64. A Gottsched Memorial

Erected by Eugen Reichel in Memory of Gottsched

I

A book¹ to stir up the minds lies before us. Eugen Reichel has undertaken to redraw the picture of his East Prussian compatriot Gottsched. He considers the image that the world has created of this man to be a distorted one. “The Germans think they know Gottsched; they imagine that they have judged him exhaustively when they repeat what his opponents and their short-sighted or frivolous epigones have said, namely that he was a schoolmaster who, although he may have striven for the good with inadequate strength , but a narrow-minded, conceited schoolmaster who was completely out of touch with life, art and poetry and who knew how to talk eloquently about literature when we still had no literature of our own.» With the boldest courage of thought, Reichel contrasts this judgment with his own, that Gottsched was “ not only not a narrow-minded schoolmaster, but rather a thinker and poet who was at the height of life, far ahead of his contemporaries, who were floundering far below him in powerlessness and intellectual narrow-mindedness; a revolutionary in all areas of intellectual life, a courageous fighter, equipped with the sharpest intellectual weapons, against the rigid, dead formalism that prevailed around him in art and literature, in the pulpits and lecture halls, in the schools and intellectual salons; a bold, far-sighted representative of free thought, free research and free speech.» As you can see, this is a re-evaluation on a grand scale!

Reichel approached his task based on Gottsched's life's work, which he had thoroughly researched. If there are literary duties, it seems to me that for all those who want to have a say in the future of German intellectual life, the duty will be to deal with this “Gottsched monument”. It is the ideal book for such a goal. A bold pathfinder in the realm of thought leads the reader along the way; a man of sharply defined intellectual physiognomy expresses his energetic views on the man he wants to bring closer to his contemporaries and to posterity on 104 pages; and then he lets Gottsched speak for himself on 188 pages. The chapters: Gottsched's self-portrait, the German, the judge of his time, the moralist, the satirist, the advocate for women and expert on women, the opponent of duels and war, the politician, the teacher and educator, the enlightener, the friend of science and nature, the linguist, the purist, the theater reformer, the playwright, the poet, the orator, the critic, the aesthete, the sage. A chapter entitled “Gottsched as judged by his students and admirers” concludes the book.

Everyone is given the opportunity to form their own opinion. There will be few who will not be surprised when they put the book down – surprised at how little it is suited to forming an opinion about Gottsched based on what our literary histories have to say about him. And the few who will not be surprised are the incorrigible ones. They cannot be helped. How highly one or the other assesses the man, of whom a new image is conveyed to him here, is not important at first. He will have to correct what each of them has. He will find enough that needs correcting in it.

That's enough for today. I'll save any further comments on the content for the next issue. I'm naive enough to believe that I'll then be speaking to quite a few owners of the book.

II

“For about ten years, one of the main trends of my life's work has been the fight for Gottsched.” With these words, Eugen Reichel introduces his “Gottsched Monument”. Under the current conditions of German intellectual life, only a man who stands on the high ground of the freest judgment could think of this fight, or even fall for it. Reichel is this man. He is one of those who can smile when so many others call themselves “free spirits”. For he can only breathe spiritually in the air of self-acquired judgment. Only those who have felt enough disgust for those who want to persuade the world to communicate endlessly and who are unable to do anything but reproduce what this world has inoculated them with, understand what that means. Read them, the noble historians of intellectual life! Read those from the nineties! What do they mostly write? Slightly revised editions of the writings that came to them from the eighties. And what did the chroniclers of intellectual life do in the eighties? They “improved” the editions of those from the seventies. Only rarely does someone come along who dares to really rewrite a chapter of the past. And if he does dare to do so, he risks a great deal. He is usually branded a dilettante by those who are at the “cutting edge of research”. He is denounced as a stubborn person who should first learn about what the files “have long since closed”, who “lacks the most elementary occurrences of his subject”. There is an even more effective means. This is the method of silence.

The “files on Gottsched have long been closed” too. But they have not been properly revised for a long time. And they were created at a time that was most unfavorable for Gottsched. They were created by people who believed that they could only achieve what they wanted if they laid the groundwork for something completely new, if they broke with all tradition. Today, we owe our entire intellectual life to the current that felt it necessary to break with Gottsched in the second half of the last century. To be unjust to Gottsched was a necessity for this current. One can certainly understand such injustice. But what reason is there to drag on forever the judgments that were passed on Gottsched at that time?

Reichel describes the battle between Gottsched and his opponents in vivid detail. “It seems strange when even a man like Danzel, who was relatively well-disposed towards Gottsched, says that Gottsched saw in ‘Messia’ the enemy that threatened him with complete destruction, and that he therefore had to fight him with the utmost severity...' “Gottsched had” - says Reichel - ‘demanded that the poet be the first to have knowledge of man, to observe nature faithfully: but now a ’turgid poet attracted the attention of the immature public, who

painted things that no eye had seen, no ear had heard and that had not entered the heart of man; but in doing so, he made the grossest mistakes in merely human imitations. So here was a much more serious danger, which Gottsched, as a theorist as well as an artist, felt obliged to confront more than anyone else in Germany.

These artistic concerns were joined by two others that undoubtedly became decisive for the position that Gottsched took on the “Messiah”: For a lifetime, he had fought not only for the liberation of science and, above all, philosophy from the rule of the clergy, but also for a poetry that was to be kept pure of all Christian dogma – but in the “Messiah”, the Orthodox faith celebrated its most unbridled orgies. He had also tried to systematically prepare a national poetry – but in the “Messiah” German poetry suddenly became a thing without a fatherland, floating in the most sultry Christian air. Gottsched therefore saw himself forced, if he was serious and honest not only about his life's work but also about the spiritual-aesthetic and secular-national culture of his people, to fight on two fronts, and it is to his undying honor that he found the courage to enter this initially hopeless struggle.»

When Gottsched began his apprenticeship, intellectual life in Germany was in a state of chaos. He brought harmony to this chaos. In almost all, at least in the most significant areas of artistic and scientific life, he became the guiding spirit. And he did so as a universal personality. He united scattered knowledge into great ideas, he provided perspectives from which the experiences and observations, which lay scattered as a disorderly mass, could be fruitfully surveyed. And everywhere he applied the highest standards to things. He is the reformer of the German theater. He is so because he knew how to instill the higher life of art into a low form of activity. And his reformatory activity was of this kind in the greatest conceivable scope.

Today, we attribute much of our intellectual life to Lessing, which Lessing could never have accomplished if he had not gone to school with Gottsched. Today, we may ask - and we may do so all the more after Reichel's work - whether we have not been driven into a blind alley by our blind adoration of Lessing. Lessing has been called the first German journalist. Perhaps this is more justified than we think. But perhaps our entire education has become too journalistic as a result of Lessing. Lessing lacked something that gives all education its true focus: the center of a firmly established worldview. For a long time, there was a dispute as to whether Lessing was a Leibnizian or a Spinozist. This is significant. His ideas constantly wavered back and forth, sometimes to Spinoza, sometimes to Leibniz. He was both and neither. Our entire general education has been given a similar impetus by Lessing. It lacks the right depth. Gottsched wanted to give it precisely this depth. His entire work is philosophical. Not philosophical in the sense of idle speculation, but philosophical in the sense that he strives everywhere to deepen judgment, to harmonize the world of ideas.

Had Gottsched not lost his influence, our general education would have continued to develop in the direction in which he had brought it: we would have become less journalistic, but therefore more solid.

Gottsched has been criticized for processing old observational material. Yes, that is why he is called a mere compiler. Well, then: call all the leading minds compilers who look at long-known observations from a new point of view, so that new laws of nature emerge from their compilations. If you want to be consistent, say it: Julius Robert Mayer did nothing but compile long-known physical observations. That is what the good editor of the Physical Journal said to himself and sent Mayer his compilation back. Now, of course, every average physicist says that the greatest discovery of theoretical physics in the nineteenth century was hidden in this compilation.

It is strange to see people smiling at the “old pedant” Gottsched today. Who are the people who smile like that? Pedants on the one hand – and scatterbrains on the other. What would Gottsched say to the “method” of some literary historians who today dismiss him as a pedant? And the others who move on to the agenda via the “old wig” could really do with a little of the discipline of Gottsched's judgment.

III

With a fitting word, Eugen Reichel points out the short-sightedness that underlies most of the common judgments about Gottsched. “To look down on Gottsched with contempt because he has not yet created an 'Oberon, a 'Don Carlos, a 'Wallenstein' or an 'Erlkönig' would be just as pointless as if one were to ridicule Gutenberg because he did not immediately invent the printing press.” (Gottsched Monument, p. 55.) In a great number of accounts of the intellectual history of the last century, one can see how Gottsched disturbs the circles that one has constructed in order to understand this intellectual life. In Max Dessoir's “History of Modern German Psychology” (Volume 1: From Leibniz to Kant, Berlin, Duncker & Humblot, 1894), we read in a footnote: “Gottsched's influence on the development of philosophy was not insignificant. His manual, “First Principles of the Whole of World Wisdom, in which all the philosophical sciences are treated in their natural interconnection in two parts (theoretical and practical),” even experienced an eighth edition after his death. This number is of delightful eloquence.” I agree with that, but it seems to me that there is little inclination to digest eloquence in the right way. It even seems to me that a sentence like Max Dessoir's (on p. 62 f. of his aforementioned work) imposes a duty on historical reflection with regard to Gottsched that has been neglected until now. I am quoting this sentence here because it proves how closely the intellectual life of the previous century is intertwined with Gottsched's work. It reads: “Nothing is more characteristic of the deeply religious nature of the German people than the theological origin of Pietism and freethinking. In the struggle against the rigid externals and narrow-mindedness of the prevailing theology, both have grown in directions that are so different from each other; while the one liberated individual thought, the other provided satisfaction for the sensitive heart. Wolff has drawn up an inventory of “Christianity within the bounds of pure reason,” and Gottsched has created a conceptual poetics in which poetry appears as an elevated art of rhetoric."

Just look at what literary historians see as the difference between Gottsched and his opponent Bodmer. Max Koch expresses this in the “History of German Literature from the Earliest Times to the Present” (by Prof. Dr. Fr. Vogt and Prof. Dr. Max Koch) ($. 419): “The contrast between Gottsched and Bod mer, for he, not the reserved Breitinger, is the instigator and caller in the great literary war that is now breaking out, is based on the difference between the two men, not merely on the differences in their artistic convictions. The parable handed down by English literary history of the friendly battle of wits between two men of completely different natures can be applied to their dispute: the ponderous, tall East Prussian, built like a galleon, towering above his opponent in erudition , solid, but slow in his movements - the small, lively Swiss, lower in build, but nimble in sailing, able to take advantage of all winds, thanks to the speed of his wit and his imagination.» Yes, we even find a highly remarkable confession in this book (p. 422): “The Leipzig and Zurich critical schools of poetry could therefore have existed side by side, and soon after the great literary war, people no longer really knew what they had been arguing about.”

All oppositions of the kind that Bodmer and his successors made against Gottsched are, for anyone who has delved into the structure of the human mind, highly incomprehensible. I would like to express myself on this through a grotesque analogy. I imagine a pugnacious fellow who stands up and wants to rebuke nature because it is pedantic enough to create lions, bears, horses, pigs and monkeys, while it would be much more appropriate to the richness of its creative power not to adhere to specific forms, but to let a small beast, half pig, half camel, emerge from the lioness. Instead of reserving itself the full extent of freedom, nature forces itself into regular formations. I am certainly not suited to be seen as a despiser of Goethe. Therefore, I can afford to say that I also see Goethe as a master of nature when he says of Gottsched that the “fanwork, which actually destroys the inner concept of poetry, was quite completely put together by him in his critical poetry.” What Goethe touches on here was the delusion that all those who believed they had to take up arms against Gottsched were caught up in. They wanted to illuminate the innermost reasons for beauty and artistry and discover their origins in the innermost nature of man. But they believed that Gottsched wanted to force poetry into fixed, pedantic rules once and for all. But can nature ever be denied the freedom to constantly change its formulas, even though it creates sharply defined forms? Did Gottsched take away the poetic genius's ability to metamorphose the laws, since he sought to discover the laws expressed in existing poetry and to present them in their natural context? It is not the person who blurs everything into a primordial soup and then raves about the inexhaustible, mystical sources of existence who comes close to the secrets of nature and the creation of the mind, but rather the person who recognizes the human mind's ability to reveal the secrets of existence in clear, sharply defined ideas. Only those who do not progress in their own thinking beyond colorless, bloodless conceptual templates are able to rail against the realization of the law. But those who elevate the spirit to vital and vitalizing ideas know that they are hitting the essential core of the world with their ideas. That clarity leads to shallowness: this is a conviction that has unfortunately found far too wide a distribution in this century. It is not wrong to attribute the opposition to Gottsched in many cases to this conviction. It is a pity that the critics make their own shallowness all too much a characteristic of clarity, which they do not even know.

A man like Gottsched cannot be understood by those for whom the words: “All theory is gray, my dear friend, and the golden tree of life is green” are a gospel. They never consider that the spirit speaks in such a way, which has previously said: “Despise reason and science, man's highest power! Let the lying spirit strengthen you only in the works of illusion and magic, and I will have you already without fail.” Those who believe that all intellectual interest can be exhausted in one-sided aesthetic and literary elements will never be able to recognize the value of a personality whose strong roots are to be found in things that must underlie all aesthetic and literary matters if the latter are not to be left hanging in the air. Eugen Reichel emphasizes this point: “The possibility of a just appreciation of Gottsched's life's work was also made more difficult” by the fact that in the period following Gottsched, the aesthetic tendency was “unduly emphasized”, because he “never forgot, despite all his powerful promotion of the aesthetic sense, that a healthy, strong people has other tasks to fulfill than just aesthetic-literary ones.” The emphasis on aesthetics in the period of our classical intellectual life has given us the feeling that art is not just a pleasant addition to life, but a necessity for every humane existence. But it is a bad thing when a great truth is distorted by small minds. Such small minds have now taken to the high horse – for those who can see, however, this high horse is just a boy's hobbyhorse – and proclaim every day how infinitely futile all “dry”, “sober” ideas are compared to the “intuitive”, “fantasy-filled” spiritual life that relies on its “feeling”. The swarm of minds that have never really taken a step into the realm of ideas, but at most have sniffed around in one of the usual world-view guidebooks or, in boyish fashion, have occupied themselves with a philosophical Robinson novel, are currently talking about great world-view questions, telling us what satisfies them or what does not satisfy them.

A work like Eugen Reichel's “Gottsched Monument” seems to me particularly suited to discredit the ideological Robinsonades among those who have still retained the health of judgment and the ability to rise to meaningful ideas. No one is more qualified to erect this monument to the great man of the last century than Eugen Reichel. He is the right person for the job because he combines the pure clarity of ideas with poetic imagination. Those who have the loudest voices today have, however, also ignored Reichel's voice. They have an instinctive antipathy to voices that come from a higher sphere than the sentimentalism of genuine world-view Robinson Crusoe enthusiasts. They dissolve everything into an unclear mental porridge. They love comfort, which is cozy with their “gray, dear friend, etc.” - We others, who know something higher than the enchanting birdsong and the starry sky and “eternal love”, we have the optimism that the boys' entertainment books do not belong to the world in matters of worldview. We will even be very pleased if the swarm spirits keep away from mature enterprises, such as Reichel's book is. But this book must nevertheless overcome the resistance of the dull world. Take the volume, which is also artistically presented on the outside, in front of you: you will read into Gottsched's explanations, which speak to us as if they were written today. And when one or the other comes to the chapters on drama, then he will perhaps feel a little ashamed that he has allowed himself to be told new truths by the dilettante revolutionaries of the art world in the past decades, when the great “pedant” Gottsched had already said it from the fountain of an outstanding worldview a hundred and fifty years before. This Gottsched, who truly did not forget life in favor of scholarship. Read what he says: “The other type of bad writing is the pedantic style, which people who have only studied in the old-fashioned way, who grew up in school and who do not know the ways of the world at all, tend to use. They measure everything according to their school rules. And even though they have the best writings of the Latins and Greeks in their hands every day, they do not imitate the elegance of these in their writing, but always remain with their school slovenliness.» But to the dreamers who talk of “the highest knowledge” and dream of “living in the light”, one must say, with Gottsched: “Dreams are dreams: they are disorderly ideas of our minds that arise when the imagination, in sleep, is not bound by the rules of reason. Nothing is so absurd that we cannot dream it sometimes.” Eugen Reichel has written a book for the waking world.