The Storyteller (14 page)

‘They come from the estate of an Irish man. O'Brien. You won't have heard of his name. He lived and died on the Balearics.'

—

Translated by Sam Dolbear and Esther Leslie
.

First published in
Vossische Zeitung
, 8 January 1933;
Gesammelte Schriften IV
, 748–54.

Possibilities at Sea
, 1932.

Johann Jacob Bachofen
, Greek Journey,
ed. Georg
Schmidt, Heidelberg: Richard Weißbach, 1927

I
n 1851, eight years before the appearance of his first major work,
The Grave Symbolism of Antiquity
, in the year 1851, Bachofen undertook his great Classical journey to Greece, through Attica, the Peloponnese, Argolis and Arcadia. This journey is Classical in a threefold sense: in respect of the sites, in
relation to their canonic significance for him (his other Greek journeys paled in the face of this one) and, finally, in respect of its Goethean attitude. Ludwig Klages, who was one of the first to be furnished with the manuscript of Bachofen's travel journal, quite rightly placed it in the orbit of
Italian Journey
. If what is meant thereby is that in this volume the German is enriched by several great pieces of descriptive prose, and the German longing for Hellas is enriched by one of its sweetest fulfilments, then it also means that these pages contribute nothing new or crucial to the form of Bachofen's teachings nor to our understanding of them. In this regard, they confront the researcher with an interesting alternative: were the fundamental thoughts of his later works still unknown to the traveller himself at this time? Or does that strange ambivalence, so characteristic of Bachofen's essence, operate here too? As with Wilhelm von Humboldt, the most Swiss among the great German thinkers, the most penetrating insight into the incomparability and irreducibility of any language is perpetually locked in a conflict with the dogma of the absolute superiority of ancient Greek. In Bachofen's mythologies penetrating insight into the ethnological primal phenomena of the mythical is in struggle with the cavalier affirmation of the Apollonian right up into Christianity, which was probably nothing more for him than the last world-historical victory of Apollo.

Seen from the outside, this diary falls into two parts. The middle section of the journey, which leads from Patras via Corinth to Epidauros, appears in a literary treatment. The remainder, beginning and end, is in note form. Of these notes, the editor has included only the first, marking the route of the journey from Basel to Patras. It is rather telling that, in the first twenty pages of the book, something like a subterranean groan rings from the interior of the traveller into the bliss of
the southern heavens; disturbing noises, one might say, which will yet be dear to Bachofen's best readers, because they tie this youthful travel epic to his later didactic
Grave Symbolism, Maternal Right, Tanaquil
. But such reflections, as compelling as they appear, would be in the wrong place if they hoped to narrow down the rights of this book to be taken for what it is: the journey through a Greece that was by then still barely accessed archaeologically, a ride by horseback through isolated high mountain valleys at the side of a handsome Greek peasant boy, accommodation in remote villages, where under a festive night sky girls' laughter beats against the ear of the lonely traveller.

Count Paul Yorck von Wartenburg
, Italian Diary,
edited by Sigrid von der Schulenburg, Darmstadt: Otto Reichl Press, 1927

I
t is certainly not a pure pleasure to relate something about this book. It is impossible to berate the author, who, in the manner of a conscientious German traveller of the old stripe, renders an account of a stay in Italy that lasted several months in note form which he never intended to print. And of the editor, who in a modest, matter-of-fact preface attempts to forestall all thinkable objections against this publication, one might confirm perhaps only his innermost feeling, if one contends that these jottings possess only a few rare passages of interest that is more than private. If the personality which speaks from them were not so particularly cultivated and congenial, they would be flatly repudiated. But even as they are, the unprejudiced reader will find little striking in them. Yorck von Wartenburg was on the point of freeing himself from the inherited templates for viewing Italy. That, and how he does it, is made manifest in a historical and factually highly interesting
excursus on the mosaics of Ravenna and Cefalu. But he proceeded too shyly along what was a new route for him, such that today – now that the renovation of the image of Italy, which he intimated, has long been completed – his diary divulges little of much significance. It is all the more easy to say this, given Wartenburg's correspondence with Dilthey was already strikingly overestimated, and the publication of this diary with a publisher close to Count Keyserling justifies the suspicion that the new feudal school in German feuilletonism might count Yorck von Wartenburg as one of their own. That would be a claim, however, which would commit a greater injustice against this sober-minded and gentlemanly dilettante than if not one word of his literary remains had come to press.

Georg Lichey
, Italy and Us: An Italian Journey,
Dresden: Carl Reissner, 1927

O
ne would have to have a card index of linguistic and thought chaos to hand, like the one Karl Kraus once had at his disposal, to locate this book in its correct context.

‘Christ or Caesar … wrestled over a soul that was equally receptive to both parties.' It is the speech from the soul of Mr Lichey, which we can bequeath to the aforementioned without envy. Unfortunately it attends the play fight on a rubbish tip, which takes on the shape of a book.

But it is good that this book was printed. Now for the first time we possess the ideal portrait of the ‘fellow traveller', avoidance of whom has always been the best and most difficult part of all techniques of journeying. But will we ever manage to shake him off, and escape the sigh: ‘It is something quite undreamt of, this Sistine Chapel'; and the admission: ‘And thus something else came along to join the shock of living
watercolours'; and the proud qualification: ‘Even the dome … did not get close to what I had seen of it in my dreams'. The travelling mob itself here attains the voice of a choir. All who ‘seek connection', who ‘push their way through', ‘carve their names' – in short, ‘for whom it has been an experience' – have once and for all found a voice in this book.

‘Italy! Is to attempt this theme not like taking owls to Athens?'

It is, however, astonishing how the author would care to attune the reader harmonically to everything that is distant through a single motto:

The verse is by Stefan George,
Faust
is by Goethe. The whole, though, is by Mr Lichey, to whom, as he himself explains nicely, ‘only the whole and always only the whole' floats before his eyes.

We will furnish him with a whole!

Rudolf Borchardt, ed
., The German in the Landscape,
Munich: Publishing House of Bremer Press, 1927

T
he series of anthologies from the Bremer Press takes on ever more clearly a great, uniform character, which appears as a most pleasing contrast to almost everything which had existed in this form until now. For if the odium of plundering – the unauthorised exploitation of a virginal stock – always sticks to the usual florilegia and selections, whether they are popularising, modernising, aestheticizing, on this one
there rests a visible blessing. Visible in the sense that these volumes, and what they bring, connect a greatness to a new form, which is now not in an abstract sense ‘historical', but an unmediated, if also a more considerate, well-fortified continuation of the blossoming of antiquity. What is effected here is the effectuation of original literature itself, and it belongs in the sphere of the lives of the great, just as much as translations of their writings and commentaries on them. Nothing in them serves the abstract vagueness of education, and in the grounded consciousness of it here Borchardt pronounces for the first time on the spirit of this collection:

They are not objective, as one says, or a listing of objects, without time, without style, without will, and fundamentally without cause; cause and time, will and style are unremittingly at work in them in the stillness, they are a part of them. We bequeath to the nation, as we sons of the nineteenth century believe in the powers of the personality, never objects as objects, but always rather only illustrations of objects, illustratively, only forms, which the object in its passage through the organic spirit has received transmutingly, and bequeath thereby, in ever-new modifications and applications, ever-new images of this organic spirit itself. Therefore these collections cannot have intended to compete with any others that currently exist, and they are moreover not at all to be compared with them.

They are anthologies in the highest sense, wreaths like that of Meleager of Gadara, whose blossoms, whether or not we even know them all by name, we now no longer think of them as dispersed.

To communicate this higher unity outside of the book, in which it is perceptible, as fundamentally distilled, that would of course be not, and all the less for the volume under discussion, a matter of an obliging improvisation. The four main
views of the body of the earth which revealed themselves to Germans in the nineteenth century – the strictly geographical, the description in terms of natural philosophy, portrayal as landscape and the historical – are all combined in this book. To develop how this is done would mean writing a second one. Here it must suffice to pronounce how certain passages of the work recombine into a spiritual landscape (the loveliest one of which, perhaps, is towards the middle, where Kleist, Immermann, Schinkel, Ludwig Richter and Annette von Droste follow each other). Indeed the whole is a Platonic landscape, a
topos hyperouranios
, in which lie perceptibly and as primal images towns, provinces and forgotten corners of the planet.

Like the predominance of such general concepts as sclerotization, the form of viable opinions (ideas) makes itself felt within the linguistic as enlivenment. Therefore here, as elsewhere, the cultural historical work of this press is so little separable from its literary output. In this volume, whose linguistic
niveau
represents a high plateau without threshold, however, the poetic prose retreats so much in the face of the scientific descriptive, the scientifically constructive, it is the case that of all the remarkable sections the most brilliant might be the ‘Curland Spit', a sketch of the homeland of the lawyer Passarge. Certainly those poets are not lacking here who have forever combined their image with a landscape, unless they had, like Eichendorff or Jean Paul, lost their outlines against the lyrically glowing skies. But precisely a reader who completely overlooks these isolated appearances of poets might yet ask himself whether the stylistic and sensuous peculiarities of French, English, Italian prose writers just as clearly emerge from the landscape book. So clearly do they emerge from these texts, as from these German self-portraits, the head of the writer appears blessed and peaceful, with a gazing eye,
in front of a fine background landscape, and collecting all of its features in his. Did he never think about how thoroughly safe German reflection on landscape and language, and how heatedly that on state and people, has always turned out? And, he might ask himself, is the obvious isolation of the best Germans everywhere – who lack an environment of like minds, a popularly rooted, established perspective on the past – not so much a reason for his strict existence in a landscape overstuffed with experience as it is an expression of it?

But this book would not be strict about exactness, not edifying on all the scholarly material – above all, it would not be a German thing – if its fullness did not come from its lack, if each landscape's circuit, which here the historian and researcher measure, were not experienceable or encountered by another closely related German type as a spellbound sphere, as a dangerous, fateful space of nature. ‘Interpreter', so pronounces Hofmannsthal, when he deals with this genius and his most woebegone, most calamitous act of God, ‘they are interpreters in their highest moment, Visionaries – the scenting, suspecting German being appears again in them, scenting after primal nature in people and in the world, interpreting the souls and the bodies, the faces and the stories, interpreting settlements and the customs, the landscape and the clan.' That is embodied in its most lucid figure, Herder, and, fifty years later, in its darkest, Ludwig Hermann Wolfram. ‘
How
does nature seduce', so announces the pontifex of his lost Faust poem, ‘the poet saturated with spirit'?

Stream becomes the brook, outpouring itself in the flood of the sea the lowly flower becomes the highest cactus column,

the willow tree becomes the primal forest's most powerful giants,

the gorse bloom becomes the giant lotus blossom.