German Literature Read online

Page 4


  Holy Roman Empire, the continuing identity of ‘Germany’ was l

  largely guaranteed by the persistence of the offi cial class and its ideology of apolitical ‘ Bildung’. The ideology, however, diverted all but the most perceptive writers from the task of defending the constitution. On the one hand, any number of new theories of ‘art’ provided as many reasons for dismissing contemporary politics as superfi cial or inauthentic. On the other, the acceptance of political engagement could lead to a general rejection of conventional ‘culture’ and a coarse anti-intellectualism. The Weimar Republic was betrayed on all sides, and if the writers and artists, on the whole, betrayed it from the left, the public service, including the professors, betrayed it, massively and effectively, from the right. The National Socialist German Workers’ Party presented itself, like ‘state socialism’, as above the distinction between left and right, as the party of national unity in the new 21

  age of work, but its appeal was unambiguously that of nostalgia for the authoritarianism decapitated in 1918. Its opportunity came when the excitement of global recovery in the 1920s faltered and, after the great crash of 1929, gave way to global depression. The disastrous decision of the Western nations to respond to this crisis with protectionism took in Germany in 1933 the form of electing a government committed to withdrawing the country from all international institutions and establishing in the economy, as in the whole of society, a command structure based on a military model – a queerly deranged memory of the Second Empire.

  In the Third Empire, however, there was none of Bismarck’s subtle accommodation with bourgeois free enterprise. It was the period of offi cialdom’s greatest and most cancerous expansion, as new layers of uniformed bureaucrats were imposed on old in a permanent revolution generating permanent turf wars, and all the while new, malign, and irrational policies were executed with the same humdrum effi ciency or ineffi ciency as ever and the atureer traditions of Frederick the Great and the 19th-century reformers terminated in Eichmann and the camp commandants who played Schubert at the end of a day’s work. By this stage, however, the German Lit

  culture of the German offi cial class had ceased to be productive and was almost entirely passive. The universities, emptied of anyone of independent mind or Jewish descent, lost their global pre-eminence for ever. The agitprop generated by the ‘Ministry of Popular Enlightenment’ in the form of fi lms, pulp fi ction, or public art is of interest now only to the historical sociologist.

  Music and the performing arts were parasitic on the achievements of the past, which by and large they caricatured. The free and creative literary spirits, whether or not they had had offi cial positions, were nearly all either dead or in an exile which they found very diffi cult to relate to their experience of Germany’s past or its present. The professors of philosophy and ‘Germanistics’

  who stayed behind devoted themselves at best to relatively harmless editorial projects. Of the worst it is still impossible to speak with moderation.

  22

  After zero hour

  After 1871, 1918, and 1933, the fourth redefi nition of Germany within a lifetime began in 1945. Territorially the adjustment was the biggest there had ever been. Millions moved westwards from areas that had had majority German populations for centuries. The state of Prussia was formally dissolved. Germany was returned approximately to the boundaries of the Holy Roman Empire (without Austria) at the time of the Reformation.

  Socially and politically too the zones occupied by Britain, France, and the USA recovered something of 16th-century Germany, before the rise of absolutism: a federal republic, with a Catholic majority, dominated by the industrial, commercial, and fi nancial power of several great towns. Hitler had succeeded where all previous German revolutionaries had failed: he had The bourgeois and the offi

  made Germany into a classless society. For 12 years inherited wealth and station had counted for nothing; what mattered was race, party membership, and military rank. After the destruction, and self-destruction, of his absolutist regime the West German Bonn Republic began from a base of social equality unprecedented in the nation’s history. But the foundation had cia

  l

  been laid by Hitler’s ‘party of the workers’ and thanks to the relatively rapid withdrawal of the occupying powers in the West the Federal Republic had from an early stage to confront, from its own resources, the question posed by its continuity with the immediate German past. At fi rst the confrontation, in the public mind, took the form of a creative denial, the energetic construction of an alternative Germany, west-facing, republican, committed to free markets and European integration, and in economic terms highly successful. Culturally, however, the underlying continuity betrayed itself in a troubled relationship with the remoter past of the nation. The literary and philosophical achievements of the period around 1800 still enjoyed their Second Empire status of ‘classics’, but they were stylized and reinterpreted as an ‘other Germany’ of the mind from which, in 23

  some mysterious and fateful process, the Germany of 1871–1945

  had become detached. To claim, however, that the Federal Republic had recovered that ‘other Germany’ – and the claim was implicit in the decision to call its cultural missions ‘Goethe Institutes’ – was to make the improbable claim that it somehow reincarnated the world of the late 18th-century principalities.

  The local German dialectic between bourgeois and offi cial which created the literary culture of that era was at an end.

  The relentless advance of the global market had destroyed both parties: the European bourgeoisie was no more, swallowed up in the tide of proletarianization which has turned us all into consumer-producers for the mass market; offi cialdom had lost its privileged relationship to the national identity with the decline in signifi cance of the nation-state and of the local centre of political power. Both the re-canonization of the classics and the contestation of their authority by critics who felt themselves suffi ciently unimplicated in the German past to sit in judgement atureer on it were failures to assess realistically the historical process in which the 18th-century literary revival, the rise and fall of German nationalism, and the emergence of the new republican Germany German Lit

  were all equally involved. The Russian zone of occupation, from 1949 the German Democratic Republic, was the site of unrealism’s last stand. Here, as elsewhere behind the Wall – surely the ultimate tariff barrier – offi cialdom for 40 years enjoyed an Indian summer, in seamless real continuity with the previous regime of malignant bureaucracy but in total mental and emotional denial of any resemblance to it. Eastern Germany, in physical possession of many of the cultural storehouses of Bismarck’s Prussia-centred Empire, claimed to be the only true inheritor of what the Second Empire had defi ned as ‘classical’ – though it implausibly represented the ‘other Germany’ as a great materialist tradition culminating in Marx, Engels, and the Socialist Unity Party. With some vacillations, which recall similar uncertainties in Hitler’s cultural policy, this party line was maintained in theatres, museums, and the educational system. With far greater rigour than in the West, therefore, any interrogation of the present which 24

  threatened to reveal its affi nities with the Germany of 1933–45

  was suppressed, and the appalling crimes of that period were dismissed as somebody else’s affair.

  So it was left at fi rst to relatively isolated writers and thinkers in the Federal Republic to begin defi ning an identity for the new Germany by remembering the nightmares from which it had awoken. Offi cial memory, in what was left of the university system, struggled, on the whole unsuccessfully, to recover the literature of the previous two centuries as a living tradition. But poets and novelists and writers for radio, supported by a market eager for books, turned, with rather more effect, to the even more intractable task of relating private consciousness to the world-historical disasters that Germany had both infl icted and The bourgeois and the offi

  suffered, and gradually gain
ed recognition outside Germany too.

  As the emigrant generation of the 1930s reached maturity, and as universities on either side of the Atlantic came to exchange personnel more freely, it also came to be appreciated in the wider world that German philosophy and critical theory still provided essential instruments for understanding the revolutionary cia

  changes of the 20th century, especially if they were allowed to l

  interact with ideas from the English-speaking cultures. After 1968

  some of these international developments accelerated, partly as a result of intensive French engagement with German thinkers, but Germany itself found it more diffi cult to move forward, perhaps because the rewards of a generation’s reconstructive efforts were at last being enjoyed. The universities, transformed into institutions of mass education, fi nally lost their privileged position in the nation’s intellectual life except perhaps in the area in which they had begun, Protestant theology. An affl uent social security system took the sting of practical urgency out of domestic moral and political issues, whatever theoretical heat they generated.

  Above all, the gravitational fi eld of the Democratic Republic pulled all left-wing thinking out of true, creating the illusion of a political alternative even when the regime was universally acknowledged to have lost all credit, spuriously reviving the 25

  attractions of ideas obsolete since 1918, such as authoritarian state socialism and German isolationism, and obscuring the signifi cance of the once more rising tide of globalization. It was to the global ‘culture industry’, to an American TV series of 1979, not to 30 years of work by her native intelligentsia, that Germany owed her public awakening to the hideous truth that only then became generally known by the name of the ‘Holocaust’. When the global market fi nally swept away the last vestige of old Germany in 1989–90, the redefi nition of the nation – again the fourth in a lifetime – continued to be hampered by a persisting nostalgia which was only superfi cially directed at the old East ( Ostalgie). In reality, it was the last – let us hope, fading – trace of an animosity that runs through 250 years of German literary engagement with the concept of nationhood: the animosity between the offi cial and the bourgeois, between the representatives of state power (which makes people virtuous) and the forces that make money (and so make people happy). In the ‘ Weltmarkt’, the confl ict atureer between the economic system and political power has certainly not gone away – if anything, it has intensifi ed – but it is more diffused, at once more intangibly collective and more internal to German Lit

  the individual. For nearly three centuries the German literary and philosophical tradition has been compelled by local circumstances to concentrate on the point where the opposing forces collide. But there has always also been a cosmopolitan, or internationalist, vein in German literature, and those who in recent generations have tapped into it – even perhaps at the cost of a life of wandering or exile – have been more able than strictly national writers to make Germany’s traumas into symbols of general signifi cance for other countries caught like their own between a national past and a global future.

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  Chapter 2

  The laying of the foundations

  (to 1781)

  (i) Towns and princes (to 1720)

  From the middle of the 13th century, the social and political tensions were becoming apparent that were to determine the culture of modern Germany. A decline in the authority of the Holy Roman Emperors coincided with a European population explosion and an economic boom. Although plague and a worsening climate halted the continental expansion in the later 14th century, Germany by then had several major urban centres, notably Cologne, Augsburg, and later Nuremberg, with around 50,000 inhabitants, which were comparable to contemporary London. The modern commercial and banking system, born in Italy around 1200, of which the German cities were soon a part, brought with it new political and cultural attitudes. The cities which, in a long struggle with Germany’s lesser rulers, the Emperors had freed from princely overlordship were, like the Italian city-states, oligarchic rather than democratic in any modern sense, but they were self-governing, through elective councils, and once the guilds, representing industry, had won a place alongside the merchants and bankers, political and economic life were closely integrated. Military and feudal values, such as obedience and honour, were overshadowed by values derived from the economic process, such as productivity and 27

  enjoyment, and by an interest in the spiritual signifi cance of the material world. Above all, the monetarization of economic relations, the replacement of feudal dues and payments in kind by rents paid in cash, a process which in urban areas was largely complete by the end of the 13th century, had a fundamental effect on conceptions of personal identity. With the breaking of the physically tangible link between producing and consuming, individuals, particularly those not involved in the economic process of work, and particularly those not allowed a signifi cant political identity either, were freed to think of themselves as primarily centres of – at least, potential – consumption and enjoyment, an attitude which can be called ‘bourgeois’, in the strict sense. Women, therefore, particularly those from monied families and those living in religious communities, were the fi rst to give literary expression to this new sense of the self. Mystical writers from Mechthild von Magdeburg (c. 1210–83) to the great Dominican theologian and spiritual director of women religious, ature er Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–1327), found new linguistic and literary resources to describe the infi nite, eternal, and unearned pleasure of the life of the soul with God: Eckhart coined some of the most German Lit

  important abstract words in the German language, including

  ‘ Bildung’. As literacy spread, the new concept of individual identity, reinforced by the practice of solitary and silent reading, rapidly made obsolete the chivalrous literature of feudalism, and after the rise of mysticism its themes survived only as the material of burlesque, of self-conscious revivalism, or of transformation into spiritual allegory. Outside the devotional realm much of the literature of the closely knit urban communities was collective or anonymous in origin: love songs, drinking songs, and ballads, later lumped together as ‘folk songs’, some of them still known today; liturgical and biblical dramas; the strictly regulated work of the literary guilds of artisans known as ‘Mastersingers’, most famous among them Hans Sachs (1494–1576). Narrative, whether in verse or prose, was often coarse, humorous, or obscene, and satirical in purpose. The collection of the exploits of the rogue Till Eulenspiegel (‘Owleglasse’) and the Low German animal epic 28

  Reynard the Fox achieved European currency. New trends in the visual arts fl owed in from the urban centres of Italy and the Low Countries and converged in the sculptor Tilman Riemenschneider (c. 1460–1531), and in Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), the two artists of world stature produced by 15th-century Germany.

  The la

  ying of the f

  oundations (t

  o 1781)

  3. Tilman Riemenschneider, Apostles from the Altar of Our Lady in the Herrgottskirche, Creglingen, and faces of the 15th-century burghers who were Riemenschneider’s patrons 29

  The Ship of Fools ( Das Narrenschiff, 1494) of Sebastian Brant (1457–1521), illustrated by Dürer, was the fi rst German bestseller of the age of print. Johann Gutenberg’s printing-press set up in Mainz around 1445 was the most infl uential contribution to world-culture made by the medieval German town, but in less than a century it was followed by another, almost equally important.

  Both the main cultural tendencies of medieval German urban life, the mystical tendency and the realistic, came to a focus in Martin Luther (1483–1546), the son of a miner, who fi rst trained as a lawyer and then became an Augustinian friar and professor of theology at the new university of Wittenberg.

  Luther’s teaching that God gave His heavenly rewards as a free gift in response to faith alone took to an extreme the mystics’

  dissociation of personal identity from the wo
rld of work. His ature er Ninety-Five Theses (1517) against the papal practice of selling

  ‘indulgences’ – remission of the temporal punishment due to sin – were a passionate defence of the improbable belief (still German Lit

  prevalent today) that the soul is independent of the economic process. At the same time, like his near-contemporary Rabelais, Luther unashamedly spoke out for the material appetites that the towns had grown up to satisfy. His robust rejection of the poverty, chastity, and obedience to clerical authority to which he had originally vowed himself was expressed in the blunt, earthy, and satirical style of popular literature. He lived with equal intensity in the two worlds that monetarization had forced apart, and that the Catholic Church was struggling inadequately to hold together, and his revival of Augustine’s distinction between the earthly and the heavenly cities was the true source of the modern dualism of matter and mind that is usually attributed to Descartes.

  His forceful yet divided personality marked all that he wrote, his pamphlets, sermons, catechisms, a handful of enormously infl uential hymns, and his translation of the Bible (1522–34), 30

  4. Luther as an Augustinian friar in 1520, by Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553)

  31

  which made him into one of the founders of the modern German language.

  But there had been reformers before Luther and if he had relied on the protection only of the towns whose culture he embodied Luther would have been burned at the stake like Jan Hus. Luther survived his condemnation by the Pope, and then by the Empire at the Reichstag held in Worms in 1521, because his cause was adopted by some of the German princes. For a prince of the Empire there were positive inducements to stand behind Luther as he faced down the authority of the Hapsburg Emperor Charles V: not just Luther’s transfer of ultimate jurisdiction in religious matters from Rome to the local ruler (originally intended only as a temporary provision), nor even the consequential transfer of Church property to the state, but a more subtle and more signifi cant advantage in the princes’