History of German Literature Georg Lukacs 1947
At the beginning of modern German literature there is a strange coincidence of literary and political events: the founding of the Freie Buehne and the fall of Bismarck. Is their connection a chronological gimmick? To the contrary, we believe that the same political-social forces broke through in both events, albeit mediated by many coincidences, almost simultaneously.
The political event is of great importance, although no contemporary was aware of it. It is about Germany’s entry into the imperialist epoch: the boastful chatterbox Wilhelm II triumphed over the creator of German unity because, with all his vices, he was a representative of the new period.
The revolution from above unleashed by Bismarck to found the Reich turned Germany into an internally anti-democratic country addicted to external aggression. Bismarck himself, of course, declared Germany “saturated” and personally did not seek aggressive wars. But the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine turned Germany’s defensive war of national unity against Napoleon III into fatal aggression. And of course the anti-democratic inner structure of the new Reich, the unshakeable position of power of the Prussian Junker militarism, the extension of its sphere of influence to the whole of Germany, which was becoming more and more Prussian, had to work in this way. Thus, on entering the imperialist age, the objective, immanent dialectics of Bismarck’s empire came into play against Bismarck’s personal will in a manner fatal to the German people.
The tearing up of the Reinsurance Pact with Russia was, albeit unconsciously, albeit often later regretted, albeit never dealt with consistently, the beginning of German imperialist expansion in the direction of the Balkans and Asia Minor, the first step towards the (rejected by Bismarck) imperialist policy of world conquest. Germany ceased to be a “saturated” country. Even the contrast between Bismarck and the young Kaiser on the labor question was touched upon only tentatively and unconsciously, and the steps taken by Wilhelm towards modern social demagogy, the attempt to reconcile the working class with German imperialism, were soon abandoned. Wilhelm II was not fit to carry out anything consistently. His regime is a dazzling and wavering rhetorical dilettantism a la Friedrich Wilhelm IV. But the social content of his reign is already contained in this first conflict. The ideologues of the most varied shades of that time, from revisionism and from Friedrich Naumann to Houston Stewart Chamberlain, continue to work in this direction.
The 1890s bring the latent crisis of the second empire. All classes feel its pressure. The ideological helplessness began long before that. It found expression in the yawning contradiction between the outward political splendor of the Reich and the ideological and artistic low level of Germany since the founding of the Reich. But in this uneasiness, which in the 1890s escalates into a violent but unclear ferment, there is no clear awareness of the condition, let alone its causes. The Anti-Socialist Laws revealed the bankruptcy of primitive Bismarckian Bonapartism. The heroic struggle of the working class in illegality made this class appear as a kind of messiah to many dissatisfied people who were disappointed with the founding of the Reich and the years it was founded with their severe economic crises. In his Emanuel Quint Gerhart Hauptmann describes this state of mind:
“People were seriously counting on a massive, general social collapse, which was to occur no later than the year nineteen hundred and renew the world. Just as the poor rural professionals who had followed in the footsteps of the fool (the hero of Hauptmann’s novel, G. L.) hoped for the millennium and for the new Zion, so and no differently did the socialist circles and those young intelligentsia who were close to their sentiments hoping for the realization of the socialist, social and therefore ideal state of the future ... What one person gave this name and another that name was basically the result of the same strength and longing of the soul for redemption, purity, liberation, happiness and for perfection in general: some called it welfare state, others freedom, others again paradise, thousand-year kingdom or kingdom of heaven.”
The “socialism” of the young generation of writers (Holz, Henckell, Hartleben, Paul Ernst, Wille, Bahr, etc.) grows out of such sentiments. In their eyes, the renewal of literature is only part of the full renewal of human life. The importance of this literary movement is its reflection of the general confusion and obscurity. Its “socialism” is not only vague, ethical and religious-messianic, but is constantly mixed with all sorts of other obscurely fermenting, predominantly reactionary, tendencies marking and preparing the transition of German capitalism to the imperialist period. M. G. Conrad’s journal, Die Gesellschaft, fights for all the “heroes”: for Zola as Tacitus of the Second Empire, for Richard Wagner, Bismarck and Nietzsche, etc.
This overall mood makes it understandable that the repeal of the Anti-Socialist Laws and the founding of the Freie Buehne (the stage and the periodical) became the hubs of the generally political and the specifically literary movement. It is well known that the transition to legality in social democracy caused a severe crisis, which came to a temporary conclusion with the Erfurt Program. The Erfurt Program was intended to give the workers’ party the direction it deserved as the leading party of social progress in Germany after its heroic trials during the time of the Anti-Socialist Laws. On the surface, this problem is solved. The anarchist-messianic revolt of the “young” comes to nothing, the first push of open opportunism (Vollmar) is pushed back. But the German Social Democrats have not understood the essential task, let alone solved it.
As a faithful Ekkehard of Germany’s democratic development, Friedrich Engels saw this danger and urgently warned against it. “What should actually be said is not in it,” he writes in the introduction to his critique of the program. Its essential content is the critique of Germany’s undemocratic development, the illusion that such a country could grow into socialism. As a result of this clear insight into the German situation, Engels characterizes the task of the workers’ party as follows: “And we do not have to undo the revolution made in 1866 and 1870 from above, but to give it the necessary supplement and improvement through a movement from below.” It is therefore a program for the decisive democratization of Germany that Engels was already putting forward at the time, with the demand that social democracy should become the leader of this movement. And, of course, Engels is not satisfied with a formal, liberal, diluted form of democracy, but contrasts the true democracy of 1793 with the Third Republic as the goal to be pursued. According to Engels, the real way to socialism in Germany is only through such a democracy, of the 1793 type. This criticism, however, has only been understood or followed by very few.
The far-reaching lack of understanding on the part of the workers’ party for the problem of democratization in Germany is part of the German tragedy and in turn has a disastrous effect on later German development. The course of German history from the defeat of the 1848 revolution to the founding of the Reich destroyed the bourgeois democracy that had never been very strong. In Bismarck’s period only the last Mohicans of German democracy, who were dying in isolation, lived. The democratic spirit in Germany is weak, with no national tradition. All those who are dissatisfied and who urge opposition to the ruling regime from the liberal side must therefore orient themselves towards the only existing opposition from below, the social democracy. Since the latter was now unable to clarify the concrete tasks of German democracy, Germany’s march towards its imperialist goals had to begin unhindered. There was a large social-democratic party whose numerical strength did not correspond to its political influence.
Around this time, for the first time in the imperialist period, Nietzsche had a broad and deep impact. It is that spiritual power that distracts the young generation not only from socialism, but at the same time from the defense of progress and freedom, democracy.
Above all, Nietzsche is the thinker who has a seductive effect on those honest-minded, progressively oriented German intellectuals in the imperialist age. (A similar role was played by Schopenhauer in the decades following the defeat of the 1848 revolution.) All the anti-democratic tendencies of the imperialist period are reflected in Nietzsche. He is the leading figure of the reaction of this time on a world scale in the spiritual realm. And not only in his direct attacks on democracy, but also in his (rich in excellent observations) psychology, aesthetics, etc. His pernicious effect is increased by the fact that he behaves as a sharp critic of present-day culture, and in this he often does something considerable: achieves that his entire philosophy wraps itself in the pretense and attitude of “revolutionary” innovation, posing as a radical break with past and present.
This peculiarity of Nietzschean philosophy has the effect that the young intelligentsia, who are vaguely searching, often follow his teaching in the belief that they are thereby playing an oppositional, if not even revolutionary role.
Throughout the period to be considered here, Nietzsche never ceases to confuse minds. In all major crises (e.g. World War I and Expressionism) his views on the individual and society distract from the problems of democracy. And later they are of great importance to those intellectuals who, as a result of their ideological confusion, are striving for a transformation of the situation in Germany in the post-war period and do not know where to orientate themselves, whether to the real revolutionary upheaval or to the radical social and national demagogy of extreme reaction. Even in comparatively calm times his psychology, his morals, his aesthetics have an effect on writers of the most diverse camps and tendencies. From Stefan George to Heinrich and Thomas Mann, this influence of Nietzsche can be felt everywhere. Therefore these remarks were necessary in order to make the social topography of the movements in German literature more clearly visible.
We are now returning to the 1890s. At the beginning of this new crisis, the Freie Buehne was founded. Its importance lies in the fact that it gives the aimless, confused oppositional literary movement a footing. It thus acquires a sharply defined physiognomy, its effect goes beyond the literary circles, at least earns them readers in the larger cities and changes the face of all German literature very quickly.
But this is also happening on the basis of a shift away from the broad, if confused, questioning of the Sturm und Drang of the 1890s. The general ideological revolt becomes a literary revolution. It is to the credit of Holz and Schlaf that they theoretically and practically brought the tendency towards natural truth, the rebellion against the unrealistic artificiality of the literature prevailing at the time, into a stylistic form. Otto Brahm creates a stage and a leading publication organ for this literature. Gerhart Hauptmann’s works give the naturalistic literary revolution a general national significance.
Not just them alone, of course. At the same time as Hauptmann, and immediately after him, a number of talented young writers appeared on the scene. Their successful penetration is the triumph of a new literary principle, the sign of a new phase in German literature. After a pause of decades, a literature of international renown is emerging in Germany again. Of course, many writers from before the founding of the Reich survived this turning point. (Gottfried Keller died in 1890, but Gustav Freytag lived until 1895, C. F. Meyer until 1898, Wilhelm Raabe even until 1911.) Their main works, however, have their roots in a long-ago period, and even where they create great things, they can look back on the decline of 1870 to 1890 without giving a positive impression, precisely because they remain completely alien to their inner being at this time. Certainly no direct threads lead from them to the new upsurge in literature.
Nevertheless, the depth of the upheaval in the 1890s is reflected in the fact that at least one important writer from the period immediately before and after the 1848 revolution experienced a new youth and thereby became an important historical figure: the old Theodor Fontane. We can only speak of the old Fontane here, because the tracing of the path he took to become the gifted, imitative ballad poet of the 1850s, the poetic glorifier of old Prussianism and the first big city storyteller in Germany is beyond the scope of this outline. His age did not have to be mentioned for biographical reasons either (his strongest novels were written between the ages of sixty-five and eighty), but because his narrative art, although growing out of this period of crisis, forms a towering peak in the literature of this time. In terms of style and in terms of attitude, however, he is far removed from the decisive literary tendencies of naturalism. Fontarre is both a concluding late figure of mid-century German epic and a critical and practical comrade-in-arms of the literary upheaval of the 1890s. Inwardly he belongs to the older generation because he only took part in the social and ideological crisis of the 1890s insofar as he poetically rejuvenated himself in its tendencies towards a realistic depiction of contemporary society and, for the first time in his life, really finds himself established as a writer. But the messianic excitement of the new generation passes him by; both the social and even more so the naturalistic-artistic. There is no trace of the naturalistic dissolution of style in his work, neither in the composition, which for all its artful nonchalance, for all its consciously relaxed nature, is deeply rooted in the traditions of the middle of the century, nor in the language, which balances its truthfulness with authenticity of content and intonation and never comes close to imitating immediate everyday speech.
Given this distance from naturalism, Fontane’s subjective and objective connection with the literary movement of the 1890s is decisive and deep. It lies in the field of a ruthlessly true-to-life and critical portrayal of society, in capturing the poetry of the German metropolis that was emerging at the time. For Fontane’s older and younger contemporaries, old Germany still determines the subject matter and style of representation. The capitalist epoch after 1870 is either ignored or appears as an elegiac and satirical intruder and destroyer (Wilhelm Raabe). The narrator Fontane, on the other hand, has his feet firmly planted in this new metropolitan reality. He accepts her victory over the old, he tries – with great success – to free her immanent poetry and to let it coagulate into a new form.
This unconditional settling into the new reality does not mean that he behaves uncritically towards it. It means only that the standard of criticism is not taken from the declining old world, but grows organically out of the social and individual psychology, out of the moral conflicts of contemporary people. And in this criticism the old Fontane essentially goes much further than his younger comrades-in-arms, in part because his skepticism is remote from their social messianism. His slow development into an important social critic and social portrayer coincides with the process of his gradual disenchantment with Prussianism, to which he had fled in the depressive years after 1848.
Of course, according to his conscious convictions, Fontane is never an oppositional democrat. But the experiences of a long life, in which he witnessed the growth and the dying of the Bismarckian system at close quarters, lead him to a deep, far-reaching, devastating critique of the human content behind the staunchly militaristic or level-headed in the shaping of ethical conflicts, something that was hidden from the bureaucratic attitude of the Prussians of his time. (How much the consequences of this criticism went beyond Fontane’s conscious political views cannot be examined here.)
Fontane was the first German writer to discover that the social and moral system of commandments in the Prussian upper class functioned only as a dead and killing automatism, that it no longer had any inner direction-giving power in the human soul. Accordingly, Fontane’s best stories contain private destinies in which the simplest and most elementary demands of human life come up against the limits of this automatism. The skeptic Fontane sees clearly that in such clashes human beings must inevitably perish, outwardly and inwardly, or at least inwardly. Namely to social imperatives, which they are forced to obey, but which for them have already lost any convincing moral dignity. The life-destroying, inhuman character of Prussianism is unmasked here in a purely narrative manner, without pathetic or satirical indignation, but with deep psychology and great moral sensitivity.
We repeat: according to his conscious political convictions, Fontane is not a democrat. But he is as a designer. For he sees that this inhumanity is rooted in the class-determined being of the Prussian ruling class, that the moral nihilism that comes to light here and is concealed by tightness is completely foreign to the people themselves. So when his plebeian figures get into conflicting relationships with this world, they can become victims and lose their happiness in life. But they show a moral superiority, which Fontane never expresses in acts of opposition or even rebellion, but whose human preponderance he consciously and energetically emphasizes (Frau Pittelkow in Stine, Lene Nimptsch in Errungen, Wirhrungen, Roswitha Gellenbogen in Effi Briest etc.).
Only once does Fontane lift the veil that otherwise covers the social consequences of his skepticism – probably also for himself: in the historical story Schach von Wuthenow. In this small masterpiece, one of the few products of German epic poetry with real depth in grasping of history, the uncovering of the human background of the Prussian attitude in private life grows into an inner prehistory of the Battle of Jena, into the unmasking of “an army that instead of honor only has conceit and instead of soul only clockwork”. But since Fontane’s heroes from the Prussian upper class show the same mental structure as the representatives of the Prussian army on the eve of Jena, only that their moral nihilism has progressed further, the conclusions from the work of his late period (may they have remained hidden from him personally) are easy to pull.
It is easy to see how the crisis of the 1880s and 1890s triggered this high level of realistic art in old Fontane. It is even easier to understand that even as a critic he became a pioneer of literary renewal. He fought resolutely for Ibsen, albeit with reservations about his morally Romantic utopianism. He used all his authority to make the young Hauptmann’s entry into German literature victorious.
The old Fontane saw this more clearly than most of the contemporary critics. Because only with the work of the young Hauptmann – apart from Fontane himself – did the naturalistic movement temporarily grow beyond the all too narrow literary boundaries of the free stage and point again in the direction of a great, national literature. The young Hauptmann brings with him what the longing of the 1880s demanded: proximity to the lively life of the present, creation of flesh and blood people who speak our language, an art close to the people, in which the great problems of the epoch find shape. That this Hauptmann achieved only in two works, in the Weavers and in the Biberpelz, does not change anything in the historical significance of his youthful deed.
The artistic maturity of the young Hauptmann is astounding, as is his poetic tact of limitation in these two works: on the one hand, a revolt of longing without clear goals (the weavers’ revolt of the 1840s), on the other hand, the partisan warfare of the lower classes against the outdated and corrupted upper class. Ultimately, however, the limitation lies in his time, in Germany at that time; his poetic tact consisted in creating whatever was possible within this framework. As soon as he strives higher, he must fail. Florian Geyer: a movement of world-historical tragedy, the failure of Germany on the threshold of the transition from the Middle Ages to modern times. Hauptmann did not grasp the deep historical dialectic of his material. He only gives the mood of the tragic in the milieu and in the purely human size: the downfall of a person who wants the pure, poetically great. And the expansion of the petty war from below and above into a permanent and latent struggle across the board (as the great French and Russians often did) also fails in Red Rooster.
His beautiful poetic qualities remain effective for a long time, but they only suffice to depict people’s being lost in life, their being crushed by life. The basis of their longing for human existence is only weakly illustrated in concrete society. A clarification and expansion of the foundations of the tragedy did not occur in Hauptmann under the conditions of German development. And his ideological deepening drives on the one hand into the purely private and individual, on the other hand and at the same time into a vacuum of mere abstraction. Compare the poetically beautiful, psychologically often deep Emanuel Quint with Pontoppidan’s Gelobtes Land, where a very similar theme is treated, and you will not only see the Dane’s greater wealth of knowledge of social structures and regulations, but also see how this makes the tragedy of the main hero richer and more concrete than in Hauptmann. With the attempt to grow beyond his original emotional base, Hauptmann loses everything that gives direction.