John George Robertson

“ Der Traum, ein Leben was the first of Grillparzer’s dramas which did not end tragically, and in 1838 he produced his only comedy, Weh’ dem, der lügt. But Weh’ dem, der lügt, in spite of its humour of situation, its sparkling dialogue and the originality of its idea—namely, that the hero gains his end by invariably telling the truth, where his enemies as invariably expect him to be lying—was too strange to meet with approval in its day. Its failure was a blow to the poet, who turned his back for ever on the German theatre. ”

“ Most disheartening of all, literature which in the 16th century had been so full of promise and had conformed with such aptitude to the new ideas, was in all its higher manifestations blighted by the dead hand of pseudo-classicism. The unkempt literature of the Reformation age admittedly stood in need of guidance and discipline, but the 17th century made the fatal mistake of trying to impose the laws and rules of Romance literatures on a people of a purely Germanic stock. ”

“ More or less common to all is the consciousness that their own ideas and surroundings were no longer in harmony with the aristocratic world of chivalry, which the poets of the previous generation had glorified. The solid advantages, material prosperity and increasing comfort of life in the German towns appealed to poets like Steinmar von Klingenau more than the unworldly ideals of self-effacing knighthood which Ulrich von Lichtenstein and Johann Hadlaub of Zürich clung to so tenaciously and extolled so warmly. ”

“ It was the best testimony to the vitality of the movement that it rarely descended to slavish imitation of the realistic masterpieces of other literatures; realism in Germany was, in fact, only an episode of the ’eighties, a stimulating influence rather than an accepted principle or dogma. And its suggestive character is to be seen not merely in the writings of the young Stürmer und Dränger of this time, but also in those of the older generation who, in temperament, were naturally more inclined to the ideals of a past age. ”

“ While Schiller, like Lessing before him, insisted on the critic’s right to sit in judgment according to a definite code of principles, these Romantic critics maintained that the first duty of criticism was to understand and appreciate; the right of genius to follow its natural bent was sacred. ”

“ At no period of German letters were literature and the theatre in closer touch than at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries; more than at any previous time has the theatre become the arena in which the literary battles of the day are fought out. ”

“ The social condition of Europe had been profoundly altered by the French Revolution; the rise of industrialism had created new economic problems, the march of science had overturned old prejudices. And in a still higher degree were the ideas which lay behind the social upheaval of the July revolution incompatible with a reversion in Germany to the conditions of Weimar classicism. There was, moreover, no disguising the fact that Goethe himself did not stand high with the younger generation of German writers who came into power after his death. ”

“ The Church had no helping hand to offer poetry, as in the more liberal epoch of the great Charles; for, at the middle of the 11th century, when the linguistic change from Old to Middle High German was taking place, a movement of religious asceticism, originating in the Burgundian monastery of Cluny, spread across Europe, and before long all the German peoples fell under its influence. For a century there was no room for any literature that did not place itself unreservedly at the service of the Church, a service which meant the complete abnegation of the brighter side of life. ”

“ Romanticism was essentially conciliatory in its tendencies, that is to say, it aimed at a reconciliation of poetry with other provinces of social and intellectual life; the hard and fast boundaries which the older critics had set up as to what poetry might and might not do, were put aside, and the domain of literature was regarded as co-extensive with life itself; painting and music, philosophy and ethics, were all accepted as constituent elements of or aids to Romantic poetry. ”

“ The 17th century in Germany presents a complete contrast to its predecessor; the fact that it was the century of the Thirty Years’ War, which devastated the country, crippled the prosperity of the towns, and threw back by many generations the social development of the people, explains much, but it can hardly be held entirely responsible for the intellectual apathy, the slavery to foreign customs and foreign ideas, which stunted the growth of the nation. ”

“ His Tristan is even more lucid than Hartmann’s Iwein, his art is more objective; his delight in it is that of the conscious artist who sees his work growing under his hands. Gottfried’s poem, in other words, is free from the obtrusion of those subjective elements which are in so high a degree characteristic of Parzival; in spite of the tragic character of the story, Tristan is radiant and serene, and yet uncontaminated by that tone of frivolity which the Renaissance introduced into love stories of this kind. ”

“ As a poet, Freiligrath was the most gifted member of the German revolutionary group. Coming at the very close of the Romantic age, his own purely lyric poetry re-echoes for the most part the familiar thoughts and imagery of his Romantic predecessors; but at an early age he had been attracted by the work of French contemporary poets, and he reinvigorated the German lyric by grafting upon it the orientalism of Victor Hugo. In this reconciliation of French and German romanticism lay Freiligrath’s significance for the development of the lyric in Germany. ”

“ On the whole, the form of literature which succeeded best in emancipating itself from the trammels of religious controversy in the 16th century was the drama. Protestantism proved favourable to its intellectual and literary development, and the humanists, who had always prided themselves on their imitations of Latin comedy, introduced into it a sense for form and proportion. ”

“ The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries.—As is the case with all transitional periods of literary history, this epoch of German literature may be considered under two aspects: on the one hand, we may follow in it the decadence and disintegration of the literature of the Middle High German period; on the other, we may study the beginnings of modern forms of poetry and the preparation of that spiritual revolution, which meant hardly less to the Germanic peoples than the Renaissance to the Latin races—the Protestant Reformation. ”

“ More than any single poet of the Court epic, more even than the poet of the Nibelungenlied, Walther von der Vogelweide summed up in himself all that was best in the group of poetic literature with which he was associated—the Minnesang. The early Austrian singers already mentioned, poets like Heinrich von Veldeke, who in his lyrics, as in his epic, introduced the French conception of Minne, or like the manly Friedrich von Hausen, and the Swiss imitator of Provençal measures, Rudolf von Fenis appear only in the light of forerunners. ”

“ Nietzsche had begun as a disciple of Schopenhauer and a friend of Wagner, and he ultimately became the champion of an individualistic and optimistic philosophy which formed the sharpest possible contrast to mid-century pessimism. The individual, not the race, the Herrenmensch, not the slave, self-assertion, not self-denying renunciation—these are some of the ideas round which this new optimistic ethics turns. ”

“ Der Traum, ein Leben, Grillparzer’s technical masterpiece, is in form perhaps even more Spanish; it is also more of what Goethe called a “confession.” The aspirations of Rustan, an ambitious young peasant, are shadowed forth in the hero’s dream, which takes up nearly three acts of the play; ultimately Rustan awakens from his nightmare to realize the truth of Grillparzer’s own pessimistic doctrine that all earthly ambitions and aspirations are vanity; the only true happiness is contentment with one’s lot, “des Innern stiller Frieden und die schuldbefreite Brust.” ”

“ The first place among the National or Popular epics belongs to the Nibelungenlied, which received its present form in Austria about the turn of the 12th and 13th centuries. Combining, as it does, elements from various cycles of sagas—the lower Rhenish legend of Siegfried, the Burgundian saga of Gunther and Hagen, the Gothic saga of Dietrich and Etzel—it stands out as the most representative epic of German medieval life. And in literary power, dramatic intensity and singleness of purpose its eminence is no less unique. ”

“ Herder convinced him that there was more genuine poetry in a simple Volkslied than in all the ingenuity of the German imitators of Horace or Anacreon; above all, he awakened his enthusiasm for Shakespeare. The pamphlet Von deutscher Art und Kunst (1773) , to which, besides Goethe and Herder, the historian Justus Möser (1720–1794) also contributed, may be regarded as the manifesto of the Sturm und Drang. The effect on Goethe of the new ideas was instantaneous; they seemed at once to set his genius free, and from 1771 to 1775 he was extraordinarily fertile in poetic ideas and creations. ”

“ Whether or not the work that has been produced in such rich measure since the year 1889—or however much of it—is to be regarded as a permanent addition to the storehouse of German national literature, there can be no question of the serious artistic earnestness of the writers; the conditions for the production of literature in the German empire in the early years of the 20th century were eminently healthy, and herein lies the best promise for the future. ”

“ Just as in the previous generation the Sturm und Drang had been obliged to make way for a return to classic and impersonal principles of literary composition, so now the classicism of Goethe and Schiller, which had produced masterpieces like Wallenstein and Hermann und Dorothea, had to yield to a revival of individualism and subjectivity, which, in the form of Romanticism, profoundly influenced the literature of the whole 19th century. ”

“ As Opitz had reformed German letters with the help of Ronsard, so now Gottsched took his standpoint on the principles of Boileau as interpreted by contemporary French critics and theorists. With Gottsched, whose services in purifying the German language have stood the test of time better than his literary or dramatic reforms, the period of German Renaissance literature reaches its culmination and at the same time its close. The movement of the age advanced too rapidly for the Leipzig dictator; in 1740 a new epoch opened in German poetry and he was soon left hopelessly behind. ”

“ Even more original poets, like Heinrich von Morungen and Walther’s own master, Reinmar von Hagenau, the author of harmonious but monotonously elegiac verses, or among immediate contemporaries, Hartmann von Aue and Wolfram von Eschenbach, whose few lyric strophes are as deeply stamped with his individuality as his epics—seem only tributary to the full rich stream of Walther’s genius. There was not a form of the German Minnesang which Walther did not amplify and deepen ”

“ In practical politics and economics, when once the unbalanced vagaries of undiluted Rousseauism had fallen into discredit, Germany produced much wise and temperate thinking which prevented the spread of the French Revolution to Germany, and provided a practical basis on which the social and political fabric could be built up anew, after the Revolution had made the old régime impossible in Europe. ”

“ A marked change came over the nation’s attitude towards Goethe, a poet to whom, as we have seen, neither the era of Hegel nor that of Schopenhauer had been favourable; Schiller was regarded with less national prejudice, and—most important of all—amends were made by the new generation for the earlier neglect of Kleist, Grillparzer, Hebbel and Keller.
The thinker and poet who most completely embodies the spirit of this period—who dealt the Hegelian metaphysics its death-blow as far as its wider influence was concerned—was Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) . ”

“ He laid under contribution the rich Renaissance literature with which the humanistic translators had flooded Germany, and he became himself an ardent champion of the “Wittembergisch Nachtigall” Luther. But in the progressive movement of the German drama he played an even smaller rôle than his Swiss and Saxon contemporaries; for his tragedies and comedies are deficient in all dramatic qualities; they are only stories in dialogue. In the Fastnachtsspiele, where dramatic form is less essential than anecdotal point and brevity, he is to be seen at his best. ”

“ Whether the latest movement in German poetry and fiction, which, under the catchword Heimatkunst, has favoured the province rather than the city, the dialect in preference to the language of the educated classes, will prove a permanent gain, it is still too soon to say, but the movement is at least a protest against the decadent tendencies of naturalism. ”

“ Romanticism became the cloak for a kind of Neo-catholicism, and Romantic politics, as enunciated by men like F. von Gentz (1764–1832) and Adam Müller (1779–1829) , served as an apology for the Metternich régime in Austria. Only at the universities—in Göttingen, Heidelberg and Berlin—did the movement continue, in the best sense, to be productive; German philology, German historical science and German jurisprudence benefited by Romantic ideas, long after Romantic poetry had fallen into decay. ”

“ Martin Luther (1483–1546) , Germany’s greatest man in this age of intellectual new-birth, demands a larger share of attention in a survey of literature than his religious and ecclesiastical activity would in itself justify, if only because the literary activity of the age cannot be regarded apart from him. From the Volkslied and the popular Schwank to satire and drama, literature turned exclusively round the Reformation which had been inaugurated on the 31st of October 1517 by Luther’s publication of the Theses against Indulgences in Wittenberg. ”