishing an identity of its own. The speakers of German have never been united in a single state calling itself Germany, not even by Hitler.

  The modern state of that name is one, historically unique, result atureer of a long and complex development. The process which brought together the Federal and Democratic Republics in 1990–1 was known as ‘re-unifi cation’ but the state that emerged from it has German Lit

  different boundaries from any of its predecessors and a signifi cant proportion of its older population was born outside it, though in territories that had thought of themselves as German, in some cases, for many centuries. Europe’s other two principal German-speaking states, Austria and Switzerland, have had rather more continuity of identity, even if Austria, as the former metropolitan state of an empire which lasted under various names from 1526 to 1918, has reached its present equilibrium only through the trauma of multiple amputation. German-speaking Switzerland (though each canton has its own history) has developed independently of the other German lands since the 15th century, if not before.