German Literature Read online

  What is called German literature is really three separate literatures, of three separate states, as distinct as the literatures of, say, England, America, and Australia. Dürrenmatt was no more 2

  Germany

  DK

  S

  LT

  1871−1918

  Baltic Sea

  Present-day boundaries of the

  European States

  The extent of the German empire

  Königsberg (Kaliningrad)

  1871–1918

  North Sea

  RUS

  Rivers

  Danzig

  EAST PRUSSIA

  Boundaries within the German

  (Gdansk)

  empire

  Hamburg

  WEST PRUSSIA

  Bremen

  Elbe

  Hanover

  Berlin

  Brunswick

  Warsaw

  BRANDENBURG

  POLAND

  NL

  WESTPHALIA

  Oder

  Frankfurt

  am Main

  Cologne

  Weimar Leipzig SAXONY

  Rhine

  Dresden

  Jena

  B

  Bonn

  SILESIA

  Giessen

  Prague

  L

  Bamberg

  CZECH REPUBLIC

  Nürnberg

  Stuttgart

  BAVARIA

  SLOVAKIA

  WÜRTTEMBERG

  FRANCE

  Danube

  Augsburg

  Tübingen

  Vienna

  Munich

  AUSTRIA

  HUNGARY

  CH

  1. Germany at its greatest extent, between 1871 and 1918

  a German writer because his plays were put on in Berlin than Arthur Miller was an English writer because his plays were put on in London, and to call Kafka a German novelist is rather like calling Seamus Heaney a British poet: there is some truth in the phrase, but only because it points to a tension between the writer’s origins and material, on the one hand, and his medium and his public, on the other. This book is concerned with the literature of the state now called Germany, which needs to be seen in isolation from the literatures of Austria and Switzerland if its own peculiar dynamic is to become visible. Rambling though it is, there is a single tale to tell and it cannot be told outside its specifi c political, social, and even economic setting.

  In order to bring out the coherence of the German story, I begin with a synopsis of political and cultural developments since the Middle Ages, without referring to individual writers. There follow four chapters which keep to the same framework but give atureer rather more detail. Chapters dealing with the Middle Ages and the literatures of Austria and Switzerland can be found on the internet (http://www.mml.can.ac.uk/german/staff/nb215). Those German Lit

  who miss Kafka in the present volume have the benefi t of the excellent Kafka: A Very Short Introduction by Ritchie Robertson (OUP, 2004), Chapters 1 and 4 being particularly relevant.

  4

  Chapter 1

  The bourgeois and the

  offi cial: a historical overview

  German literature, in the narrow sense, is the literature of the states, predominantly the Lutheran states, of the Holy Roman Empire, and of their 19th-century successor kingdoms, which were gathered by Bismarck into his Second Empire and, after an interval as the Weimar Republic, formed the core of Hitler’s Third Empire. Austria, though a part of the Holy Roman Empire, can be excluded from this story, as Bismarck excluded it, together with Hungary and Austria’s other, non-Imperial, territories in the Danube basin. Prussia, however, has to be included because of its crucial role in the political defi nition of Germany, even though the duchy, later kingdom, of Prussia (now divided between Poland, the Baltic states, and Russia) was never part of the Empire but was an external power-base for the Electors of Brandenburg, rather like Austria’s Danubian hinterland, and even though Brandenburg-Prussia contributed little of signifi cance to German literature, outside the realm of philosophy, until the 19th century.

  The clergy and the university

  The Lutheranism is important. The Reformation of the early 16th century marks the beginning of German literature, in the sense of the term used here. Not just because the Reformation followed relatively soon (and doubtless not by chance) on the 5

  linguistic changes which brought into existence the modern form of the German language, and on the invention of moveable-type printing, which made it desirable, and feasible, to have a standard written language for the whole area across which German books might circulate. By transferring the responsibility for the defence of the Christian faith from the Emperor to the local princes, the Reformation made it possible to imagine a German (Protestant) cultural identity that could do without the Empire altogether, as free of political links to the Roman past as it was of religious links to the Roman present. More, the Reformation launched the individual Protestant states on a voyage towards cultural and political self-suffi ciency even within the German-speaking world. In particular their clergy, then the largest class of the professionally educated and professionally literate, the bearers of cultural values and memory, were cut off from their fellows, even their fellow Protestants, by the boundaries of their state and their historical epoch. They could call only with reservations atureer on the experience of Christians in other places and times and, in practical matters, they had to make their careers in dependence, direct or indirect, on the local monarch. Charged with providing, German Lit

  or supervising, primary education and other charitable activities, such as the care of orphans, which in Catholic states remained the responsibility of relatively independent religious orders or local religious houses, Protestant ministers were often virtually an executive branch of the state civil service.

  The instrumentalization of the clergy in the Protestant princely states exercised a profound infl uence on German literature and philosophy because of a peculiarity in Germany’s political and economic development. The towns, mainly Imperial Free Cities, which in the late Middle Ages had been the most dynamic element in German society – centres of commerce, industry, and banking which were also the centres of a richly inventive middle-class culture, especially in the visual arts – went into decline in the century after the Reformation and failed to adjust 6

  to Europe’s shift from overland to overseas trade and to the new importance of the maritime nations. Germany’s devastating religious civil war, the Thirty Years War from 1618 to 1648, sealed their fate. In the post-war period only the state powers could raise the capital necessary for reconstruction, and with few exceptions, the great Free Cities decayed into mere ‘home towns’. The princely territories, with their predominantly agricultural economies and rural populations that could be pressed into military service, gained correspondingly in relative power and infl uence. A political revolt of the middle classes, which in 16th-century Holland and 17th-century England was largely successful but which in France went underground with the suppression of the Fronde by the young Louis XIV, was in Germany out of the question. The Empire became a federation of increasingly absolute monarchs The bourgeois and the offi

  who in cultural as in political matters looked to the France of the Sun King as their model. The courtly arts, such as architecture and opera, dedicated to the entertainment and glorifi cation of the prince and his entourage, did well, but printed books were predominantly academic (so often in Latin) or, if they were intended to circulate more widely among the depressed cia

  middle classes, were either trivial fantasies, without social or l

  political signifi cance, or works of religious devotion commending contentment with one’s lot. One institution, however, of the greatest importance to the middle class, which after the middle of the 17th century fl ourished better in Germany than elsewhere in Europe, was the university. At a time wh
en England made do with two universities, Germany, with only four or fi ve times the population, had around 40. The university had come late to the German lands – the fi rst was at Prague in 1348 – but in the post-Reformation world it had a quite new signifi cance. The absolute, princely state, with its ambition to control everything, needed offi cers to carry its will into every part of its domains, and these the university provided, principally, until the later 18th century, by training the clergy. Practical subjects, such as fi nance and agriculture, were also taught, and much earlier in Germany 7

  than in England, but always with a view to their utility in the state administration. The offspring of well-to-do professionals could afford to study law and medicine and rely on family connections to fi nd them a billet, but for an able young man from a poor background the theology faculty, much the largest and most richly endowed, offered the best prospects of social advancement and future employment.

  The 18th-century crisis

  Eighteenth-century Germany was a stagnant society in which economic and political power was largely concentrated in the hands of the state, and intellectual life was initially in the grip of the state churches. There was little room for private enterprise, material or cultural. Yet this society experienced a literary and philosophical explosion, the consequences of which are still with us. The constriction itself put up the boiler pressure. In England atureer and France there was a signifi cant property-owning middle class, a bourgeoisie in the full sense of the word, able to fi nd an outlet for its capital and its energies in trade and industry, German Lit

  emigration and empire, and eventually in political revolution and reform. In Germany the equivalent class was proportionally much smaller and shut away in the towns, where it could engage in political or economic activity of only local importance. What Germany had in abundance was a class of state offi cials (and of Protestant clergymen who were state offi cials by another name), who were close to political power, and were often its executive arm, but who could not exercise it in their own right, and could only look on enviously at the achievements of their counterparts in England, Holland, or Switzerland, or, after 1789, in France:

  ‘They do the deeds, and we translate the narrations of them into German’, wrote one of them. The only outlet for the energies of this peculiarly German middle class was the book. Germany in the 18th century had more writers per head than anywhere else in Europe, roughly one for every 5,000 of the entire population.

  Its fi rst industrial capitalists, its only private entrepreneurs who 8

  before 1800 were mass-producing goods for a mass market, were its publishers. In the middle of the 18th century Germany’s offi cial class entered a crisis. The Seven Years War (1756–63) defi nitively established Prussia as the dominant Protestant power in the Empire and, on the continent of Europe, a counterweight to Catholic Austria, while Prussia’s ally, England, emerged similarly victorious on the world stage in the race for colonies at the expense of its Catholic rival, France. Yet at this moment when – at least from a German point of view – Anglo-German Protestantism seemed to have demonstrated its superiority in all respects over Europe’s Catholic South, the religious heart of the cultural alliance began to succumb to an enemy within. Under the name of Enlightenment, the deist and historicist critique of Christianity, which had originated largely in England, began to detach The bourgeois and the offi

  Germany’s theologically educated elite from the faith of their fathers. Since there was not much of a private sector in which an ex-cleric could seek alternative employment, and since loyalty to the state church was something of a touchstone for loyalty to the state itself, a crisis of conscience was an existential crisis too. The struggle for a way out was a matter of intellectual and sometimes cia

  personal life and death. Two generations of unprecedented mental l

  exertion and suffering within the pressure-vessel of the German state brought into existence some of the most characteristic features of modern culture, which elsewhere took much longer to develop.

  Two routes led out of the crisis, one considerably more secure than the other. First, it was possible to adapt Germany’s most distinctive state institution, the university, to meet the new need.

  New career paths, inside and outside academic life, became available for those with a scholarly bent but a distaste for theology, through the creation of new subjects of study or the expansion of previously minor options. Classical philology, modern history, languages and literatures, the history of art, the natural sciences, education itself, and, perhaps most infl uential of all, idealist philosophy – in these new or newly signifi cant university 9

  disciplines 18th and early 19th-century Germany established a pre-eminence which, in some cases, has lasted into the present.

  Second, and more precariously, the ex-theologian could turn to the one area of private enterprise and commercial activity readily accessible to him: the book market. It has been calculated that, even excluding philosophers, 120 major literary fi gures writing in German and born between 1676 and 1804 had either studied theology or were the children of Protestant pastors. But there was a snare concealed behind the lure of literature. To make money a book had to circulate widely among the middle classes, the professionals and business people, and their wives and daughters, not just among the offi cials. But these were the classes that the political constitution of absolutist Germany excluded from power and infl uence. It was not therefore possible to write about the real forces shaping German life and at the same time to write about something familiar and important to a wide readership. The price of success was triviality and falsifi cation; if you were seriously atureer devoted to real issues you would stay esoteric, and poor. The German literary revival of the 18th century was in great measure the attempt, fuelled by secularization, to resolve this dilemma.

  German Lit

  Especially in the earlier phases it seemed that the example of England, the ally in Protestantism, might be the answer, and hopes of a German equivalent to the English realistic novel, at once truthful and popular, ran high. But Germany could not model its literature on that of England’s self-confi dent and largely self-governing capitalist middle class. Its social and economic starting point was different, and it had to fi nd its own way.

  In Germany, political power and cultural infl uence were concentrated in absolute rulers and their immediate entourage, loosely termed the ‘courts’. The interface between these centres and the rest of society, and specifi cally the groups that made up the reading public, was provided by the state offi cials.

  Therefore, the class of offi cials – those who belonged to it, those who were educated for it, and those who sought access 10

  to it – formed the growth zone for the German national literature.

  In material terms, a state salary, whether a cleric’s, a professor’s, or an administrator’s, or even just a personal pension from the monarch, provided a foundation so that a literary career, albeit part-time, was at least possible and did not have to be a relentless chase after maximal earnings. In intellectual terms, the writers’

  proximity to power, and to the state institutions, meant that the issues they raised in the symbolic medium of literature were genuinely central to the national life and identity, even if their perspective was that of non-participants. The public literary genre which most precisely refl ected the ambiguous realities of life in the growth zone, and which, towards the end of the century, reached a point of perfection subsequently recognized as ‘classical’, was the poetic drama, the drama which, though The bourgeois and the offi

  performable and performed, was most widely distributed and appreciated as a printed book. The dramatic form refl ected the political and cultural dominance of the princely court, for none of Germany’s many theatres were purely commercial undertakings, all required some kind of state subsidy, and even in the Revolutionary period most still served their original and cia

  principal function of entertaining the ruler
. Circulation as a book, l

  however, as Germany’s equivalent of a novel, both truthful and commercially successful, refl ected the aspiration of the middle classes to a market-based culture of their own. And, fi nally, the philosophical, if not explicitly theological, tenor of the themes of these plays refl ected the secularization of Lutheranism which was providing a new vocabulary for the description of personal and social existence, whether by playwrights in the state theatres or by professors in the state universities. Among the most important elements in this new vocabulary were the concepts of moral (rather than political) ‘freedom’ and of ‘Art’, as the realm of human experience in which this freedom was made visible. The German

  ‘classical’ era gave to the world not only the meaning of the word

  ‘Art’ which enabled Oscar Wilde to say nearly a hundred years later that it was quite useless, but also the belief that literature was primarily ‘Art’ (rather than, say, a means of communication).

  11

  The rise of bourgeois Germany

  ‘Germany’ around 1800 was not so much a geographical as a literary expression. The most powerful impetus to give it a political meaning probably came from Napoleon. He imposed the abolition of the ecclesiastical territories, a radical reduction in the number of the principalities from over 300 to about 40, and the organization of the remainder into a federation of sovereign states, even before the formal dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806. His annihilating defeat of Prussia in the same year forced on it a programme of modernization which was to determine German social and political structures for the next century and a half. The modernization did not, however, take the republican form it had taken in France, and though constitutionalism briefl y fl ourished when it was necessary to rouse the people to throw off the Napoleonic yoke from the necks of their princes, it was abandoned after the Carlsbad Decrees of 1819

  atureer which turned Germany, until 1848, into a confederation of police states. The Prussian commercial, industrial, and professional middle classes were still too weak to challenge the king, or German Lit