Mimesis (76 page)

In this way love, in Schiller’s
Luise Millerin
, became the point of departure for the revolutionary in politics, for a politically founded realism. However, the basis furnished by a love story was too narrow, and the sentimentally touching style was unsuitable for the production of a genuine reality. The accidental, personal, and touching features of the specific case claim too much of our attention. To make the conflict sufficiently sharp, the minister and Wurm had to be portrayed as unmitigated scoundrels. If they were not, if, furthermore, the minister did not happen just at this time to be confronted with the necessity of making sure of the prince’s mistress by marrying her to a member of his own family, a solution or at least a delay would be possible. As for conditions in general throughout the principality, we are given only isolated and not always clearly understandable details. These are always gruesome, whether they concern the sale of subjects of the principality as soldiers to be sent to America or conditions at court, as in the great discussion between Ferdinand and the Lady (2, 3). They are always presented with hair-raising rhetorical pathos; they always give the impression that the duke and his court have no function whatever, but simply bleed the people by their extravagance and abuse them for their vicious pleasures. We hear and sense practically nothing of inner problems, historical complications, the function of the ruling class, the causes of its moral decline, nor of practical conditions in the principality. This is not realism, it is melodrama; it is very well adapted to release a strong, emotionally political effect; but it is in no way an artistic statement of the reality of the time. It is a caricature even where it depicts real conditions and events, because it detaches them from their roots, deprives them of their inner essence, overilluminates them both as a result of enthusiasm and in the service of propaganda. And the one motif which is probably of cardinal importance for the comprehension of the social structure, a motif which is also stressed by H. A. Korff—the inner lack of freedom of the subjects of the principality, who, in their stuffy, narrow, and misguided attitude of piety toward the burden laid upon them, acknowledge it as an eternal right—this motif does not come out clearly enough. Luise’s failure, which is due to her lack of inner freedom (3, 4), is misinterpreted by Ferdinand, because the involved action demands a fit of jealousy on his part, which is entirely improbable after all that has happened; and so the auditor’s interest is immediately diverted from
the motif underlying her failure—as in general Luise is represented as so touchingly innocent, so filled with noble sentiments, that her essential narrowness and pusillanimity are not spontaneously recognized by the auditor; only the analytical critic of her character and Schiller’s art becomes conscious of them. For even in this scene she produces the impression of being a self-sacrificing heroine, and even when she is taken in by Wurm’s absurd scheme, she is still “great and awe-inspiring.”

Nevertheless, the play is highly important in connection with our study—if only because, among the better known works of German classicism and romanticism, it has remained the only one of its kind. In the age of Goethe no further attempts were made toward the tragic treatment of an average contemporary bourgeois milieu on the basis of its actual social situation. The excellent characterization of the musician Miller especially, so much more homogeneous and natural than that of his daughter, remained quite unapproached in its level of style. Schiller himself, and the trend of German literature in general, turned away from realism in the sense of a concrete portrayal of contemporary political and economic conditions, with its forceful mixing of styles. Mixing of styles, which had been enthusiastically taken up under the influence of Shakespeare, appears almost exclusively in subjects from history or the realm of poetic fantasy; when applied to the present, it remains within the narrowest, unpolitical sphere or, as idyl or irony, aims exclusively at the personal. The combination of a forceful realism with a tragic conception of the problems of the age simply does not occur. This is the more striking and, if you will, the more paradoxical since it was precisely the German intellectual development during the second half of the eighteenth century which laid the aesthetic foundation of modern realism. I refer to what is currently known as Historism.

Basically, the way in which we view human life and society is the same whether we are concerned with things of the past or things of the present. A change in our manner of viewing history will of necessity soon be transferred to our manner of viewing current conditions. When people realize that epochs and societies are not to be judged in terms of a pattern concept of what is desirable absolutely speaking but rather in every case in terms of their own premises; when people reckon among such premises not only natural factors like climate and soil but also the intellectual and historical factors; when, in other words, they come to develop a sense of historical dynamics, of the incomparability
of historical phenomena and of their constant inner mobility; when they come to appreciate the vital unity of individual epochs, so that each epoch appears as a whole whose character is reflected in each of its manifestations; when, finally, they accept the conviction that the meaning of events cannot be grasped in abstract and general forms of cognition and that the material needed to understand it must not be sought exclusively in the upper strata of society and in major political events but also in art, economy, material and intellectual culture, in the depths of the workaday world and its men and women, because it is only there that one can grasp what is unique, what is animated by inner forces, and what, in both a more concrete and a more profound sense, is universally valid: then it is to be expected that those insights will also be transferred to the present and that, in consequence, the present too will be seen as incomparable and unique, as animated by inner forces and in a constant state of development; in other words, as a piece of history whose everyday depths and total inner structure lay claim to our interest both in their origins and in the direction taken by their development. Now we know that the insights which I have just enumerated and which, taken all together, represent the intellectual trend known as Historism, were fully developed during the second half of the eighteenth century in Germany. To be sure, elsewhere and earlier there were trends which prepared for Historism and affected the form under which it established itself; but the fact remains that it was thus formed and established in Germany during the age of Goethe. We need not elaborate this, because much excellent material has been published on the subject. Friedrich Meinecke’s book on the origins of Historism (Munich and Berlin, 1936) is the finest and most mature treatment I know. In the Germany of those days the revolt against the classicistic and rationalistic taste of France was also carried further than anywhere else. In the process the thing we call separation of styles, the exclusion of realism from high tragedy, was overcome, and this is a basic prerequisite both for a historical and for a contemporary realism of tragic dimensions. And yet at least the second of these, a contemporary realism, did not achieve complete development. Even the literary treatment of historical subjects, which had been begun with so much sensory truth in Goethe’s early works, relapsed through Schiller’s later development into a kind of separation of styles. Schiller’s dualistic genius, which made a sharp separation between ideas and the sensory, increasingly asserted itself, and in his later years his interest went much more to
the workings of the moral sense in man and to the freedom which builds upon it than to man’s individuality as embedded in the sensory and the historical.

However, we are here more immediately concerned with realism in the treatment of contemporary subjects, and we shall try to determine the causes which prevented its full development in what appears to be such a favorable aesthetic situation. These causes are to be sought in contemporary conditions themselves and in the relation to them of the leading German writers and, more generally, of the leading classes in Germany. In this connection we shall have to deal especially with Goethe, partly because of his dominant influence and partly too because no other writer was endowed with so much natural talent for grasping the sensory and real.

Contemporary conditions in Germany did not easily lend themselves to broad realistic treatment. The social picture was heterogeneous; the general life was conducted in the confused setting of a host of “historical territories,” units which had come into existence through dynastic and political contingencies. In each of them the oppressive and at times choking atmosphere was counterbalanced by a certain pious submission and the sense of a historical solidity, all of which was more conducive to speculation, introspection, contemplation, and the development of local idiosyncrasies than to coming to grips with the practical and the real in a spirit of determination and with an awareness of greater contexts and more extensive territories. The origins of German Historism clearly show the impress of the conditions under which it was formed. Justus Möser based his ideas on his penetrating study of the historical development of a very restricted territory, that of the cathedral chapter of Osnabrück. Herder, on the other hand, saw the historical in its broadest and most general implications, yet at the same time in its profound particularity; but he represented it so little concretely that he is of no help toward a grasp of reality. The work of these men already announces the basic tendencies which German Historism was long to retain: local particularism and popular traditionalism on the one hand, and all-inclusive speculation on the other. Both these tendencies are far more concerned with the extra-temporal spirit of history and the completed evolution of what is in existence than with the presently visible germs of the concrete future. Such, in all essentials, the position remained, down to Karl Marx; and that it remained such was due in no small measure to the fact that concrete futurity, which, pressing in from abroad, announced
itself more and more imperatively from the last decades of the eighteenth century, aroused horror and revulsion in the majority of outstanding Germans. The French Revolution with all its emanations, the upheavals in its wake, the germs of a new social structure which irresistibly developed from it in spite of all opposition, encountered a passive, defensive, and irresponsive Germany. And it was not only the imperiled powers of the past which met the Revolution in a hostile spirit, it was also the youthful German intellectual movement. And here we find Goethe.

Goethe’s attitude toward the Revolution, the Napoleonic era, the wars of liberation, and the dawning tendencies of the nineteenth century is known. It resulted from his solid bourgeois background, from his deepest inclinations and instincts, and finally from his education, which led him ever more to respect slowly evolving forms and to abhor formless ferment and everything recalcitrant to orderly disposition. His political attitudes do not interest us here as such, but only indirectly insofar as they determined his manner of treating contemporary subjects in his literary works.

Those among his works which are wholly or in part and directly or indirectly concerned with events of the Revolution all have one thing in common: they avoid entering into the dynamic forces at work. They sometimes present individual symptoms in the most concrete fashion, as well as such reflections and consequences of the Revolution as are visible in the fates of emigrants, of border districts affected, and of other individuals, families, and groups; but as soon as the whole is at issue, Goethe turns to generalities and ethical principles, sometimes in a disgruntled mood, sometimes in a spirit of cheerfully pessimistic worldly and political wisdom. Thus he writes in his Annals for 1793: “It will be set to the credit of an active, productive mind, of a truly patriotic man intent upon furthering literature at home, if he is frightened by the upheaval of everything that exists, while not the slightest premonition of something better, or only of something else, which is to result from it finds voice in him. His reaction will be shared if he finds it vexatious that such influences extend to Germany, that addle-headed and indeed unworthy individuals usurp the leadership.” It was precisely his “vexation” which prevented him from devoting to the social restratification an interest of so lovingly genetic a kind as he did to so many other subjects—an interest of a kind which alone (as he knew better than anyone else) leads to “premonitions finding voice.” In a very fine passage of his book on Historism (2, 579), Meinecke
explains what it was that appealed to Goethe in the historical: the slow emergence and growth of historical entities through inner urgencies, the development of what is individual from what is typical, and the intervention of unpredictable powers of destiny in such developments. The situation, Meinecke continues, is that Goethe was certainly always aware of the general and vital current of history but that he drew from it only those phenomena which—because he loved them—he could master directly by the cognitional principles which were most peculiarly his own. Here, Meinecke concludes, Goethe’s selective principle in regard to history is clearly illuminated, in precisely the sense in which it is contained in the regretful epilogue, “Cursory Description of Conditions at Florence,” in the appendix to his translation of Benvenuto Cellini. There Goethe says: “Had Lorenzo [the Magnificent] lived longer, and could a progressive, gradual development of the situation as laid down have taken place, the history of Florence would represent one of the most beautiful of phenomena; but it would seem that in the course of earthly things we shall but seldom experience the fulfillment of beautiful possibilities.”

In these explanations, however, I think Meinecke fails to clarify one thing: it seems to me that those parts of history which Goethe ignored, he could have “mastered directly by the cognitional principles which were most peculiarly his own”—if he had loved those parts of history. His personal dislike prevented him from applying those principles, and that is why the phenomena did not reveal their secret to him. The dynamics of opposing social forces and the economic substratum of Florentine history, which he ignored or touched upon but lightly (I am paraphrasing Meinecke here), the civic unrest which he censured as proof of “the infirmities of a badly administered and badly policed state”—these are things which he dislikes, and therefore he turns his back on them. Or at least, when he felt compelled to take up such matters, he ceased to be an observer of the dialectically tragic, and became a classicistic moralist. At such moments, I believe, he no longer senses “the general and vital current of history.” For him, the “fulfillment of beautiful possibilities” lies entirely in the flowering of aristocratic cultures in which significant individuals can develop unimpeded, and the principle of order which is present to his mind in such connections is comparatively eudemonistic. It is his aversion to everything violent and explosive—which after all is also a result of the general and vital current of history—that explains why when confronted with the explosive and violent he did not probe beyond the symptomatic, the personal,
and the moralistic; why he ascribed so great an importance to the Affair of the Necklace, with its elements of anecdote and intrigue, though after all it was only a symptom of certain conditions in the highest circles and did not reveal anything at all essential about the historical forces at work in the revolutionary crisis; why he was long inclined to see in the remarkable figure of Napoleon a “conclusion” which solved “the riddle in so decisive and unexpected a fashion” (
Campaign in France
, near the end); why finally (to quote, from among many, a particularly emphatic utterance) he wrote in the
Wanderjahre
in connection with a polemic against “prevailing opinions” in the sciences: “State and Church may be able to show cause why they should declare themselves dominant, for they are dealing with the recalcitrant masses, and as long as order is maintained it does not matter by what means; but in the sciences the most absolute freedom is necessary. …” (
Wanderjahre
, book 3, chapter 14.) Such attitudes and utterances interest us in the present connection not so much immediately in that they illustrate Goethe’s conservative, aristocratic, and anti-revolutionary views, but rather mediately because they explain how Goethe’s views prevented him from grasping revolutionary occurrences with the genetico-realistic-sensory method peculiar to him on other occasions. He disliked them. He tried harder to get rid of them than to understand them, and ridding himself of them meant assuming toward them a moralistic attitude in part condemnatory and in part serenely philosophical. For him, they represented the vulgar which subdues us all, “the vile … [which] is in power, whatever else you may be told.”