85. A Heine Hater

It is often said that great men have the weaknesses of their virtues. It is no less true, however, that those who emulate great men inherit the weaknesses of their vices to an outstanding degree. The first sentence is applicable to the great aesthete and literary historian Friedrich Theodor Vischer, who was for a long time an ornament of the Stuttgart Technical University; the other truth comes to mind when one looks at his successor on the teaching pulpit, Mr. Carl Weitbrecht. Vischer's broad view of artistic matters was tinged with a certain philistinism; the fine humorist, who gave us the heart-warming novel "Also One", is constantly spoiled by an "inner philistine". And as gratifying as it is that Vischer has given Goethe's idolatry of the judgmentless a good rap on the knuckles with his third part of "Faust", the fact that the honest Swabian goes about his "dispatching" in a rather too bourgeois manner makes a rather uncomfortable impression amidst all this joy. But these are the faults of great virtues. Carl Weitbrecht lacks these virtues; he has shown this sufficiently in his many writings. There is no doubt that he learned a lot from Vischer. And that is why his book "This side of Weimar" has many good points. He has pointed out some of the advantages of Goethe's nature, some of which were lost to the great spirit in later life. However, the flip side of Vischer's merits appears quite repulsive in the two volumes that Carl Weitbrecht recently had published as "Deutsche Literaturgeschichte des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts" in the "Sammlung Göschen" (no. 134 and 135 of this collection, G. J. Göschensche Verlagshandlung, Leipzig 1901).

You don't have to be very suspicious when reading these two volumes to come to the conclusion that the first was written to accuse the "German Jew" Heine of every conceivable evil; the second to vent a bitter resentment against everything so-called "modern". Among the various judgments that emerge, this appears again and again, in the most diverse paraphrases: a poet, a writer is all the more well-behaved the less he does it like the evil Heine. Here are just a few examples. "When Goethe died, Heine was the man of the time - that characterizes the situation: the old man in Weimar has fallen silent, and a German Jew in Paris sets the tone." Just in passing, I would like to point out a small thoughtlessness on the part of Mr. Weitbrecht. According to his statements on page 8, the "Old Man of Weimar" had nothing more to say at the beginning of the nineteenth century. "The life that he" (Goethe) "lived and expressed in literature in the first third of the century had little more in common with what the nation lived and fought for at that time; just as he had brought his personal life over from the previous century, so he lived it to the end in the new century... a lonely greatness, certain of his immortality, but more and more alienated from the present." What is Carl Weitbrecht's fault that he has Goethe spiritually dead by the end of the eighteenth century: in order to have an "elegant" entrance for a butchery of Heine, one can behead Goethe's genius twice.

What has poor Heine, in Weitbrecht's opinion, had on his conscience! "From Heine, as from hardly anyone else, the Germans have learned for generations to despise their own nation and to speak ill of it, because their governments did criminally stupid things, because the freedom that the French Revolution meant could not be introduced so quickly in Germany; from him they have learned to regard criticism and joking about German things as a higher sign of intellectual development and freedom of thought than patient, self-denying work on these things; from him they have learned the vain tone that trumpets the pains and dissatisfactions of the individual as the pains of humanity and forgets that the nation stands between the individual and humanity". Mr. Carl Weitbrecht may think about Heinrich Heine as he is able, according to his talent. People who understand Heine can hardly be upset by Weitbrecht's private opinion. But what you have to have a serious word with gentlemen like Carl Weitbrecht about is the, to put it mildly, offensive presumption with which he labels "the Germans" as fools. For only fools could prove to be "docile" in the sense described in Weitbrecht's sentence above. Does Carl Weitbrecht's Swabian soul not have anything that would make it ashamed of such a characterization of its nation?

Weitbrecht often refers to Heine to say how others were different. "What was witty, self-satisfied play in Heine was serious, incurable suffering in Lenau". Learn, Mr. Weitbrecht, to characterize the spirits out of themselves, because what Lenau was has nothing to do with what Heine was. But it continues in this tone. It is true that Mr. Weitbrecht must himself acknowledge Menzel's scurrilous denunciation, which contributed to Gutzkow's punishment, as such; but he cannot get past this acknowledgement without the tasteless sentence: "Heine felt very flattered to see himself most solemnly placed at the head of the whole movement... and coined the poisonously dishonest title of "denunciator" for Wolfgang Menzel, whose unnecessarily clamorous criticism of Gutzkow's trivial novel "Wally" had, however, given the Bundestag the external occasion for its folly."

Even Freiligrath's manly way of bearing the suffering of exile inspires Mr. Weitbrecht to lash out at the "German Jew": "He did not blubber softly or flirt with exile" (Freiligrath) "for that reason." Weitbrecht's idea of how Heine led the spirits by the reins is quite amusing. "It was Heine who made Platen and Immermann enemies." So the good Platen would not have been taken in by the "Jew in Paris": he would not have portrayed the "Nimmermann" as the "vain fop" in his "Romantic Oedipus". Gustav Schwab and Paul Pfizer were, in Weitbrecht's sense, called to do quite different things than what they achieved, but they "were no match for Heine's dishonest fencing tricks". In his review of Emanuel Geibel, our literary historian makes the beautiful statement: "Wherever he seemed to achieve or strive for the brevity of the simple lyrical mood or the very compact song in his earlier poems, he was mostly dependent on role models, including even Heine; the more he gave of himself, however, the more effort he needed." Oh misery upon misery: poor Geibel, it must be said of you that you once wrote some decent poetry; but that's nothing, because Heinrich Heine seduced you into such skill.

I think we can take leave of Mr. Weitbrecht after these rehearsals. To write the right words about the further course of his remarks would be to be cruel.

It is just a pity that a "collection" like Göschen's, which contains so much good stuff, has absorbed Weitbrecht's two volumes of ranting.