50. Literature and Society in the Nineteenth Century

There is much¹ debate today about scientific methods. It is often believed that fruitful scientific work is only possible if the methods are established. Those who are really concerned with the matter in any area of natural or spiritual life can gain very little from all the disputes about methods. Only a new observation, a new thought that sees things in a context that has been ignored until its appearance, can be truly fruitful. Every time I have come across a piece of work that has revealed remarkable aspects of a subject, I have observed how little the worker cares about the dispute over methods. But I have also always observed how utterly insignificant are the works of those whose authors tie themselves into the Spanish boots of a particular scientific method. But what is absolutely necessary in order to treat a field of natural or spiritual life fruitfully is a free, unbiased mind that sees things without being influenced by conventional judgments - I deliberately do not say prejudices - and one's own view of life. Only someone who has such a view of life is able to tell me something about a thing that I consider worth reading or listening to, if the things themselves are accessible to me. I will also read a travelogue of a country unknown to me by a person who is insignificant, as well as a report on a geological excursion that I cannot make myself. But if someone presents me with the development of “literature and society” in the nineteenth century, I demand that he interest me as a unique personality through the possession of a world and life view. With such an attitude, I approach a book like that of S. Lublinski, “Literature and Society in the Nineteenth Century.”² whose first and second parts I have already reviewed in this journal, and whose third and fourth parts I would like to discuss here. I have rarely put down a book on literary history with such satisfaction as this one. A subtle observer of intellectual events and an original thinker's physiognomy speaks to me.

It is precisely these two qualities that enable $. Lublinski to identify with a sure instinct the great, impersonal currents of the times that absorb and sweep away individualities, while at the same time assigning to these individualities themselves the right share in progressive historical development. How clearly this emerges in this book in the treatment of Börne, Gutzkow, Treitschke and others. Nowhere is the historical background from which it grows overlooked by prejudice for the rights of the individual; but nowhere is the individuality of the personalities lost sight of out of a preference for the necessary historical course of events. Lublinski owes the best that he is able to bring us through his book to this impartiality.

The very first chapter of the third volume, “Menzel, Börne and Goethe”, is a perfect example of what has been said. Wolfgang Menzel is sketched out with a few, but all the more characteristic strokes. “[...] Menzel was the first to apply the standard of the student fraternity to German intellectual history. At the same time, he was the first of the new generation to confront the old generation in a resolute ‘clear fighting position.’ The position of Menzel outlined in these sentences is characterized brilliantly. The traditional judgments about Ludwig Börne are put into perspective. Up to now, Börne's critical-aesthetic view has been presented as an outgrowth of his political views. Lublinski shows that the energetic, belligerent Frankfurter is an opponent of Goethe as an aesthete, that he is the founder of a new aesthetic. From this point of view, Börne's relationship with Jean Paul appears in a new light. “It has become a fable convene of literary history to attribute Börne's enthusiasm for Jean Paul entirely to the tiresome politics. Nothing could be more wrong or at least more one-sided.” No, it is the “intimate art” that Börne saw Jean Paul as the “prophet and revealer” of.

I am in a special position here vis-à-vis Lublinski. I do not even agree with him on the facts. I believe that the basis for Börne's entire work must be sought in the political impetus. However, “the political” must be understood in a much broader sense than is usually the case. Lublinski himself says: “Börne, in contrast to Heine, was a thoroughly social person, a born publicist, but not a born writer or even a poet. He only felt comfortable in the midst of the people and did not like to dissect and explore the soul of the masses, because he would then have had to take a superior position to them.” A mind that can be said to have such a view is a thoroughly political one. Nevertheless, Lublinski gains a thoroughly new and justified judgment of Börne by emphasizing the non-political. This enables him to reject the narrow-minded politics that were emphasized in Börne's attitude. I would like to go into this point in more detail, because it shows me how the thoughts of another can become meaningful to me even if I want to grasp them differently, provided that this other person views his subject from truly meaningful thoughts.

The judgments that Börne passed on Schiller's “Tell” and on King Claudius in Shakespeare's “Hamlet” are aptly cited by Zublinski. He rightly claims that there are deeper motives behind Börne's condemnation of Schiller's poetry than those cited by the author himself. It was not Tell's dishonesty towards the bailiff, nor the murder and treachery that led Börne to his harsh judgment; rather, it was the fact that Schiller created a hero in Tell who did not make the fate of the Swiss people his own and the driving force behind his actions, but who basically only represented his own personal interests. “He who has only enough strength to cope with himself is the strongest alone, but he who has a surplus of strength after self-control will also control others and become more powerful through association.” The same reason that led Schiller to create Tell not as a figure through whom the spirit of the Swiss people would work, but as a character with very general human interests, was the same reason that led Börne to condemn this character; for Börne's political pathos demanded not an individual, private personality, but a public, political one. And from this point of view, Hamlet was also repulsive to him. This man seemed to him to be rootless in his whole attitude within the social conditions that surround him. He seems to see neither right nor left, but only to know the impulses of his own soul. Börne himself preferred the villain Claudius, who is “not bad for his own sake alone”, who belongs to the type of Shakespearean villains that Börne describes as follows: “They form a species, they bear the mark of Cain on their foreheads, the title page of the book of sins of humanity, which is not responsible for the content that it indicates.” The general human nature that Goethe sought to achieve when he sought to reach the level of classicism, which Schiller followed him in: Börne had no sympathy for this. Goethe and Schiller ultimately felt it to be a falsification of general human nature when something adheres to it from the “accidental” influences of the immediate environment into which it is born. They therefore seek to lift their characters out of this randomness. Börne seems to have perceived this urge for a higher nature in man as a lack of interest in the actual suffering and joy that man encounters at every turn. And this perception probably stems from his political pathos, just as the Goethe-Schiller ideal of the general human being stems from an apolitical, purely aestheticizing pathos. There is a great difference between the attitude of Goethe, for whom the outbreak of the Paris July Revolution is an uninteresting event compared to the simultaneous dispute between two French naturalists about animal organization, which deeply moved him, and that of Börne, who feverishly devoured every news item that arrived from the Paris uprising in 1830. In contrast to this, I would not subscribe to Lublinski's statement ($. 43): “It is a strange coincidence that Börne, this Goethe-hater, was at the same time the first Goethe philistine in Germany, or, which is the same thing, the first philistine of humanity.”

Despite the fact that Lublinski's point of view for judging Börne is somewhat crazy, the overall characterization of this personality is clear, sharp and too accurate. I followed his characterization of Young Germany and Gutzkow with even greater sympathy. Here one has the feeling that Lublinski is describing a current of thought in which he is not only thoroughly at home, but intimately familiar. Gutzkow's very own individual essence is portrayed in just as characteristic strokes as his relationship to Hegel, Goethe and the political and social movements of his time. An excellent light is cast on the aesthete of Young Germany, Ludolf Wienbarg, and on Heinrich Laube as well.

Here Lublinski shows himself to be an historian of unusually fine tact. The subject he has chosen, “Literature and Society”, requires him to weigh up the effects of contemporary trends in the individual personalities in a sometimes quite subtle and dynamic way. He has now succeeded in characterizing in the most tactful way how Hegelianism, Goetheanism, historicism, romanticism and other currents of the time were perceived by the leading minds in the second third of the century.

To give just one example, Lublinski describes the influence of Hegelianism on Young Germany. “What seemed so terrible to the young people about Hegel's system was the master's stony tower, this mighty colossal pyramid, for which he used not ordinary stones, but historical ages, all peoples and people of the globe. A young person was confronted with the following: you belong to the nineteenth century, the last step of the pyramid... Luther lived in the sixteenth century, so he made the Reformation. The mysterious metaphysical law that built the tower had the reformer by the collar, and it was not his choice, it was not his personal matter of conscience to make the Reformation or not to make the Reformation.” What matters for Lublinski's task is not that this is a completely misleading view of Hegel's world view, but that it correctly reflects this view in the minds of the Young Germany. For only because this image lived in his mind was Gutzkow able to say, with regard to Hegel's ideas: “Did a concept or a great, noble, generous soul die in Cato? Was Philip II, was Robespierre without moral accountability? Was the world spirit the prompter of all the great words spoken by men? The prompter of Arria's non dolet, of Huss's sancta simplicitas, and even of that wistfully bitter saying with which a gladiator greeted the emperor: Caesar, moriturus te salutat? This philosophical schematism cheats humanity out of its exaltation.» Gutzkow may be thoroughly wrong in characterizing Hegel in this way: he does so because the creator of the “time novel” is working his way up in him, who longs for people who carry the spirit of their time as their temperament, as their passions, as their ethos, who want to be shaped by this spirit of the time, not comprehended by the great world idea. We find the social factors, the social milieu, in the effects when we study the individual soul of the personality. What takes place at the bottom of the individual soul is to a great extent a result of the power factors in the environment, in the political circumstances of the individual in question. To understand and shape people from the ethical, religious and social factors of the people: that was the tendency that worked its way up in Gutzkow. We recognize this tendency already in his first novel “Maha Guru”; we also find it in his “characterizations”. Lublinski says of Gutzkow's latter works: “He preferred to choose characters who were either strange and abnormal or at least living in strange circumstances, which he sought to capture in their innermost essence, faithfully, conscientiously and poetically. This essence was transferred to his style, which was also of a demonstrative and explanatory nature and here and there added the peacock feather of colorful punch lines... He never made a joke for the sake of a joke or with the intention of fighting and destroying; instead, the main thing was always to explain and illuminate a strange character in a purely objective way.” In another passage, Lublinski gives further reasons why the Young Germans were particularly successful with character sketches. “Of course, the Hegelian dialectic that they had been taught, this mental gymnastics that had been transformed into psychological insight, came to their aid. And since they were portraying public characters, the principle of the interaction between social conditions and the character of the individual personality arose quite naturally."

Lublinski continues in the same style of characterization, which is both astute and finely nuanced, in his descriptions of the 1840s, 1850s and 1860s. Readers with a more aesthetic disposition will notice the author's fleeting passing over purely artistic and aesthetic questions. Lublinski focuses more on the content of artistic phenomena than on form. This historian follows what is firmly rooted in the culture of the time, what is the expression of a characteristic stage of the zeitgeist, down to the finest ramifications; the purely artistic sometimes comes up a little short. I would not call that a criticism, but rather a virtue of the book. It seems to me much better for someone to do what they can do excellently according to their own individual abilities than to submit to some so-called “objective” methodology. It may seem strange to some that Lublinski says in the preface to the fourth volume: “A Ernst von Wildenbruch could be passed over here, where the interaction between literature and society is concerned, after I had already mentioned the most concise literary representative of the new Prussian Teutonism: Heinrich von Treitschke.” I find it perfectly justified that Lublinski should assert such a subjective maxim. What he had to say could be better illustrated by Treitschke than by Wildenbruch.

The chapter entitled “The Silver Age of German Literature” is also a masterpiece. He uses this term primarily for the time of Hebbel, Otto Ludwig and Keller. In the case of Hebbel, it is particularly striking how Lublinski is able to follow this poet into the grandiose dialectic of his imagination, how he is able to characterize the “high tragedy”, the “great form” of this powerfully struggling spirit. I would like to quote just one excellent passage from this characterization (IV, p. 23): “Hebbel had come to civilization and morality from the primeval forest as a first discoverer and lawmaker, as it were. He still felt the forces of nature boiling in his organism, while his eye read with delight and terror the flaming words of law on a stone tablet, behind which the brooding thought sensed cultural treasures that could not be found in the jungle. That was the rigid and elemental, if you will, the Nordic-Atavistic in his nature. For it happened to him, as it did to the North Germans in general, when they received the moral law as Christianity in ancient times. Hebbel also took the law into his innermost being, which began to split as the young cultural element came into violent conflict with ancient racial instincts. The consequences of such struggles are well known: mysticism, moral anguish, hair-splitting casuistry, tireless probing and pondering, demonic wrestling for a solution to the riddle of the world.»

The figures of Gustav Freytag, Julian Schmidt, Paul Heyse and Friedrich Spielhagen are explained in razor-sharp lines from the conditions of their time; at the same time, their significance is weighed with a sure sense. Lublinski also proves to be a good observer when he describes the influence of the emergence of the “new empire” and the spread of socialist propaganda on the development of literature and society.

The author is more reserved and sketchy in his description of the literary currents of the recent past and those that are still continuing today. He has a feeling for the uncertainty and incompleteness that is expressed in these currents. This prevents him from overestimating individual phenomena, in relation to which the judgment of other contemporaries becomes considerably questionable. “So far, it has not been possible to produce works of high art, monumental poetry that belong to world literature or even come close to the best creations of narrower German literature, as they were produced [in] the classical period or in the 1850s.” This is how Lublinski expresses his opinion of contemporary literature. Whether he is right or not, I will refrain from passing judgment. It would be pointless to discuss whether the author of this book has the necessary distance from the present that is doubtless to be granted to him in relation to older phenomena.