18. Ludwig Tieck as a Dramatist

An excellent contribution to the history of German dramaturgy was recently made by Heinrich Bischoff. ( Ludwig Tieck als Dramaturg. Bruxelles, Office de publicite). Tieck's relationship to dramatic literature and the theater requires an objective appraisal. Bischoff has summarized the reasons for this well in his introductory chapter. "I do not know," wrote Loebell to Tieck's biographer R. Köpke in 1854, "whether there is a second example in the whole of literature of a hatred against an author that so dominates the criticism than against L. Tieck. - For example, the Low German word "Schrullen", which otherwise hardly occurs in the written language, has been found for Tieck's critical opinions. The Bremen-Lower Saxon dictionary explains Schrulle as "an attack of nonsense, evil, foolish mood. And G.Schlesier accuses Tieck in the "Allgemeine Theater-Revue, (Stuttgart and Tübingen, 1st year, S.3 f.), he has broken the German theater, blocked its path and its development, misled the poets and actors and cheated them of a happy development of their talent". Tieck's critical masterpiece, the "Dramaturgische Blätter, would like to banish Schlesier for a few hundred years; there is poison on every page of it."

Bischoff cites a variety of reasons for this unprecedented underestimation of Tieck. Tieck was regarded as the head of the Romantic school. This is why opponents of this literary movement hated him from the outset. Personal envy was also a factor among his contemporaries. "We know for certain that Tieck fought a hard battle in Dresden, where he developed his main dramaturgical activity, against a small-minded, ill-intentioned party that envied his intellectual superiority. The Young Germans, Heine, Laube, Gutzkow, to whom Tieck was opposed in a series of his novellas: Reise ins Blaue, Wassermensch, Eigensinn und Laune, Vogelscheuche, Liebeswerben, were also ill-disposed towards him."

In more recent times, finally, little effort has been made to study Tieck's dramaturgical writings. The judgment of his contemporaries and immediate successors is taken without much scrutiny. "A striking example is provided by the recently published work by E. Wolff, "Geschichte der deutschen Literatur in der Gegenwarv. In his overview of the history of German dramaturgy, Wolff not only makes no mention of Tieck, but also ascribes to O. Ludwig's "Shakespeare-Studien" the merit that is due to Tieck's "Dramaturgische Blätter". The "clarifying reckoning with Schiller was carried out by Tieck almost half a century before O. Ludwig. The conclusion reached by O. Ludwig that true historical tragedy must return from Schiller to Shakespeare is, so to speak, the pivotal point of Tieck's dramaturgical writings. Just as Lessing settled accounts with the French, Tieck settled accounts with Schiller, with full recognition of his talent and merits, and, like Lessing, pointed to Shakespeare. This is why it is not Ludwig's "Shakespeare-Studien" but Tieck's "Dramaturgische Blätter" that stand out as a landmark in the history of German dramaturgy."

The fact that he did not present his views in a closed system, but rather occasionally, has also contributed greatly to Tieck's misunderstanding. They can be found scattered throughout his various writings. Bischoff gives an overview of the writings that come into consideration: (a) the preliminary reports to his poetic works, (b) the conversations about art and literature in "Phantasus", (c) the satirical outbursts in the fairy tale comedies and Schwänken, especially in "Zerbino" and "Puss in Boots", d) the "Unterhaltungen mit Tieck" contained in the second volume of Köpke's biography, e) as the main source the "Kritische Schriften", which Tieck published in four volumes with Brockhaus in Leipzig from 1848-1852, f) the "Nachgelassene Schriften" published by Köpke can be considered as an appendix.

Ludwig Tieck was not fond of aesthetic studies. He was of the opinion that theory could never be used to make the fine distinctions that come into consideration in art. One must theoretically exaggerate the truth in some direction in order to arrive at a precise definition. That is why such theories remain stuck in half-truth, if they do not have to resort to the completely untrue.

Bischoff proves himself to be a good psychologist by establishing the difference between Tieck the dramatist and Tieck the dramatist. Anyone who overlooks this must underestimate Tieck. In Tieck's dramas an unclear fantasy prevails; nowhere does the poet know how to restrain the creations of the imagination by critical reason; there is little to be found of orderly composition, and yet Tieck, the dramaturge, demands artistic deception from the drama first and foremost. This can never be achieved with such an overgrowth of fantasy as prevails in his own dramas. Tieck the dramatist demands an image of life; Tieck the playwright gives a fantastic play. Furthermore, Tieck, the dramatist, seeks his material in the Middle Ages; at the same time, as a dramatist, he demands the immediate presence of the action. As a critic, Tieck frowned upon mood-painting in drama; as a poet, he inserted ottavas, tercinas, stanzas and canzonas into his dramas, which serve nothing but to lyrically paint the mood.

In his "Karl von Berneck", Tieck drew the true archetype of a gruesome tragedy of fate; yet as a critic he condemns this dramatic genre in the harshest terms.

Bischoff explains this dichotomy in Tieck's personality in a plausible way. One must distinguish between two periods in his work: a Romantic period, which lasts until around 1820, and a period which is characterized by a turning away from all Romanticism and a return to a more realistic view of the world. The dramas belong to the first period, the dramaturgical studies fall into the time after the change in his basic aesthetic convictions. "Tieck concludes his Romantic production with "Fortunat" before turning to modern life in his novellas, a long series of which he began in 1820, and depicting it in a predominantly realistic manner." "The sharp contrast between his dramatic and dramaturgical production is thus explained by a complete change in his aesthetic views; his dramaturgical activity only began when his dramatic work was finished."

Tieck's "Letters on Shakespeare" were published in 1810. At this time, the views of the Romantics were also his own. But over time, he turned away from these views completely. He expressed this clearly to Köpke: "They wanted to make me the head of a so-called Romantic school. Nothing has been further from my mind than that, just as everything in my entire life has been party-oriented. Nevertheless, people never stopped writing and speaking against me in this way, but only because they didn't know me. If I were asked to give a definition of the romantic, I would not be able to do so. I don't know how to make a distinction between poetic and romantic." "The word romantic, which one hears used so often, and often in such a wrong way, has done a lot of harm. It has always annoyed me when I have heard people talk about romantic poetry as a special genre. People want to contrast it with classical poetry and use it to describe a contrast. But poetry is and remains first and foremost poetry, it will always and everywhere have to be the same, whether you call it classical or romantic." - For Tieck, the greatest, the typical dramatist is Shakespeare. At first, this enthusiasm for Shakespeare may well have been of romantic origin. But in his mature years he reproaches Romantic Shakespeare criticism for detaching Shakespeare from the general course of development of his time and presenting him as a miracle that had fallen from the sky. Nevertheless, there is no great difference between Tieck's view of Shakespeare and that of Schlegel. It is not his opposition to Romanticism that is particularly clear. Rather, this is the case with his judgment of Calderon. Tieck sees Calderon's powerful influence on German drama as a pernicious one: "Soon Calderon had become our nation's favorite poet without further criticism. The accidental, the strange, the conventional, which his time imposed on him, or which he elevated to artificiality, was not only equated with the essential, the great dramatic in his works, but often preferred to the truly poetic. People forgot for a long time what they had recently admired in both Germans and Englishmen, and, however unequal the two poets might be, Calderon and Shakespeare were probably regarded as twin brothers; and others, still more enthusiastic, thought that Calderon began to speak where Shakespeare left off, or performed those difficult tasks in a grand manner which the colder Northerner did not feel equal to; even Goethe and even Schiller took a back seat to the drunks at that time, those intoxicated people who truly and seriously believed that true salvation for poetry could only come from the Spaniards and especially from Calderon. "

The critic Tieck detested most was the German tragedy of fate. He turned against the blind, demonic fear of fate, which played such a large role in the world view of Romanticism, in the sharpest way and with biting derision, although the same power plays a terrible role in his youthful dramas. "Karl von Berneck" is, as far as I know, the first time an attempt has been made to introduce fate in this way. A ghost who is to be redeemed by the fulfillment of a strange oracle, an old guilt of the house that must be purged by a new crime, which appears at the end of the play as love and innocence, a virgin whose tender heart forgives even the murderer, the ghost of an unforgiving mother, everything in love and hate, except for a sword itself that has already been used for a crime, must serve a higher purpose without it being able to be changed, without the characters knowing it. I realized even then how different this fate was from that of Greek tragedy, but I deliberately wanted to substitute the ghostly for the spiritual". He later condemned such dramatization: "Instead of debts and financial hardship, a crime, kidnapping, adultery, murder, blood; instead of the uncle, stern father, strange old man or general, heaven itself, which is even more stubborn than those family characters and cruel to boot, because it knows no other development than fear of death and burial."

The contrast between Tieck, the dramatist, and Tieck, the playwright, becomes clear in Tieck's harsh condemnation of the dramas of the mature Schiller. It seems like a mockery of his own production when Tieck bitterly rebukes the workings of fate in the "Bride of Messina". For Schiller attempted to give the dark rule of fate a semblance of necessity; while Tieck himself, in his "Abschied" and "Karl von Berneck", grants it a desolate reign in the form of chance.

Tieck's rejection of the Romantic as opposed to the natural, the human, is expressed most harshly in his criticism of Schiller's and Goethe's anticizing tendencies. He is generally an enemy of humanism, which carries ancient education and views into modern life. He believed that art could only flourish if it drew its content from the soil of the national. In "Goethe and his time" he speaks out against humanism: "It would be desirable that a mind as brilliant as Rousseau's or Fichte's should show, with the same sharp, perhaps even sharper one-sidedness than they wrote about the closed commercial state and the harm of the sciences, what a disadvantage knowledge of the ancients has brought us. How everything that was still remembered has sunk into contempt, how all new, good and correct endeavors have been inhibited, how the peculiar, patriotic has often been destroyed by a wrong worship and half-understanding of the ancients." And in his dramatic fairy tale "The Life and Deeds of Little Thomas, Called Thumbelina", he mocks by ironically depicting objects borrowed from folk tales, for example the seven-league boots, in an antique light: "Believe me, I can see from these boots that they have come down to us from ancient Greece; no, no, no modern artist does such work, so secure, simple, noble in cut, such engravings! Oh, this is a work by Phidias, I won't let that be taken away from me. Just look at it, when I place one of them like this, how completely sublime, sculptural, in quiet grandeur, no excess, no flourish, no Gothic addition, nothing of that romantic mixture of our days, where sole, leather, flaps, folds, tufts, jizz, everything must contribute to produce variety, splendor, a dazzling being that has nothing ideal; the leather should shine, the sole should creak, miserable rhyming being, this consonance in appearance; . .I have modeled myself after the ancients, they will not let us fall in any of our endeavors." Tieck has the court cobbler Zahn say this.

The modern world and modern life are fundamentally different from those of the Greeks, Tieck believes. This is why he condemns the dragging of ancient ways into modern drama, as demanded by Goethe, Schiller and the two Schlegels. Tieck also valued above all that which approached the modern in its presentation and conception, such as the dramas of Euripides, while the Graecomans were more attracted to Sophocles and Aeschylus, in which the specifically Greek is expressed more purely. The praise that Goethe and Schiller bestowed on Aristotle was thoroughly repugnant to Tieck. He sees a fundamental difference between the living conditions of Greek and German drama. For the Greeks, it was the shaping of the fable, the plots that mattered; for the moderns, the main thing is the development of the characters. "The newer drama is obviously essentially different from the old; it has lowered the tone, motives, character sketches, the contingencies of life are more prominent, the emotional forces and moods develop more clearly, the composition is richer and more varied, and the relationship to public life, the constitution, religion and the people is either silenced or stands in a completely different relationship to the work itself. The meaning of life, its aberrations, the individual, the strange, have been given more prominence; and those authors who have sometimes tried to strike the round, full tone of the old tragedy have almost always lapsed into bombast and the tone of Seneca."

Tieck contrasts the modern character drama with the old situation drama. At the center of his dramaturgical explanations is the idea that modern drama has the task of cultivating characterization and realism. He therefore turns against Schiller's idealism and never tires of opposing it with Shakespearean realism.

Consistent with these statements are Tieck's following comments on Goethe: "I admired Goethe immensely in his youthful poems and still admire him; I have spoken and written so much in his praise that, when I now hear so many uncalled-for panegyrists, I could still be tempted in my old age to write a book against Goethe for a change. For there can be no mistake about the fact that he, too, has his weaknesses, which posterity will certainly recognize." "We must never concede," is another statement, "that Goethe later stood higher in his enthusiasm, poetic power and opinion than in his youth... His striving for the many-sided has fragmented his powers, his consciously looking around has caused him doubt and at times removed his enthusiasm."

In contrast, Tieck emphasizes the stamp of the German spirit and the truly modern character in the dramas of the Sturm und Dränger. His judgment of Heinrich von Kleist gives us a good insight into Tieck's view. His deep penetration into the characters portrayed and his truthful realism cannot be emphasized often enough. His comments on the "Prince of Homburg" are particularly characteristic. He rebuked the public, who had become accustomed to seeing all heroes drawn according to a certain template. The general concept of a hero has clouded the view that an individual heroic figure can also be like the Prince of Homburg. According to this general concept, a hero should above all despise death and hold life in low esteem. But Kleist once drew a hero whose fear of death is understandable from the nature of his soul.

Bischoff correctly describes Tieck's relationship with Lessing. This relationship also illustrates Tieck's attitude towards naturalism. Lessing, according to Tieck, had turned with zeal against the eccentricity and silliness of conventional idealism. But he fell into the error of wanting to depict nature as such. In this way, he became the inventor and creator of domestic, natural, sensitive, petty and thoroughly untheatrical theater. For Tieck, despite his realistic creed, never wanted to see mere naturalness on the stage, but rather a deepened naturalness recognized in its essence. This is why Kleist's characters, who reveal their souls, seemed more dramatic to him than Lessing's characters, who are assembled from individual observations.

One result of Tieck's views on drama is his comments on the art of acting. In the great battle between the Hamburg and Weimar schools, he took the side of those who defended and practised the former. He did not want declamation, but character portrayal, not the beautiful, but the meaningful. He is said to have spoken harshly against Goethe's view of the art of acting. He probably made derisive remarks about the rules as defended by the Weimar poet and theater director: that everything should be beautifully portrayed, that the spectator's eye should be stimulated by graceful groupings and attitudes, or that the actor should first consider not working out the natural, but presenting it ideally. In this respect Tieck is much closer to modern views than Goethe. He had no understanding of the fact that the actor must always turn three quarters of his face towards the audience, never play in profile, nor turn his back to the spectators. Tieck called such acting artificial declamation and false emphasis. In contrast, he praises Schröder: "It is simplicity and truth that characterized Schröder, that he did not adopt a captivating manner, never rose and fell in tones in declamation without necessity, never pursued the effect merely to excite it, never struck up that singing lament in pain or emotion, but always led the natural speech through correct nuances and never abandoned it."

Tieck is said to have been a captivating reader. He proved precisely how highly he valued a stylistically perfect form of speech despite his demand for naturalness.

In general, Tieck's aspirations should not be confused with demands for a complete stripping away of everything that the stage demands by its very nature. He had a keen sense of the possibilities of the theater. Characteristic is what he says about the decorations: "Why should the stage not be decorated where it suits, amuse with dress and dance? Why should a thunderstorm not be represented naturally? There is only talk of this not becoming the main thing and displacing the poet and actor." The ideal that Tieck had in mind for the stage was a middle ground between the old English stage with its lack of ornamentation and the modern development of all kinds of refined means, which only blunt the receptivity for the actual poetry. In 1843, he staged Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" with the help of the three-storey Mystery Stage, because this arrangement avoids the countless transformations that destroy all coherence and destroy a sensation that was just in the making.

Devrient, the author of the "History of German Dramatic Art", was the most enthusiastic in his recognition of Tieck's services to German dramaturgy. While working on this work, on March 24, 1847, Devrient wrote to Tieck: "The History of German Dramatic Art, which I have undertaken to edit, brings everything I have ever heard from you about the nature of our art back to my mind, the further and deeper I research, and makes so much that I otherwise doubted become a complete conviction. I feel more and more in agreement with what you have said here and there in your works about the development of the German stage - unfortunately it is far too little for my needs - so that I have come to recognize your views as the most infallible."