Buch lesen: «The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 11»

EDITOR'S NOTE

The illustrations in this volume, devoted to the writings of Spielhagen, Storm, and Raabe, are from paintings by Michael von Munkacsy, Jacob Alberts, and Karl Spitzweg. Munkacsy may be called an artistic counterpart to Spielhagen, inasmuch as he shared with him the conscious striving for effect, the predilection for striking social contrasts, and the desire to make propaganda for liberalism. Spitzweg was allied to Raabe in his truly Romantic inwardness, his joyful acceptance of all phases of life, his glorification of the humble and the lowly, and his inexhaustible humor. Alberts is probably the most talented living painter of that part of Germany which forms the background of Storm's finest novels: the Frisian coast of the North Sea.

Kuno Francke.

THE LIFE OF FRIEDRICH SPIELHAGEN

By Marion D. Learned, Ph.D

Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, University of Pennsylvania

The struggle for liberal institutions, which found expression in the Wars of Liberation, the July Revolution of 1830, and the March Revolution of 1848 – with visions of a German Republic, with bitter protest against the Reaction, with a new hope of a regenerated social State and a renovated German Empire – marks only the stormy stages of the liberalizing movement which is still going on in the German nation. Since 1848, radical revolt has taken on forms very different from the dreams which fired the spirits of the Forty-eighters. The sword has yielded to the pen, the scene of combat has shifted from the arsenal and the battlefield to the printed book and the Council Chamber; while the necessity of an active policy of military defense has saved the German people from the throes of bloody internal strife.

In the transition from the armed revolutionary outbreak of 1848 to the evolutionary processes of the present day, the novel of purpose and of living issues (Tendenz-und Zeitroman) has played an important part in teaching the German people to think for themselves and to seek the highest good of the individual and of the classes in the general weal of the nation as a whole. In the front rank, if not the foremost, of the novelists of living issues in this period of social and economic reform was Friedrich Spielhagen, whose novels were almost without exception novels of purpose.

Friedrich Spielhagen was born in Magdeburg in the Prussian province of Saxony, February 24, 1829. He was the son of a civil engineer, and descended from a family of foresters in Tuchheim. His seriousness and precocity won him the nickname of "little old man," and also admission to the gymnasium a year before the average age of six. In 1835, when he was six years old, his father was transferred to the position of Inspector of Waterworks in Stralsund. It was here by the sea and among the dunes that the young poet spent his most plastic years, and became, like Fritz Reuter, his contemporary and literary colleague of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, the poet of the Flat Land, which he made so familiar to the German public of the '60s and '70s. Spielhagen has given his own account of the first years of his life in his autobiography entitled Discoverer and Inventor which is evidently modeled after Goethe's Poetry and Fact. Here we learn with what delight the boy accompanied his father on his tours of inspection about the harbor city, with what difficulties he contended in school, which he says was to him neither "stepmother" nor "alma mater," what deep impressions his vacation visits at the country homes of his school friends left upon his sensitive mind. Although his family never became fully naturalized in the social life of Stralsund, but remained to the end "newcomers," Spielhagen says of himself that, in his love for Pomeranian nature, he felt himself to be "the peer of the native born of Pomerania, which has come to be, in the truest sense of the word, my home land."

The sea with its endless variety of moods and scenes opened to him the secrets of his favorite poet Homer. He says: "I count it among the greatest privileges of my life that I could dream myself into my favorite poet, while the Greek original was still a book of seven seals." Following the steps of his great German model, Goethe, he tested his talents for the stage both at home, where he was playwright, manager, stage director, prompter and actor, all in one, and later on the real stage at Magdeburg only to find that he was not called to wear the buskin.

In his school days he began to read the authors of German fiction and poetry: Tieck, Arnim, Brentano, Stifter, Zschokke, Steffens, Goethe's Hermann and Dorothea and Faust (First Part), Lessing, Uhland, Heine's Book of Songs, Freiligrath, Herwegh. He also browsed about in other literatures: Byron's Don Juan he read first when he was seven years of age; of Walter Scott he says: "In speaking this precious name I mention perhaps not the most distinguished, but nevertheless the greatest and most sympathetic, stimulator of my mind at that time. * * * In comparison with this splendid Walter Scott, the other English and American novelists, Cooper, Ainsworth, Marryat, and whatever their names whose novels came into my hands at that time are stars of the second and third magnitude." He regards Bulwer alone as the peer of the Scottish Bard.

The English influence of the time was reflected also in the life about him, especially in the sport-life, with its horse-racing, pigeon-shooting, card-playing (Tarok, L'Hombre, Whist or Boston) and kindred pastimes. He knew "that Blacklock was sired by Brownlock from Semiramis, and Miss Jane was bred of the Bride of Abydos by Robin Hood" – an interesting sidelight on the Byronic influence of the time. This sport-life so zealously cultivated by the gentry, and his visits to the manor houses of his school friends during the vacations, afforded him glimpses into the customs and traditions of the agrarian gentry of Pomerania, and the manorial economy and reckless life of the nobles with their castles, dependents, laborers, overseers, apprentices, volunteers and the like – the first impressions of his Problematic Characters.

In 1847 Spielhagen left Stralsund to study jurisprudence at the University of Berlin, a journey of thirty German miles in twenty-four hours. What a revelation the great capital presented to the youthful provincial, who had never seen a railroad nor a gas jet before he began the journey! Arriving before the opening of the semester he had time to take an excursion into Thuringia, which later became so dear to him and is reflected in his From Darkness to Light (second part of Problematic Characters), Always to the Fore, Rose of the Court, Hans and Grete, The Village Coquette, The Amusement Commissioner, and The Fair Americans. Returning to Berlin he heard, among others, Heidemann on Natural Law and Trendelenburg on Logic. The signs of revolution were already visible in the university circles, but had not as yet awakened the interests of Spielhagen, who declared that revolution was a matter of weather, and that he himself was a republican in the sense that the others were not.

The next semester Spielhagen went to the University of Bonn, wavering between Law and Medicine. The landscape of the lower Rhineland was not congenial to him. He longed for his Pomeranian shore with its dunes and invigorating sea life. In Bonn he met leaders of the revolutionary party – Carl Schurz, "le bel homme," and Ludwig Meyer. The portrait he sketches of Carl Schurz is an outline of that which the liberator of Kinkel rounded out for himself in his long years of sturdy citizenship in America. Spielhagen warned Schurz at that time that his schemes were quixotic.

During the following vacation, on a foot-tour through Thuringia, Spielhagen witnessed the effects of the revolution and the ensuing reaction. He arrived at Frankfurt-on-the-Main just after the close of the Great Parliament. He was deeply impressed with the violence done to Auerswald and Lichnowski, and witnessed the trial of Lassalle for the theft of the jewel-casket of the Baroness von Meyendorf. His attention was thus fixed upon the personality of the great socialist reformer who was later to play such an important rôle in his novels, and of whom he said: "Lassalle set in motion the message which not only continues today, but is only beginning to manifest its depth and power, and the end of which no mind of the wise can foresee."

In Bonn Spielhagen finally went over to classical philology, and devoted much time also to modern literature. His beloved Homer, the Latin poets, Goethe's lyrics, Goetz, Iphigenia, Tasso, Wilhelm Meister, The Elective Affinities, Immermann's Münchhausen, Vilmar, Gervinus, Loebel, Simrock's Nibelungen, Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield, Dickens and Shakespeare all claimed his attention. The most interesting incident of his stay at Bonn was his audience with the later Crown Prince Frederick, who had come with his tutor, Professor Curtius, to take up his studies at the university – an audience which was repeated at the Court of Coburg in 1867, when Spielhagen came face to face with his literary antipathy, Gustav Freytag.

After three years of vacillation in his university studies, he finally made peace with his father, and decided to take his degree in philology. To this end he entered the University of Greifswald and began the more serious study of esthetics, starting with Humboldt's Esthetic Experiments, and developing his own theory of objectivity in the novel. Meanwhile he read the English novelists Dickens, Thackeray, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and the Germans Lichtenberg, Rabener, Jean Paul, Thümmel, and Vischer's Esthetics. His essay On Humor and other critical works owe much to these studies. After giving his interpretation of an ode of Horace in the seminary, he worked at his dissertation, and found in Tennyson the theme for his first finished work, Klara Vere.

Having left the university, Spielhagen entered the army for his year of service. Here he gained valuable experience and information, which stood him in good stead in his novels. During this year he found time to delve again into Spinoza, whom he had studied in Berlin. The doctrines of this philosopher now had a new meaning for him and offered him a philosophic mooring which he had so much needed in deciding upon his career. Commenting on his reading he says: "I wished to win from philosophy the right to be what I was, the right to give free rein to the power which I felt to be dominant in my mind. I wished to procure a charter for 'the ruling passion' of my soul." This charter he found in Spinoza's words: "Every one exists by the supreme right of Nature, and consequently, according to the supreme right of Nature, every one does what the necessity of his nature imposes, and accordingly by this supreme right of nature every one judges what is good and what is bad, and acts in his own way for his own welfare." This principle of "suum esse conservare" becomes the guiding thought in Spielhagen's life at this time. With this philosophic turn of mind came a reaction against Byron's immoral characters such as Don Juan.

He was now confronted with the problem of reconciling in his own life Freiligrath's words, "wage-earner and poet." His pedagogical faculties had been developed by the informal lectures which he had given to the circle of his sister's girl friends. After the manœuvres were over he took a position as private tutor in the family of a former Swedish officer of the "type of gentleman," as he says. In this rural Pomeranian retreat the instincts of the poet were rapidly awakened. Enraptured with the beauty of the country he adopted Friedrich Schlegel's practice of writing down his thoughts and shifting moods in the form of fragments. As the family broke up for the holidays, he strapped on his knapsack for a cross-country tour homeward, making a détour to visit an old friend at Rügen. It was here that he fell in love with Hedda, the heroine of the story On the Dunes. He felt love now for the first time in its real power, which was lacking in Klara Vere. But this new, strange passion left him only the more a poet. In one of his fragments he wrote: "The poet worships every beautiful woman as the devout Catholic does every image of the Holy Virgin, but the image is not the Queen of Heaven."

The vacation had made him discontented with his position. All the rural charm seemed changed to commonplace. He now felt a bond of sympathy with Rousseau, Victor Hugo, and George Sand, sought literary uplift in Homer, Æschylus, Shakespeare, Scott, Byron, and extended his reading to Gargantua, Tom Jones, Lamartine, Madame Bovary, and Vanity Fair, but declares he would willingly exchange Consuelo for Copperfield. It was at this time when Spielhagen was in unsteady mood as to his future, that he saw for the last time his old Greifswald friend, Albert Timm, who in the last three years had sadly changed from the promising student to the cynic: "'Yes,' he cried (from the platform of the moving train) 'I am going to America, not of my own wish, but because others wish it. They may be right; in any case, I have run my course in Europe. Perhaps I shall succeed better over there, or perhaps not; it's all the same. * * * Somewhere in the forest primeval! To the left around the corner! Don't forget: to the left around the – ' and the train sped out of sight." These parting words of his shipwrecked friend reminded Spielhagen only too keenly of his own unsettled career.

At length Spielhagen decided to go to Leipzig to prepare for a professorship of literature in the university. After a tour in Thuringia, during which he saw in Ilmenau a gipsy troop which furnished him with the character of Cziska in the Problematic Characters, he again took up his study of literature and esthetics. His encounter with Kant's philosophy and Schiller's esthetic theories led him back to Goethe and Spinoza. In the midst of these philosophical problems, he received one day a letter from Robert Hall Westley, an English friend in Leipzig, "a gentleman bred and born," telling him of a vacancy in English at the "Modernes Gesamt-Gymnasium" at that place. Spielhagen accepted the position in 1854, and in good American fashion followed the method of docendo discimus. Thus he finds himself again a producer.

The first fruit of his critical studies during the early Leipzig period was the completed essay On Humor, which was now accepted and published by Gutzkow in Unterhaltungen am häuslichen Herd. This, his first printed work, gave him new courage. His studies in English led him again to the English and American poets. The offer of a Leipzig firm to publish a collection of translations of American poetry added new zest to his reading in American literature. The chief source of his translations was Griswold's Poets and Poetry of America. A specimen from Emerson's Representative Men will illustrate his skill in translating:

Sphinx

 
"O tiefer und tiefer
Muss tauchen der Geist;
Weisst alles du, weisst du,
Dass gar nichts du weisst;
Jetzt zieht es dich mächtig
Zum Himmel hinan;
Bist droben du, steckst du
Dir weiter die Bahn."
 

These translations appeared under the title Amerikanische Gedichte. In addition to selections from Bryant, Longfellow, Poe, Bayard Taylor, and others, he translated also George William Curtis' Nile Notes of an Howadji, which was published with the title Nil-Skizzen.

His admiration for American literature was very great, as his own words will show: "But upon this wide, entirely original, field of poetry what abundance, what variety of production! Palmettos grow by the side of gnarly oaks, and the most charming and modest flora of the prairie among the garden flowers of magic beauty and intoxicating perfume." The American poems were followed by translations of Michelet's L'Amour and other French and English works.

Spielhagen connected himself with Gutzkow's Europa and devoted himself for a time to criticism. Among the essays of this period are Objectivity in the Novel, Dickens, Thackeray, etc. At the suggestion of Kolatschek, an Austrian Forty-eighter, who had returned from America and founded the periodical Stimmung der Zeit in Vienna, Spielhagen wrote a severe criticism of Freytag's historical drama The Fabians. This attack upon Freytag was occasioned by the severe criticism of Gutzkow's Magician of Rome, published in the Grenzboten, edited by Julian Schmidt and Gustav Freytag. It was Spielhagen's demand for fair play as well as his admiration for Gutzkow that drew him into the conflict.

The old home in Pomerania had been broken up by the death of his father and the marriage of his sister, and the events of his early life could now be viewed as history. Out of these events and his later experience grew his first great novel, Problematic Characters (1860, Second Part 1861). This novel deals with the conditions in Pomerania in particular, and in Germany in general, before 1848. The title is drawn from Goethe's Aphorisms in Prose: "There are problematic characters which are not adapted to any position in life and are not satisfied with any condition in life. Out of this arises that titanic conflict which consumes life without compensation." The hero, Dr. Oswald Stein, is the poet himself in his rôle as family tutor and implacable foe of the institutions of the nobility, "a belated Young German" and an incipient socialist. He falls in love with Melitta von Berkow in her Hermitage, with the impulsive Emilie von Breesen at the ball, and with Helene von Grenwitz, his pupil. Because of the latter he fights a duel with her suitor, Felix, and then goes off with Dr. Braun to begin anew at Grünwald. In the second part of this novel this unfinished story is carried to its tragic and logical conclusion, when Oswald dies a heroic death at the barricades. Although most of the chief characters drawn in the novel are types, they are modeled after prototypes in real life. Oswald, the revolutionist with a suggestion of the Byronic, echoes the poet in his early career. Dr. Braun (Franz), the man of will, is modeled on the poet's young friend Bernhard, and Oldenburg, the titanic Faust nature, is taken from his friend Adalbert of the Gymnasium days at Stralsund. Albert Timm was his boon companion at Greifswald, and Professor Berger is a composite of Professor Barthold, the historian, and Professor M – , who later became insane.

In the years 1860-62 Spielhagen was editor of the literary supplement of the Zeitung für Norddeutschland, doing valuable service as a literary journalist. In this position he had opportunity to prepare himself for the wider activities as editor of the Deutsche Wochenschrift and later (1878-84) of Westermann's Monatshefte. After 1862 he was identified with the surging life of Berlin.

In The Hohensteins (1863) the story of a declining noble family, recalling the historical novel of Scott and Hauff's Lichtenstein, the socialistic program of Lassalle begins to appear. Lassalle's doctrines find their spokesman in the hero, Bernhard Münzer, the fantastic but despotic agitator and cosmopolitan socialist; while the idealist, Baltasar, voices the reform program of the poet himself in the words: "Educate yourselves, Germans, to love and freedom."

In the next novel, In Rank and File (1866), the program of Lassalle is reflected in Leo Gutmann, a character of the Auerbach type. The mouthpiece of the poet is really Walter Gutmann, who sums up the moral of the story in these sentences: "The heroic age is past. The battle-cry is no longer: 'one for all,' but 'all for all.' The individual is only a soldier in rank and file. As individual he is nothing; as member of the whole he is irresistible." Father Gutmann, the forester, is evidently an echo of the poet's family traditions, while Dr. Paulus is an exponent of the philosophy of Spinoza. Leo's career and fall illustrate the futility of the principle of "state aid" in the reform program. Even the seven years of residence in America were not sufficient to rescue him from his visionary schemes.

In Hammer and Anvil (1869) the same theme is treated in a different form. The poet teaches here that the conflict between master and servant, ruler and subject, must be reinterpreted and recognized as a necessary condition of society. "The situation is not hammer or anvil, as the revolutionists would have it, but hammer and anvil; for every creature, every man, is both together, at every moment." Thus the "solidarity of interests" is the aim to be kept in view, and is shown by Georg Hartwig, who having learned his lesson in the penitentiary now appears as the owner of a factory and gives his workmen an interest in the profits.

The most powerful of Spielhagen's novels is Storm Flood (1877), in which the inundation caused by the fearful storm on the coast of the Baltic Sea in 1874 is made a coincident parallel of the calamity brought about by the reckless speculation of the industrial promoters of the early seventies. As the catastrophe on the Baltic is the consequence of ignoring the warnings of physical phenomena in nature, so the financial crash and family distress which overwhelm the Werbens and Schmidts are the result of the violation of similar natural laws in the social and industrial world. The novelist has here reached the highest development of his art. The course of the narrative gathers in its wake all the elements of catastrophe, to let them break with the fury of the tempest over the lives of the characters, but allows the innocent children of Nature to come forth as the happy survivors of this wreck and ruin. The characters of Reinhold and Else, who find their bliss in true love, are his best creations. The poet has here proved himself a worthy disciple of Shakespeare and Walter Scott.

After this blast of the tempest, the poet turned to the more placid scenes of his native heath in the novel entitled Flat Land (1879), in which he describes the conditions of Pomerania between 1830-1840. The wealth of description and incident, the variety of motive and situation, make this story one of the most characteristic of Pomeranian scenery and life.

In the novel What Is to Come of It? (1887), liberalism, social democracy, nihilism, held in check by the grip of the Iron Chancellor, contend for the mastery. And what shall the result? The poet answers: "There is a bit of the Social Democrat in every one," but the result will be "a and lofty one and a new, glorious phase of an ever-striving humanity." Here are brought into play typical characters, the Bismarckian Squire, the reckless capitalist, the particularist with his feigned liberalism.

Spielhagen's pessimism finds vent in A New Pharaoh (1889), which is a protest against the Bismarck régime. The ideals of the Forty-eighter are represented by Baron von Alden, who comes back from America to visit his old home only to find a new Pharaoh, who knows nothing of the Joseph of 1848. Finding the Germans a race of toadies and slaves, in which the noble-minded go under while the base triumph, he turns his back upon the new empire for good and all. "Nothing is accomplished by the sword which another sword cannot in turn destroy. The permanent and imperishable can be accomplished only by the silent force of reason."

In addition to his more pretentious novels, Spielhagen wrote a large number of shorter novels and short stories. To these belong Klara Vere and On the Dunes, already mentioned, At the Twelfth Hour (1863), Rose of the Court (1864), The Fair Americans (1865), Hans and Grete, and The Village Coquette (1869), German Pioneers (1871), What the Swallow Sang (1873), Ultimo (1874), The Skeleton in the Closet (1878), Quisisana (1880), Angela (1881), Uhlenhans (1883), At the Spa (1885), Noblesse Oblige (1888). The most important of Spielhagen's latest novels are The Sunday Child (1893), Self Justice (1896), Sacrifices (1899), Born Free (1900).

The place of Spielhagen in German literature is variously estimated. Heinrich and Julius Hart in Kritische Waffengänge (1884) contest his claim to a place among artists of the first rank and condemn his use of the novel for purposes of reform; while Gustav Karpeles in his Friedrich Spielhagen (1889) assigns him a place among the best novelists of his time. This latter position is more nearly correct. The modern disposition to cry art for art's sake, and to denounce all art which has a didactic purpose, is the offspring of ignorance of the real nature of art. In a general way all art has a didactic purpose of varying degrees of directness. It is just this didactic purpose which has entitled the novel to its place among the literary forms, and it is this purpose which made Spielhagen's novels such a potent power in the social revolution of the later nineteenth century.

The charge has been made against Spielhagen that his characters are mechanical types used as vehicles of the author's doctrines or of the tendencies of the time. This charge is not sustained by the facts, even in the case of his first somewhat crude novel, the Problematic Characters, of which he says later: "There was not a squire in Rügen nor a townsman in Stralsund or Greifswald who did not feel himself personally offended." And the pronounced and clearly defined characters of Storm Flood, in their sharp contrasts and fierce conflicts with social tradition and natural impulse, present a vivid picture of the surging life of the New Empire.

Spielhagen possessed an intimate knowledge of literary technique. Few if any of his contemporaries had given more careful attention to the principles of esthetics and of literary workmanship, as may be seen from his critical essays and particularly the treatises, Contributions to the Theory and Technique of the Novel, and New Contributions to the Theory and Technique of the Epic and Drama.

It was but poetic justice that the novelist of the stormy days of the Revolution should be permitted to spend the declining years of his long life in the sunshine of the new Berlin, in whose making he had participated and whose life he had chronicled. He died February 24, 1911, having passed his fourscore years.