Nationalism before the Nation State: Literary Constructions of Inclusion, Exclusion, and Self-Definition (1756-1871) 9004366830, 9789004366831

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: Nationalism before the Nation State • Dagmar Paulus and Ellen Pilsworth
Part 1: Eighteenth-Century Debates and Dilemmas
1 Johann Joachim Spalding’s 1778 Kriegs-Gebeth: Church Prayers (Kirchengebete), War Prayers (Kriegsgebete), and the Patriotic and National Discourse in Late Eighteenth-Century Germany • Johannes Birgfeld
2 Enlightenment Dilemmas: Nationalism and War in Rudolph Zacharias Becker’s Mildheimisches Liederbuch (1799/1815) • Ellen Pilsworth
Part 2: Germany and “Other” Stories: Defining the Nation from Outside
3 “No sensuous requirement that might not be satisfied here to surfeit”: Heinrich von Kleist and Friedrich Schlegel Constructing the German Nation in Paris • Caroline Mannweiler
4 Femininity, Nation, and Nature: Fanny Tarnow’s Letters to Friends from a Journey to Petersburg (1819) • Dagmar Paulus
Part 3: German-Jewish Voices in the Nationalism Debate
5 Jews for Germany: Nineteenth-Century Jewish-German Intellectuals and the Shaping of German National Discourse • Anita Bunyan
6 Moses Hess: One Socialist Proto-Zionist’s Reception of Nationalisms in the Nineteenth Century • Alex Marshall
Part 4: Looking Back, Looking
7 Nationalism, Regionalism, and Liberalism in the Literary Representation of the Anti-Napoleonic “Wars of Liberation,” 1813–71 • Dirk Göttsche
8 Learning from France: Ludwig Börne in the 1830s • Ernest Schonfield
Index

Citation preview

Nationalism before the Nation State

National Cultivation of Culture Edited by Joep Leerssen (University of Amsterdam) Editorial Board John Breuilly (The London School of Economics and Political Science) Katharine Ellis (University of Cambridge) Ina Ferris (University of Ottawa) Patrick J. Geary (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton) Tom Shippey (Saint Louis University) Anne-Marie Thiesse (cnrs, National Center for Scientific Research)

volume 22

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ncc

Nationalism before the Nation State Literary Constructions of Inclusion, Exclusion, and Self-Definition (1756–1871)

Edited by

Dagmar Paulus Ellen Pilsworth

leiden | boston

Cover illustration: Georg Friedrich Kersting, Auf Vorposten (The Outpost), painting, 1815. Source: Public domain The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2019059349

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 1876-5645 ISBN 978-90-04-36683-1 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-42610-8 (e-book) Copyright 2020 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Acknowledgments  vii List of Illustrations  viii Notes on Contributors  iX Introduction: Nationalism before the Nation State  1 Dagmar Paulus and Ellen Pilsworth

Part 1 Eighteenth-Century Debates and Dilemmas 1 Johann Joachim Spalding’s 1778 Kriegs-Gebeth: Church Prayers (Kirchengebete), War Prayers (Kriegsgebete), and the Patriotic and National Discourse in Late Eighteenth-Century Germany  9 Johannes Birgfeld 2 Enlightenment Dilemmas: Nationalism and War in Rudolph Zacharias Becker’s Mildheimisches Liederbuch (1799/1815)  32 Ellen Pilsworth

Part 2 Germany and “Other” Stories: Defining the Nation from Outside 3 “No sensuous requirement that might not be satisfied here to surfeit”: Heinrich von Kleist and Friedrich Schlegel Constructing the German Nation in Paris  57 Caroline Mannweiler 4 Femininity, Nation, and Nature: Fanny Tarnow’s Letters to Friends from a Journey to Petersburg (1819)  76 Dagmar Paulus

vi

Contents

Part 3 German-Jewish Voices in the Nationalism Debate 5 Jews for Germany: Nineteenth-Century Jewish-German Intellectuals and the Shaping of German National Discourse  99 Anita Bunyan 6 Moses Hess: One Socialist Proto-Zionist’s Reception of Nationalisms in the Nineteenth Century  121 Alex Marshall

Part 4 Looking Back, Looking Forward: Nineteenth-Century Contests of Memory and Progress 7 Nationalism, Regionalism, and Liberalism in the Literary Representation of the Anti-Napoleonic “Wars of Liberation,” 1813–71  147 Dirk Göttsche 8 Learning from France: Ludwig Börne in the 1830s  171 Ernest Schonfield Index  195

Acknowledgments Our thanks go to each of the contributors to this volume, as well as to all who participated in the conference at University College London in 2017, from which this book takes its title. We are grateful to University College London for funding that conference, and to the University of Reading for generous financial assistance during the final stage of this book’s publication. We would also like to thank colleagues at University College London, the University of Bristol, and the University of Reading for their support throughout this process. In particular, thanks go to Professor Susanne Kord for her ­encouragement at the conference stage, to Professor Robert Vilain for advice on our book proposal, and to Dr Sophie Payne for compiling the index. Finally, we thank the team at Brill for their assistance at all stages of publication.

Illustrations Figures 1.1

1.2

4.1

Johann Joachim Spalding: Kriegs-Gebeth, anonymous print most likely from 1778, front side. Source: Original document in the private property of the author  21­ Johann Joachim Spalding: Kriegs-Gebeth, anonymous print most likely from 1778, reverse side. Source: Original document in the private property of the author  22 The Styrian Tableau of Nationalities, early eighteenth century. Source: Public domain  83

Table 2.1 The texts contributed by Becker in Mildheimisches Liederbuch (1799 and 1815). Source: Häntzschel’s list of contributors in Mildheimisches Liederbuch: Faksimiledruck (47*)  39

Notes on Contributors Johannes Birgfeld studied in Hamburg, London, and Bamberg, before completing his Ph.D. at the University of Saarbrücken in 2009. This work was printed in 2012 as Krieg und Aufklärung, a two-volume study of German speaking literature’s reaction to war experiences between 1700 and 1800. He has taught German literature after 1500 at the universities of Bamberg (1999–2003), Oxford (2006/07), and ­Saarbrücken (2003–present). His main areas of research are German literature of the eighteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, war and literature in the eighteenth century, and the history of theatre and drama in German from 1500 to today. He has published on a wide spectrum of writers and issues. Anita Bunyan is a Fellow and Director of Studies in Modern Languages at Gonville and ­Caius College, Cambridge. She works on Modern Jewish-German and JewishAustrian cultural history and has published most recently on nineteenth-­ century authors such as Heinrich Heine and Berthold Auerbach, and on contemporary writers Henryk Broder and Robert and Eva Menasse. Dirk Göttsche is Professor of German at the University of Nottingham; Dr phil Münster 1986 (Die Produktivität der Sprachkrise in der modernen Prosa, 1987), Habilitation Münster 1999 (Zeit im Roman: Literarische Zeitreflexion und die Geschichte des Zeitromans im späten 18. und im 19. Jahrhundert, 2001). He is a member of the Academia Europaea, Honorary President of the International Raabe-Society, and Principal Investigator of the Leverhulme International Research Network “Landscapes of Realism: Rethinking Literary Realism(s) in Global Comparative Perspective” (2016–19). Further book publications include: Zeitreflexion und Zeitkritik im Werk Wilhelm Raabes (2000), Kleine Prosa in Moderne und Gegenwart (2006), Remembering Africa: The Rediscovery of Colonialism in Contemporary German Literature (2013), Realism and Romanticism in German Literature (ed. with Nicholas Saul, 2013), Raabe-Handbuch: Leben – Werk – Wirkung (ed. with Florian Krobb and Rolf Parr, 2016), Handbuch Postkolonialismus und Literatur (ed. with Axel Dunker and Gabriele Dürbeck, 2017). Caroline Mannweiler After earning her Ph.D. with a thesis on Samuel Beckett’s oeuvre (L’éthique becketienne et sa réalisation dans la forme), Caroline Mannweiler joined the

x

Notes on Contributors

Department of Comparative Literature at the Gutenberg Institute for World Literature and Written Media at the University of Mainz. She has published on (amongst others) Friedrich Schlegel’s reception of Diderot, on Kleist’s Marionettentheater and its echoes in Beckett’s dramatic work, as well as on Goethe’s concept of Weltliteratur. Her current research focuses on scientific translations (particularly German-French) in France in the eighteenth century. Alex Marshall studied French and German at the University of Edinburgh, and on graduating taught English as a Foreign Language for three years, which he has continued intermittently. He studied for his Master’s degree and then a doctorate in ­German at the University of Oxford, entitled Die uralte moderne Lösung: Nation, Space and Modernity in Austro-German Zionism before 1917. He has now taken up a Lectureship in German with TESOL at Sheffield Hallam University. Dagmar Paulus is a Senior Teaching Fellow in German Studies at University College London, UK. She received her Ph.D. in German Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK, in 2013, and her MA at the Humboldt-Universität Berlin. Her first book, Abgesang auf den Helden: Geschichte und Gedächtnispolitik in Wilhelm Raabes historischem Erzählen, was published in 2014. Other publications include contributions to the Storm and Raabe Handbooks and various articles on German Realism and nationalism. Her areas of expertise include nineteenth-century German literature, cultural memory, nationalism, and travel writing. Ellen Pilsworth is Lecturer in German and Translation Studies at the University of Reading. Her doctoral thesis (University College London, 2017) explored German war poetry between 1760 and 1815. Her current research interests include Romanticism, “1968” in Germany, and anti-fascism in Germany, Austria, and Britain. Ernest Schonfield is Lecturer in German at the University of Glasgow. His research interests include Vormärz literature (Heine, Büchner) and modern German novels ­(Fontane, Thomas Mann, Bachmann, Özdamar). His most recent publication is Business Rhetoric in German Novels: From Buddenbrooks to the Global Corporation (2018).

Introduction: Nationalism before the Nation State Dagmar Paulus and Ellen Pilsworth Over the past years, it has become only too clear that nationalism is far from dead in the political landscape of the global North. At the time of writing this introduction, for instance, a nationalist and openly xenophobic party, the ­Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), has become a relevant political force in the German federal and regional parliaments for the first time since 1945. In 2016, the UK decided in a referendum to leave the European Union, following a public “Leave”-campaign which was significantly fuelled by a desire to reduce immigration. Across Europe, the success of right-wing parties in countries such as France, the Netherlands, Italy, Hungary, Poland, and Austria indicates that nationalism is on the rise again. No doubt at least partly in response to the challenges of a globalised world, countries and people across Europe and beyond seem increasingly to believe that they are better off on their own. In light of these events, the questions of how nationalism arises, what shape it takes, and what we can learn from its history gain a new relevance. This ­volume, based on a 2017 conference in London, aims to deepen our understanding of the history of German nationalism. We do not focus primarily on historiography, but on the representation of nationalism in eighteenth and nineteenth-century German culture and literature. Literature is not produced in a vacuum. On the contrary, it often reflects the major political and social debates of its own epoch, and also plays a role in the construction of dominant ideologies. The study of literature, therefore, provides an alternative way of looking at historical events, as well as offering a comparative perspective on contemporary issues. But what is nationalism? In the current climate of growing nationalism and populism in so many societies around the world, it is important to understand its roots and history—not only in its political phenotypes such as states, but also in its underlying ideologies and thought patterns. While German nationalism in the twentieth century has been the object of much scholarly inte­ rest, this volume explores the phenomenon during the time before a German nation state existed. The German nation had been imagined long before it took political shape in 1871, and nationalism is not merely a political force, but also an emotional and cultural phenomenon that has been embraced by both the left and the right throughout history. From our perspective today, it is important to remember that nationalism was seen by many as a progressive and

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004426108_002

2

Paulus and Pilsworth

l­iberal idea in German thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The e­ ighteenth-century philosopher and theologian Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), for example, presented nationalism theoretically as popular, rather than elitist, democratic, rather than authoritarian, and unifying, rather than exclusionary. As it developed, the concept of a German national identity was always profoundly influenced by other defining personal characteristics and beliefs, such as religious affiliations, regional and class loyalties, and even gender. On the other hand, as our title implies, national identities were also ­constructed ex negativo, that is, by defining the nation in contrast to foreign others—a line of thinking which can lead (and has in practice often led) to chauvinism, xenophobia, and isolationism. Rather than presenting the history of one single German national identity as a straightforward trajectory, therefore, the contributions in this volume point towards an intersectionality in which ideas of nation compete with and co-exist alongside other forms of identity. There are complex changes over time as well. Individuals and groups responded differently to the concept of German nationalism before and after the French Revolution, for example. Ultimately, through its focus on written literature rather than political his­tory, this volume illustrates the process by which national identities are c­ onstructed— often retrospectively—and given permanence through cultural memory. Far from being naturally determined (though some eighteenth-­century thinkers such as Herder argued otherwise, along lines employed by today’s far-right; see Speltz 2018), nations are now understood to be collectively “imagined,” and their traditions “invented” (Anderson 1983; Hobsbawm/Ranger 1992). We have organised the chapters in this book to form four main parts in roughly chronological order, each handling a different aspect of German nationalism and its development. Part One contains chapters which deal with approaches to nationalism in the long eighteenth century. Birgfeld’s chapter opens by evaluating a number of different definitions of the term “nation” in the late eighteenth century and ca. 1800. He investigates a war time church prayer produced during the time of the Bavarian Wars of Succession, sugges­ ting this conflict provides a “missing link” in the story of nationalism, which otherwise tends to skip from the Seven Years’ War straight to the Revolu­ tionary  and Napoleonic Wars. As well as providing insights into this under-­ researched conflict, Birgfeld also shows the degree to which middle-class wri­ ters, including religious thinkers, were often encouraged to “toe the party line” in matters of nationalism. Moreover, his study also shows that audiences were often critical of this kind of state manipulation, particularly when it seemed to undermine their Christian values.

Introduction

3

The perceived clash of certain elements of nationalist thinking with aspects of Enlightened Christian morality is investigated further in Pilsworth’s chapter, through the example of the pedagogue Rudolph Zacharias Becker. Despite his enlightened and religious idealism, he was forced to address nationalist arguments and rhetoric within his educational publications. Puzzlingly, the second edition of his pedagogical songbook Mildheimisches Liederbuch included a good deal of aggressively anti-French material, even though his other writings and his personal memoirs reflect rather the opposite approach to militarism and nationalism. Together, these two opening chapters explore not only the role of eighteenth-century religious discourse in forming nationalist projects, but also the inherent tensions between them, which were often unresolved. In Part Two, the chapters’ focus shifts from within Germany to those consi­ dering German nationalism and national identity from outside its borders. Mannweiler’s study of Kleist’s and Schlegel’s writings on Paris (1801/03) shows the degree to which France was seen as both inspiration and nightmare for nationalist and social developments in Germany in this period, in particular by focusing on their critique of capitalism and modernism in Paris. The chapter by Paulus explores the German view on Russia, analysing travel writing by Fanny Tarnow (1819). As well as revealing the intersection of gender and national identity in Tarnow’s literary construction of her own self in the letters, Paulus also explores how established national stereotypes and even interpretations of nature inform her construction of the “Others” she encounters on her journey. Part Three turns back to voices within Germany, putting a spotlight on German-Jewish contributors to the debates around nationalism in the nineteenth century. As Bunyan points out in her chapter, histories of German nationalism tend to treat Jews as the objects of nationalist discourse (especially as the victims of anti-Semitism), even though many Jewish writers actively participated in debates around German nationalism. Bunyan’s chapter explores the conflicting approaches taken by Ludwig Börne, Moritz Hauptmann, and Berthold Auerbach to the question, after 1848, of how political freedom from an oppressive aristocracy could be achieved without sacrificing the goal of national unity. While Hauptmann and Auerbach initially supported national unity at the cost of a more liberal political agenda, Börne saw far earlier the path that nationalism can take towards anti-Semitism, and was thus far more critical of the nationalist movement between 1848 and 1871, which failed to achieve greater civic freedom and maintained traditional, despotic power structures. Marshall’s chapter then contextualises the arguments of socialist writer ­Moses Hess for a Jewish state in Palestine, seeing these partly as a reaction to

4

Paulus and Pilsworth

the very anti-Semitic developments which Börne had predicted, but also as drawing on inspiration from the success of the nationalist movement in Italy which had achieved political independence from the Austrian Empire. Overall, we see again and again that debates of nationalism are influenced by examples from other national struggles, and that the co-existence of multiple identities (whether of gender or ethnicity) complicate and enrich the tapestry of “nationalisms” presented in the writings of this period. In this volume’s final section, we include two chapters which show authors reflecting on the development of nationalism both retrospectively and in ­anticipation of the future. Göttsche’s chapter demonstrates that there was no immediate consensus on how to record the so-called “Wars of Liberation” in ­German cultural memory. In fact, it would take decades for the narrative of these wars as a crucial and glorious turning point in the history of the German nation to take a lasting hold. As Göttsche shows, early reactions and responses to these wars were far more complex than that long-dominant narrative of a united national uprising suggests, although this is frequently still referred to in the historiography of nationalism. Like Mannweiler’s contribution, Schonfield’s chapter complicates the image of a united German nation still further by exploring the degree to which some Germans looked to France as a model for desirable, progressive social change in their own country. Ludwig Börne’s Briefe aus Paris (Letters from Paris) and his polemical text Menzel der Franzosenfresser (Menzel: He Eats French People) offer a harsh rebuke to conservative forms of German patriotism, which, as Börne argued, were maintained in the service of the rich and powerful at the expense of the poor. Börne’s contributions to the debate on nationalism in the 1830s preceded the writings of Marx and Engels, although they make many of the same observations about the link between nationalism and entrenched class hierarchies. Together, Göttsche and Schonfield illustrate that the role of France in the forming of German nationalism of the 1830s was viewed from a number of different, competing perspectives even at the time. Taken together, is it our hope that the chapters collected here can lead to further and more nuanced studies of nationalism in Germany, both in this early period and beyond. It is ironic that the influences of other countries and cultures (e.g. France and Russia in the chapters outlined above) should have played such an important role in the defining of Germanness and German national identity. Perhaps this, more than anything else, is one of the key lessons to take with us from the study of German nationalism between 1756–1871 into the twenty-first century: that no nation or nationality exists in isolation from others.

Introduction

5

Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of ­Nationalism. Verso, 1983. Hobsbawm, Eric and Terence Ranger, editors. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge UP, 1992. Speltz, Andrea. “Hands off Herder: The New Right’s Appropriation of an EighteenthCentury Cultural Theorist,” Publications of the English Goethe Society, vol. 87, no. 2, 2018, pp. 110–20.

Part 1 Eighteenth-Century Debates and Dilemmas

∵

Chapter 1

Johann Joachim Spalding’s 1778 Kriegs-Gebeth: Church Prayers (Kirchengebete), War Prayers (Kriegsgebete), and the Patriotic and National Discourse in Late Eighteenth-Century Germany Johannes Birgfeld 1

Nation, “Vaterland,” and Patriotism

In the first half of the eighteenth century, the German concept of a nation was  rather broad. In 1740 Zedler’s Universal-Lexikon defines it as “eine-vereinigte ­Anzahl Bürger, die einerley Gewohnheiten, Sitten und Gesetze haben” [a ­number of citizens united by the same set of customs, manners, and laws]. It continues: Aus dieser Beschreibung folget von selbst, daß ein gewisser, grosser oder kleiner Bezirck des bewohnten Erd-Kreises, eigentlich nicht den Unterschied der Nationen ausmache, sondern daß dieser Unterschied eintzig und allein auf die Verschiedenheit der Lebens-Art und Gebräuche beruhe, folglich in einer oftmahls kleinen Provintz, Leute von unterschiedenen Nationen bey einander wohnen können. Schwerlich wird sich z. E. jemand zu behaupten unterstehen, daß die Wenden, ob sie gleich annoch, und zwar fast mitten in Deutschland, in einem schmalen Strich Landes wohnen, auch auf allen Seiten Deutsche Nachbarn haben, zur Deutschen Nation gehören, welches aber nothwendig folgen würde, wenn der Unterschied der Nationen nach den Provintzen solte beurtheilet werden. Vielmehr kan man sagen, daß das Wort Nation dem Inbegriff verschiedener Nationen, die in einem Bezircke wohnen, und eigentlich ein Volck (Populus) heisset, entgegen gesetzet werde. [From this description it is self-evident that the differences between nations are based not on their particular geographic areas of the inhabited world—be they large or small—but on their dissimilarities of ­custom and way of life only. Hence, in small provinces people of different nations often live in close proximity to each other. Hardly anyone for instance will claim that the Wends (though in the midst of Germany they inhabit

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004426108_003

10

Birgfeld

a small area surrounded entirely by German neighbours), are a part of the German nation, which he would be forced to do if the difference between nations were defined by the territory inhabited. Rather, one might say that the word nation is opposed to that of a people (populus), which can signify different nations living together in one district; Zedler, vol. 23, col. 901–02.] Zedler thus suggests that nations are defined by a shared set of morals, customs, and laws, not by borders, or their habitation of a certain territory or within a specific governmental district. Hence it is the “Geburth selbst, und der Vater, nicht aber der Ort der Geburth, [die] den Ausschlag machen, zu welcher Nation jemand gehöret” [birth itself, and the father, but not the place of birth that define to which nation one belongs; Zedler, col. 902]. Zedler, however, ­concedes that competing concepts of nation exist: “[So] hat der Gebrauch es schon lange eingeführet, daß das Wort Nation auch für ein Volck, welches in einer gewissen und von andern abgesonderten Provintz wohnhafft ist, genommen wird. Bisweilen aber bedeutet es auch so viel, als ein gewisser Stand (Ordo) oder eine Gesellschaft (Societas).” [In this way it has long been customary to give the name “nation” to a people who inhabit a province which is ­defined and set apart from others. In the meantime it has also, however, taken on the meaning of a certain order (ordo), or society (societas); Zedler, col. 902.] According to Zedler in 1740, then, the term “nation” could denominate such different things as a social rank, a specific society, the entire population of a certain region or state territory (here called: Volk), or a subset of people sharing  a specific set of morals, traditions, and manners, independent of their ­residence in a governmental district and independent of the cultural homo­ geneity  of that district or state. Speaking of a German nation could thus refer to (1) ­everyone living within the borders of the Holy Roman Empire as well as to (2) all those within and outside it sharing what one might define as a specifically German way of life. Zedler’s definition, however, also (3) gives licence to refer to subgroups of a German nation as nations, differing between a Prussian, Austrian, or Saxon Nation. Similarly, Johann Christoph Adelung’s Grammatisch-kritisches Wörterbuch der hochdeutschen Mundart [critical­ grammatical dictionary of High German] notes: “Auch besondere Zweige einer solchen Nation, d. i. einerley Mundart redende Einwohner einer Provinz, werden zuweilen Nationen genannt, in welchem Verstande es auf den alten Universitäten, wo die Glieder nach Nationen vertheilet sind, üblich ist” [Even particular branches of a nation, that is inhabitants of one province sharing the same dialect, are sometimes called nations, like in the old universities when they organised their members into nations; col. 439–40].

Johann Joachim Spalding’s 1778 Kriegs-Gebeth

11

Given the “Vieldeutigkeit dieses Wortes” [ambiguity of the term; Adelung, col. 440], it is not surprising that Johann Georg Zimmermann had no clear concept of what constitutes a nation, neither when he first published his essay Von dem Nationalstolze in 1758 (in later editions called Vom Nationalstolze [On National Pride]) nor in its subsequent (amended and altered) editions. Within the opening lines, for instance, of the first chapter of the fourth edition of 1768, nation and "Volk" [people] are used synonymously: Die Brille der Eigenliebe sitzt beynahe jeder Nation auf der Nase. Es sind wenige Völker, deren einzele Bürger nicht wegen der Vorzüge des ganzen Volkes sich einen Vorzug vor den andern zueignen. Beinahe jede grosse und kleine Nation brüstet sich auf etwas, das sie sich vor anderen Nationen eigen glaubt. [Nearly every nation wears the spectacles of self-love on its nose. There is hardly any people in which individual citizens would not claim specific merits for themselves because they are regarded as virtues of the entire nation. Nearly every grand and small nation boasts of something she believes to be unique to herself; Vom Nationalstolze, p. 2.] A few lines later, Zimmermann adds the “Republik” to the list of institutions able to show “Nationalstolz” [national pride; p. 3], only to further widen the circle in the third chapter: Jedem einzelnen Menschen gleich, hat jedes Dorf, jede Stadt, jede Pro­ vinz, und jedes Volk seine besondere Eigenliebe, und seinen besonderen Stolz. Jeder Bürger nimmt durch eine Art von Reflection an dem allgemeinen Stolze theil, und hilft seinem Dorfe oder seiner Nation, jedem andern Dorfe oder jeder andern Nation ein krummes Maul zu machen. [Like any individual, every village, town, province, and people has its own specific self-love and pride. Through a kind of reflection, every citizen partakes in the general sense of pride and helps its village or nation in causing displeasure to every other village or nation; Vom Nationalstolze, p. 46.] Zimmermann’s essay provoked an intense debate, in which Thomas Abbt’s Vom Tode für das Vaterland [On Death for the Fatherland; 1762] was undoubtedly the most influential contribution. That the title of Abbt’s essay did not include the terms “Nationalstolz” or “Nation” but rather spoke of “Vaterland” should again not cause irritation. After all, “Vaterland” was a term as ambivalent as “Nation” and could refer to many entities from one’s hometown to the country

12

Birgfeld

where one grew up or lived, as well as to the German Holy Roman Empire in total (cf. Clemens). Clearly the main focus for Abbt and ­Zimmermann lay not in defining “Nation” or “Vaterland,” but in examining the benefits and risks of emotions (pride/love) felt by an individual for either a certain place, a region, or a culture. Like Abbt, Zimmermann used a number of terms to d­ enominate these feelings, among them one which might in fact be called the most central in all debates leading up to new concepts of the nation, national pride and nationalism during the latter half of the eighteenth century: patriotism. It has been argued, notably by Hans Peter Herrmann and Hans-Martin Blitz, that although in Germany an (aggressive) nationalism as a quasi-religious mass phenomenon (“Nationalismus als Massenphänomen mit ReligionsersatzCharakter”; Herrmann, “Einleitung,” p. 12) could be observed first at the time of the Befreiungskriege, “irrationale und machtorientierte Selbstbehauptungs­ wünsche und militante Aggressionsphantasien” [irrational fantasies of selfassertion, power, and military aggression] emerged as early as the 1740s in the shape of an “Eliten-Nationalismus der Schriftsteller” [nationalism of the literary elite; “Einleitung,” p. 12]. According to Herrmann, patriotism and nationalism did not follow one another, but were systematically linked as two ­insep­arable sides of the (early) modern self- and world-views.1 Instead we might have to accept, so Herrmann argues, that nationalistic thinking had its roots far back in the eighteenth century. According to Herrmann, the “light” and “dark” sides of nationalism are intrinsically tied to one another (see “­Einleitung,” p. 14), and the “patriotic fall of man” (“der Sündenfall des Patriotismus”) happened long before 1789 (“Ich bin fürs Vaterland,” p. 34). Finally, he argues that very early in the eighteenth century, “auch die aggressiven, brutalen und ideo­logisierten Formen des neuzeitlichen Volks- und Nations-­ Begriffs in der öffentlichen Diskussion durchgespielt wurden” [even the aggressive, brutish, and ideologised forms of the (early) modern concepts of a people and a nation were acted out in public debates; “Ich bin fürs Vaterland,” p. 61]. A quick glance at the published writings of the time, however, indicates that the attitudes of eighteenth-century elites (as of the public in general) towards “Vaterland” and “Nation,” patriotism and nationalism were at no time 1 “Patriotismus und Nationalismus lassen sich nicht in eine geordnete historische Abfolge bringen, beide gehören auch systematisch zusammen als die zwei miteinander verbrüderten Seiten neuzeitlicher Selbst- und Weltanschauung” [The concepts of patriotism and nationalism cannot be placed in chronological order. They belong together systematically, as two complimentary sides of the early modern view of the self and the world; “Einleitung,” p. 12].

Johann Joachim Spalding’s 1778 Kriegs-Gebeth

13

­ omogeneous or uncontroversial, and that they did not develop in a straight h line ­towards an aggressive nationalism as quasi-religious mass phenomenon. Instead, the debate has proved multifaceted. As Blitz himself has highlighted, incidents of unusually aggressive forms of patriotism (for example, the case of provincial preacher Adolph Dietrich Ortmann) were just incidents indeed, that neither went unnoticed nor undisputed, as the critical reaction by ­Friedrich Carl von Moser proves (see Blitz, pp. 186–97). Lessing’s Philotas (1759) is yet another early statement of ambiguity towards the concept of sacrifice for the fatherland or nation. Outright criticism of contemporary wars in literary texts by Andreas Belach (Nachtgedanken bey einer gefährlichen Reise in Kriegszeiten [Night-Thoughts on a Dangerous Journey in Times of War]; 1761) or Daniel Jenisch (Borussias, 1794), of the apparent disrespect and ignorance of the princes and kings for the corporal and mental sacrifices of the ordinary soldiers in Thümmel’s Wilhelmine (1764), the criticism of the patriotic excitation among supporters of Frederick ii as in Lessing’s Minna von Barnhelm (1767) or in Nicolai’s Sebaldus Nothanker (1773–76) are more examples of the complexity of the debate.2 When in 1779 a number of medals were coined in Vienna, Berlin and Brussels, but also in Saxony, to commemorate the Peace of Teschen, a Saxon one read “gottes allmaechtige hand errettet das vaterland” [God’s almighty hand saves the fatherland] on one side and “friede hat der herr gegeben sachsen soll nun ferner leben” [God has given peace, Saxony shall live on] on the other. These somewhat ambiguous slogans leave it to the buyer to decide if “Vaterland” here implied merely Saxony or a larger German realm. Similarly, although Gleim’s derogatory depictions of Frederick’s enemies in his early Grenadierlieder are well known by scholars of nationalism, his later poems sparked by the other wars of his day show that he held different attitudes towards nationalism and war throughout his life (cf. Pilsworth). Finally, as late as 1788, Christian August ­Vulpius wrote in his Glossarium für das Achtzehnte Jahrhundert [Glossary for the Eighteenth Century] under the heading “Vaterland”: Vaterland, eine Frazze, welche nur schwachköpfichte Menschen amusirt. Es ist daher ein sehr uneigentliches Sprüchwort: Dulce & decorum est pro patria mori. Wollten die Krieger nur vors Vaterland sterben, so würde der größte Theil des Adels unversorgt herumlaufen, und mancher Monarch hätte kaum so viel Soldaten, sich eine Leibwache halten zu können.

2 For detailed debates of these texts and their ambiguous position towards the wars and ­Prussian patriotism, c.f. Johannes Birgfeld, Krieg und Aufklärung.

14

Birgfeld

[Fatherland, a grimace that amuses only halfwits. Dulce & decorum est pro patria mori is rather an unfitting saying. If soldiers were really willing to die for the fatherland alone, the majority of the gentry would be without a job and many a monarch would have hardly enough soldiers to make up his personal bodyguard; Vulpius, p. 86.] To summarise: the German eighteenth century has no clear, undisputed, or dominant concept of the nation or the fatherland. It has been argued, however, that instances of a chauvinistic nationalistic rhetoric should be interpreted as signs of a specific nationalism of the literary elites and of an inseparable link between patriotism and nationalism within the (early) modern condition in western Europe. In contrast, this chapter aims to promote a more nuanced narrative of the debate about the nation, fatherland, nationalism and patriotism in the latter part of the eighteenth Century in Germany. It hopes to do so by focussing on the public reactions to the War of Bavarian Succession 1778–79 and in particular on the specific genre of the publicly declaimed church prayer using the example of a war-time church prayer composed, by order of the ­Prussian government, by the highly renowned and widely respected Enlightenment theologian Johann Joachim Spalding (1714–1804). 2

The Role of Churches in the Development of Nationalist Discourse

A potentially highly influential factor in the formation of these debates, which has come under closer investigation only recently, are the protestant churches, or to be more precise: the manipulative meddling of the courts with the largest regular public convention of a state’s subjects, the (Sunday) church service. Besides the occasional victory service held in the capital city and/or near the battlefield after a decisive military success, protestant states like Prussia, ­Hanover, or the Electorate of Saxony used their institutional influence on the protestant church systematically for purposes of propaganda. To begin with, the courts attempted to shape the memory and public interpretation of a significant military event by ordering all protestant churches within the state to hold a countrywide thanksgiving service at a set date using a specific quote from the Bible as the reference text for the service’s central sermon. It allowed the courts to proliferate a specific interpretation of a military event presented with the authority of the local priest speaking in the name of God. Deciding on the biblical text at the centre of the sermon also enabled the courts to set a certain tone for the further debate of the event, as the biblical text would

Johann Joachim Spalding’s 1778 Kriegs-Gebeth

15

regularly be chosen from the Old Testament—rich in martial, gruesome imagery (see Birgfeld, “Kirche und Krieg”). Secondly, during the eighteenth century throughout the Holy Roman Empire, protestant public church services on Sunday mornings included a very specific form of prayer, all but forgotten today, known to worshippers back then as “öffentliches Kirchengebet” [public church prayer] or “Landeskirchen­ gebet” [country church prayer]. Immediately following the sermon (“nach geendigter Predigt”) this solemn prayer (“feierliches Gebet”) was read aloud by the priest at the pulpit (often also jointly recited with the congregation) and ideally engaged with the “Anliegen aller Christen im Lande von dem Landes­ herrn an” [general concerns of all Christians within the state, starting with those of the territorial ruler; L. 132]. Their focus could be quite broad as with the “Allgemeines Kirchen-Gebet” in use in 1779 in the Electorate of Saxony, combining multiple glorifications of God with requests for the wellbeing of the prince’s family, of soldiers, and teachers, as well as with pleas for the preservation of peace, freedom, and the rule of law (“Allgemeines Kirchen-Gebet”). Church Prayers, however, could at any time and for any given period be changed by the courts through the prescription of new texts focussing on issues of great interest to the courts themselves. By doing so, courts had an opportunity to include a specific interpretation of current events through the (re-)phrasing of the prayer that would henceforth be spoken on every Sunday in all churches, either by the priests in the name of the congregation or by the priest and the congregation together.3 Courts wrote and prescribed church prayers during an epizootic as well as in war times, instilling on the congregation their own interpretation of events, which legitimised their own military efforts and discredited those of the enemy. Not surprisingly, church prayers in war times offer a complex and, to date, largely unexplored angle on the formation processes of national(ist) discourses in the late eighteenth century.

3 W.B.L. in his comments on the church prayer suggests a varied practice as he refers on the one hand to “Gemächliche Prediger, die dies nicht anders, als ein obrigkeitliches Patent in aller Geschwindigkeit publiciren” [leisurely preachers publicising the church prayer as quickly as any other patent issued by the authorities], and on the other hand stresses: “Es ist auch gar nicht einmal notwendig, daß die Zuhörer dies Gebet nachflistern, das allgemeine Geflister, das durch die Versammlung zischet, stört sogar Nachdenken und Empfindungen” [there is not even a need for the audience to mumble the words of the prayer themselves; for the general whispering within the congregation disturbs all thoughts and sentiments; 133].

16 3

Birgfeld

The Special Case of the War of the Bavarian Succession

When addressing the question of a continuous evolution from local patriotism towards chauvinistic nationalism, there is a missing link between the Seven Years’ War, the event in which local patriotism particularly in Prussia first ­became very significant, and the time of the Coalition Wars ending in the German Campaign of 1813, in which the new nationalism is a characteristic element. This missing link is the War of Bavarian Succession (1778–79) between Austria on one side, and Prussia and the Electorate of Saxony on the other. It was sparked by the death of Maximilian Joseph, Elector of Bavaria, on 30 December 1777. Childless himself, his successor became Charles Theodor, Count Palatine, who quickly in negotiations with Joseph ii—leading to the Vienna Convention of 3 January 1778—gave up his tenure to Upper Palatinate and Lower Bavaria for the benefit of Vienna. When, not much later, Austrian troops entered both territories, Prussia and the Electorate of Saxony objected and later declared war on Austria on 3 July 1778. Although the subsequent military campaigns lacked heavy battles and massive bloodshed, the contemporaries were anxious that this fourth military encounter between Prussia and Austria since 1740 might develop into yet another long and disastrous war. They were, therefore, greatly relieved when on 13 May 1779 a peace deal was signed in Teschen, Saxony, sparking numerous public celebrations, particularly in Saxony. The significance of the Bavarian War of Succession lay in the fact that contemporaries, unable to know its outcome, treated it as having the potential to be as grave and devastating as the Seven Years’ War had been. Hence, poets in Austria, Bavaria, Prussia, Saxony, and beyond composed and published poems in reaction to the war, among them once again Denis, Gleim, Karsch, and ­Ramler, but also a new generation of writers like Joachim Christian Blum, Karl Wilhelm Daßdorf, Friedrich Gedike, Christian Leberecht Heyne, Carl Mastalier, August Gottlieb Meißner, and Johann Rautenstrauch. As in the previous war, sermons were ordered by the courts prescribing specific Bible quotes, and again church prayers were written, declaimed, and recited throughout the country. In other words, the War of Bavarian Succession, being the most intensely monitored and commented military event between the Seven Years’ War and the Coalition Wars after 1792, might be regarded as a touchstone for a historically more detailed picture of the evolution of the patriotic discourse with regard to military events between 1763 and the end of the century. It could help to determine whether first instances of a nationalistic (and chauvinistic) rhetoric occurring during the Seven Years’ War indeed grew and developed straight into the nationalistic and chauvinistic sentiments and propaganda of

Johann Joachim Spalding’s 1778 Kriegs-Gebeth

17

the Wars of Liberation against Napoleon in the early nineteenth century, as has been suggested (see Blitz and Herrmann), or if the history of German nationalism in the latter half of the eighteenth century was more complex. Of the two major manipulations by the courts regarding the regular sacred convention of believers in protestant churches to worship God during the Seven Years’ War and in the subsequent years, the manipulation of the sermon as a propaganda tool for the courts met with strong public criticism. This was not least triggered by Thomas Abbt’s Vom Tode für das Vaterland in which he, without mentioning the systematic manipulations of public sermons through the courts already taking place, demanded that priests publicise the notion of death for the fatherland using their authority as priests and in the name of God. In response, Friedrich Carl von Moser wrote in the second run of his “Reliquien” [Relics; 1766], under the heading “Der Prediger” [The Preacher]: Ein Geistlicher, der die Nachfolge Christi in Leben und Lehre beweisen will, kan nie oft genug des deutlichen Ausspruchs Christi eingedenk seyn; Mein Reich ist nicht von dieser Welt. Die Diener der Kirche sind dazu weder beruffen, noch von der Obrigkeit bestellt, sich in die Händel der Großen zu mengen, es ist allemal ein Fehler, wann sie es thun, wann es auch in den besten Absichten geschiehet […]. Beten, trösten, ermahnen ist die Sache und Pflicht jeden rechtschaffenen Geistlichen, […] den Politicker zu machen, soll er nicht nur andern überlassen, sondern sich auch nicht einmal dazu gebrauchen, bereden oder nöthigen lassen. [A clergyman attempting to prove himself as a follower of Christ in his life and teachings cannot contemplate Christ’s clear statement that “my realm is not of this world” often enough. The servants of the Church are neither called upon nor summoned by the authorities to take part in the quarrels of kings and princes, and it is always a mistake for them to do so, even with the best of intentions. To pray, to comfort, to reprimand are the concern and duty of a godly cleric, […] he should not only leave the others to act as politicians, but should never allow himself to be used for that purpose, or talked or forced into it; Moser 138–39.] Moser goes on to attack Abbt in particular, and later Ortmann, adding a second argument. He postulates that an obligation to risk one’s life for a fatherland— which in Abbt’s case, according to Moser, would be “nichts als die Mark Brandenburg” [only the Margraviate of Brandenburg; Moser 141]—might lead directly to civil war (“ein allgemeiner bürgerlicher Krieg”; Moser 142) between the supporters of the many and very different fatherlands to which people might identify as belonging.

18

Birgfeld

Although only Moser’s intervention, followed by Friedrich Nicolai’s equally critical literary comment on Abbt’s essay in his novel Sebaldus Nothanker have received some scholarly attention, the second type of systematic state manipulation of the public church service outlined above also became a matter of a fervid public debate from 1778 onwards, when at the beginning of the War of Bavarian Succession a new Prussian Kirchengebet for the war period was introduced. And this prayer was, to be sure, like all other church prayers “zum ­Ablesen allgemein anbefohlen worden” [ordered to be read out publicly throughout the country; Ulrich 170]. 4

The New Prussian War Time Church Prayer (1778)

The new church prayer was not very long and not very complex in structure and argument: Großer und allmächtiger Gott, du höchster Regierer aller Dinge, der du Begebenheiten der Welt nach deinem heiligen Rathe lenkest, und am Ende in allem, was du über uns verhängst, deine Weisheit und Güte verherrlichst. Wir bethen auch jetzt in Demuth deine Wege an, da du abermal die Geißel des Kriegs über Länder und Völker aufgehoben, und deinen Knecht, unsern allertheuersten König, dazu bestimmt hast, öffentliche Freyheit zu schützen, Recht zu schaffen, und dem Unterdrückten beyzustehen. Zu dir, o Herr, ist unser Flehen gerichtet, der du Sieg und Segen in deinen Händen hast. Tritt du auf die Seite dessen, der Friede suchte, und ihn nicht finden konnte—Sey du mit unserm Könige, wie du bisher, zur Bewunderung der Welt, mit ihm gewesen bist—Bewahre vor allen Dingen sein theures mit Ehre und Ruhm bekröntes Leben, welches er nun noch in neue Gefahren dahingiebt—Halte deine beschirmende Hand über den Kronprinzen, über den Prinzen, des Königs Bruder, und über die Verwandten des Königl. Hauses, welche an diesen Gefahren Theil nehmen—Gieb den Feldherren des Königs Weisheit und Stärke des Geistes, seinen Kriegern Treue und Muth, und allen seinen Unterneh­ mungen Glück und Gedeyhen—Laß die Dauer dieser gewaltsamen Erschütterung kurz, des Elends des Blutvergiessens und der Verwüstungen so wenig als möglich, und die erwünschte Wiederkehr des Friedens für uns eine neue Ursache des Dankes und der Freude seyn—Zeige noch ferner, daß du unser beschützender und wohlthätiger Gott bist, dessen allmächtigen Beystand wir so oft erfahren haben, und auf den wir auch

Johann Joachim Spalding’s 1778 Kriegs-Gebeth

19

jetzt mit Zuversicht hoffen! Erhöre was wir von dir bitten, durch Jesum Christum, unsern Heyland, Amen! [Great and almighty God, supreme disposer of all things, directing all worldly occurrences by your holy council, glorifying your wisdom and benevolence in everything you impose on us! We humbly worship your ways again today, as you have once again taken up the scourge of war against countries and people and appointed your servant, our dearest king, to defend public freedom, to enforce justice, to support the oppressed. To you, oh Lord, we direct our pleas, as you hold victory and blessing in your hands. Join the side of the one who searched for peace but could not find it. Be with our king as you have been so far to the admiration of the world. Above all, save his dear life, crested with honour and fame, which is now endangered once again; hold your shielding hand over the crown prince, the prince, the king’s brother, and over all members of the royal house, participating in these dangerous events. Bestow wisdom and mental fortitude upon his generals, loyalty and courage upon his warriors, and fortune and prosperity upon all his endeavours. May the duration of this violent tremor be short, the misery of bloodshed and devastation as small as possible, and the desired return of peace yet another cause for gratitude and joy. Show yourself further to be our safeguarding and beneficent God, whose almighty aid we have experienced so often and in whom our hope rests confidently once again! Answer our prayers through Jesus Christ, our Saviour, Amen; Spalding 337–38.] The prayer opens with an invocation and glorification of God. Structurally quite conventional, this introduction, however, makes a subtle point in calling God the “höchste[n] Regierer” [supreme ruler]—reminding the audience that there is an entity above Frederick “the Great”—before declaring that all earthly events result from God’s decisions and express his wisdom and benevolence. This is followed by a brief interpretation of the war that has just broken out and of Frederick ii’s role in it, before pleading to God to protect the Prussian king, his family, and soldiers, and to make this war as brief as possible, with the minimum of bloodshed and destruction. So what is it that makes the case of this Prussian church prayer in war times from 1778 particularly interesting? First of all, we have a report of its first public reading in Berlin as part of ­Issac Daniel Dilthey’s (1752–93) and Johann Georg Müchler’s (1724–1819) fiction­alised, pro-Prussian running commentary of the events of the current war and the public debate about them in the shape of a collection of letters, called Briefe des Sir Georg R—an seinen Freund Sir Carl B—über die ­Bayerischen

20

Birgfeld

­Angelegenheiten [Letters of Sir Georg R to his Friend Sir Carl B on the Bavarian Affair]. In the sixteenth letter of Sir Georg R to his friend Sir Carl B, dated “Berlin, den 25. Julius 1778” it reads: Ich habe Ihnen noch nichts von dem Kriegesgebethe gesagt, welches nun alle Sonntage Vormittage auf den hiesigen Kanzeln verlesen wird. […] Als das Kriegesgebeth zum erstenmale verlesen wurde, war ich in der Nikolaikirche, und hörte den Probst Spalding, aus dessen Predigten ich überhaupt nicht gern wegbleibe, seitdem ich einmal darin gewesen bin. [I haven’t yet told you about the war prayer, which is now read out here every Sunday morning from the pulpits. (…) When the church prayer was read out for the first time I was in St. Nicholas’s Church, listening to provost Spalding, whose sermons I have tried never to miss, since the very first one I attended; Dilthey/Müchler 84–86.] 25 July 1778 being a Saturday and the war starting on 3 July 1778, a Friday, ­Dilthey’s and Müchler’s report suggests that the first reading across Prussia took place either on 5, 12, or 19 July. Since on the other hand one has to allow some time for the composition and even more so for the distribution of the prayer to every protestant church in Prussia, 19 July is the most likely date. But be that as it may, it shows that the new church prayer entered very quickly into the lives of Prussians, where it was destined to remain, repeated week after week “nach geendigter Predigt” [after the sermon; L. 132] until the end of the war that had just broken out. Since the church prayer was intended to express “the general concerns of all Christians within the state starting with those of the territorial ruler” (L. 132) and by no means the thoughts or interests of an individual, the church prayers were regularly distributed without disclosing their authorship. This also explains why the fictional author in Dilthey’s and Müchler’s Briefe des Sir Georg R did not mention that Johann Joachim Spalding had written the prayer himself. Nevertheless, Spalding’s prayer quickly received a lot of attention, resulting in a number of documented prints. One was a leaflet with no information at all as to its purpose, title, author, printer, year or place of print: Lacking any indication of its use, it seems most unlikely that this was the official print of the new church prayer that was distributed to all protestant priests in Prussia. Instead, we might see it as proof of a widespread interest by members of the congregations within Prussian churches to own a (cheap) copy of the prayer which had become a feature in every Sunday mass, for ­private study after church or with the intent of joining in with the priest when he read it out. Much the same motivation must be assumed behind a second

Johann Joachim Spalding’s 1778 Kriegs-Gebeth

21

Figure 1.1 Johann Joachim Spalding: Kriegs-Gebeth, anonymous print most likely from 1778, front side Source: Original document in the private property of the author

leaflet that survived, held by the Saxon State and University Library Dresden and accessible online. Here the printer has arranged the prayer over three pages, with illustrations, following a proper title page identifying Spalding as the author (see Königlich Preußisches Kriegsgebeth).

22

Birgfeld

Figure 1.2 Johann Joachim Spalding: Kriegs-Gebeth, anonymous print most likely from 1778, reverse side Source: Original document in the private property of the author

Beyond those two copies, Spalding’s prayer was reprinted in full at least five more times. Johann Heinrich Friedrich Ulrich included it in his Ueber den Religionszustand in den preußischen Staaten seit der Regierung Friedrichs des Grossen [On the State of Religion in the Prussian Territories Since the Reign of ­Frederick the Great; 1778] as “von den geistlichen Räthen des Oberkonsistoriums in Berlin […] angefertiget” [composed by the clerical councils of the ­senior c­ onsistory in Berlin; Ulrich 170–71]. It was similarly reprinted in a 1799

Johann Joachim Spalding’s 1778 Kriegs-Gebeth

23

issue of the journal Christliches Magazin under the title “Spaldings Gebet für Friedrichs Unterthanen. Julius 1778” [Spalding’s Prayer for Frederick’s Subjects, July 1778]. Johann Jacob Moser printed it, without mentioning its creator, as “Formular Kirchengebets in denen Königlich-Preußischen Landen” [standard church prayer in the Prussian royal territories] in his Beyträge zu dem neuesten Europäischen Völckerrecht in Kriegs-Zeiten. Erster Theil [Contributions on the Newest European Law of Nations in War Times, First Part; 462–63]. It was additionally included in Dilthey’s and Müchler’s Briefe des Sir Georg R (1779; 90–91), and, finally, in 1782 in the Journal für Prediger [Journal for Preachers], naming Spalding as the most likely author.4 Furthermore, an alternative version in which the segment referring to the Prussian king, the Prussian prince, etc., had been removed was reprinted at least four more times in 1788, 1801, 1805, and 1827—now again without naming Spalding as the author (see Allgemeine Sammlung 79–80; Deutsches Stockholmisches Gesang-Buch, 108; Allgemeine Liturgie 290; Christliches Gebetbuch 103–104). Considering all this, ­Spalding’s church prayer not only generated a most remarkable public interest in itself, but it did so for a surprisingly long time and often independent of the fame or status of its author, since his name was more often not conveyed than given. 5

A Forced Prayer, or: Spalding and the Authorities

Given the success of the church prayer with the public, it might seem surprising that Spalding did not write it voluntarily. In his Lebensbeschreibung [­Description of my Life], an autobiographical report to which he contributed regularly until his death, and which was only published posthumously, Spalding describes how he came to compose it: In dem folgenden Jahre (1778) bedrohete der anfangende bayersche Successionskrieg, bey welchem ich öffentliche Kirchengebete aufsetzen mußte, ein neues gemeines Elend, dessen längerer Dauer aber in dem nächsten Jahre (1779) durch den Teschenschen Frieden glücklicherweise vorgebauet ward. [The next year (1778) saw a new threat with the onset of the War of the Bavarian Succesion, for which I had to compose public church prayers. A new general distress, which was blessedly brought to a close by the Peace

4 “[W]elches [Gebet], so viel wir wissen, Herr[n] Probst Spalding zum Verfasser hat” [as far as we know, this prayer was written by Provost Spalding; L., “Von Verbesserung” 143–44].

24

Birgfeld

of Teschen in the following year (1779); Spalding, Lebensbeschreibung 103.] At the time of the outbreak of the War of the Bavarian Succession in 1778, ­Johann Joachim Spalding was already sixty-four years old. Born in 1714, he studied theology and philosophy in Rostock and Greifswald, before his anonymously published Betrachtung über die Bestimmung des Menschen [Reflections on the Destiny of Mankind; 1748] made him one of the leading protagonists of protestant Enlightenment theology (Neology) in Germany. His first position as a parish priest came as late as 1749 in Lassan in Pommerania; his second post followed in 1757 in Barth. In 1764, however, with a “veritable jump in his career” (cf. Beutel, “Frömmigkeit” 181), Spalding was appointed to the post of Prussian Oberkonsistorialrat [senior councillor of the consistory in Prussia], provost in Berlin and first pastor at the Church of St. Nicholas and St. Mary in Berlin, becoming at once the highest ranked Lutheran reverend in Prussia. Beyond that, Spalding had connections to a broad network of intellectuals and artists at the heart of the Enlightenment movement. Friedrich Gedicke, Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim, Christian Gottlieb Heyne, Anna Louisa Karsch, Johann Kaspar Lavater, Karl Wilhelm Ramler, Johann Peter Süßmilch, Johann Georg Sulzer, Johann Peter Uz, and Johann Georg Zimmermann were among his friends. He corresponded with Klopstock and Kant, and between 1783 and 1786 he was a member of the influential Berliner Mittwochsgesellschaft [Berlin Wednesday Society; see Beutel, Johann Joachim Spalding]. After failed attempts at resistance, he withdrew from all his public posts when in 1788 Frederick William ii of Prussia issued the famous edict on religion (“Religionsedikt”), followed by the edict on censorship (“Zensuredikt”), both mainly drafted by Johann ­Christoph von Woellner to dispense with many of the attainments of the Enlightenment under King Frederick ii (see Beutel, Johann Joachim Spalding 259–71). Therefore, when forced to compose the war time church prayer in 1778, Spalding was a highly respected advocate of the Enlightenment in general, and Enlightened theology in particular. At the same time, unlike many contemporaries, he was not an enthusiastic admirer of his King Frederick ii: “Dem Theologen mißfiel ebenso die demonstrative Unkirchlichkeit des Monarchen wie die exorbitante Glorifizierung, die ihm zuteil wurde” [the theologian disliked the king’s unconcealed disinterest in all matters of the church as much as the often exorbitant public glorification of his person; Beutel, Johann Joachim Spalding 197–98]. So, in 1778 the Prussian government deliberately misemployed one of the leading representatives of Enlightened theology by ordering him to compose the text of this intrinsically manipulative prayer. It is likely that Spalding’s case is not the only example of such government coercion. This

Johann Joachim Spalding’s 1778 Kriegs-Gebeth

25

suggests that although members of the middle classes were involved in the state’s public relations campaigns—including the promotion of patriotism— we cannot see their involvement as unequivocal evidence for the “Eliten-­ Nationalismus der Schriftsteller” [nationalism of the literary Elite; Herrmann, “Einleitung” 12]. 6

Spalding’s Prayer at the Centre of a Public Debate

Given the brevity of the text and its disposition to serve a limited liturgical purpose only, the indications of a remarkable readers’ interest are noteworthy indeed. They signify nothing less than a high sensitivity of the public towards the courts’ attempts to use their institutional influence on the churches to meddle with the Sunday congregation for their propagandistic aims. In this context it is equally remarkable that Spalding’s church prayer also became the subject of a lively public debate. To be sure, the majority of documented reactions praised the prayer, sometimes quite enthusiastically. Dilthey’s and Müchler’s Briefe des Sir Georg R, for example, called it “vortrefflich; ganz im Geiste des wahren Christentums; völlig so wie Gebethe beschaffen seyn müssen. Gänzliche Entfernung alles Menschenhasses, aller Feindseligkeit und alles Grolls, ist das nicht die erste Erforderniß jedes wahrhaftig christlichen Gebetes?” [excellent, fully in the spirit of true Christianity; composed just the way a prayer should be. Not a trace of any misanthropy, animosity, or bad blood, isn’t that the first requirement of any true Christian prayer?; Briefe 85]. Still in 1778, Johann Heinrich Friedrich Ulrich referred to the Prayer as an “ungemein schönes Gebet” [tremendously beautiful prayer; Ueber den Religionszustand 170]. In 1782, the thirteenth volume of the Journal für Prediger regarded it a masterpiece (“Meisterstück”) and a paradigm of war prayers which “ein Christ, der würklich Philosoph ist, mit ruhiger Seele beten kann, und das dem gemeinen Manne keine falsche und niedrige Ideen von der weisen unerforschlichen Regierung Gottes beybringt” [enables a Cristian, who is a real philosopher, to pray with a calm soul, and which will not suggest false or ignoble ideas of God’s wise and inexorable government to the common man; L., “Von Verbesserung” 143]. Nonetheless, on Thursday 10 September 1778, in that year’s seventy-second issue of the Brünner Zeitung, under the heading “Donau vom 3 Sept,” an unnamed contributor presented the readers with a lengthy critical discussion of Spalding’s prayer. He opens by informing his readers on the one hand about the prayer’s widespread usage, and on the other hand about the existence of a

26

Birgfeld

pamphlet discussing the prayer very critically: “Es sind aus der Feder eines Officiers von den Oberrheinischen Kreistruppen einige Anmerkungen öffentlich im Druck erschienen, die das Preußische Kriegsgebet betreffen, welches seit dem [Kriegsbeginn] […] in allen Preußischen Staaten gebetet wird” [an officer of the Upper Rhenish Circle troops has published notes regarding the Prussian war prayer that has been being recited in all Prussian states since the beginning of the war; N., (Bbbb3r)]. Interestingly enough, neither the pamphletist nor the anonymous writer quoting him takes issue with the existence of war time church prayers per se: Es ist nicht nur gewöhnlich, daß die Unterthanen zu Kriegszeiten für den glücklichen Fortgang der Waffen ihres Regenten beten; sondern sie sind auch aus Pflicht dazu verbunden. Diese Pflicht ist […] um so viel größer und stärker, wenn der Landesbeherrscher selbst zu Felde geht, und seine eigene Person in Gefahr setzet. Ja, man wird, wenn man billig denkt, einen Unterthan das eifrige Gebet für das Glück der Waffen seines Herrn auch alsdann nicht verargen, wenn gleich die ganze übrige Welt von der Ungerechtigkeit des Kriegs überzeugt seyn sollte. [It is not only common for subjects to pray in wartime for the military  fortune of their regents; in fact it is their duty to do so. This duty is even greater and stronger if the regent himself enters the battlefield and puts his own person in danger. Yes indeed, a just person will not take umbridge over a subject’s eager prayers for his master’s military fortune, even if the whole world is convinced of the injustice of the war; N. (Bbbb3r).] Therefore, both the pamphletist and (in the main body of the article in the Brünner Zeitung) the anonymous writer himself, take issue not with the existence of this prayer, but with what they regard as its inappropriate political content, partisanship, patriotism, and misuse of a prayer’s original intent for purposes of propaganda: Allein der Verfasser des Gebets schweifet auf zweyerley Art aus. Erstens  mischet er solche Dinge ins Gebet, die dazu gar nicht gehören; und durch diese Einmischung wird aus dem Gebete ein Manifest an Gott, oder eine Denkschrift, worinn um eine göttliche Garantie angehalten wird. ­Zweytens kommen in dieser Gebetsformel, oder vielmehr in diesem nach Art eines Gebetes eingekleideten Manifest offenbare Unwahr­heiten vor, welche jeder Preußische Unterthan, der nur die geringste Kenntniß vom Deutschen Staatsrechte hat, sogleich erkennen muß, so daß er selbige mit gutem Gewissen nicht nachbeten kann. Indessen soll doch ein

Johann Joachim Spalding’s 1778 Kriegs-Gebeth

27

a­ llgemeines Gebet so beschaffen seyn, daß es jedermann ohne Bedenken mitbeten könne. [However, the writer of this prayer diverted in two ways. For one, he mixed issues into the prayer that do not belong there; and by this incorporation the prayer becomes a manifesto towards God, or a memorandum, asking for a godly guarantee. Secondly, this prayer, or rather this manifesto disguised as a prayer, contains apparent falsehoods, which every Prussian subject of even the most rudimentary knowledge of German Constitutional Law recognises immediately, so that he will not be able to join in with this prayer. But a public prayer should be of such a nature that every man can join in without any hesitation; N. (Bbbb3r).] Furthermore, misusing the church prayer for the proliferation of false facts in the eyes of the pamphletist and the anonymous writer seems particularly reprehensible, as people are tempted to believe them, “zumal da sie öffentlich von der Kanzel hergebetet wurde[n]” [as they have been read out publicly from the pulpit; N. (Bbbb3v)]. And there are more arguments: although it seems that the prayer “was composed by one of the senior councillors of the consistory in Berlin” (“sein ­Daseyn einem der Berlinischen Oberkonsistorialräthe zu verdanken [hat]”), the anonymous writer points out that the prayer “hat gewiß nicht ohne Gutheißung der Königlichen Staatsminister im Druck erscheinen können” [could in no way have been published without the approval of the regal ministers of state; N. (Bbbb3v)]. To the anonymous writer, it seems clear that the text constitutes a piece of state propaganda. In his view, this church prayer is hypocritical, ‘uncomplex’, hubristic, full of historically false and propagandistic claims, and finally part of an attack on the Holy Roman Empire itself. After all, so he argues, Frederick ii in his writings presented a concept of God as a deity who “sich um das Wohl einzelner Völker oder Staaten gar nicht bekümmerte” [is not at all interested in the well-being of individual peoples or states; N. (Bbbb3v)]. Also, the church prayer reduces “den ganzen Inhalt der Preußischen Erklärungen von allen erdichteten Bewegursachen zum Kriege, und alle Lästerschriften sehr künstlich” [the content of the Prussian declarations and slanderous pamphlets about imagined reasons for going to war; N. (Bbbb4r)] to a few lines. Finally, the prayer even dares to claim “ein einzelner Churfürst sey von GOtt bestimmt, sich gegen das Oberhaupt des Deutschen Reichs zum obersten Richter aufzuwerfen, und hiemit […] die Grundverfassung des Reichs und alle Rechte der ganzen Reichsversammlung zu zerstören” [a single elector had been chosen by God to rise against the head of the Holy Roman Empire as his superior judge, and thus to destroy the foundations of the Imperium as much as the Reichstag; N. (Bbbb4r)].

28

Birgfeld

Obviously, the anonymous writer, defining himself as a scribe based in the Danube region (the German-speaking parts of which were predominantly under Bavarian and Habsburg governance) is more likely to side with Austria than Prussia. This obvious partisanship might have been one factor motivating the apparently pro-Prussian Johann Georg Müchler and Issac Daniel Dilthey to defend Spalding’s prayer against the criticism by the pamphletist and the anonymous writer as publicised in the Brünner Zeitung at length in the eighteenth of their Briefe des Sir Georg R, dated “18. September 1778” over twelve pages! In extenso they attempt to refute each and every argument of the prayer’s critics, e.g., by declaring the king’s religious beliefs irrelevant for his subjects’ prayer (Dilthey/Müchler 106). They also deny that “dergleichen Einmischungen in die Kriegesgebethe wären politische Kunstgriffe, deren sich Preußen immer bedient hätte, um dem unerfahrnen Theile des Publikums blauen Dunst vor die Augen zu machen, und sich eine stärkere Parthie zu verschaffen” [interferences of this kind with war prayers were political tricks employed by Prussia on a regular basis to pull the wool over the eyes of the less experienced parts of the public in order to strengthen its own campaign; Dilthey/Müchler 104–05]. After all, “Preußen braucht bey seiner Macht und seinem Ansehn zu solchen elenden Kunstgriffen, wenn sie auch Wirkung haben könnten, seine Zuflucht nicht zu nehmen” [given its might and good reputation, Prussia has no need to resort to such wretched tricks, even if they were able to achieve certain effects; Dilthey/Müchler 105]. Obviously, any “Kirchengebet” during war was intended to manipulate the public in that it aimed to intensify patriotic sentiments and to promote the state’s interpretation of the war and the legality of its actions. In addition, research has shown again and again that Frederick’s Prussia was particularly keen and effective in using all means available to influence public opinion during war time at home and abroad. 7 Conclusion The case of Johann Joachim Spalding’s 1778 war time church prayer offers a number of valuable insights into the complexity of debates about patriotism and nationalism with regard to the educated elites within Prussia. Although Spalding was no admirer of Frederick ii, his king ordered this most revered man of the church to compose the prayer which by definition constituted an intrusion of the state into the religious worship in every protestant church of the country. The prayer Spalding wrote was brief and simply structured. No invectives against the enemy can be found in the text. There is no mention of

Johann Joachim Spalding’s 1778 Kriegs-Gebeth

29

“Vaterland,” death for the fatherland, or a nation. But while the prayer was met with remarkable interest by readers, and received accolades by critics, the middle part, in which Spalding included a political interpretation of the events and turned partisan, soon came under scrutiny, becoming the subject of an intense debate. Within this debate, arguments presented in the wake of the Seven Years’ War by Moser against Abbt and Ortmann (see above) were brought forward once again by the anonymous writer in the Brünner Zeitung. The details of this debate and the circumstances of the composition of the prayer, however, are all together a very clear indication that in 1778 and 1779 during the War of the Bavarian Succession, intellectuals were very much sensitised against even slight forms of (patriotic/national) partisanship, as observable in Spalding’s prayer. They also argue against the idea of a straight line of development from patriotic sentiments during the Seven Years’ War towards the nationalistic rhetoric during the Wars of Liberation. Instead, the case of Spalding’s church prayer reveals rather a sensitive public—apparently less open to the extremes of patriotism than they had been some fifteen years before. It might not be wrong to speculate that this had to do with the manifold frustrations voiced after the end of the Seven Years’ War when it became clear, particularly in Prussia, that patriotic commitment and sacrifice for king and fatherland did not result in proper public recognition by the state. Neither did it lead to the increased political participation which the middle classes had imagined as the apt reward for their efforts, and which they felt kings like Frederick ii had even dangled in front of them (cf. again Abbt’s Vom Tode). The mixture of disillusionment, disenchantment, disappointment, and self-criticism among the middle classes regarding their patriotic engagement during the Seven Years’ War undoubtedly must be considered a source for the occurrence of a new sensitivity in the late 1770s in this matter, as observed here in the case of Spalding’s church prayer.

Works Cited

Primary

Abbt, Thomas. “Vom Tode für das Vaterland.” Aufklärung und Kriegserfahrung. Klassische Zeitzeugen zum Siebenjährigen Krieg, edited by Johannes Kunisch, Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1996, pp. 589–650. Adelung, Johann Christoph. Grammatisch-kritisches Wörterbuch der hochdeutschen Mundart. Mit D.W. Soltau’s Beyträgen revidirt und berichtigt von Franz Xaver Schönberger, vol. 3, B. Ph. Bauer, 1811.

30

Birgfeld

Allgemeines Kirchen-Gebet, wie solches, in den Chur-Sächsischen Landen, ietziger Zeit, abgelesen wird. Anno 1779. Dresden: gedruckt und zu finden in der Churfürstl. Sächßl. [sic] Hof-Buchdruckerey, 1779. Allgemeine Sammlung liturgischer Formulare der evangelischen Kirchen. Edited by Georg Friedrich Seiler, Johann Jakob Palm, 1788. Allgemeine Liturgie oder Versuch einer möglichst vollständigen Sammlung von Gebeten und Anreden bey dem öffentlichen Gottesdienst und andern feierlichen Religionshandlungen. Edited by Heinrich Wilhelm Frosch, vol. 1, Friedrich Barth, 1805. Christliches Gebetbuch, zum Gebrauch der Evengelischen Gemeinden in Siebenbürgen. Samuel Filetsch, 1827. Deutsches Stockholmisches Gesang-Buch mit einem Gebet-Buche. Joh. A. Carlbohm, 1801. Dilthey, Isaac Daniel, and Johann Georg Müchler: Briefe des Sir Georg R—an seinen Freund Sir Carl B—über die Bayerischen Angelegenheiten. Nebst Sieben und zwanzig Fortsetzungen, welche die merkwürdigsten Vorfälle dieses Krieges, nebst dahin gehörigen Raisonnements, Anecdoten, vorzüglichen Geschichten u. s. w. enthalten. Berlin, bey Christian Ludewig Stahlbaum, 1779. Königlich Preußisches Kriegsgebeth von Probst Spalding, 1778. http://digital.slubdresden.de/ppn331288419/1. L,W.B. “Von Verbesserung der Liturgie und des Kirchenrituals. Erste Nachlese.” Journal für Prediger, edited by Christoph Christian Sturm, vol. 13, no. 2. Carl Christian Kümmel, 1782, pp. 129–60. Moser, Johann Jacob. Beyträge zu dem neuesten Europäischen Völckerrecht in KriegsZeiten. Erster Theil. Heerbrandt, 1779. von Moser, Friedrich Carl. Reliquien. 2. Verbesserte Auflage. 1766. N.N. “Donau vom 3 Sept.” Brünner Zeitung, vol. 72, 1778, sheet [Bbbb3r–Bbbb4v]. Spalding, Johann Joachim. Kleinere Schriften, edited by Olga Söntgerath, 2006. Kritische Ausgabe, general editor Albrecht Beutel, vol. 6, Mohr Siebeck, 2001–06. Spalding, Johann Joachim. Johann Joachim Spaldings Lebensbeschreibung von ihm selbst aufgesetzt und herausgegeben mit einem Zusatze von dessen Sohne Georg Ludewig Spalding. Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses, 1804. “Spaldings Gebet für Friedrichs Unterthanen. Julius 1778.” Christliches Magazin, edited by Johann Konrad Pfenninger, vol. 2, no. 2, [n. publ.], 1779, pp. 141–42. Ulrich, Johann Heinrich Friedrich. Ueber den Religionszustand in den preußischen ­Staaten seit der Regierung Friedrichs des Grossen. In einer Reihe von Briefen, vol. 2. Weygandsche Buchhandlung, 1778. Vulpius, Christian August. Glossarium für das Achtzehnte Jahrhundert. Edited by Alexander Kosenina, Wehrhahn, 2003. Zedler, Johann Heinrich. Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexicon aller Wissenschaften und Künste, vol. 23. Zedler, 1740.

Johann Joachim Spalding’s 1778 Kriegs-Gebeth

31

Zimmermann, Johann Georg. Vom Nationalstolze. Vierte, um die Hälfte vermehrte, und durchaus verbesserte Auflage. Orell, Geßner, und Compagnie, 1768.

Secondary

Beutel, Albrecht. Johann Joachim Spalding. Meistertheologe im Zeitalter der Aufklärung. Mohr Siebeck, 2014. Beutel, Albrecht. “Frömmigkeit als ‘die Empfindung unserer gänzlichen Abhängigkeit von Gott.’ Die Fixierung einer religionstheologischen Leitformel in Spaldings Gedächtnispredigt auf Friedrich ii. von Preußen.” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, vol. 106 (2009), pp. 177–200. Birgfeld, Johannes. Krieg und Aufklärung. Studien zum Kriegsdiskurs in der deutschsprachigen Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts. Wehrhahn, 2012, 2 vols. Birgfeld, Johannes. “Kirche und Krieg im 18. Jahrhundert. Überlegungen zum Verhältnis von Kriegspredigt, Kriegsgebet, Staat und Literatur.” Krieg und Frieden im 18. ­Jahrhundert. Internationale wissenschaftliche Jahrestagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft zur Erforschung des 18. Jahrhunderts, edited by Stefanie Stockhorst, Wehrhahn 2015, pp. 525–43. Blitz, Hans-Martin. Aus Liebe zum Vaterland. Die deutsche Nation im 18. Jahrhundert. Hamburger Edition, 2000. Clemens, Gabriele. “Vaterland.” Enzyklopädie der Neuzeit, edited by Friedrich Jäger, vol. 14. Metzler, 2011, col. 8–10. Herrmann, Hans Peter. “Einleitung.” Machtphantasie Deutschland. Nationalismus, Männlichkeit und Fremdenhaß im Vaterlandsdiskurs deutscher Schriftsteller des 18. Jahrhunderts, edited by Martin Blitz, Hans Peter Herrmann, and Susanna Moßmann, Suhrkamp, 1996, pp. 7–31. Herrmann, Hans Peter. “‘Ich bin fürs Vaterland zu sterben auch bereit.’ Patriotismus oder Nationalismus im 18. Jahrhundert? Lesenotizen zu den deutschen Arminiusdramen 1740–1808.” Machtphantasie Deutschland. Nationalismus, Männlichkeit und Fremdenhaß im Vaterlandsdiskurs deutscher Schriftsteller des 18. Jahrhunderts, edited by Martin Blitz, Hans Peter Herrmann, and Susanna Moßmann, Suhrkamp, 1996, pp. 32–65. Pilsworth, Ellen. “‘Nicht unsrer Lesewelt, und nicht der Ewigkeit’: Late Style in Gleim’s Zeit- and Sinngedichte (1792–1803).” Re-Populating the Eighteenth Century: SecondTier Writing in the German Enlightenment, edited by Johannes Birgfeld and Michael Wood, Camden House, 2018, pp. 52–68.

Chapter 2

Enlightenment Dilemmas: Nationalism and War in Rudolph Zacharias Becker’s Mildheimisches Liederbuch (1799/1815) Ellen Pilsworth 1

Introduction: Nationalism and War: A Slippery Slope

By way of introduction to this chapter, I would like to examine a short text by someone renowned for his poetry of protest and social criticism, Christian Friedrich Schubart, entitled “Der Patriot und der Weltbürger” [the patriot and the cosmopolitan; 1774]. It depicts an argument between two men about their relationship to their fatherland. Brimming with emotion, the patriot begins by exclaiming “Wie lieb ich dich, mein Vaterland, / Wo ich den ersten Odem zog, / und frische Lüfte atmete; Wie lieb ich dich! Wie lieb ich dich!” [how I love you, my fatherland, where I drew my first breath, where I breathed fresh air, how I love you! How I love you!; Schubart, 284]. The cosmopolitan replies more coolly, whilst taking a pinch of tobacco and smirking: “Was Vaterland?—Haha, ha, ha! / Mir ist, weil ich weit klüger bin, / Die ganze Welt mein Vaterland. / Wo für mich Brot und Ehre ist, / Da ist mein Vaterland” [Pah! Fatherland? Haha ha ha! Because I am far cleverer, the whole world is my fatherland. Wherever there is bread and honour for me, that’s my fatherland; Schubart 285]. At first, the poem’s narrator seems to sympathise with the first of the two speakers: he calls him “ein deutscher Biedermann” [a good German citizen], and comments in parentheses after the patriot’s emotive, tearful display, “Oft weint ich in der Mitternacht / Auch solche Tränen; Gott, du weißt’s!” [I too have often cried such tears at the midnight hour, God knows!; Schubart 284]. And yet the final stanza causes us to lose respect for the poem’s narrator, and for the patriot as well. The “good German citizen” hurls abuse at the cosmopolitan, insulting his mother, accusing him of incest, and likening him to cow or a pig: So schlägst du mit geballter Faust Die eigene Mutter, die dich tränkte, Ins Angesicht?—Undankbarer, Hat jene Dirne dich gesäugt, Der du die geilen Lippen küssest? –

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004426108_004

Nationalism and War in Becker’s Mildheimisches Liederbuch

33

Fleuch hin zur Krippe, draus du frißt, Und nenne sie dein Vaterland! – [So! You punch your own mother, who nursed you, in the face? You ungrateful wretch. Were you nursed by that whore whose lascivious lips you kissed? Run off back to your feeding trough and call that your fatherland!; Schubart 285.] The poem ends there. Whose side is the reader encouraged to take? Michaela Wirtz identifies the poem’s narrator as Schubart himself, seeing it as evidence that he “[stellt] den Patrioten über den ‘kalten’ Weltbürger” [places the the patriot above the cosmopolitan; Wirtz 18], but I would argue that this poem is rather ironic in fact. The dissonance is simply too great between the loving and emotional tears of the patriot (and the narrator), and the angry abusive tirade that erupts from him in the final verse. The fact that Schubart leaves this angry outburst uncommented suggests a kind of embarrassment on the behalf of the poem’s narrator: though he was happy to side with the patriot when expressing his tears of patriotic love, he does not support him in abusing the cosmopolitan at the end. As Wirtz also shows, Schubart was by no means blinded by patriotism in reality, but rather embraced the onset of the French Revolution, and was actually pleased to see the Alsace becoming a part of the French Republic (Wirtz 18), and so I think we must read this poem’s superficially pronationalist message as heavily tongue-in-cheek. Two ideas can be drawn from this poem which set the scene for my analysis of Becker’s work, which is the main focus of this chapter. First of all, it illustrates the late eighteenth-century debate between nationalistic patriotism on the one hand, and Enlightened cosmopolitanism on the other hand. While the narrator of Schubart’s poem identifies with the nationalistic patriot, also stressing his German identity by calling him “der Deutsche” (285, emphasis in original), I would argue that the poem overall makes fun of this figure by presenting both his positive and negative emotional outbursts as extreme, irrational, and fundamentally un-Enlightened. The poem demonstrates that nationalism was not only seen at this time as a productive ideology for political progress, but also as the very opposite—as a hindrance to more civilised, cooperative and progressive ways of running a nation. We will see in Becker’s works that the idea of nationalism conflicted sharply with his model for Enlightenment overall, as I discuss further below. The second message of this poem is the implication that this kind of emotional nationalism never remains a pure idea, but that it inevitably leads to physical conflict and war. The fact that the poem breaks off after the patriot’s abusive tirade suggests that the dialogue is over, and could even imply that the

34

Pilsworth

two men have resorted to a fist fight. It certainly shows that dialogue is impossible when one of the speakers is an ideologue who cannot tolerate an opinion different to his own. When negotiations fail, war is the last resort, and its purpose is always injuring (see Scarry 63). This poem, then, demonstrates subtly the path from nationalism to warfare, by showing nationalism as a fanatical ideology that dooms negotiations and potentially leads to violence as the only remaining means of settling disputes. Having established that some in the eighteenth century saw the path from nationalism to war as a slippery slope, and viewed nationalism as a hindrance to Enlightenment progress,1 let us now turn to the main subject of this chapter: Rudolph Zacharias Becker. 2

Becker as Enlightenment Activist and Early Pacifist

Rudolph Zacharias Becker (1752–1822) was a social activist, public educator, and publicist (Tölle ii), rather than a poet as such, and has mostly been studied within the context of Volksaufklärung.2 All of Becker’s writings pursue the goal of making Enlightenment thought accessible to the poor and uneducated, with the ultimate aim of improving German society, both morally and economically, from the bottom up. He first outlined his ideas in 1785, in an essay entitled “Versuch über die Aufklärung des Landmannes” [on the Enlightenment of the common man]. Here, he explains that the goal of true Enlightenment should be to enable people to fulfil their natural human inclinations for self improvement; to become “stufenweise immer edler, glückseliger, der Unsterblichkeit würdiger, und der Gottheit ähnlicher” [increasingly nobler, happier, more worthy of eternal life, and closer to God; “Versuch” 116–17]. He called this intrinsic human drive for self-improvement “Perfektibilität” (perfectibi­ lity) or “Vervollkommnung” (perfectioning; see Freytag 189–304; Tölle 257–64), and saw it as the way to bring about lasting social change on a broad scale. Becker believed that if the poorest and most oppressed people in society were only encouraged to pursue this goal, and, more importantly, were allowed to do so by those in power, then the necessary improvements to the prevailing social, political, and economic systems would take care of themselves:

1 See, for example Blitz, pp. 200–01 for an analysis of the debate between Lessing and Gleim, and pp. 191–94 for an exploration of the debate between Moser and Ortmann on the distinctions between patriotism and xenophobia (“Nationalhaß”). See also Pilsworth 61–62. 2 This term refers to a movement during the Enlightenment period which broadly aimed to educate the lower classes of society, though with a variety of different objectives; see Böning et al.

Nationalism and War in Becker’s Mildheimisches Liederbuch

35

Denn offenbar ist die Haupttriebfeder der Entwickelung des Menschen, der ihm eigenthümliche Hang zur Vervollkommenung [sic], in den meisten Staatsverfassungen, entweder noch gar nicht angespannt, oder falsch gerichtet: und der Kampf der Vernunft mit der Thorheit, des Lichts mit der Finsternis, ist noch lange nicht entschieden. [For it is obvious that the primary drive behind human development, that is, man’s own innate desire for perfection and self-fulfillment, is either not considered by most state constitutions, or it is misgoverned. The battle of Reason against stupidity, and of light against darkness is far from over; “Versuch” 109.] Though Becker still fundamentally supported the authority of the aristocracy, he was not afraid to argue that rulers should take a more active role in encouraging their subjects to improve their own lives and livelihoods. He was, however, categorically opposed to revolution of the kind seen in France, instead believing that instigating gradual improvements from the bottom up was the way to secure a more egalitarian society. The issues of war and nationalism presented Becker with a dilemma because they conflicted with his philosophy of Enlightenment, which is founded on an awareness of humanity’s place within the universe, and under God’s rule. He stressed the need for educating the poor not only for their own sake, but for the benefit of society as a whole: “Wer aber seinen Blick von seinen kleinen persönlichen Angelegenheiten bis zum großen Weltall erhebt, und die rechte Stelle kennt, die der Mensch in demselben bekleidet, wird gewiss die Aufklärung des Volks für eins der gemeinnüzigsten und rühmlichsten Geschäfte halten” [anybody who lifts up his gaze from his own petty, personal affairs, and looks into the great universe, correctly recognising the space that man takes up within it, will surely see that the Enlightenment of the common man is one of the worthiest pursuits for the benefit of the greater good; Becker, “Versuch” 109]. Becker’s holistic approach to humanity—founded on the idea of Christian equality and brotherhood—does not leave much space for private self-interest or nationalism. In 1795, Kant would cite the moral arguments against war ever being legal in his essay “Zum ewigen Frieden” [On Perpetual Peace; 441], and we can see similar lines of argumentation in Becker’s works of this decade. For him, it is difficult to see how war and bloodshed could ever be justified as means to a truly Enlightened end. Indeed, some of Becker’s writings mark him out as an early pacifist figure, although this term is not normally applied to writers and thinkers of this period. On the whole, nationalism and war conflicted with Becker’s goals for social progress, as we will see in more detail by examining some of his pedagogical texts.

36 3

Pilsworth

Becker’s “Mildheim System”: A Programme for Enlightenment

In order to spread his ideas for Enlightenment to his poor and mostly illiterate target audience, Becker developed a series of pedagogical works meant for communal use in rural communities. The first of these was the novel-like Nothund Hülfsbüchlein für Bauersleute [Guidebook for Farmers; 1788]: an educational “Volksbuch” [chapbook] which he had already outlined in his essay, “Versuch über die Aufklärung des Landmannes” (56). Set in the fictional village of Mildheim, the novel tells the story of how the villagers of Mildheim benefitted from reading a textbook called “das Noth- und Hülfsbüchlein,” which itself is inserted into the frame narrative between chapters fourteen and fifteen. The textbook teaches each of its lessons through fictional stories, character monologues and dialogues, and a series of delightful woodcuts which were included to entertain illiterate users of the book. (The work was designed for reading aloud.) The success of Noth- und Hülfsbüchlein für Bauersleute was tremendous. As many as 100,000 copies were sold between June 1788 and February 1791, with the total number of copies sold rising to 130,000 by March 1798 (Tölle 241). ­Siegert describes the work as the most widely disseminated secular book in Germany around 1800 (476). Because of its great success, Becker issued Part Two of Noth- und Hülfsbüchlein in 1798, and followed this publication with more works for communal use alongside it: Das Fragebuch für Lehrer [Question book for Teachers], Die Mildheimische Sittentafel3 [Mildheim Table of Morals], and Mildheimisches Liederbuch [Mildheim Songbook].4 Together, these works make up the “Mildheim System.” All were carefully designed for their target audience, and carried the same message: that the means for agricultural, educational, medicinal, personal, and spiritual progress are available to everyone, no matter how poor you may be, if you only think positively and practically about how to bring about progressive changes in your own life. Indeed, Becker repeatedly stressed that the goal of his work was not to entertain, but rather to instruct and influence: Die Absicht, warum ich das Noth- und Hülfsbüchlein herausgegeben habe, war nicht bloß, dem Landmanne und gemeinem [sic] Bürger ein

3 See Siegert (Aufklärung 815–1) for a facsimile of the Sittentafel. 4 Later additions to this series were the pamphlet Das Friedensfest, wie solches zu Mildheim gefeiert worden [how the peace celebrations were conducted in Mildheim; 1801], and Das Mildheimische Evangelienbuch [the Mildheim book of the Gospel; 1815]. See Freytag 165.

Nationalism and War in Becker’s Mildheimisches Liederbuch

37

Buch in die Hände zu liefern, das von ihm mit Nutzen und Vergnügen gelesen werden könnte: sondern zu machen, daß diese Stände durch den Gebrauch dieses Buches, und der damit in Verbindung stehenden Liedersammlung gewisse Kentnisse und Einsichten, auf welchen ihr Wohlseyn beruhet, wirklich erlangen, und eine gewisse Art zu denken und zu handeln, die zur wahren menschlichen Glückseligkeit führt, wirklich annehmen möchten. [The intention behind my Guidebook was not only to provide the farmer and common man with a book that he could read for his pleasure and profit, but also to ensure that by reading this book, these classes might truly acquire the knowledge and insights contained there, and in the accompanying songbook, upon which their own wellbeing depends. I hope that they should actually learn a certain new way of thinking and behaving, which will lead them to true human happiness; Fragebuch 3.] As these passages make clear, Becker was a dedicated writer and social activist, who was motivated by a powerful sense of injustice in the world in which he lived. His respect for all of humanity, regardless of wealth or social status, and his determination to improve things for the poorest and most oppressed in society, are as admirable today as they were in the eighteenth century. Becker presented both his public mission and his theory of perfectibility as founded on his Christian principles, and it was difficult for him to reconcile the ideas of nationalism and war with his social ideals, though this conflict was clearly less avoidable in 1798 than it had been a decade before. In the first Nothund Hülfsbüchlein, from 1788, the only mention of war had appeared in chapter fifty-five: “Was Bauersleute in Kriegsnoth, auch bey Streitigkeiten und Processen zu beobachten haben” [what peasant folk have to watch out for in times of war, as well as times of dispute and legal proceedings]. Here, the narrator cited the visible improvements in warfare as evidence for human perfectibility: “Das es auf Erden immer besser wird, sieht man unter anderen auch an der Art, wie man heut zu Tage Krieg führt” [evidence for the fact that everything on Earth is constantly improving can be seen, among other things, in the way that wars are fought today; Noth- und Hülfsbüchlein 397]. By the time of Becker’s publication of Part Two, however, his rose-tinted spectacles had clearly been shattered by the chaos and bloodshed of the French Revolution, and the invasion of the German lands by the quickly mobilizing French Revolutionary armies (see Birgfeld i 100–03, ii 583–89). In chapter fourty-four of the later edition of Nothund Hülfsbüchlein (1798), the narrator describes the barbarism of the warfare witnessed in Germany between 1792 and 1797, and attributes it to the failure of the Enlightenment project. He still insists, however, that if only people would

38

Pilsworth

truly improve themselves, then war would be over for good: “der Krieg wird ganz aufhören” (Noth- und Hülfsbüchlein [1798] 333–34). How, then, did Becker’s approach to nationalism and war change between the two editions of his Mildheimisches Liederbuch [Mildheim Songbook]? As the works were designed for use as part of the pedagogical “Mildheim System,” we might ask how Becker hoped to educate his readers regarding these two ideas. As I will show, my analysis of the first edition of the songbook in 1799 shows Becker wrestling with the two concepts, in view of the very real military threat now already posed to the German lands by the French Revolutionary army. By the time of the 1815 edition, however, after the Wars of Liberation, it seems to have become impossible for Becker to exclude nationalistic viewpoints from entering his collection. Rather than seeing this as a straightforward case of nationalistic brainwashing, I suggest there is a more subtle and intellectual reason for Becker’s inclusion of this controversial material. 4

Nationalism and War in Mildheimisches Liederbuch (1799) and Das Friedensfest (1801)

Containing 518 songs, Mildheimisches Liederbuch5 was produced for use alongside the second edition of the Noth- und Hülfsbüchlein für Bauersleute (1798), as a further resource to underpin the same lessons. Becker sourced his material from various writers and pedagogues of the time (see Weissert 22–6 and 38– 42), and only wrote a small number of poems himself, usually to fill thematic gaps, or when the topic was one he felt strongly about, such as “Justice” or “Enlightenment” (see Table 2.1). Becker printed a call for contributions, designating both the thematic and formal aspects of the poetry he was hoping to include. The texts had to be easily comprehensible, avoiding figurative speech, and upholding solid moral precepts (see Becker, “An die Leser” 407). Songs were included in different sections that, taken together, covered every aspect of life, including the natural world, sickness and health, spiritual life, childhood, domestic life, the work carried out by various trades and professions, important occasions such as weddings, births, and deaths, and social events such as festivals. Each of the songs in the Liederbuch was also paired with a lesson from the Mildheimische Sittentafel. The songs on patriotism and war appear in the third part of Mildheimisches Liederbuch, which is under the rubric: “Der Mensch in Gesellschaft mit seines 5 References to Mildheimisches Liederbuch (1799) will be given as mlb; references to Mildheimisches Liederbuch (1815) will be given as mlb.2.

Nationalism and War in Becker’s Mildheimisches Liederbuch

39

Table 2.1  The texts contributed by Becker in Mildheimisches Liederbuch (1799 and 1815)

Number in mlb Number in mlb.2 Subject matter (1799) (1815) 17

38

Water/streams

21

42

Water/streams

31

68

Domestic animals

Not included

243

Imprisonment

367

537

Against war

369

539

Praising peace

411

598

Song for a miller

432

632

Song for a new school boy

446

650

Song for butchers

462

671

Song for a builder

467

677

Song for builders

476

685

Song for smiths

471

686

Song for wagoners

487

714

Song for a pastor

491

718

Song “für Schriftsteller” [for writers]

426

720

Praising the Enlightenment

496

733

Justice

Source: Häntzschel’s list of contributors in Mildheimisches Liederbuch: Faksimiledruck (47*)

Gleichen, als Freund und Lebensgefährte, Staatsbürger und Zunftgenosse, bis zum Grabe” [man in society among his equals, as a friend and companion, a state citizen and guild member, until the grave]. The section “Vaterlandslieder” [songs for the fatherland] from pp. 214–21 contains nine songs for use at patriotic or national celebrations. They are, however, almost entirely peaceful and non-violent. For example, song 359 praises the local prince (a space is left so that the singer may insert the name of his or her local ruler), and calls for an end to hatred: “Es sterbe Haß und Neid! Es blühe Redlichkeit noch zu der Enkelzeit im Vaterland!” [may hatred and envy perish. May honesty still thrive in

40

Pilsworth

our fatherland, even in our grandchildren’s time; mlb 216].6 Clearly, this is an anti-revolutionary song, echoing Becker’s respect for monarchical constitutions, which he saw as part of the God-given universal order. The first verse of song 361 argues similarly: “Auch wir, dem Himmel Dank! sind frey; nur sind wir’s still und schlicht; bey uns ist Freyheit, nicht Geschrey, tobt und rumoret nicht” [we too are free, thank God! But we are free calmly and simply. We have freedom here, not uproar. Do not rage and rumble; mlb 217]. Verse 5 makes a comparison with the French Revolution more explicit: “Was soll uns FreyheitsSchwärmerey? Wir haben Freyheits-Sinn; macht mich die rothe Müze frey, wenn ich es sonst nicht bin?” [we do not need to rave about freedom, as we already have it within us. Does a red cap set me free, if I am not free already?; mlb 217]. To summarise this section, then, Becker’s “patriotism” is mostly expressed as support for the aristocracy and critique of the French Revolution, but without descending into hatred of the French or an explicit call to arms against them. The only song which mentions the idea of death for the fatherland is told in the voice of a young boy, who is eager to join the army he sees passing though his village, and is willing to die for his fatherland, like his father before him, if needed (see song 364, mlb 219). There is no song which defines German national characteristics as anything that could not be seen as generic Christian attributes (honesty, goodwill, love, etc.). This kind of patriotism was acceptable to Becker: celebrating and upholding the principle of Enlightened monarchical rule, preventing violent revolution, and spreading messages of universal goodwill. Songs on the topic of war appear in two different sections of the collection: one on “Krieg und Friede” [war and peace; mlb 221–23], and one with the title “Für den Wehrstand” [for the military; mlb 309–26]. The location of these sections already tells us much about how Becker viewed the role of soldiers and war in society. The section entitled “Krieg und Friede” comes immediately after “Vaterlandslieder,” stressing the obvious link between nationalism and war. Yet the military section appears separately, at the end of a long list of other pro­ fessions ranging through farmers, various types of craftsmen, hired hands, and teachers, before turning to soldiers. The only groups to follow after soldiers are Jews and gravediggers. As well as reflecting Becker’s anti-Semitism, this order shows the relatively low esteem with which soldiers were still held in society in 1799, even within the lowest social class for which this work was ­produced. Harari has demonstrated that ­eighteenth-century military strategy considered 6 The texts in Mildheimisches Liederbuch are presented as prose, in columns, which is why I have not indicated line breaks in my transcriptions from this work. The decision to present texts in this way was part of the work’s chapbook “disguise” (see Becker, “Versuch” 130).

Nationalism and War in Becker’s Mildheimisches Liederbuch

41

common soldiers essentially as mindless automatons, and that this view only began to change in the early 1800s, when German armies reformed in imitation of the French models that allowed soldiers more initiative (Harari 160–77). Mildheimisches Liederbuch indirectly reflects this older suspicion of soldiers as brutal, cunning, and filled with low urges (Harari 160–61) because this is exactly the kind of behaviour that its songs oppose. It is clear that Becker still saw soldiers in this traditional way, and yet attempted to civilise them by presenting them in an idealised manner. For example, soldier songs 501 and 502 both include statements of piety and morality that seem, frankly, too good to be true. The soldier speaker of song 501 asserts: Daß ich des Wirthes Kind und Weib zur Unzucht nicht verführe, sey Arbeit stets mein Zeitvertreib, wenn ich bin im Quartiere: weil Nichtsthun, wie ihr alle wißt, der Anfang aller Laster ist. [So that I do not seduce the landlord’s children and wife when I am quartered, I make work my constant occupation. For idleness, as you all know, is the source of all vice; mlb 317.] The military songs of Mildheimisches Liederbuch promote good behaviour only, and killing and death play a comparatively minor role in them. More often than not, they focus on moral behavior while soldiers are amongst civilians, rather than on life on the battlefield. None of the ten songs for soldiers include the kinds of violent and gory imagery that we are used to from the militant poetry of the Seven Years’ War by Karsch, Gleim, et al. Song 504 does incite soldiers to fight the enemy, yet it makes sure to remind the reader that “des Feindes Blut ist Menschenblut; und Mordblut ist nicht Heldenmut” [the enemy’s blood is human blood, and murderous blood is not heroic blood; mlb 320]. Previously, song 503 had explained that war is an unpleasant necessity which must be fought, however regretfully, in order to maintain and uphold justice: “Nicht jeder übet jederzeit Gerechtigkeit und Redlichkeit, man muß die Frevler schlagen, daß sie nichts Aergers wagen; drum giebts auf Erden Krieg, drum giebt es, leider! Krieg” [Not everyone always acts justly and honestly. We have to beat back the wicked, or they will stop at nothing. That’s why there’s war on Earth, that’s why—alas! there’s war; mlb 319.] Furthermore, song 503 reminds soldiers of their duties as fellow human beings, and as Christians: “Doch wer ein braver Krieger ist, ein braver Krieger und ein Christ, wird nicht mit Blute spielen, der kann auch menschlich fühlen, er hat ein Menschenherz, er hat ein Menschenherz” [yet he who is a good soldier and a Christian, he will not play with blood. He can feel humanely, and has a human heart,

42

Pilsworth

he has a human heart; mlb 319]. Within the genre of war songs, these appear surprisingly peaceable! The soldier songs discussed above do not reflect the level of brutality that the narrator of the second part of Noth- und Hülfsbüchlein (333) had claimed to have observed in the wars fought over the 1790s. They instead maintain an idealised view of warfare as a moral institution, and of soldiers as the perfect and exemplary Christians. However, not all of the songs in the 1799 edition of Mildheimisches Liederbuch maintain this idealised view of warfare. Becker appears both to accept war as a moral necessity in times of crisis (as in the songs explored above), and also to criticise it as a human tragedy, as the following songs show. Appearing in the section “Für den Wehrstand,” songs 506 and 510 were authored by Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart (although his name was not included in this 1799 edition). The first of these (usually entitled “Kaplied” [Cape song]) was written to criticise the selling of German soldiers to fight for foreign armies in Africa. Becker adds a reassuring footnote explaining to the reader that such things would never happen in Germany again.7 Yet this footnote also reveals a certain anxiety about including the song at all: “Dieses Lied ist von Wirtembergischen Soldaten gesungen worden, die an die Holländer verkauft waren, und auf das Vorgebirge der guten Hoffnung geschickt wurden: welches nun in ganz Deutschland wohl nicht mehr geschehen wird” [this song was sung by soldiers from Württemberg who were sold to the Dutch, and sent to the Cape of Good Hope, a practice which will probably never happen again in all of Germany; mlb 320]. Though Becker’s need to explain his inclusion of this song may partially have resulted from its common usage by republican agitators (Schneider 294), the second text by Schubart included in this section of Mildheimisches Liederbuch as no. 510 demonstrates even more clearly Becker’s uneasiness about addressing the topic of war. Schubart’s poem (elsewhere entitled “Der Bettelsoldat,” see Grätz 311–13) is told in the voice of a war cripple who painfully regrets his decision to join the army, and ends by entreating his listeners to avoid making the same mistake: Ihr Söhne, bey der Krücke, An der mein Leib sich beugt, Bei diesem Tränenblicke, Der sich zum Grabe neigt; Beschwör’ ich euch—ihr Söhne! 7 Wilson describes the practice of selling soldiers as “universally loathed and publicly criticised in Germany,” despite being fairly widespread (Wilson 303).

Nationalism and War in Becker’s Mildheimisches Liederbuch

43

O flieht der Trommel Ton! Und Kriegstrommetentöne: Sonst kriegt ihr meinen Lohn. [You sons! By the crutches that I cling to, by my tearful gaze which lowers itself to the grave, I entreat you, sons, oh!—flee the sound of the drums and the trumpets of war, or your reward will be the same as mine’; Schubart 324.] However, the version in Mildheimisches Liederbuch adds two more verses with a caveat which must have been added by Becker (see Steinitz 456) in view of the very real threat now posed by the French Revolutionary army on German soil: Nur wenn dem Vaterlande ein Feind mit Krieges-Noth, und eurem Volk die Schande der Unterjochung droht: Dann, Kinder, greift zum Schwerdte! dann schont nicht Blut, nicht Feu’r! dann reiniget die Erde von solchem Ungeheur! [Only if an enemy approaches the fatherland in a time of war, and threatens your people with the shame of subjugation, / Then, children, reach for your sword! Then, spare neither blood, nor fire. Then, cleanse the Earth of such a monster; mlb 325.] The aggressive, militaristic language of the final stanza contrasts entirely with  Schubart’s original poem, and also stands out in the section of soldier songs on the whole. Becker’s decision to modify this anti-war song for inclusion in Mildheimisches Liederbuch is evidence of his significant moral dilemma on the topic of war. He was clearly both aware of its brutal, inhumane, and un-­Christian nature, and yet could no longer practically banish it from his worldview, or from his song collection, in 1799. Becker’s additional stanza makes room for war as a moral necessity, but only when the freedom of the nation is severely threatened, as it then was by Napoleon’s troops. The other section containing war songs in this edition, entitled “Krieg und Friede” contains only three songs, and all of them are against war. The last of these three (song 368) is particularly intriguing. It comes from the closing chorus of Johann Adam Hiller’s comic opera of 1772, Der Krieg. Eine komische Oper in drei Akten [War: a Comic Opera in Three Acts]: a highly satirical depiction of warfare and military culture with a libretto by Christian Felix Weiße.8 The 8 The libretto also featured some poems by Carl Wilhelm Ramler, and was based on a play by Carlo Goldoni, La Guerra.

44

Pilsworth

complete text in the opera’s version has five verses (see Hiller et al. 181–82), whereas only three are included in Mildheimisches Liederbuch. Perhaps Becker knew only a shorter version of the song, as Weiße and Hiller’s opera songs frequently entered the oral tradition and became known as folksongs in their own right, without any connection to their operatic context (see Joubert). If this is the case, then this anti-war song may have been genuinely popular at the time. Its second stanza uses the language of the pastoral to imagine a world returned to peacetime, considering the cosmopolitan image of “Vater-Erde” [father Earth] rather than the narrower, more usual “Vaterland”: Du [Friede] kehrst unsre Vater-Erde wieder in ein Paradies; tränkst uns mit der Milch der Heerde, wärmst uns mit der Schaafe Fließ. [You (peace) make a paradise of our Father-Earth again. You water us with the milk of the herd and warm us with the fleece of the sheep; mlb 222.]9 The other two songs in this section for war and peace were written by Becker himself (though presented anonymously; see Table 2.1), which again shows that he felt the need to engage critically with the difficult topic of war. Both of his texts are anti-war songs. In song 367, the poetic speaker cries out against war in a tragic monologue which is quite long for a Mildheimisches Liederbuch song (eleven stanzas). The poem opens with a panoramic view of a battlefield from the speaker’s perspective: Ach! was seh’ ich? Weite Felder dicht von Mann und Roß bedecket; Wagen Züge durch die Wälder Meilen weit dahin gestrecket; alles in dem schönsten Glanze, überall Trompeten-Schall: eilen sie zum frohen Tanze? Feyern sie ein Freudenmahl? [Oh, what do I see? Broad fields packed with men and horses, lines of wagons stretching miles away through the forests. Everything gleams beautifully, and trumpet fanfares are heard all around. Are they hurrying to a joyful dance? Are they celebrating a banquet?; mlb 221.] The poem thus uses the techniques of epic poetry (now established for patriotic war poetry by writers such as Karsch, as in her poem “Auf den Sieg bei Torgau”), in which the scene unfolds and is viewed from afar. However, ­Becker’s speaker is deeply saddened by what he sees:

9 This song is also sung by the fictional villagers of Mildheim in Becker’s anti-war pamphlet, Das Friedensfest (14), discussed in more detail below.

Nationalism and War in Becker’s Mildheimisches Liederbuch

45

Ach! Sie rüsten sich zum Kampfe; Blut und Tod ist ihr Begehren! Bald verhüllt in schwarzem Dampfe sich der Glanz von beyden Heeren; Feld und Wald umher erbeben; Donner rollen Schlag auf Schlag, Blitze leuchten, Wolken heben sich empor, Nacht wird aus Tag. [Alas! They are preparing for battle; desiring blood and death. Soon the glow of both armies is cloaked in black smoke. The surrounding fields and forests shake. Thunder rolls, striking again and again, lightening flashes. Clouds go up, turning the day into night; mlb 221.] The poem’s use of weather imagery here presents the war as a kind of natural disaster, like a terrible but natural storm—again, echoing contemporary comparisons of the French Revolutionary Wars with natural disaster (E. Becker 84–85). However, Becker’s battle song does not take sides, but views both (unnamed) armies neutrally as “die Streiter” [the opponents]. Rather than championing any particular political cause, this poem undermines the glory with which war is associated, by summarising the outcome of the battle in a single sentence: “einer siegt, der andre fliehet” [one wins, the other flees]. In contrast, however, the majority of the poem’s remaining nine stanzas depict in great detail the suffering of the wounded, the destruction of the fields, and the moral depravity and loss of innocence that warfare brings with it. Stanza six shows frustration at the failure of the Enlightenment to put an end to such horrific acts of warfare: Sind dies Löwen, sind es Tieger, die aus Blutdurst sich verderben? Nein! ach! Menschen sind die Krieger, Menschen, Brüder, gleiche Erben eines Geistes hoher Würde, der vom Quell der Lieb’ entspringt, und sich von des Lebens Bürde wieder auf zum Himmel schwingt. [Are they lions, are they tigers, who destroy each other out of lust for blood? No! Alas! These warriors are people, people! They are brothers, equal heirs of the same noble dignity of spirit that springs from the fountain of love, and that returns to heaven when released of its mortal burden; mlb 221.] Similarly, stanza eight suggests a pacifist outlook—that warfare must be for ever abandoned if mankind is to achieve its true, God-given, potential: Krieg! o, aller Ungeheuer schrecklichstes, verlaß die Erde! Lösche dein zerstörend Feuer, daß der Mensch zum Menschen werde! Bis du gänzlich ausgerottet, schändet sein Geschlecht die Welt; ihres Schöpfers Weisheit spottet, wer dich für nothwendig halt;

46

Pilsworth

[War! Oh you most terrible of all monsters, leave the Earth! Put out your destructive fire, so that humanity can become humane! Until you have been stamped out for good, the race of mankind will bring shame to the world. Whoever thinks you are necessary makes a mockery of his own Creator’s wisdom; mlb 367.] Becker presents his opposition to war as rooted in his Christian faith here. Correspondingly, the other song authored by him in this section (song 369, mlb 222) praises God for peace, and begs forgiveness on behalf of all those who fight wars. Curiously, this poem is not divided into numbered stanzas, but appears more like a dramatic monologue, or a prayer, closer to a speech than a song. Perhaps this indicates that Becker did not write the poem specifically for inclusion within Mildheimisches Liederbuch, but for another purpose originally. It surely seems significant, however, that Becker chose to write two poems for this section himself, when he wrote only sixteen overall for the whole 1799 edition (see Figure 2). Becker’s decision to write his own pacifist poems here suggests that he felt a particular interest in the topic, and, I suggest, felt motivated by his Enlightened and Christian idealism to make a powerful case against war in this section, particularly as large-scale war with the French seemed increasingly likely. In 1801, Becker took his anti-war activism even further, publishing a dedicated pamphlet called Das Friedensfest, wie solches zu Mildheim gefeiert worden [the peace celebration, as celebrated in Mildheim]. The foreword describes the fictional peace festivities in Mildheim as having been planned “nicht allein zum Vergnügen, sondern auch zur wahren christlichen Erbauung der Gemeinde” [not just for the people’s enjoyment, but for their true Christian edification; Das Friedensfest 4].10 As part of the event in Mildheim, Corporal Wackersinn (one of the fictional military men who has now returned from the war with France) describes the life of a soldier and the nature of warfare for the crowd of gathered villagers (16–36). He paints a terrible, gruesome picture of the slaughter on the battlefield (30–36) and recounts that one man exclaimed after a battle, while viewing the piles of bodies around him, “Brüder seht, das ist unsere heutige Arbeit! Die Menschen haben wir gemordet! Und, was hatten sie uns gethan?” [brothers, look, this was our day’s work: we murdered people! And what had they done to us?; 35]. The description of soldier’s work as m ­ urder

10

This might also show the influence of Kant’s essay “Zum ewigen Frieden” on Becker’s thinking, as Kant’s text suggested that declarations of peace should not only be followed by festivals of thanks (“Dankfeste”), but also by a day of penance (“Bußtag”; Kant 443).

Nationalism and War in Becker’s Mildheimisches Liederbuch

47

is striking (see Siegert 820–21), as it presents such work as in contempt of secular law as well as God’s law. Furthermore, by using the term “brothers” and questioning the reason for the enmity between the two armies, this speaker highlights the futility of such warfare, as all men are equally deserving of life and respect. Wackersinn then reflects critically: “wer sollte es für möglich halten, daß der nach dem Bilde Gottes erschaffene Mensch so tief sinken und verwildern könnte!” [who would have thought it possible that man, created in God’s image, could sink to such low depths, and could become so wild?; 36]. Clearly, as late as 1801, war was still incompatible with Becker’s Enlightenment philosophy, and there was very little space for narrow-minded nationalism in his egalitarian worldview. But did Becker adapt his stance in response to the increasing militarisation and nationalisation of his reading public during the next fifteen years, including the Wars of Liberation? 5

After the Wars: Mildheimisches Liederbuch (1815) and Becker’s Prison Memoir

Schneider has pointed out that the 1815 edition of Mildheimisches Liederbuch contains reams of political songs produced in support of the nationalist movement during the Wars of Liberation (Schneider 291, note 2). He also draws attention to the introduction of two new sections, whose titles reveal the newly increased significance of military songs and celebrations by this time: “Für Soldaten, Landwehr und Landsturmmänner” [for soldiers and reserves] and “Lieder zum Fest aller Deutschen, den 18. und 19. October” [songs for the festival of all Germans on 18 and 19 October; Schneider 303]. By identifying key themes, and counting the number of songs in both editions which address them, Schneider reveals certain shifts that had taken place in the public consciousness during Germany’s period of Napoleonic rule, especially regarding nationalism and the military. The number of songs glorifying death for the fatherland jumps from three (in the first edition) to thirteen; on the topic of soldiers in general from three to sixteen; and on the enmity of the French from three to eleven. Other ideas have also gained prominence in reaction to the French Revolutionary wars. For instance, the religious notion of reliance on God now takes up thirteen songs, rather than only two; and sentiments such as praise for the princes, criticism of tyrants, and freedom and human rights are more numerously represented in 1815 than they were in 1799. Yet we might well ask why Becker chose to include so much of this material, especially when some of the more violent and aggressive material contradicted his own moral theories of perfectibility and Enlightenment progress. Having gone to such lengths in 1799

48

Pilsworth

to select only texts which suited his Enlightenment philosophy of perfectibility, why include so much popular material now? The inclusion of so much poetry in support of the Wars of Liberation in the second edition of Mildheimisches Liederbuch indicates that something significant about Becker’s editorial attitude had changed between 1799 and 1815. It seems to show him relaxing his control over his material, allowing more, and conflicting, political voices to be heard. I explain this change in Becker’s editorial practice as his reaction to the harsh censorship Germany had experienced under French rule. As a publisher, Becker had always been firmly against controlling freedom of speech, but his aversion to this aspect of Napoleon’s rule was further strengthened when he was imprisoned for seventeen months in Magdeburg fortress in light of publications which Napoleon perceived as a threat to his regime (see Tölle 93–114, 223; Freytag 57–59). A year after his release on 5 May 1813, Becker began working on a personal memoir of his experiences, entitled Leiden und Freuden in siebzehnmonatlicher Gefangenschaft [sufferings and joys over seventeen months in prison]. In this memoir, he maintains his role as the morally upstanding Enlightenment writer, presenting his time in captivity as having strengthened his religious faith (Leiden 192), as well as having taught him the importance of tolerance. Significantly, Becker’s memoir never incites hatred of the French, nor encourages the reader to take up arms. Again and again, Becker writes in defense of the French prison guards and officials that he met with, “um nicht den Nationalhaß gegen ein Volk zu nähren, das die ihm eigenthümlichen Fehler des Charackters durch so manche Vorzüge in der geistigen und geselligen Bildung vergütet” [so as not to feed the national hatred of a people who quite make up for their unique character flaws through their many intellectual and social merits and achievements; Leiden 182]. Becker’s only real bone to pick with the French, he argues, is Napoleon’s despotism. For a despotic state can only be maintained by oppressive structures which must stand in direct contradiction to God’s plan for humanity (that is, for constant development and self improvement). Only states ruled by “erbliche monarchische Verfassung[en]” (inherited constitutional monarchies) can allow their subordinates to achieve this kind of self-fulfilment, he argues. In despotic states, on the contrary, all subordinates become mere pawns in the ruler’s games, having no will or rights of their own (Leiden 182–3). The despotic state is diametrically opposed to the kind of self-governed society for which Becker’s Volksaufklärung programme had argued, in which people are encouraged to think for themselves, and to take action to improve their own communities for the common good. Toppling the tyrant Napoleon was therefore in the mutual interest of both the French and the Germans:

Nationalism and War in Becker’s Mildheimisches Liederbuch

49

[Es ist nötig] daß wir den letzten Blutstropfen daran setzen, die hohen Zwecke des jetzigen Völkerkrieges zu erringen: Freyheit und Selbstständigkeit dem Vaterlande, und die Rechte der Menschheit allen Völkern Europas, auch—dem französischen. [We must fight to the last drop of blood to achieve the noble goals of the current civil war: freedom and independence for the fatherland, and human rights for all people of Europe, including the French; Leiden 192.] Fittingly, his memoir ends with a poem thanking God for Germany’s liberation (seeing it as stemming from God’s will, rather than attributing it to German military superiority), and calling now for forgiveness and mercy between the two countries: Groll und Rache sey vergessen; Unserm Todfeind sey verziehn! Keine Thräne soll ihn pressen, Keine Reue nage ihn! Unser Schuldbuch sey vernichtet, Ausgesöhnt die ganze Welt! Droben überm Sternenzelt Richtet Gott, wie wir gerichtet. [May resentments and vengeance now be forgotten, may our enemy be forgiven! No more tears shall oppress him, nor regrets burden him. May all debts be called off, and all the world be reconciled! High above the firmament, God will judge how we have judged; Leiden 196] In his own poems and writings, therefore, Becker does not express nationalistic, anti-French sentiments, rather maintaining that it is in everyone’s interest to topple Napoleon, in order to restore peace and freedom for all. Some of the poetry in support of the Wars of Liberation included in the 1815 edition of Mildheimisches Liederbuch, however, contains sentiments which flatly contradict these peaceful hopes. For instance, Arndt’s famous poem “Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland” [What is the German Fatherland?] included as song 563, defines Germanness as a shared hatred of the French: “Das ist das deutsche Vaterland, […], wo jeder Franzmann heißet Feind” [the German fatherland is wherever the French are hated; mlb.2 361]. A text from the first volume of Des Knaben Wunderhorn (called “Husarenglaube”), with its violent imagery of decapitating French soldiers, also appears in this edition as song 758. Immediately after this song comes another, even more violent one. One verse will serve to show its general theme:

50

Pilsworth

Was willst du, Franzos, an des Rheines Gestaden? Willst unsere Schiff für dich wohl entladen? Du Räuber, wir wollen dir füllen den Sack, statt köstlicher Waare, mit blutigem Pack! [What do you want, Frenchman, on the banks of the Rhine? Do you want to empty our ships for yourself? You thief, we will not fill your bags with precious wares, but with bloody ones!; mlb.2 504.] The inclusion in 1815 of a wider variety of material, expressing viewpoints which Becker did not personally share, shows that he has modified his editorial role. While Becker’s 1799 collection had employed a very controlling editorial approach, even though he did not personally pen most of the texts in the collection, his editorial method in 1815 opens the work up to more diverse messages. He no longer feels a need to disguise the work as an anonymous, collectively authored Volksschrift (chapbook), and instead names all of the contributors in the collection. The work becomes polyphonic, revealing a more democratic, rather than authoritarian attitude to pedagogy. I see this new openness and tolerance in Becker’s approach as a response to ­Napoleon’s authoritarian censorship and surveillance (“die lauernden ­Klapperschlangen der Pariser hohen Polizey” [those lurking rattlesnakes from the French senior police]; Leiden 119), as well as his own experiences of political imprisonment. Rather than censoring material and maintaining a sense of pedagogic authority, Becker’s 1815 edition instead models a more trusting form of education. That his time in prison had a profound effect on Becker’s outlook is shown not only by his prison memoir, but also in the only new poem that he contributed personally to Mildheimisches Liederbuch in 1815: song 243. After its attribution to Becker, the poem carries the footnote: “Den 13. Febr. 1812 in der Casematte Nr. iv. auf der Citadelle zu Magdeburg auf Birkenrinde geschrieben” [written on 13 February in casemate no. 4 in Magdeburg fortress, on a piece of birch bark; mlb.2 148], thus overtly inviting a biographical reading of this poem. It bears striking similarities to another poem by Schubart on the same theme, called “Der Gefangene” [the prisoner], which also precedes it in the collection. Schubart’s poem is similarly adorned with a footnote and biographical reference: “Auf der würtembergischen Bergstellung Hohenasperg verfaßt, wo der Dichter viele Jahre seines Lebens gefangen saß, ohne zu wissen, warum” [written in the Württemberg mountain fortress of Hohenasperg, where the poet sat imprisoned for many years, without knowing the reason; mlb.2 147]. This parallel presentation draws an association between Becker and Schubart,  presenting both as defiant agitators, willing to suffer physically for their political beliefs. Schubart’s poem was not included in the 1799 version of ­Mildheimisches Liederbuch, and so Becker’s decision to print it in 1815 suggests

Nationalism and War in Becker’s Mildheimisches Liederbuch

51

it now held a special importance for him. Becker’s poem copies the form of Schubart’s exactly, and there are also parallels in content. Both texts have eleven stanzas, each of four cross-rhymed lines, yet the message of Becker’s poem contrasts significantly with that of Schubart’s. The tone of the latter is d­ esperate and hopeless, with the repeated refrain of “Gefangener Mann–ein armer Mann!” [imprisoned man—a poor man!] whereas Becker’s poem applies his trademark optimism, faith, and hope, even to this direst of situations. The closing lines of Becker’s poem stress the importance of a reliance on God, which can bring joy and freedom, even in death, and present Becker himself as a (potential) martyr for his political cause—an idea also seen in his prison memoir (Leiden 25). However, Becker’s (imagined) death here is the death of the political prisoner, rather than that of the soldier. Becker and Schubart are depicted as patriotic martyrs for their own consciences in these poems. Patriotism for Becker is not simply a matter of fighting and dying for a collective defined by its allegiance to a political leader. Rather, what matters are the higher values for which each individual is willing to suffer, and not necessarily on the battlefield. 6 Conclusion Overall, then, we have seen how Becker’s two editions of Mildheimisches Liederbuch reveal the fraught complexity of the discourses around war and nationalism both in 1799 and 1815. I have argued that Becker maintained his own moral stance against war and nationalism, even after experiencing political oppression of the harshest kind. However, Becker allowed his collection to include some violent, nationalistic viewpoints that he did not personally appear to share, and this suggests that his commitment to freedom of expression ultimately overruled his desire to select, censor, and shape his material to reflect his own personal beliefs. What had begun as an educational songbook for peasants in 1799 takes the shape, in 1815, of a poetic anthology for the whole reading and singing public. Rather than enforcing the first edition’s pedagogical aims for Enlightenment progress based on Becker’s individual philosophy of Enlightenment, the second edition reflects the competing thoughts and emotions experienced by a still developing nation emerging from occupation. His inclusion of so many nationalistic and militaristic songs should not be seen as evidence that Becker, or Germans as a whole, had been brainwashed by such material. On the contrary, I suggest that it shows Becker experimenting with a new educational method in this 1815 edition: one founded not on pedagogical authoritarianism, but on tolerance and trust. Rather than spoon-feeding his

52

Pilsworth

readers a diet of pure, Enlightened moral fibre, we might see Becker’s second edition of Mildheimisches Liederbuch as more truly Enlightened, in that it contains conflicting narratives around war, patriotism, and nationalism, and therefore allows readers to think for themselves. More importantly, its inclusion of genuinely popular material allowed it to represent the developing ­German nation in a manner befitting an Enlightened, more democratically orientated society—something Becker was still hoping to achieve.

Works Cited

Primary

Becker, Rudolph Zacharias. “An die Leser.” Deutsche Zeitung für die Jugend und ihre Freunde, oder moralische Schilderungen der Menschen, Sitten und Staaten unsrer Zeit, vol. 49, 7 December 1787, pp. 403–10. Becker, Rudolph Zacharias. Das Friedensfest, wie solches zu Mildheim gefeyert worden: nebst der Vorlesung des Korporal Wackersinn vom Soldatenleben und Kriegswesen und der Predigt vom ewigen Frieden, welche der Herr Pfarrer Starke auf dem Luftplatze gehalten. Beckersche Buchhandlung, 1801. Becker, Rudolph Zacharias. Fragebuch für Lehrer über das Noth- und Hülfsbüchlein. Beckersche Buchhandlung, 1799. Becker, Rudolph Zacharias. Leiden und Freuden in siebzehn monatlicher französischer Gefangenschaft: Von ihm selbst beschrieben Beckersche Buchhandlung, 1814. Becker, Rudolph Zacharias. Mildheimisches Liederbuch: Faksimiledruck nach der Ausgabe von 1815. Edited by Günter Häntzschel, Metzler, 1971. Becker, Rudolph Zacharias. Mildheimisches Liederbuch von 518 lustigen und ernsthaften Gesängen, über alle Dinge in der Welt und alle Umstände des menschlichen Lebens, die man besingen kann. Beckersche Buchhandlung, 1799. Becker, Rudolph Zacharias. Noth- und Hülfsbüchlein für Bauersleute: Nachdruck der Erstausgabe von 1788. Edited by Reinhart Siegert, Harenberg, 1980. Becker, Rudolph Zacharias. Noth- und Hülfs-Büchlein oder lehrreiche Freuden- und Trauer-Geschichte der Einwohner zu Mildheim: Zweiter Theil. Beckersche Buchhandlung, 1798. Becker, Rudolph Zacharias. “Versuch über die Aufklärung des Landmannes.” Der Teutsche Merkur, vol. 3, 1785, pp. 108–31. Hiller, Johann Adam, et al. Der Krieg: Eine komische Oper in drei Akten. 1773. http:// digital.staatsbibliothekberlin.de/werkansicht?PPN=PPN72988418X&PHYSID= PHYS_0009&DMDID=. Kant, Immanuel. “Zum ewigen Frieden: Ein philosophischer Entwurf.” Immanuel Kants Werke. Edited by A. Buchenau, E. Cassirer, and B. Kellermann, vol. 6, Cassirer, 1923, pp. 425–74.

Nationalism and War in Becker’s Mildheimisches Liederbuch

53

Schubart, Christian Friedrich Daniel. Schubarts Werke in einem Band. Edited by Ursula Wertheim and Hans Böhm, Volksverlag, 1959.

Secondary

Becker, Ernst Wolfgang. Zeit der Revolution!—Revolution der Zeit? Zeiterfahrungen in Deutschland in der Ära der Revolutionen 1789–1848/49. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999. Birgfeld, Johannes. Krieg und Aufklärung: Studien zum Kriegsdiskurs in der deutschsprachi­gen Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts. Wehrhahn, 2012, 2 vols. Blitz, Hans-Martin. Aus Liebe zum Vaterland: Die deutsche Nation im 18. Jahrhundert. Hamburger Edition, 2000. Böning, Holger, et al., editors. Volksaufklärung: Eine praktische Reformbewegung des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts. Lumière, 2007. Freytag, Christine. “Mensch, werde und mache alles immer besser”: Überlegungen zur Aufklärung und Vervollkommnung des Menschen am Beispiel von Rudolph Zacharias Becker in der Zeit von 1779 bis 1794. Edition Paideia, 2014. Grätz, Katharina. “Enttäuschte Erwartungen. Schubarts Lyrik zwischen Rollenspiel und authentischen Selbstausdruck.” Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart: Das Werk, edited by Barbara Potthast, Winter, 2016, pp. 299–320. Harari, Yuval Noah. The Ultimate Experience: Battlefield Revelations and the Making of Modern War Culture, 1450–2000. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Joubert, Estelle. “Songs to Shape a German Nation: Hiller’s Comic Operas and the Public Sphere.” Eighteenth-Century Music, vol. 3, no. 2, 2006, pp. 213–30. Pilsworth, Ellen. “‘Nicht unsrer Lesewelt, und nicht der Ewigkeit’: Late Style in Gleim’s Zeit- and Sinngedichte (1792–1803),” Edinburgh German Yearbook 12: Re-Populating the Eighteenth Century: Second-Tier Writing in the German Enlightenment, edited by Johannes Birgfeld and Michael Wood. Camden House, 2018, pp. 52–68. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford UP, 1985. Schneider, Herbert. “Revolutionäre Lieder und vaterländische Gesänge: Zur Publikation französischer Revolutionslieder in Deutschland und zum politischen Lied in R. Z. Beckers Mildheimischem Liederbuch.” Volk—Nation—Vaterland, edited by Ulrich Herrmann, Felix Meiner, 1996, pp. 291–324. Siegert, Reinhart. Aufklärung und Volkslektüre: Exemplarisch dargestellt an Rudolph Zacharias Becker und seinem “Noth- und Hülfsbüchlein”: mit einer Bibliographie zum Gesamtthema. Buchhändler-Vereinigung, 1978. Steinitz, Wolfgang. Deutsche Volkslieder demokratischen Charakters aus sechs Jahrhunderten, vol. 1, Akademie, 1962. Tölle, Ursula. Rudolph Zacharias Becker: Versuche der Volksaufklärung im 18. Jahrhundert in Deutschland. Waxmann, 1994. Weber, Ernst. Lyrik der Befreiungskriege (1812–1815). Gesellschaftspolitische Meinungsund Willensbildung durch Literatur. Metzler, 1991.

54

Pilsworth

Weissert, Gottfried. Das Mildheimische Liederbuch: Studien zur volkspädagogischen Literatur der Aufklärung. Horst Bissinger, 1966. Wilson, W. Daniel. “Skeletons in Goethe’s Closet: Human Rights, Protest, and the Myth of Political Liberality.” Unwrapping Goethe’s Weimar: Essays in Cultural Studies and Local Knowledge, edited by Burkhard Henke, Susanne Kord, and Simon Richter, Camden House, 1999, pp. 295–309. Wirtz, Michaela. Patriotismus und Weltbürgertum: Eine begriffsgeschichtliche Studie zur deutsch-jüdischen Literatur 1750–1850. Niemeyer, 2006.

Part 2 Germany and “Other” Stories: Defining the Nation from Outside

∵

Chapter 3

“No sensuous requirement that might not be satisfied here to surfeit”: Heinrich von Kleist and Friedrich Schlegel Constructing the German Nation in Paris Caroline Mannweiler 1

Introduction: Paris as a Site of Modernity and Its Discontents

The intimate connection between Romanticism and the advent of modern capitalist societies has been clearly stated by Marx, who in his Grundrisse writes the following: Auf früheren Stufen der Entwicklung erscheint das Individuum voller, weil es eben die Fülle seiner Beziehungen noch nicht herausgearbeitet und als von ihm unabhängige gesellschaftliche Mächte und Verhältnisse sich gegenübergestellt hat. So lächerlich es ist, sich nach jener ursprünglichen Fülle zurückzusehnen, so lächerlich ist der Glaube, bei jener vollen Entlee­ rung stehenbleiben zu müssen. Über den Gegensatz gegen jene romantische Ansicht ist die bürgerliche nie herausgekommen und darum wird jene als berechtigter Gegensatz sie bis an ihr seliges Ende begleiten; Marx, Grund­ risse 80. [In earlier stages of development the single individual seems to be developed more fully, because he has not yet worked out his relationships in their fullness, or erected them as independent social powers and relations opposite to himself. It is as ridiculous to yearn for a return to that original fullness as it is to believe that with this complete emptiness history has come to a standstill. The bourgeois viewpoint has never advanced beyond this antithesis between itself and this romantic viewpoint, and therefore the latter will accompany it as legitimate antithesis up to its blessed end; Marx, Outlines 100.] Without necessarily going as far as Löwy and Sayre who view the reaction against capitalism as the defining trait of Romanticism (see Löwy, Sayre 53), it is nonetheless worthwhile to reflect on the connection Marx mentions when

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004426108_005

58

Mannweiler

reading Kleist’s and Schlegel’s Paris reports. For it is obvious that to both authors Paris appears not only as the capital of France or, as Schlegel ironically puts it, as “the capital of the universe” (Schlegel, “Reise” 73),1 but as a place in which the peculiar “emptiness” of bourgeois-capitalist society becomes palpable. To this “emptiness,” the German visitors Kleist and Schlegel respond with something one might call, following Marx, a romantic antithesis, but the question remains what exactly is meant by “romantic.” As will be shown, individualistic as well as nationalist connotations of Romanticism are relevant for Kleist’s and Schlegel’s reactions to Paris but these connotations differ regarding their antagonistic potential in bourgeois-capitalist society. While the individualistic tendencies strongly present in Kleist’s letters underline his estrangement from modern society that remains unreconciled, Schlegel chooses to cope with his estrangement by transforming it into a collective trait of a virtual nation that he concretely addresses in his journal Europa.2 Thus, his antagonism becomes an active position participating in society and its market system. 2

Friedrich Schlegel in Paris, or How to Merchandise Isolation

Schlegel’s travelogue “Reise nach Frankreich” [Journey to France] was published in his own journal Europa and covers not only his impressions from Paris but also his journey to Paris starting in Germany—a phenomenon not uncommon in travel writing and that we will find again in Kleist’s letters. This itinerary offers him the opportunity to establish the differences between the two countries, or more precisely between his perceptions of the two countries. For Schlegel’s “Reise nach Frankreich” is not an informative text that tries to give a detailed account of places but rather a vehicle for the author’s observations and meditations. Concerning Paris, these observations clearly show the connection between Romanticism and the state of society later described by Marx, since Schlegel, in a letter written from Paris, describes the place as the “Vollendung der Nullität” [epitome of nullity; Hirzel 100], an emptiness that occurs despite and—one might even say because of—material abundance. In a similar vein, Schlegel views Paris as epitomising the principle of “Wucher” [usury] and “Plattheit” [flatness; “Reise” 71] that he observes as the general 1 Unless otherwise indicated, translations are mine. 2 For the contextualisation of such constructions of a “German” identity in reaction to the experience of Paris among German travellers, see I. Oesterle and Grosser.

Kleist and Schlegel Constructing the German Nation in Paris

59

t­endency of the age—also in Germany: “das herrschende Princip der menschlichen Angelegenheiten gegenwärtig, was alles lenkt und endlich ent­ scheidet aber, ist Gewinn und Wucher, und überall nichts als Gewinn und Wucher” [however, the ruling principle of human affairs currently, that which governs and ultimately determines everything, is profit and usury, and everywhere nothing but profit and usury; “Reise” 71–72]. This overall characteristic of his time Schlegel sees at work in the daily life of French cities, namely Metz and certain parts of Paris: “das Leben scheint aufgelöst in ein allgemeines Kaufen und Verkaufen, Verzehren und Zubereiten” [Life seems dissolved in a general buying and selling, consuming and confectioning; “Reise” 69]. But he explicitly refuses to view this as a merely national phenomenon: “Gegen diese europäische Gleichheit verschwindet in der Tat jeder Nationalunterschied”; [Indeed, against this European consistency, every national difference disappears; “Reise” 72]. This also goes for other traits of modern (i.e. functionally differentiated) societies particularly salient in Paris but in no way limited to it, which are “Egoismus” [egotism] and an absolute lack of “Phantasie” [imagination]: Ferne aber sey es von mir, diese Gründlichkeit im Egoismus als einen Zug in dem Charakter einer Nation ansehen zu wollen. Es bedeutet dieses nur die Stelle, die sie in der allgemeinen Europäischen Verderbtheit unsers Zeitalters einnimmt. Auch der erwähnte Mangel an Phantasie, der nie natürlich ist, sondern immer nur die Folge einer gewaltsamen oder zufälligen Ertödtung, kann nur dem Zeitalter, nicht der Nation als ein ursprünglicher Charakter zugeschrieben werden, wenn gleich nirgends diese Aeußerung des allgemeinen Uebels so auffallend erscheint, als gerade hier. [But far be it from me to regard this thoroughness in egotism as a trait in the character of a nation. It merely marks the position that this nation occupies in the general European depravity of our age. Also, the mentioned lack of imagination that is never natural but always the consequence of a violent or accidental death, can only be ascribed to the age, not to the nation as an original character, even though this expression of the general evil nowhere seems as striking as just here; “Reise” 71.] Selfishness, lack of spirituality, all these are traits that Schlegel attributes to the age and to the growing mechanisation of life that had already been described by Schiller in his famous Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen [Letters on the aesthetic education of man; 1795] and that Schlegel describes as the “Trennung und immer weiter getriebene Trennung des Einen und Ganzen

60

Mannweiler

aller menschlichen Kräfte und Gedanken” [separation and ever-increasing separation of the one and the whole of all human forces and thoughts; “Reise” 75]—a description that is not very far from the Marxist term of Entfremdung [alienation]. What gets lost in these “mechanised” times is above all the bond between people, and here it is interesting that Schlegel seems to suggest that this bond even exists in France, since he abstains from making selfishness a trait of the national French character. But be this as it may, and even if Schlegel could be said to follow a Herderian concept of the people as a creative and organic force, France is clearly not the country from which Schlegel expects a solution for the problem of the age. That he does seem to wish for such a solution is important to notice since it shows his intolerance of the developments of his age which “muß den denkenden Mann mit einer Verachtung gegen sein Zeitalter erfüllen” [must fill every thinking man with contempt; “Reise” 76]. Marx’s observation of Romanticism as an antithesis to bourgeois-capitalistic society thus seems to be valid for Schlegel. But how does Schlegel imagine this antithesis to be lived out? In regards to this question, his Paris reports and the whole effort of the Europa constitute an important step in Schlegel’s evolution as a writer, since he abandons the self-consciously elitist approach of the Athenäum for a more generally readable style. His explicit goal is to reach a new and broader audience, and his suggestions for how to promote his journal show this effort in a comic way: Vielleicht würde es auch gut sein, bei jedem Heft ein Stück guten Honigkuchen gratis auszutheilen!—Nein, aber im Ernste, es ist mein allergrößter Ernst damit, so populär zu sein als nur irgend möglich ist. […] kann es kommen, daß ich von solchen Aufsätzen die mir gutes Futter fürs Pulver scheinen auch wohl solche aufnehme, die ich im Athenäum nicht aufgenommen haben würde. [Maybe it would also be useful to distribute a piece of good gingerbread with each issue!—No, but seriously, I am completely serious about being as popular as at all possible. […] perhaps I will even select some of those articles that seem to me good canon fodder, and that I would have never included in the Athenäum; Schlegel, “Briefe,” 502.] Research has commented on Schlegel’s Europa project (and his “Reise nach Frankreich”) in different ways, starting with Curtius’s very positive interpretation of Schlegel’s “Reise” as a contribution to “intercultural” understanding, an interpretation that has since been completely rebutted by G. Oesterle, but almost all research agrees on one aspect, namely the economic reasons behind

Kleist and Schlegel Constructing the German Nation in Paris

61

the publication.3 Schlegel needed money, which is why his efforts at popularisation are not merely a sign of a more democratic attitude but simply a compromise necessitated by his difficult personal situation. These circumstances had led him to leave Germany in the first place, where his support system had broken apart, a system (above all his brother, August Wilhelm Schlegel) that was itself already a rather marginalised group always looking for recognition. This should be kept in mind not only when reading Schlegel’s letters from Paris in which he implores visits from the “true” Germany—“Jeder der aus Deutschland kommt, nämlich aus dem Wirklichen, nicht bloß aus dem Phänomen, was wohl auch so genannt wird, ist mir herzlich willkommen” [everyone who comes from Germany, that is to say from the real one, not just from the phenomenon that happens to also be called that way, is very welcome to me; Schlegel, “Briefe” 523–25]—but also when reading the ambivalent comments on Germany in “Reise nach Frankreich.” As has been mentioned before, ­Germany is not simply the positive alternative to Paris unaffected by the problems of modernity, since it is itself part of the age’s decline that Schlegel views as a general European problem. But at the same time, Germany seems to carry the seeds for improvement, seeds that Schlegel locates in the past rather than in the present. Thus, he reflects on seeing castles such as the Wartburg with a nostalgic remembering of former times: “Wenn man solche Gegenstände sieht, so kann man nicht umhin, sich zu erinnern, was die Deutschen ehedem waren, da der Mann noch ein Vaterland hatte” [When looking at such things, one cannot help remembering what the Germans used to be, back when a man still had a fatherland; “Reise” 58]. Those days when Germans “still had a fatherland,” Schlegel goes on to characterise as happy times that have been interrupted by the people’s desire for foreign customs and foreign money (see “Reise” 58), a development that Schlegel does not intend to accept as an irrevocable liberalisation, but views as a wrong path. This is why the older times become for him a time of greater truth that his contemporaries should hold on to (see “Reise” 61) and that will hopefully return one day: “Vielleicht wird der schlummernde Löwe noch einmal erwachen und vielleicht wird, wenn wir es auch nicht mehr erleben sollten, die künftige Weltgeschichte noch voll seyn von den Thaten der Deutschen” [Perhaps the slumbering lion will awaken again and perhaps, even 3 For a detailed history of the journal Europa and Schlegel’s personal situation at the time, see Chélin 1981 and more recently Breuer. Hoock-Demarle seems somewhat undecided if ­Schlegel had to become entrepreneurial or simply became entrepreneurial (483), but definitely notices the differences between the Athenäum and Europa in terms of market orientation.

62

Mannweiler

though we might not live to see it anymore, future world history will be full of the deeds of the Germans; “Reise” 61]. It is evident that Schlegel does not content himself with a nostalgic attitude. Past times are for him not something ­irretrievably lost but something that should be reactivated to improve the future, an attitude which is not entirely surprising since Schlegel does not see modern developments as progress but rather as deterioration. His later support of Restoration as a political alternative is thus clearly anticipated in his “Reise nach Frankreich.” Besides, in his conjuring-up of a past but therefore future Germany, one cannot help but notice certain parallels with current nationalist rhetoric, but it is not the goal of this article to meditate on those rhetorical similarities. Rather, it should be noticed that Schlegel gives a more precise idea of his concept of Germanness which focuses on the Germans’ particular “Liebe zur Freiheit” [love of freedom; Reise 61] and which includes the attribute “romantic”: Wegen dieser ursprünglichen Freiheit des deutschen Lebens, die ein unvergänglicher Charakter der Nation ist, erscheint sie auch in ihren guten Zeiten ursprünglicher und dauerhafter romantisch, als selbst die orientalische Märchenwelt. […] Eine gefühlte Rechtlichkeit, die mehr ist, als die Gerechtigkeit des Gesetzes und Ehre, eine kindlich aufrichtige und unerschütterliche Treue und Herzlichkeit der Gesinnung ist der tiefste und hoffentlich nie ganz zu vertilgende Zug des deutschen Charakters. [Because of this original freedom of German life which is an unfading characteristic of the nation, the nation even in its better times seems more original and more lastingly romantic than even the oriental fairytale world. […] A deeply felt honesty that is more than the justice of law and honour, a genuinely wholehearted and unswerving loyalty and warmth of disposition is the profoundest and hopefully never to be completely eradicated feature of the German character; Schlegel, “Reise” 61.] One could very well argue that the term “romantic” in this context ties into Schlegel’s critique of the estranged present where freedom is replaced by a mechanical order and where honesty is replaced by opportunistic adaptation to social norms. But it is less a critical stance towards the present that seems to dominate Schlegel’s characterisation than the positing of a coherent national identity that is identifiable and inalienable and of course necessarily collective—­even if it advocates freedom and originality. This paradoxical situation in which individuality and originality become a collective trait shows Schlegel’s development towards a Romanticism that favours a concept of the nation as an organic entity, an attitude that necessarily involves certain compromises. For Schlegel not only

Kleist and Schlegel Constructing the German Nation in Paris

63

constructs this organic German nation as a counterpart to France, he also progressively excludes Prussia and Berlin as symptoms of the Enlightenment (see Breuer 13) which can be found not only in France but all over Europe.4 Schlegel’s concept of a German nation is thus at the same time an oversimplification and a rather hypothetical entity. But this did not prevent Schlegel from adopting this new simplified concept of Germany as a motivation for his current intellectual activities. Quite on the contrary, his new reliance on a German mission goes hand in hand with his new journalistic project, the Europa, for which he hopes to gain an audience as large as possible. While the earlier romantic Athenäum would have rather done without an audience than without its idiosyncrasies, Schlegel now wanted to adapt his writing to his goal of winning larger audiences. This shift was actually noticed by some readers, namely Wilhelm von Humboldt, who commented on a certain shallowness in Schlegel’s new publication (see Leitzmann 150). But Schlegel was determined to reach a broader public and put considerable effort into promoting the journal. Announcements were planned in Munich, Vienna, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Petersburg, Switzerland and in an English journal published in Paris (see Körner 39), though Schlegel explicitly excluded the French as a desired audience for his project as expressed in a letter to Wilmans: “So sehr ich den Absatz des Journals wünsche, so wünsche ich doch nicht daß es gerade hier von Franzosen vorzüglich viel gekauft werden möchte” [as much as I wish the journal to sell well, I however do not wish it to be bought primarily by the French; Körner 38]. This wish is certainly due to Schlegel’s fear of censorship that he alludes to in the following, but it also confirms the impression that Schlegel’s stay in Paris did not foster his interest in anything French. In fact, Schlegel’s writings in the Europa but also the (partly private) lectures he gave at the time in Paris and Cologne are full of anti-French resentment (see Schlegel, Wissenschaft 142, 144; Vorlesungen 192, 234, 244, 246) and the complementary valorisation of everything Germanic. This dichotomous construction of national identity is certainly typical of many Germans at the time and was strengthened during the Anti-Napoleonic wars. But in the case of Schlegel, it is additionally interesting to notice how this antagonistic identity formation goes hand in hand with the acceptance of the competitive, commercial logic he criticised as omnipresent in Paris.

4 The increasingly negative connotation of the Enlightenment in Schlegel’s perspective is palpable in his commentary on tsar Aleksandr i in a letter from February 1806, in which Schlegel wonders whether the tsar is an honourable person or merely a “Lumpenhund” [scoundrel] and “Aufklärer” [proponent of the Enlightenment; see Körner 293.]

64

Mannweiler

Schlegel managed to transform his own estrangement in Paris (something that he famously expresses in a letter to his brother by identifying himself with an elephant in a menagerie, who simply does not belong to the place; see Walzel 497), into a self-confident position within an intellectual field progressively shaped by national stereotypes. While in Paris, he prepares his return to Cologne where his “Deutscher Patriotismus” [German Patriotism; Körner 73] and religious tendencies (Schlegel would later convert to Catholicism) are not only appreciated but might lead to a career. Instead of meditating on his position as an outsider in Paris, Schlegel finds confirmation in new national forces in G ­ ermany. This new identity and self-confidence, one might add, also expresses itself in new genres and academic fields that Schlegel started to prefer, namely history. The great historico-geographical sketches that Schlegel adopts also at the end of the “Reise nach Frankreich” contain sweeping generalisations and judgments that contrast with the much less positivistic and also less dogmatic style of Schlegel’s earlier fragments. Thus, Schlegel reacted to the emptiness, consumerism, and lack of imagination he observed in Paris by adopting a less creative and more pragmatic attitude himself—a pragmatism that seems also to influence his new reliance on the nation as a collective he wishes to be part of. This pragmatism, it must be noticed, should not be confounded with realism, since Schlegel never engaged in any kind of detailed analysis of the political and social situation of his age. Rather, this pragmatism means a reduction of complexity as it is inherent in the life of “buying and selling” Schlegel so vehemently criticised. In this respect, Schlegel’s “romantic antithesis” seems to be rather compatible with the developments of society as a whole: it re­sponds to alienation by agreeing to play by the rules of competition and market ­orientation—a market that Schlegel would ultimately find in the anti-French and anti-revolutionary reality of the Austrian Empire (see Breuer/Jäger). 3

Kleist in Paris–Fascination and Exile

A few years before Schlegel, another famous German poet, Heinrich von Kleist, visited the French capital, the point of attraction for any European intellectual at the time. Not unlike Schlegel’s, Kleist’s stay in Paris was partly motivated by his difficult situation in Germany where he struggled to establish any fixed ­career path (see Schulz 209–28). Whereas staying in Paris helped Schlegel to adopt a pragmatic career plan, it did not help Kleist to do so—quite the ­contrary. His last letters from Paris end with his plan to establish himself as a farmer in Switzerland, a plan that both his sister, Ulrike, and fiancée, ­Wilhelmine von Zenge, promptly identified as not in tune with Kleist’s talents

Kleist and Schlegel Constructing the German Nation in Paris

65

and ­personality. However, the plan to be a farmer and therefore to live a rather autonomous life is very much in accordance with Kleist’s Rousseauistic tendencies and his critique of the superficial life in the city, as demonstrated in the following passage which depicts the sense of isolation experienced in cities: Man geht kalt an einander vorüber; man windet sich in den Straßen durch einen Haufen von Menschen, denen nichts gleichgültiger ist, als ihres Gleichen; […] dabei knüpft man sich an keinen, keiner knüpft sich an uns; man grüßt einander höflich, aber das Herz ist hier so unbrauchbar, wie eine Lunge unter der luftleeren Campane, und wenn ihm einmal ein Gefühl entschlüpft, so verhallt es, wie ein Flötenton im Orkan. [You walk past each other coldly; you wind through the streets through a crowd of people, indifferent to nothing more so than their own kind; […] you establish ties with nobody, and no one establishes ties with you; you greet one another politely but the heart is as useless here as a lung in an airless bell, and if a feeling once escapes it, it dies away, like the sound of a flute in a hurricane; Kleist, Sämtliche Briefe 246.] As could be observed in Schlegel’s travelogue, Kleist’s description of Paris is simultaneously a critique of the alienation inherent in modern city life—an alienation in which meaningful friendships and personal relations are replaced by anonymous relations between consumers: Es ist kein sinnliches Bedürfniß, das hier nicht bis zum Ekel befriedigt, keine Tugend, die hier nicht mit Frechheit verspottet, keine Infamie, die hier nicht nach Principien begangen würde—noch schrecklicher ist der Anblick des Platzes an der halle au bléd, wo auch der letzte Zügel gesunken. [There is no sensuous requirement that might not be satisfied here to surfeit, no virtue that is not impudently ridiculed, no infamy but a point is made of perpetrating it. Even more horrifying is the halle au blé, where the last restraints are loosed; Kleist, Sämtliche Briefe 265; translation in Kleist, Abyss 120.] Obviously, Kleist is at the same time horrified and fascinated by the liberalism of Parisian life, but this does not prevent him from holding on to an ideal of non-alienated interpersonal relationships. A very interesting passage in this respect is his description of commercial tours to the countryside offered in Paris in which Kleist confronts two notions of Romanticism. First, he describes

66

Mannweiler

at great length how an ingenious entrepreneur had the idea of offering the ­urban population in Paris tours to the countryside where they can experience nature, yet in a commodified form. Not only do they have to pay for spending one day in rural simplicity at the Hameau de Chantilly, but this nature is also rather a pseudo-nature as Kleist indicates by ironically mentioning the small pond on which tourists can take boat trips. Also, his detailed observations about little cottages in which tourists take on the names of shepherds and ­fishers and are served the most exquisite food in rustic tableware show how Kleist ridicules this commodified experience of nature as a deliberate selfdeception. This analysis of “modern” forms of consumption and commodification is interesting in and of itself, but it is particularly remarkable that Kleist designates this touristic offer as a “romantisches Fest” [a romantic celebration; Kleist, Sämtliche Briefe 278–79] that he mentions in the same context as the initiative of the landgrave of Hesse-Kassel to build himself a gothic castle. Thus, Kleist constructs a notion of Romanticism as an anachronistic return to lost times and nature which in modern times can only take on the form of pseudo-authentic experiences, or to put it differently, the form of a game. But right after his description of the romantic celebration of the tourists, Kleist writes a touching scene about a young man and a young woman whom he also saw at the hamlet of Chantilly and who enjoyed themselves independently of the planned and commercialised satisfactions going on next to them. In one and the same passage, Kleist therefore confronts two notions of Romanticism, one which he clearly identifies as a sort of hedonistic escapism and one which holds on to the possibility of a spiritual kinship that transcends the superficiality of modern life. Quite evidently, this latter form of Romanticism can be connected to national traits as it is the case in Schlegel’s reports where he mentions friendship as a rather German quality: “Was Freundschaft bedeute und welches Glück sie gewähre, das mag nur ein Deutscher fühlen” [what friendship means and which joy it confers, only a German may feel; “Reise” 57]. And in the case of Kleist’s letters from Paris also, the experience of friendship is tied to a German place, namely Dresden (see Kleist, Sämtliche Briefe 244–47). But contrary to Schlegel, Kleist seems to realise that his memories of happy times in Dresden and the wonderful nature around [...] Dresden, that he describes [...] highly literary quality of his letters, are forms of longing. And longing is only possible if the desired object is absent. While for Schlegel, places like the Wartburg provoke a remembrance that seems to connect Schlegel to a national identity, and even a national mission to a certain extent, Kleist’s remember­ ing of Germany is tied to his existential feeling of exile: “Als ich in mein [sic]

Kleist and Schlegel Constructing the German Nation in Paris

67

­ aterland war, war ich oft in Paris, u. nun ich in Paris bin, bin ich fast immer in V mein [sic] Vaterland” [in my homeland I was often in Paris, and now in Paris I am almost always back in my homeland; Kleist, Sämtliche Briefe 264; translation in Kleist, Abyss 120]. The feeling of difference and the insight into the permanent state of year­ ning that this difference implies is a highly romantic topos, particularly reminiscent of the early works of Schlegel and the romantic school where the appreciation of difference played a crucial role in concepts such as the “progressive Universalpoesie” [progressive universal poetry]. Kleist seems to be aware that the self-identification as poet or artist could be an adequate response to his situation: “Es mag wahr sein, daß ich so eine Art von verunglücktem Genie bin, wenn auch nicht in ihrem Sinne verunglückt, doch in dem meinen” [it may be true that I am a kind of failed genius, even if not failed in their understanding of the word, but in mine; Kleist, Sämtliche Briefe 283]. But Kleist refrains from any such options of fixing his identity and settling on a career—and by doing that forms exactly the sort of romantic antithesis to capitalism Marx wrote about. For in analysing Kleist’s reasons for remaining an outsider, one finds above all scenarios of alienation. Besides his already mentioned critique of a life of pure consumption and artificial experiences, the letters also contain a brilliant critique of the ideals of education and learning in a society based on the maximisation of profit. Thus, Kleist observes that in supporting the sciences the French state does not merely want to promote the search for truth but is looking for truths that can be applied. By applications, Kleist means essentially commercially relevant applications that offer new or enhanced forms of consumption and that augment the wealth of the state (see Kleist, Sämtliche Briefe 269–70). While Kleist does not propose a return to pre-modern times and underlines the beneficial consequences of a scientific approach to life that cures people from detrimental superstitions, he clearly deplores the instrumentalisation of every human’s capacity for mere economic reasons. Fatally (for his income) he applies this logic to himself and refuses to write a single line for money: Aber Bücherschreiben für Geld—o nichts davon. Ich habe mir, da ich unter den Menschen in dieser Stadt so wenig für mein Bedürfniß finde, in einsamer Stunde (denn ich gehe wenig aus) ein Ideal ausgearbeitet; aber ich begreife nicht, wie ein Dichter das Kind seiner Liebe einem so rohen Haufen, wie die Menschen sind, übergeben kann. [But writing for money–o speak not of it! Finding so little to gratify me among the people of this city, I have in many a lonely hour (for I seldom go out) been at work giving form to my imaginings, but I cannot

68

Mannweiler

­ nderstand how a writer can hand over his love child to so coarse a mob u as the public; Kleist, Sämtliche Briefe 283; translation in Kleist, Abyss 132.] The contrast with Schlegel is striking at this point: While Schlegel has adopted a more pragmatic view of writing and convinced himself that there is a new German public for him to reach, Kleist is caught in an emancipatory (and slightly elitist) pattern of thinking that seems out of place in his Parisian environment. As proof, one need only observe what happened to the emancipatory value of liberty that shaped the French Revolution, and that has now come down to a fun fair. In an often-cited passage, Kleist articulates the disappointment that he felt while participating in the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille on the fourteenth of July. According to Kleist, the celebration in which crowds of people admire fireworks, carousels, and light shows is unworthy of the value of liberty that gets lost in the distractions offered to the public on the occasion. Instead of a recollection of the values of the Revolution, the festivities offer the crowds a multitude of sensual pleasures (see Kleist, Sämtliche Briefe 249), a strategy that Kleist vehemently rejects. In terms prefiguring Benjamin’s analysis of modern entertainment as “Zerstreuung” [distraction], Kleist describes how the celebration tends to amuse and distract (Kleist, Säm­ tliche Briefe 249) the public which renders any reflection about the event and values celebrated rather improbable. In his eyes, the capital of the Revolution, Paris, has become the capital of entertainment, or, as Schlegel termed it, of consuming. This fact is deplored by both authors, but Schlegel does not seem to be personally affected by this observation. He is ready to believe that this state of affairs will end, and that better times will come when the true character of the nations surfaces again, whenever this might be. To the fact of alienation, ­Schlegel responds with the notion of the nation—and a very personal, pragmatic plan to insure his own well-being. Kleist, on the contrary, relies on no collective that could offer an alternative to the present situation. His reaction to alienation in Paris rather resembles those of romantic artists that live in exile wherever they are: Dann ist es Abend, dann habe ich ein brennendes Bedürfniß, das Alles aus den Augen zu verlieren, alle diese Dächer und Schornsteine und alle diese Abscheulichkeiten und nichts zu sehen, als rund um den Himmel—­ aber giebt es einen Ort in dieser Stadt, wo man ihrer nicht gewahr würde? [Finally it is evening, and I feel the burning need to have all this out of sight, all these roofs and chimneys and monstrosities, and to see nothing but the sky all about–but is there any place in this city where one might

Kleist and Schlegel Constructing the German Nation in Paris

69

not be aware of it?; Kleist, Sämtliche Briefe 278; translation in Kleist, Abyss 120.] The description of the blue sky that Kleist repeats in a very similar wording in another letter shows his feeling of estrangement that he could not even resolve into an experience of the sublime, as I. Oesterle convincingly argued (“Briefe über Paris” 104–05). The artificial pleasures of the city and its museum in his eyes cannot replace the experience of sublime nature. But be this as it may, Kleist’s reactions characterise him as an artist who defines himself by his individual perceptions and idiosyncrasies, and not by his belonging to any kind of collective. In fact, his letters from Paris are also the place where he articulates profound critiques of any kind of unquestioned collective norms, including moral ones: Man sage nicht, daß eine Stimme im Innern uns heimlich u. deutlich anvertraue, was Recht sei. Dieselbe Stimme, die dem Christen zuruft, seinem Feinde zu vergeben, ruft dem Seeländer zu, ihn zu braten und mit Andacht ißt er ihn auf– [There is no use saying that a voice deep within confides secretly and clearly what is just. The same voice that calls on the Christian to forgive his enemies calls on the savage to roast him, and he eats him up with piety; Kleist, Sämtliche Briefe 271; translation in Kleist, Abyss 125.] Evidently, Kleist is not a proponent of any kind of jubilatory relativism. But it is precisely his insight into the effects of collectives, or, to put it differently, his sociological approach to things that make him doubtful about easy ways of judging. In this respect, it is interesting to observe his reaction to a postmaster who refuses to hand out a letter to him: “Tausendfältig betrogen, glaubte er [der Postmeister] nicht mehr, daß in Paris jemand ehrlich sein könnte” [a thousand times betrayed, he no longer believed there was one honest man left in Paris; Kleist, Sämtliche Briefe 268; translation in Kleist, Abyss 123]. Instead of a simple moral judgment of the postmaster, Kleist understands his behaviour as being a consequence of his life in a particular society, namely the society of Paris. And, in a similar vein, one could note his curious explanation of the indifference of the French towards the war crimes committed by their own people: [O] war es möglich, daß dieses Thal ein Schauplatz werden konnte für den Krieg? Zerstörte Felder, zertretene Weinberge, ganze Dörfer in Asche, Festen, die unüberwindlich schienen, in den Rhein gestürzt–Ach, wenn

70

Mannweiler

ein einziger Mensch so viele Frevel auf seinem Gewissen tragen sollte, er müßte niedersinken, erdrückt von der Last—Aber eine ganze Nation erröthet niemals. Sie dividirt die Schuld mit 30000000, da kömmt ein kleiner Theil auf jeden, den ein Franzose ohne Mühe trägt. [O, how was it possible that this valley could become a setting for war? Destroyed fields, trampled vineyards, entire villages in ashes, fortresses, that had appeared invincible, swept into the Rhine–Ah, if one single person must bear all this desecration on his conscience, he must sink beneath it, crushed by the burden. But a nation never blushes. Guilt is divided by thirty million, a part of blame lights on each, and so each Frenchman bears it without pain; Kleist, Sämtliche Briefe 262; translation in Kleist, Abyss 119.] These passages do not simply express anti-French resentment but a thorough critique of the effects of groups on individual morality. In view of all these critiques, it can come as no surprise that Kleist’s alternative to Paris takes on a radically solitary character–the life of a peasant in Switzerland. A life that Kleist, following his individualistic approach, does not want to enforce on everybody: Ein jeder hat seine eigne Art, glücklich zu sein, und niemand darf verlangen, daß man es in der seinigen sein soll. Was ich thue, ist nichts Böses, und die Menschen mögen über mich spötteln so viel sie wollen, heimlich in ihrem Herzen werden sie mich ehren müssen.—Doch wenn auch das nicht wäre, ich selbst ehre mich. Meine Vernunft will es so, und das ist genug. [Everyone has his own way of being happy, and no one may demand that another choose his own. It is nothing evil that I do, and people may scoff at me as they wish, but in their secret hearts they must honor me. And if not, then I honor myself. My Reason wishes it so, and that is enough; Kleist, Sämtliche Briefe 285; translation in Kleist, Abyss 133.] Autonomy and individual freedom, these seem to be values that Kleist cherishes more than community and belonging. That it has never been possible to live only according to one’s own reason and that Kleist’s radical interpretation of autonomy could not be realised in real life should be evident. In that respect, one might say that Kleist’s stay in Paris left him less a romantic nationalist than an idealist unable to find a place in society.

Kleist and Schlegel Constructing the German Nation in Paris

4

71

Anti-Capitalism, Nationalism, and the Danger of Nihilism

To attempt the question of how this interpretation ties into Kleist’s later antiFrench outbursts would go too far beyond the remit of this article.5 But it can be observed that even in his propagandist play, Die Hermannsschlacht [The Battle of Hermann; 1808], at least one aspect that we find in Kleist’s letters from Paris remains relevant, and that is Kleist’s critique of material possession as the only important value. How else could one interpret the enumeration of material goods Hermann asks the Germans to be ready to destroy, and his provocative contempt for their shocked reaction (which he of course expected)?6 Or Hermann’s answer to Thusnelda, who asks Hermann to differentiate between good and bad Romans and gives the example of Romans who protected the public places and property—an example Hermann immediately rejects, explaining to her that the Romans did that only in order to take advantage of this property later?7 Thus, Die Hermannsschlacht seems to perpetuate Kleist’s antimaterialistic stance that we could observe in his letters from Paris, but it also shows the problematic aspect of this stance, which is a latent nihilism. This nihilism can also be found in Schlegel’s account of the “nullity” of Paris, France and the whole age that leads him to this outrageous exaggeration: Was ehedem Großes und Schönes war, ist so ganz zerstört, daß ich nicht weiß, wie man in diesem Sinne auch nur behaupten könnte, daß Europa als ein Ganzes noch vorhanden sey, es sind vielmehr nur noch die zurückgebliebenen Resultate, wohin jene Tendenz der Trennung endlich nothwendig führen mußte. Sie kann als vollendet angesehen werden, da sie bis zur Selbstvernichtung gekommen ist. [What anciently existed as great and beautiful is so entirely destro­ yed that I don’t know how one could possibly claim that [...] Europe as a whole still exists [...], rather there are only results remaining, whereto the tendency of separation necessarily had to lead in the end. This tendency can be [...] considered complete [...] given that it has ended in self-­destruction; Schlegel, “Reise” 77.] 5 Particularly the discussion of Kleist’s Hermannsschlacht is highly controversial and complex, since even the most basic question, namely the question of whether it is a propagandist play or a play about propaganda, as Zons argued, seems hard to answer. 6 See Kleist, Hermannsschlacht i, 3. 7 See ibid., iv, 9.

72

Mannweiler

The “Tendenz der Trennung,” that is the process of modernisation in society, entailing the division of labour, the disappearance of corporate structures and the transformation of society into a “mechanism” and of man into a “machine” (Reise 77), is for Schlegel the main reason for a situation in Europe that is not merely imperfect but catastrophic. Since Schlegel does not exclude Germany from this state of Europe, it seems logical that his solution to the problems of an increasingly alienated Europe must come from outside, in Schlegel’s vision from India and a very vague concept of the North: Wir sollen der Entwicklung auch nicht bloß unthätig zusehen, sondern selbst den thätigsten Antheil daran nehmen, wir selbst sollen mitwirken, die tellurischen Kräfte in Einheit und Harmonie zu bringen, wir sollen die Eisenkraft des Nordens, und die Lichtgluth des Orients in mächtigen Strömen überall um uns her verbreiten. [We should not simply stand by and observe this development, but should most actively take part in it. We must work to bring all earthly forces into unity and harmony, we must spread the iron force of the north and the blaze of light of the Orient in powerful streams everywhere around us; Schlegel, “Reise” 78.] The vagueness of this mission statement is evident but not really surprising in a situation where the cause of the problems is identified in material and social structures but the solutions thought to lie in some sort of cultural action. This discrepancy informs both Schlegel’s and Kleist’s reports from Paris and informs of course the Romantic antithesis to bourgeois society that Marx described. As we could observe, this antithesis is in no way homogenous but encompasses different notions that could be subsumed under the term “Romantic.” These notions range from Schlegel’s concept of Romanticism as a specifically G ­ erman, i.e. national quality that should be saved, and that includes virtues such as “­Liebe zur Freiheit” [love of freedom] and originality, to Kleist’s observation of Romanticism as a fashionable return to nature in a commodified form. It also includes the notion of Romantic love put forward by Kleist as a counterpart to commodified pleasures and the notion of friendship as antagonist to the anonymity and superficiality of human relations in Paris. As to which of these concepts are really antagonists to the life of “buying and selling” (Schlegel, “Reise” 69), one could observe that the critique of the age articulated by Schlegel in his “Reise nach Frankreich” to some extent adopted the rules of market orientation and competition, although the audience reached was a lot smaller than Schlegel had hoped. Kleist’s letters were of course excluded from any market orientation, not only because they were letters, but also because Kleist at the time saw his activity as incompatible with the logic of buying and selling.

Kleist and Schlegel Constructing the German Nation in Paris

73

­ owever, a few years after his stay in Paris, Kleist’s anti-commercial attitude H somewhat changed, and just like Schlegel, he started publishing newspapers in order to find income but also a place in society. He tried the aesthetic sphere (Phoebus), the national sphere (Germania) and finally a journal that addressed the inhabitants of a city (Berliner Abendblätter), in which one of the first articles was entitled “Fragment eines Schreibens aus Paris” [Fragment of a writing from Paris]. This fragment was mostly concerned with questions of advertising, store display, and the “real” quality of offered goods—questions that obviously continued to entertain a strong connection with the city of Paris. Thus, Kleist’s Abendblätter confirm the stereotypical attribution of consumer culture to Paris and France, as well as the critique of this culture from a German point of view. But the publication also confirms the fact that these national stereotypes are part of the cycle of “buying and selling,” and that a German audience apparently appreciated consuming stories about French consumer culture, be it with a critical stance towards this culture or not. 5 Conclusion In comparing Kleist’s and Schlegel’s reactions to their stay in Paris, one is initially forced to notice important similarities, particularly concerning the rejection of a life of “buying and selling” that both authors observe and deplore in the French capital. In scenes prefiguring Marxist accounts of alienation and commodity culture, both authors show an understanding of processes of mo­ dernisation not limited to Paris but especially visible and palpable in the French capital. Surrounded by these phenomena of modernisation, both authors feel isolated and respond by idealizing places where they felt more at home, notably Dresden. Yet while Kleist remains in a state of longing and existential isolation, Schlegel chooses a more active and pragmatic way of coping with his isolation: he publishes a journal and thus transforms his individual experience into a marketable product, thereby accepting the rules of commodification he actually criticises. This journal, despite its title Europa is mostly addressing a German audience and contains passages that express a national mission that Germany will hopefully live up to in the future. This mission remains rather vague but it helps Schlegel to identify with a greater collective and to give his journal an audience, may it be a mostly virtual one. Concerning Schlegel’s concept of the nation, his experience in Paris thus underlines the functional aspect of nations as options for identification in a progressively alienated society but also the very pragmatic (if not downright opportunistic) aspects that the adoption of a national stance may be accompanied by. In contrast, Kleist refuses to publish anything for money while in Paris and opts for

74

Mannweiler

the life of a peasant in Switzerland. This (evidently Rousseauistic) plan proved to be impossible to realise but it shows Kleist’s profound wish to escape the logic of commodification and competition that he saw reigning in Paris. It also shows that Kleist does not rely on a concept of nation to identify with but rather strives for autonomy and even a maximum of independence from any kind of collective structure. Needless to say this autonomy presupposes an economic autonomy that Kleist lacked, which is why he was also forced to compromise. These compromises partly took the form of journals that Kleist published later in life and for which the German nation, understood as an alternative to the French nation, became a possible market. In short, national stereotypes, even if they consist in an anti-capitalist self-description, prove to be “marketable”—a paradox particularly pertinent for certain reactions of German Romantics to the life in Paris.

Works Cited

Primary

Kleist, Heinrich von. An Abyss Deep Enough. Letters of Heinrich von Kleist. With a Selec­ tion of Essays and Anecdotes. Edited, translated and introduced by Philip B. Miller, E.P. Dutton, 1982. Kleist, Heinrich von. Sämtliche Briefe. Edited by Dieter Heimböckel, Reclam, 1999. Körner, Josef, editor. Krisenjahre der Frühromantik. Briefe aus dem Schlegelkreis. Vol. 1. Francke, 1969. Leitzmann, Albert, editor. Wilhelm von Humboldts Briefe an Karl Gustav von Brink­ mann. Karl W. Hiersemann, 1939. Marx, Karl. Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. Dietz, 1953. Marx, Karl. Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Martin Nicolaus, Penguin, 1973. Schlegel, Friedrich. “Reise nach Frankreich.” [1803]. Studien zur Geschichte und Politik, edited by Ernst Behler, Schöningh 1966, pp. 56–79. Schlegel, Friedrich. Friedrich Schlegels Briefe an seinen Bruder August Wilhelm. Edited by Oscar F. Walzel, Speyer & Peters, 1890. Schlegel, Friedrich. Vorlesungen über Universalgeschichte (1805–1806). Edited by JeanJacques Anstett, Schöningh, 1960. Schlegel, Friedrich. Wissenschaft der europäischen Literatur. Vorlesungen, Aufsätze und Fragmente aus der Zeit von 1795–1804. Edited by Ernst Behler, Schöningh, 1958.

Secondary

Breuer, Ulrich and Maren Jäger. “Sozialgeschichtliche Faktoren der Konversion Friedrich und Dorothea Schlegels.” Figuren der Konversion. Friedrich Schlegels Übertritt

Kleist and Schlegel Constructing the German Nation in Paris

75

zum Katholizismus im Kontext, edited by Winfried Eckel and Nikolaus Wegmann, Schöningh, 2014, pp. 127–47. Breuer, Ulrich. “Lebensstationen.” Friedrich-Schlegel-Handbuch, edited by Johannes Endres, Metzler, 2017, pp. 1–32. Chélin, Henri. Friedrich Schlegels “Europa.” Peter Lang, 1981. Curtius, Ernst Robert. “Friedrich Schlegel und Frankreich.” Zeitschrift für französischen und englischen Unterricht, vol. 31, Berlin, 1932, pp. 1–17. Dusche, Michael. “Friedrich Schlegel’s Writings on India: Reimagining Germany as ­Europe’s True Oriental Self.” Deploying Orientalism in Culture and History: from ­Germany to Central and Eastern Europe, edited by James Hodkinson. Camden House, 2013, pp. 31–54. Hirzel, Georg. “Ungedruckte Briefe an Georg Andreas Reimer.” Deutsche Revue über das gesamte nationale Leben der Gegenwart, vol. 18, no. 4, 1893, pp. 99–114. Grosser, Thomas. “Reisen und Kulturtransfer. Deutsche Frankreichreisende 1650–1850.” Transferts: les rélations interculturelles dans l’espace Franco-Allemand (xviiie et xixe siècle), edited by Michel Espagne and Michael Werner, 1988, pp. 163–228. Hoock-Demarle, Marie-Claire. “Europa, die Frühromantik und der “europäische” Goethe.” Goethe und das Zeitalter der Romantik, edited by Walter Hinderer, Königshausen & Neumann, 2002, pp. 475–88. Löwy, Michael and Robert Sayre. “Figures of Romantic Anti-Capitalism.” New German Critique, vol. 32, 1984, pp. 42–92. Oesterle, Günter. “Friedrich Schlegel in Paris oder die romantische Gegenrevolution.” Les Romantiques allemands et la Révolution francaise. Die deutsche Romantik und die französische Revolution, edited by Gonthier-Louis Fink. Université des Sciences Humaines de Strasbourg, 1989, pp. 163–79. Oesterle, Ingrid. “Paris–das moderne Rom?” Rom–Paris–London. Erfahrung und Selb­ sterfahrung deutscher Schriftsteller und Künstler in den fremden Metropolen, edited by Conrad Wiedemann, Metzler, 1988, pp. 375–419. Oesterle, Ingrid. “Werther in Paris? Heinrich von Kleists Briefe über Paris.” Heinrich von Kleist. Studien zu Werk und Wirkung, edited by Klaus-Michael Grathoff, Westdeutscher Verlag, 1988, pp. 97–116. Schöning, Matthias. “Geschichte und Politik.” Friedrich-Schlegel-Handbuch, edited by Johannes Endres, Metzler, 2017, pp. 238–63. Schulz, Gerhard. Kleist. Eine Biographie. C.H. Beck, 2007. Tzoref-Ashkenazi, Chen. “India and the Identity of Europe: The Case of Friedrich Schlegel.” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 67, no. 4, 2006, pp. 713–34. Zons, Raimar. “Deutsche Assassinen. Kleists Hermannsschlacht.” Hermanns Schl­ach­ ten.  Zur Literaturgeschichte eines nationalen Mythos, edited by Martina Wagner­Egelhaaf, Aisthesis, 2008, pp. 215–38.

Chapter 4

Femininity, Nation, and Nature: Fanny Tarnow’s Letters to Friends from a Journey to Petersburg (1819) Dagmar Paulus 1

The Role of Women in Travel Writing

To this day, women travellers do not receive as much scholarly attention as male authors. This is especially true for female writers who published before 1900, many of whom remain largely unknown even within academic circles (see Ujma 19–20). Of course this applies not only to female travel writers but to many women authors of the time in general, however, going abroad and then writing about one’s experiences certainly posed a particular challenge. Travel and travel writing became more common over the course of the eighteenth century, not only for aristocrats but also, increasingly, for members of the bourgeoisie (see e.g. Wuthenow 16; Ujma 14–5). The resulting literary publications enjoyed a broad readership keen to experience foreign parts through the lens of someone else’s account at a time when a large part of the reading public did not have the time or means to go abroad themselves. For the travellers, as Stefanie Ohnesorg has outlined, these journeys were not only educational but also a chance to break free from the everyday humdrum at home, and to test one’s abilities in a foreign country, or at least in a different state of the German lands. Women, however, were largely excluded from this kind of pursuit. The case against female travellers was made on the basis of the alleged inherent weakness of women taken for granted at the time: [die Frau] sei zu schwach und zu empfindlich, um “richtig” [zu] reisen, und es sei daher in ihrem “eigenen Interesse,” ihre Welt-ER-Fahrung [sic] indirekt, d.h. über den Mann und nach dessen Gutdünken zu sammeln und sich auf die geschützte Sphäre des Heims zu beschränken, um dort ihrer “wahren Bestimmung” nachkommen zu können. [(It was said that) women were too weak and too sensitive to travel “properly”, and therefore it was in their own interest if they gathered their experience of the world indirectly, i.e. through, and according to, the

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004426108_006

Femininity, Nation, and Nature: Fanny Tarnow’s Letters

77

man. They should confine themselves to the protected sphere of the home and find their true vocation there; Ohnesorg 192.]1 Therefore, if a woman in the nineteenth century chose to travel all the same, she had not only to face practical problems, such as language constraints or finding a suitable mode of transport and accommodation on the road. She was also potentially subject to judgements and criticism about her undertaking based on her gender. According to Annegret Pelz, some women therefore tried to make themselves invisible when they travelled, either by hiding their gender by wearing disguises, dressing as men, or keeping silent altogether (143). And, in case she chose to not only travel but also to write and publish about her experience, she would have to contend with the usual difficulties women writers generally had to combat at that time: condescension from the part of male writers and critics, publishers reluctant to accept their work, and sometimes even criticism from the part of other women who did not accept their fellow females’ endeavours (Stranakova 227). Nevertheless, women did of course travel, and they wrote, and they were published. Given the difficult situation for women writers during the first half of the nineteenth century, it is interesting to consider their contributions to political discourses of their time. On the one hand, women remained excluded from most public positions, let alone offices of state, and their voices seemed to have little impact in ongoing political or social debates. On the other hand, women writers too were influenced by the discourses of their time, not only on gender but also around political and social issues. Nationalism is one of these discourses which we can find reflected in many texts of the period, including travel writing. Indeed, travel writing is especially fruitful for the analysis of nationalism, as the experience and description of a foreign culture often makes notions of national identity, national bias, and national stereotypes visible (Brenner 27). So how did women writers relate to the political phenomenon of nationalism, and how did they reflect it in their works? In this chapter, I investigate these questions and apply them to a travel report by Fanny Tarnow, written during an eighteen-month long stay in Saint Petersburg, the capital city of Imperial Russia, from 1815 until 1816. I first consider Tarnow as a female writer, analysing the writing strategies she uses in her account. I then discuss national stereotypes of Russia, outlining how they were reflected in travel writing, and explore the role they play in Tarnow’s writing. Finally, I analyse the role of nature in national discourse. 1 All translations in this chapter are mine.

78 2

Paulus

Female Writing Strategies in Tarnow’s Briefe

Fanny Tarnow was born in 1779 as the first daughter of a well-to-do lawyer and landowner, receiving a careful education until her father lost his wealth. She then earned her living as a housemistress for various employers until 1812. In 1794, she published her first poems anonymously in a local journal. After the death of her mother in 1815, she spent eighteen months with a friend in Saint Petersburg. She became an official correspondent for the Morgenblatt für gebil­ dete Stände [Morning Paper for Educated Classes], publishing thirty-one subsequent pieces on her travels to Saint Petersburg in the journal, albeit anonymously (Stranakova 233). Later, these correspondent pieces were published again in the 1830 edition of her collected works. Apart from her travelogues, Tarnow was also a prolific writer of novels, all of which are largely forgotten today but helped to secure her a certain degree of fame during her own time, mainly among female readers (Wägenbaur 94). After her return, she lived in many different cities in Germany and again made a living primarily as a housemistress, but also supported by the proceeds of her writing, until the publication of her collected works in 1830 provided her with a constant income. Towards the end of her life, she mainly worked on translations from English and French, including one of the first translations of George Sand into German. She died in 1862, having remained unmarried all her life (Stranakova 233; Bölte 100). Tarnow’s travel account is in the form of letters written to friends, both male and female, although it is not clear whether these friends existed in reality or are fictional. Some of the female recipients are addressed by their names, others remain anonymous.2 The letter, a highly popular literary form in the eighteenth century, provided authors with a useful framework for their report: it allowed for familiarity and expression of emotions but also for more objective descriptions of things encountered by the traveller, such as nature, architecture, or local customs. It is also a seemingly private form of publication, and as  such a typical strategy for a female author wary about sticking her head above the parapet by engaging in literary production that, at the time, was still predominantly a male province (Becker-Cantarino 83–5). By choosing the 2 It is interesting that Tarnow tends to focus on philosophical, political, or aesthetic topics when writing to male addressees. In the letters to female friends, she writes more about her experience and observations, including, in one instance, descriptions of Russian household customs such as cookery, food markets, and laundry; i.e. “classic female” themes. Such descriptions are largely absent in travelogues by male authors, making Tarnow’s account a valuable resource on the everyday lives of Russian women at that time.

Femininity, Nation, and Nature: Fanny Tarnow’s Letters

79

epistolary form, women authors could keep up the appearance of not truly having intended their work for a broader audience but merely for their own friends at home. In the case of Tarnow, her account’s very title indicates this wariness: Briefe auf einer Reise nach Petersburg an Freunde geschrieben [Letters on a journey to St. Petersburg, written to friends]. It is a disclaimer that these letters were intended for a private readership, and just happened to have somehow found their way into the public sphere. There are other typically female writing strategies to be found in Tarnow’s account that indicate that she was well aware of the social expectations connected to her gender while writing. In the foreword, Tarnow gives an extensive apology about her work, assuring her readers that the publication of her account was really quite contrary to her own wishes. While she does not explain how her letters ended up in print, she hastens to belittle her ability to write a “proper” travelogue, thereby excusing the seemingly private character of her account: [D]iesen Karakter zwanglos hingeworfener, freundschaftlicher Briefe habe ich ihnen nicht nehmen wollen und auch nicht nehmen können, da ich zu nichts in der Welt weniger tauge, als sie zu einer Reisebeschreibung aneinander zu reihen, wozu mir nicht bloß das Talent, sondern auch die erforderlichen wissenschaftlichen Kenntnisse fehlen. [I did not want to change these letters’ casual and friendly character, nor would I have been able to do so, since I am not in the least capable of fashioning them into a travel account. For such an endeavour, I lack not only the talent but also the necessary scientific knowledge; ii.] As feminist scholars have pointed out, such disclaimers at the beginning of a piece of writing are often included by women writers of this time. Konstanze Fliedl for example identifies the effects of “Camouflage, […] Verkleine­ rungsrhetorik und Bescheidenheitsstrategien” [camouflage, diminishing rhetoric and strategies of modesty; 74] encountered in a wide range of women’s writing throughout the nineteenth century. Male authors, on the other hand, are much more likely to begin their travel accounts by embarking on general reflections, explaining the background of their journey, or otherwise setting the mood for what is to come (Stranakova 235). However, further on in the text it becomes clear that Tarnow is not an entirely self-effacing and timid writer. Almost from the outset, she seems to be at pains to portray herself as an intrepid adventurer whose spirits are not easily dampened by the hardships of her journey—and explicitly so in contrast to other travellers on the vessel, both male and female:

80

Paulus

Ich allein blieb von jeder Anwandlung des bösen Übels [travel sickness] frei und fühlte mich auch, als ich am andern Mprgen [sic] erstand, so leicht und frei wie ein Vögelchen in der Luft. […] Einsam setzte ich mich oben auf die Kajüte, ein Platz den alle meine Reisegefährten wegen des starken Schwankens als gefährlich scheuen […]. [I alone was not touched by the effects of travel sickness, and also felt light and free like a little bird in the air when I got up the next morning. I sat by myself on top of the cabin, while all my fellow passengers thought this spot to be too perilous because of the ship’s swaying; 5.] Here, quite contrary to the image established in her preface of a timid woman reluctant to break the boundaries set upon her gender, Tarnow expresses her joy at being free to see the world and even chooses to position herself on a spot deemed too dangerous by others. By proving herself as perfectly capable in body and mind of withstanding the perils of a voyage, Tarnow preempts any potential claims that women are generally unfit to embark on journeys due to their supposedly tender condition (Ohnesorg 159). At the same time, however, this is not normally a point male travellers felt obliged to make, as they were not faced with preconceived assumptions about their ability to travel in the first place—or lack thereof. This example demonstrates the conundrum female writers had to contend with at that time. By defiantly emphasising her strength of mind and body, a woman would automatically imply that she was an exception to the rule established by patriarchal society: that women are weak, and should not put themselves in danger by travelling. There is another example of Tarnow contradicting the bashful image of herself in the preface, where she asks that “Man fordre nun aber auch von diesen Blättern nichts mehr, als sie zu geben verheißen: eine treue, aber ganz anspruchslose Darstellung des Eindrucks[,] den die Gegenstände auf mich gemacht haben […]” [Please do not expect more from these pages than what they promise to give: a faithful but very simple account of the impressions that things have made upon me; ii]. Contrary to this statement, Tarnow’s account does not only contain simple descriptions of what she saw and did, but goes further by including philosophical reflections, sometimes extending over several pages. As Brenner has shown, by the eighteenth century the old notion of the cosmos as a secure system in which everyone has their own assigned place had long been lost, but in exchange the world was now perceived as open and inviting exploration (Brenner 21). An echo of this balanced experience of ­excitement and anxiety can be found in Tarnow’s account as she contemplates the waves of the sea and the starry sky, pondering the insignificance of a single human being in the unending stream of time (Tarnow 6). Like many

Femininity, Nation, and Nature: Fanny Tarnow’s Letters

81

c­ ontemporary travel writers, Tarnow embarks not only on a physical journey, but also explores her own mind on a journey of the spirit. Tarnow uses the experience of a foreign country in this sense to reflect on herself and on what she encounters. This goes well beyond a “ganz anspruchslose Darstellung” [very simple account] demonstrating Tarnow’s education as well as her empfindsam [sentimental] frame of mind. Far from not possessing the necessary know­ ledge to write a travel account, as she claims in the preface, Tarnow clearly ­demonstrates not only her skills as a writer but also her awareness of literary fashions at that time, and of the conventions of her genre, the travelogue. She punctuates her depictions of sights, architecture, and local customs with lighthearted descriptions of the people she meets (both Russian and German), and with philosophical or literary contemplations. Her account is a piece of literary writing clearly intended for publication from the start, not just a combination of diary-like entries of private thoughts. It is altogether quite plain that the preface had been added as a disclaimer, trying to make up for her boldness as a female writer venturing into the public sphere. Tarnow was certainly under no illusion about her supposed role as a woman in the society of her time. Even though she had received a thorough education and met famous writers of her time in person (such as Arndt, Kotzebue, and Klinger), she did not have the status and opportunities in literary circles or with the wider reading public that male authors had. She must have been conscious of these constraints placed upon her, and modified her writing accordingly, as a concession towards the dominant understanding of gender roles. However, Tarnow also challenges these roles by presenting herself as an intrepid traveller and as a shrewd observer of the foreign culture.3 In fact, the discrepancy between her disclaimers and what follows in her text is so obvious that it is quite likely that her supposed bashfulness was not meant entirely seriously. Tarnow could very well have written her introduction tongue-in-cheek, secretly making fun of her era’s gender conventions. I would therefore contest Stranakova’s verdict that Tarnow was all too ready to submit to the cultural consensus of her time (242).

3 It is interesting to note that Tarnow also shows gender awareness in other contexts. For example, when she visits a church, she is struck by the parallels between the lives of the women she observes at prayer and that of the Virgin Mary: “Mich rührte das, weil ich darin die Gleich­heit alles Frauenschicksals empfand. Diese still und fromm vor Gott geweinten Thrä­ nen […]–gewiß, Elise, nur ein weibliches Herz kann es fühlen, wie tief betrübt eine Frau seyn kann!” [I was touched by that, feeling how the fates of all women resemble each other. These tears, silent and pious, before God–Elise, surely only another female heart can feel how deeply sad a woman can be; 66].

82 3

Paulus

National Stereotypes in Travel Writing

When Tarnow went on her journey in 1816, negative cultural stereotypes about Russia already had a long history in Western European countries. As early as the sixteenth century, according to Naarden and Leerssen, “Russia was considered [by the West] a backward, sparsely populated realm of nobles and serfs, with little political organisation and no cultural or intellectual achievement. The autocratic Tsar was seen either as a rough-hewn warlord or as an Asianstyle despot […]” (227). One hundred years later, these negative images were still at large. Travellers to Russia in the eighteenth century (most of them male) had written about their journeys, describing the country, its nature, climate, and people. More often than not, their judgement of Russia was not too favourable, as seen, for example, in Friedrich Christian Weber’s Das veränderte ­Russland [Russia Changed; 1721, 1739/40]. This large collection of journal entries, maps, and reports in three volumes was one of the first publications on Russia to reach a comparatively broad readership in Germany. Weber, a secretary at the court in Hanover dispatched to Saint Petersburg, wrote court anecdotes and descriptions of the city and countryside from first-hand experience, but also generalising remarks about what he perceived as typical character traits and traditions of the Russians. According to Wolfgang Geier, these express a nascent notion of national mentality which, over the course of the eighteenth century, fed into the development of national identity from the part of the observers (8). But of course these were by no means objective depictions. Perceptions of foreign countries were then already fraught with preconceptions, as the (in-) famous Steirische Völkertafel [The Styrian Tableau of Nationalities], dating from the early eighteenth century, makes all too clear. The Völkertafel is a list of ten European nations, offering characterisations of each by means of a grid. Each nation is represented by a painted figure at the top, while on the left is a column of criteria, such as clothing, character traits, vices, and virtues fig. 4.1. According to the Völkertafel, the Russian is coarse, treasonous, mean, has no wits whatsoever, loves the whip, and most resembles a donkey. In contrast to this image of the brutal and unrefined “Muscovite,” the tableau paints a rather different picture of the typical German, who appears to be good, pious, invincible in war, frank, wily, and most resembles a lion. The Russian alone of all the nations represented on the Völkertafel is depicted in an exclusively negative light while the other nations are said to possess a mixture of good and bad qualities. For instance, the Italian is supposed to be jealous and sly but also honorable and clever. The Turk is seen as quite negative as well, an image in all likelihood fuelled by anti-Islamic resentment. However, at least their country

Femininity, Nation, and Nature: Fanny Tarnow’s Letters

83

Figure 4.1 The Styrian Tableau of Nationalities, early eighteenth century Source: public domain

is “liebreich” [delightful] and their character “zärtlich” [tender]. The Russian, on the other hand, appears to have no saving grace at all. It is striking that Turks and Russians, arguably the two most negative and also most “foreign” figures on the tableau, are said to have some characteristics in common: both are said to be treacherous heathens. This illustrates the long-lived stereotype that Russia is not a part of Europe at all but belongs to a different, thoroughly foreign, and potentially dangerous cultural sphere, threatening Western European civilisation. It is, in one word, utterly Other. As has been argued by Susan Bassnett, the stereotypical view of another often says more about the observer than about the observed. For Bassnett, subtexts can be found in travelogues that shed light on how the observer creates an image of the culture he or she observes. This leads then to the people of the foreign culture being seen not as individuals but as objects of study, making clear the inherent power divide between the traveller and the observee (Bassnett 92–3). On the Völkertafel, we can see the construction of an uneven power relation between Germany and Russia (and indeed, practically all other European nations). Germany proclaims itself to be civilised and worthy, while

84

Paulus

the other nations, and especially the Russians, are seen as unrefined and barbaric. Not even the Russians’ Christian faith is acknowledged as such but seen as similar to the Turks’ “heathen” religion. Ironically, even after Russia had developed its status as a European power under Peter i as a result of the Great Northern War (1700–21), it was still common in the countries of Western E ­ urope to brand it as “Asian” (Naarden and Leerssen 227). Russia was denied membership in the club of European powers, thereby cementing its status as Other, foreign, not belonging to the Occident. Manfred Beller and Joep Leerssen, in their 2007 study of imagology (the study of cultural stereotypes), focused on the dichotomy of hetero-images and self-images, i.e. how a given culture perceives a foreign one as opposed to how it perceives itself. Beller and Leerssen underline that these perceptions “take shape in a discursive and rhetorical environment; they are representative of literary and discursive conventions, not of social realities” (iii). That is to say, stereotypes are generated through discourse, not through empirical observation of a given culture. They are what Beller and Leerssen call “imaginated,” meaning that such statements are not based on empirical facts and can therefore not be verified. As a consequence, it is also harder to dismantle them, or even to become aware of them in the first place (27). In fact, imaginated discourse on Russia is pervasive in many examples of travel writing throughout the nineteenth century. Since Russia was largely untouched by the Industrial Revolution that swept most of Western Europe from approximately the beginning of the nineteenth century onwards, it again ended up being regarded as backward, even though there had previously been some rapprochement during the Enlightened reign of Catherine ii (Naarden and Leerssen 227). A famous example from this period denouncing Russia as uncivilised and oppressive is Astolphe de Custine’s notorious La Russie en 1839 [Russia in 1839] in which he defines Russia as the very antithesis of the civilised West: under­ developed, dirty, lacking morals and an aesthetic sense. But such a stereotypical view of Russia as uncivilised and backward can also be found in German travel accounts—somewhat ironically, one might add, given that the Industrial Revolution was also slow to spread in Germany, and the founding of the first German nation state did not happen until 1871. In terms of the economy and state structure, Germany therefore shared Russia’s fate in being perceived as backward by other Western European states, especially Britain. In fact, ­Geoffrey Hosking argued in 1998 that “a fractured and underdeveloped nationhood has been their [the Russians’] principal historical burden in the last two centuries or so, continuing throughout the period of the Soviet Union and persisting beyond its fall” (xx). However debatable such a statement might seem

Femininity, Nation, and Nature: Fanny Tarnow’s Letters

85

today, the diagnosis of a fractured nationhood certainly applied to Germany as well up until 1871. That, however, did not stop German travellers such as Kotzebue, Haxthausen, and also Tarnow, from buying into the stereotypical view of Russia as an underdeveloped, pre-modern state. Such statements crop up time and again in publications on Russia during the nineteenth century, influencing travellers’ perceptions, and, consequently, also their writings on the country (Kopelev 36–40). The popular playwright August von Kotzebue for example, whose acrid account of his involuntary journey to Siberia (Das merkwürdigste Jahr meines Lebens; The most Extraordinary Year of my Life; 1801) reached a broad readership, has hardly anything positive to say about Russia at all. Johann Gottfried Seume’s report from Russia (Mein Sommer 1805; My Summer 1805; 1806) is somewhat more differentiated but still complains about the clumsy bureaucracy and lack of hygiene he encountered in Russia, as well as the overall despotic makeup of Russian society. Some fifty years later, August von Haxthausen also underlines the lack of development in Russia, especially in the field of agriculture (5). Travelogues such as these contributed to the reinforcement of uneven power relations between the two cultures, in which Russia had the role of the object being studied and judged. Views on foreign cultures that were common in Germany fed into and shaped travellers’ perceptions before they even set out, and their reports, in turn, often contribute further to the perpetuation of already existing stereotypes. Such cultural preconceptions are also part of the strategy Tarnow uses to construct an image of herself as a travel author who was both female and German. First of all, it must be pointed out that Tarnow, like many contemporary travellers to Russia, did not speak the Russian language. This fact alone makes her problematic as a reporter from foreign parts. It means she was unable to converse with people in their own language, could not read any publications, literature, or newspapers, and in all ways had to rely on translations in order to make sense of her surroundings. Communication on equal terms with the local inhabitants was impossible—either Tarnow’s Russian counterpart would have to know another language, or a translator would have had to be present. This impediment, however, did not affect Tarnow’s readiness to judge what she encountered in Russia—people, customs, culture, and even nature. Again, this is by no means exceptional; indeed it is striking to see how liberally Western European writer-travellers throughout the nineteenth century passed their judgements on Russia when they were linguistically very poorly equipped to do so. Kotzebue, Seume, Haxthausen, Chamisso, as well as an anonymous female writer, Frau B., travelling to Russia in the 1820s, showcase this tendency not just to observe but to judge the foreign country they visited. By doing so,

86

Paulus

they established a clear power divide between themselves (the observers), and the Russians (the observed). Russia became an object to be studied and assessed. The resulting texts fed into, and reinforced, existing stereotypes of ­Russians being dirty, lazy, constantly drunk, etc. Chamisso added to that by endowing the Russians with an innate childlike quality, thereby contributing to a widespread view of Asian countries as immature and in need of supervision by “more enlightened” cultures (Chamisso 133). It is highly probable that Tarnow, an educated and well-read woman, was familiar with at least a few of these travelogues on Russia. The account by ­Kotzebue, for example, was highly successful. It appeared in new editions in 1802 and 1803, and was translated into several European languages. In all like­ lihood, Tarnow read it, given that she had made Kotzebue’s acquaintance and gained his support in preparation for her journey to Russia (Stranakova 231). In some respects, there are even parallels between Kotzebue’s descriptions of Russia and Tarnow’s. For example, both authors differentiate between the ­Russian people and its ruler. Kotzebue is harsh in his verdict on the Russian people; in effect, he describes the Russians just as the Völkertafel does: coarse, lacking in education or refinement, lazy, and dirty (168; 179; 217). The Tsar, however, is exempt from this judgement, as Kotzebue takes some care to describe him as just, wise, and loving towards his people (93; 162; 198). This was probably a strategic move, given that Kotzebue continued living in Russia after his release, and was therefore keen to be in the Tsar’s good books. A similar view of the Russian sovereign can be found in Tarnow’s account, where she presents Tsar Alexander i as the very image of a perfect ruler who is noble, fair, and humane (234 f.). She even praises Alexander as a model for all rulers, including those in power in the German lands: “Der Sinn, in dem er [Alexander] handelt, [ist eine] Zurechtweisung für alle, welche sich sträuben, es begreifen zu wollen, daß Achtung der Menschheit, Anerkennung ihrer Würde und ihrer Rechte […] die wahren Stützen eines Staates […] sind” [The spirit that guides Alexander’s actions reprimands all those who refuse to understand that the true pillars of the state are respect for mankind, and acceptance of peoples’ dignity and rights; 234]. In praising Alexander as an enlightened and humane sovereign, Tarnow covertly criticises the state of affairs in Germany, where these qualities were rarely to be found amongst the ruling class. She even makes a direct reference to Germany, lamenting the dishearte­ ning experiences in her home country which had so often dampened the spirit of hope for a better future (236). This is a remarkable political statement in a time when the hopes of establishing a nation state in Germany with political participation had been dashed after the Congress of Vienna, and in the run-up to the oppressive censorship laws of the Karlsbad Decrees of 1819, the year in which Tarnow’s Briefe were published. Nowhere else in her account is such an

Femininity, Nation, and Nature: Fanny Tarnow’s Letters

87

explicitly critical comment on the political situation in Germany to be found. Praising a foreign monarch, thereby making the contrast to German rulers ­visible, is a technique that allowed Tarnow to express her criticism covertly without fear of negative repercussions for herself after her return home. This passage also marks her as a politically engaged liberal who was well informed and critical about the situation in her home country. While Tarnow does not hold back with her admiration of the Tsar, her verdict on ordinary Russians, on the other hand, is not very positive. Tarnow, too, subscribes to many of the usual stereotypes about the allegedly unrefined ­Russian. There are several examples throughout her text where she criticises the people she encounters as essentially uncivilised. For example, she perceives the Russians as prone to getting drunk (85; 90; 135), lazy and of dubious morals (especially maidservants, 132 f.), and dirty (79). Her depiction of Russia is not negative throughout, however. For example, she appreciates Russian folk culture and religious devotion (65), and praises the beauty of Saint Petersburg and its architecture, especially the churches (25; 37; 48). In this respect, her account differs markedly from de Custine’s, whose description of the city concedes hardly anything positive at all. Tarnow is much less acrimonious, although even the churches whose beauty she generally admires (16; 25) appear to her as inferior to their German counterparts, lacking the latters’ genuine piety: “es ist Einem immer, als trete man in einem [sic] sauber aufgeputzten Gesellschaftssaal” [but one always has the impression of entering a neatly arranged ballroom; 63]. In a similar vein, she denies the Russians a deeper understanding of art (120). On the whole, Tarnow claims to perceive a lack of true meaning behind an only outwardly appealing surface. This criticism of Russia as an essentially superficial culture has of course its counterpart in the tacit claim that Germany is the very opposite, buying into the popular myth that German culture is all about the deeper truths and able to appreciate that which does not meet the eye at first glance. As a rule, the reproach of superficiality as opposed to “German genuineness” had often been directed at France in a discourse that was still ongoing in the first decades of the twentieth century. ­Tarnow however uses it to criticise a country that often prides itself to be soulful and capable of deep emotions, as opposed to the more technically-minded rest of Europe. Tarnow and de Custine both claim that Russia is a barbaric country, however, de Custine predominantly attacks the lack of modern infrastructure and an underdeveloped society. Tarnow does allow for these in her description of Russia, but at the same time puts forward that these achievements lack true substance and are essentially fake. As a member of a culture that is alle­ gedly deeper and more truthful, she claims to be able to see through these “deceptions.”

88

Paulus

It is important to bear in mind that, whether Tarnow’s judgement of Russia be positive or negative, she assumes the role of a superior observer, thereby relegating the foreign culture to the role of inherently inferior observee. Like many other travel writers of her time, Tarnow presumes to be in a position to make judgments of a culture with which she is barely familiar. This becomes especially clear when she embarks on descriptions of what she perceives as the Russian national character. Tarnow makes generalised statements about what she perceives as typical Russian characteristics, which are, according to her, rather negative: Die russischen Frauen sind in der Regel häßlich; die Männer schlank, aber ihre Gesichtszüge selten bedeutend. Im Auge aber liegt fast immer der Ausdruck von Verschmitztheit und Schlauheit. Diese beweiset er auch im geschäftigen Leben so allgemein, daß man sie für einen herrschenden Zug im Nationalkarakter erkennen muß. [The Russian women are, as a rule, ugly; the men are slim but their features are rarely remarkable. There is almost always a sly and wily expression in their eyes. These characteristics are also so omnipresent in business life that they must be regarded as a dominant trait in the ­Russian national character; 138.] Despite this negative, and of course untenable, assessment, Tarnow does allow for the fact that the Russian Empire consisted of a mixture of different ethnicities, therefore making it hard to discern an actual national character (138). In another letter, however, she engages again in musings about what the Russians are generally like, coming to the conclusion that they are child-like, unformed, with a tendency to imitate others (135; 232). These characteristics correspond to what Edward Said has described as the typical view of the East by Western observers (Said 48). While Said focuses primarily on countries of the Arabic world, we can also perceive the phenomenon of Orientalisation with reference to Russia in Tarnow’s travelogue. Another example is her assessment of ­Russian women: “Die Ungezwungenheit der russischen Damen hat für ein deutsches weibliches Gemüth etwas Unangenehmes; dazu kommt noch das asiatische far niente” [The familiarity of Russian ladies is unpleasant for a German female mind; and  then there is also the Asiatic far niente; 198]. By judging Russian women as lazy, and classifying this vice as “Asiatic” (albeit, ironically, with an expression taken from the Italian, as if German, the language of the industrious, did not even have a word for it), Tarnow sees Russians as Other, inferior to the more civilised German observer, who, in this example, provides the measure of all things. Emerging from this alleged Otherness of Russia, she perceives a vague threat:

Femininity, Nation, and Nature: Fanny Tarnow’s Letters

89

Im Umgang mit den vornehmeren Russen werden Einem oft die Lücken in der Bildungsgeschichte dieses Volkes merklich und das ängstigt, weil man nicht errathen kann, welcher Einfluß der ganz eigenthümliche Gang der Civilisation dieses Volkes auf die Entwickelung seines Karakters und dadurch auf das Schicksal des übrigen Europas haben wird. [In dealing with the more refined Russians one often perceives the gaps in the educational history of this people, and this is worrying, as one cannot guess what influence this people’s very specific course of civilisation will have on the development of its character, and therefore also on the fate of the rest of Europe; 139.] Russia is thus not merely inferior and less civilised but ultimately also unknowable and therefore potentially dangerous. This is exacerbated by what Tarnow perceives as a trait of dishonesty, especially in Saint Petersburg: “Am fühlbarsten wird dies indessen wohl hier in Petersburg, wo man die Roheit der Barbarei mit dem Firnis aller Laster der Überfeinerung übertüncht sieht” [This is most perceptible here in Saint Petersburg, where the crudest barbarism is whitewashed with all the vices of excessive refinement; 139]. While Tarnow allows for Russia to exert influence on the continent’s history, acknowledging its power and influence, she makes a clear distinction between the vast empire in the East and the rest of the European states, with the former posing a threat to the order and civilisation of the latter. This is remarkable, as the fear of Russia as a tyrannical system that oppresses its citizens rose sharply in the West only after the accession of Nicholas i in 1825. By contrast, A ­ lexander i was primarily seen as a positive figure due to his role in the Napoleonic Wars 1805–15 (Donnert 169 and 178; Kopelev 36). It may be that Tarnow’s fear derived from her observations of a culture she was essentially unfamiliar with. Such generalisations on the observed country’s people can be found in all of the travelogues on Russia by the German authors mentioned above, however, they are conspicuously absent in accounts by some Russian writers on ­Germany from the same period, such as Karamzin, Pogodin, or Zhukovskij. One possible explanation is that German authors reproduced already existing discourses in their accounts, cementing Russia’s role and reputation as inferior to German culture. By contrast, Russian writers like the three mentioned above responded to this uneven power relation (of which they were, in all likelihood, aware) by underlining their education and familiarity with German culture.4 In fact, especially Pogodin and Karamzin demonstrate a thorough knowledge of ­German 4 Denis Fonvytsin took a different approach–his account on Germany is full of complaints about the shortcomings of the country he visits. According to him, the food is bad, people are unfriendly, transport is unreliable, and most of the cities not worth a visit (365; 367; 371).

90

Paulus

art, history, and literature, the likes of which are rarely to be found in a German author writing about Russia (Panofsky 16). The stereotypes discussed above were widespread and can be found, with variations, in many travelogues by European writers in the early nineteenth century. They are indicators of hubris on the part of the travellers who, often tacitly, assume their own culture to be superior to the one they visit and judge against their own notions and standards. In Tarnow’s Briefe, the distinction between “Us” and “Them” also serves the process of defining her German identity. After Napoleon had brought about the end of the Holy Roman Empire, hopes were high among German liberals that a nation state might be established. Nine years later, when Tarnow went on her journey, the German lands were again divided into a confusing patchwork of duchies and dioceses, with the nascent nationalist movement oppressed by the princes. The ensuing struggle for unification also gave rise to the question of German identity, about how it could be defined and on what, in the absence of a nation state, it could be founded 4

Nationalism and Nature

Apart from more obvious criteria, such as language and history, nature and landscape provide a method of defining and understanding national identity. For the Romantics, national identity was indeed an organic concept, not a human-made construct, “as distinctive and unique as the natural landscapes in which these [national identies] were claimed to be rooted” (Olsen 55). In the mid-nineteenth century, the German author Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl declared the forest as the very epitome of German-ness, and the mysterious source of its people’s strength. In fact, he even denies the French and the British a relevant future due to their alleged lack of forests (36). Riehl puts forward an obscure understanding of national character based on the assumption of a mystical power to be found in the German landscape, especially in the forest, which he perceives as preferable to state institutions, however liberal: “Was helfen den Engländern ihre freien Gesetze, da sie nur gefesselte Parke, da sie kaum noch einen freien Wald haben?” [What good are their free laws to the English, as they only have tied-up parks, and hardly any free forest anymore?; 41]. Tarnow is not as openly jingoistic as Riehl but in her account she repeatedly promotes the notion of a “German” landscape, or even a “German” nature. Shortly after her arrival, for example, she encounters a group of German expatriates living on an islet within Saint Petersburg, and, feeling at home amongst the people speaking German and playing skittles, claims that the green of

Femininity, Nation, and Nature: Fanny Tarnow’s Letters

91

s­ urrounding trees and meadows looks more “German” (67), sadly without explaining how to identify a German shade of green. Here we can perceive a strongly felt national identity based on greenery that is, at the same time, vague and unclear. Among her compatriots, she claims to perceive an aura of difference that distinguishes this little enclave from its Russian surroundings, and attributes this difference to the natural world, as if the presence of a few Germans could have any discernible effect on plants in the vicinity. In a similar vein, she also attributes national character to the changing of the seasons. Towards the end of her travelogue for example, Tarnow laments a lack of the joyful feeling in Saint Petersburg that spring induces in Germany: “Solche Tage hat man hier nicht—solche stille innige Empfindungen weckt hier die Natur nicht in der Menschenbrust […]” [There are no such days here— nature does not bring such still and deep feelings to a human’s heart here; 252]. To illustrate her point, Tarnow quotes Uhland’s poem Lob des Frühlings [Praise of Spring] containing several archetypes of spring, such as the scent of violets and new green. Tarnow expresses her longing for her home at this time, and claims that, even outside Saint Petersburg, the Russian spring lacks all these things (255). According to her description, natural phenomena are by no means universal but different in different countries, thereby forming a part of national identity. Even generic elements of spring such as birdsong and flowers appear as specifically German, or at least European, and absent in Russia. ­Tarnow effectively claims that the latter is not only inferior to the former but in fact unnatural and abnormal as even natural processes are stunted and incomplete in Russia. A similar example of attributing national identity to nature can be found early on in Tarnow’s Briefe when she describes the surroundings of a country house where she is staying with a friend. After her initial enthusiasm about the city of Saint Petersburg, she describes Russian nature as thoroughly foreign: “Die Blumen sind ohne Duft, die Gehölze ohne Leben, alles Laub der Bäume dunkel, matt und bestäubt, und nur die Wiesen erinnern mich in ihrem hellen Grün und üppigen Graswuchs an Deutschland […]” [The flowers lack scent, the woods are without life, the foliage of the trees is dark, limp, and dusty, and only the meadows with their light green and lush grass remind me of ­Germany; 29]. Nature appears to be lacking the true essence that makes it so beautiful at home. Instead, Tarnow conjures a nightmare image of a dead nature that is unsettlingly foreign in its perceived deviation from the botanical norm. This is striking insofar as the urban experience of Saint Petersburg with its ­bewildering mass of people and buildings had not instilled a similar feeling of  foreignness in Tarnow upon her arrival—on the contrary, she proves her ­familiarity with the new setting by recognising all the famous buildings she

92

Paulus

e­ ncounters (22). While authors like de Custine or Kotzebue and even Seume construct the perceived Otherness of Russia by focusing mainly on culture, ­Tarnow does so primarily by denouncing nature in Russia as profoundly lacking. Perhaps the most obvious example of ascribing national identity to nature in Tarnow’s text can be found in a passage about trees. In the garden of a ­Russian acquaintance, Tarnow sees a grove of oaks and is deeply moved: Die Anpflanzung war sorgfältig gepflegt, aber man sah es ihr doch an, daß der Baum der deutschen Freiheit und der deutschen Kraft ein Fremdling in diesem Boden war. Den jungen Stämmen fehlt allen das frische, kräf­ tige Leben der vaterländischen Wälder und sie sahen mich eben so trauernd wehmüthig an, als ich sie. [The grove was carefully tended but one could easily see that the tree of German freedom and German strength did not belong in this soil. The young trunks all lacked the fresh, strong life of the fatherland’s woods, and we looked at each other with a sad and melancholy glance; 32.] From the eighteenth century onwards, the oak tree had begun to be seen as a Germanic symbol. In the early nineteenth century, and especially in connection with the Napoleonic Wars, the oak featured in a number of patriotic poems by authors such as Arndt and von Schenkendorf, and was also found in the inscription on the tomb of Theodor Körner. The oak gradually replaced the lime as the quintessential German tree at that time, a process reinforced by the re-discovery of Tacitus’ Germania (ad 98) as a supposed document of ­German-ness in which the forest plays a prominent role. The fact that the oak features prominently in the symbolic traditions of both France and England did not seem to diminish the oak-loving spirit in the German lands (Steuer 411). In the passage quoted above, Tarnow claims the oak tree entirely for ­Germany, both on a botanical and a symbolic level. She presumes to provide proof of the oak tree being inherently and essentially German by claiming it cannot thrive in foreign soil. What the trees allegedly lack in Russia is the particular strength and vigour of the German forest that distinguishes it from all other woodland. While even Riehl concedes that Russia’s forests are impressive (36), Tarnow insists that forests in different countries have different characters, and that the German forest is of course superior. Similar to her assessment of the seasons analysed above, she claims that Russian nature itself is inferior to its German counterpart, preventing even the strong oak from flourishing properly. However, the oak tree in the passage above is not a mere plant. It also carries a powerful national symbolism, namely that of Germany as a strong and free nation, and is therefore, according to Tarnow, out of place in Russia. The

Femininity, Nation, and Nature: Fanny Tarnow’s Letters

93

­ erceived weakness of the trees she observes can therefore be attributed to the p geographical distance from Germany but also, symbolically, to a perceived lack  of freedom and strength in the state of Russia. Ironically, contempory ­Germany was far from being a free country itself, given that the Karlsbad Decrees of 1819 were soon to oppress every oppositional movement in the following decades (Kortländer 13). The German strength and freedom Tarnow sees represented in the oak trees were therefore certainly not actual qualities of the many German states, but rather projections of a diffuse notion of national character that Germans were supposed to share, and which, according to the hopes of the national movement, would eventually lead to the formation of a German nation state (Jeismann 49). However immaterial this national character might be, for Tarnow it is clear that it cannot be found in Russia. She claims that strength and freedom are German qualities, and the ailing oak trees in Russia supposedly prove that. By alleging that even nature is different in the two countries, Tarnow makes a strong case for the perceived Otherness of Russia where even seemingly universal things like plants or seasons are not the way one is accustomed to in Western Europe. She also reinforces her previous claim of Russian superficia­ lity by denying Russian nature the ability to evoke the same deep-felt emotions as German nature. Furthermore, by deriving national identity from the natural world she subscribes to the idea that nations are organic entities grounded on empirical facts. Assigning perceived national traits not only to people but also to landscape, and even to nature itself, underlines the notion that national communities are not artificial constructs but naturally given entities. This was of course a widespread conviction within the nascent national movement. As opposed to the concept of nations as constructs developed by historians as Hobsbawm and Anderson, the notion of an organic nation provides certainty and reduces ambiguity, especially in times that were or are susceptible to doubt. In Tarnow’s case, the idea of a nation reflected in nature helped to instil a sense of identity and belonging in a national community that did not yet ­exist as a political entity in Germany. But even after 1871, the notion of national landscapes continued to exert influence on political discourses and can also be found in National Socialist ideology (Olsen 79).

5

Conclusion: Gender and Nation

Tarnow was aware of the constraints placed upon her as a female writer of her time. As a result, she developed coping strategies, e.g. disclaimers about her alleged lack of skills as a writer, while at the same time demonstrating that

94

Paulus

she was, in fact, very able to meet the demands both of the journey itself and of its description. By appearing to concede her “shortcomings,” she avoided open rebellion against the gender conventions of her time, while quietly resis­ ting the notion that women are lacking as travellers and writers by travelling and writing. Additionally, her account stands out from many other travelogues on Russia in that it includes descriptions of women’s everyday life that are missing from accounts by male authors. However, being aware of her difficult position as a woman did not prevent her from adapting common cultural prejudices about Russia. She is complicit in the contemporaneous view of Russia as an inherently inferior culture, reproducing national stereotypes and deriving her own understanding of national identity as a German against the background of what she perceives as “typically Russian.” By reproducing common national stereotypes, she contri­ butes to contemporary views of Russia that were largely negative and, at the same time, constructs a notion of German-ness based on a positive mirrorimage of the alleged negative characteristics of Russia. But Tarnow does not only ascribe certain stereotypical characteristics to the people she encounters on her trip, or to man-made elements such as architecture, religion, or the arts. She also puts forward the notion that nature is not universal but rather reflects what is perceived as the national character of a country. For Tarnow (and for many of her contemporaries), nations are not artificial constructs but growing organisms with distinctive characteristics that permeate everything. Tarnow participates actively in an ongoing discourse on national identity in her account, thereby contributing to an attempted definition of German-ness; a notion that was far from clear at her time and continues to be debated today. This demonstrates, once again, that national stereotypes often say more about the person who expresses them than about the culture at which they are  aimed. Tarnow’s Briefe oscillate between confident self-assertion as a ­German (and therefore, ‘inherently superior’ to her Russian counterparts) and self-­conscious justification as a female author-traveller (and therefore, ‘inherently inferior’ to her male counterparts).

Works Cited

Primary

Chamisso, Adelbert von. Reise um die Welt. Rütten & Loening, 1978. de Custine, Astolphe. Russische Schatten. Prophetische Briefe aus dem Jahre 1839. Translated by A. Diezmann, Greno, 1985.

Femininity, Nation, and Nature: Fanny Tarnow’s Letters

95

Frau E.B. Einige Erinnerungen von meinen Reisen in Russland, der Türkei und Italien: zur Unterhaltung für alle Leser, besonders für das weibliche Geschlecht. Kollmann, 1831. Fonvytsin, Denis I. “Dnevnik.” Works of D.I. Fonvytsin, Marks, 1893, pp. 364–401. Haxthausen, August von. Die ländliche Verfassung Rußlands. Ihre Entwickelung und ihre Feststellung in der Gesetzgebung von 1861. Brockhaus, 1866. Kotzebue, August von. Das merkwürdigste Jahr meines Lebens. Kösel, 1965. Seume, Johann Gottfried. Mein Sommer 1805. Aufbau, 1990. Tarnow, Fanny. Briefe auf einer Reise nach Petersburg an Freunde geschrieben. Enslin, 1819.

Secondary Becker-Cantarino, Barbara. “Leben als Text. Briefe als Ausdrucks- und Verständigungsmittel in der Briefkultur und Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts.” Frauenli­ teraturgeschichte. Schreibende Frauen vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart, edited by Hiltrud Gnüg and Renate Möhrmann, Metzler, 1985, pp. 83–102. Brenner, Peter J. “Die Erfahrung der Fremde. Zur Entwicklung einer Wahrnehmungsform in der Geschichte des Reiseberichts.” Der Reisebericht. Die Entwicklung einer Gattung in der deutschen Literatur, edited by Peter J. Brenner, Suhrkamp, 1989, pp. 14–49. Bassnett, Susan. Comparative Literature. A Critical Introduction. Blackwell, 1993. Beller, Manfred and Leerssen, Joep, editors. Imagology. The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Characters. A Critical Survey. Rodopi, 2007. Bölte, Amely. Fanny Tarnow. Ein Lebensbild. Wegener, 1865. Donnert, Erich. Rußland (860–1917). Von den Anfängen bis zur Zarenzeit. Pustet, 1998. Fliedl, Konstanze. “Auch ein Beruf. ‘Realistische’ Autorinnen im 19. Jahrhundert.” Deutsche Literatur von Frauen, Band 2: 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Gisela Brinker-Gabler, Beck, 1988, pp. 69–85. Geier, Wolfgang. Russische Kulturgeschichte in diplomatischen Reiseberichten aus vier Jahrhunderten: Sigmund von Herberstein, Adam Olearius, Friedrich Christian Weber, August von Haxthausen. Harrassowitz, 2004. Hosking, Geoffrey. Russia. People and Empire 1552–1917. Fontana, 1998. Jeismann, Michael. Das Vaterland der Feinde. Klett-Cotta, 1992. Kopelev, Lev. “Zunächst war Waffenbrüderschaft.” Russen und Rußland aus deutscher Sicht. 19. Jahrhundert: Von der Jahrhundertwende bis zur Reichsgründung (1800–1871), edited by Mechthild Keller, Fink, 1992, pp. 11–82. Kortländer, Bernd. “‘Censur muß sein.’ Heine, die Zensur, das Archiv.” Zensur im 19. Jahr­hundert. Das literarische Leben aus Sicht seiner Überwacher, edited by Bernd Kortländer and Enno Stahl, Aisthesis, 2012, pp. 11–22.

96

Paulus

Naarden, Bruno and Leerssen, Joep. “Russians.” Imagology. The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Characters. A Critical Survey, edited by Manfred Beller and Joep Leerssen, Rodopi, 2007, pp. 226–30. Ohnesorg, Stefanie. Mit Kompaß, Kutsche und Kamel. (Rück-)Einbindung der Frau in die Geschichte des Reisens und der Reiseliteratur. Röhrig, 1996. Olsen, Jonathan. Nature and Nationalism. Right-Wing Ecology and the Politics of Identity in Contemporary Germany. Macmillan, 1999. Panofsky, Gerda S. Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin in Germany. Fiction as Facts. Harrassowitz, 2010. Pelz, Annegret. “‘… von einer Fremde in die andre?’ Reiseliteratur von Frauen.” Deutsche Literatur von Frauen, Band 2: 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Gisela BrinkerGabler, Beck, 1988, pp. 143–53. Riehl, Wilhelm Heinrich. Die Naturgeschichte des deutschen Volkes. Reclam [ca. 1935]. Said, Edward. Orientalism. Routledge, 1978. Steuer, Heiko. “Das ‘völkisch’ Germanische in der deutschen Ur- und Frühgeschichtsforschung.” Zur Geschichte der Gleichung “germanisch–deutsch.” Sprache und Na­ men, Geschichte und Institutionen, edited by Heinrich v. Beck et al., de Gruyter, 2004, pp. 357–502. Stranakova, Monika. “‘Es ist hier vieles ganz anders, als man bei uns glaubt.’ Fanny Tarnows Reise nach St. Petersburg.” Wege in die Moderne. Reiseliteratur von Schrift­ stellerinnen und Schriftstellern des Vormärz, edited by Christina Ujma, Aisthesis, 2009, pp. 229–42. Ujma, Christina. “Wege in die Moderne. Reiseliteratur von Schriftstellerinnen und Schriftstellern des Vormärz.” Wege in die Moderne. Reiseliteratur von Schriftstell­ erinnen und Schriftstellern des Vormärz, edited by Christina Ujma, Aisthesis, 2009, pp. 13–29. Wägenbaur, Birgit. Die Pathologie der Liebe: Literarische Weiblichkeitsentwürfe um 1800. Schmidt, 1996. Whitfield, Peter. Travel. A Literary History. Bodleian Library, 2011. Wuthenow, Ralf-Reiner: Die erfahrene Welt. Europäische Reiseliteratur im Zeitalter der Aufklärung. Insel, 1980.

Part 3 German-Jewish Voices in the Nationalism Debate

∵

Chapter 5

Jews for Germany: Nineteenth-Century Jewish-German Intellectuals and the Shaping of German National Discourse Anita Bunyan 1 Introduction In 1832 the Bavarian publicist Johann Wirth wrote a pamphlet entitled Die politische Reform Deutschlands [The political reform of Germany] in which he argued: Mehr noch, als nach Freiheit und nach materieller Wohlfart der e­ inzelnen Provinzen, verlangen indessen die entschiedenen Patrioten D ­ eutschlands nach der politischen Einheit ihres Vaterlandes. Und in der That mit Recht: denn dieselbe ist eben das einzige Mittel zur Freiheit und Wohlfart der einzelnen Provinzen; ohne sie giebt es keine Bürgschaft für das Bestehen und Gedeihen der wahren Freiheit, ohne sie keine Aussicht zu dauerhafter Organisation des Welttheils und kein Heil für Europa! [Meanwhile, more than for Freedom and for the material prosperity of the separate provinces, the resolute patriots of Germany long for the political unity of their Fatherland. And in fact they are right: for this is the only way to achieve Freedom and Prosperity for the separate provinces; without it there can be no guarantee that true Freedom will survive and flourish, without it no prospect for the lasting organisation of this part of the world and no salvation for Europe; Die politische Reform 15.] As Wirth’s statement indicates, in the first half of the nineteenth century, the call for German national unity became linked to demands for political “freedom.” Only national unity in the form of a nation state, it was argued, could bring about reform and an end to the political repression exercised by the aristocratic sovereigns who ruled the multiplicity of German states in Central ­Europe. A new generation of German writers and publicists demanded that the cultural nation be given political expression. Confronted with a political establishment hostile to any transformation of the status quo, many o­ ppositional

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004426108_007

100

Bunyan

writers now took upon themselves the increasingly urgent task of defining and promoting the concept of German national identity as a vehicle of political and social transformation. The concept of the nation, now highly politicised, rapidly became a battleground on which the establishment and the opposition fought desperately to appropriate the newly resonant concept of the “national interest” for their own political cause. In the historiography of nineteenth-century Germany, Jewish Germans still tend to be treated as passive objects of this vibrant German nationalist discourse.1 The idea of the nation was not, however, an uncontested entity into which Jews sought to “assimilate.” Instead, Jewish Germans also sought to influence and lay claim to this powerful cultural and political vision which enabled many of them to accommodate their multiple situational identities: as Jews, regional patriots, and Germans. In the 1830s and 1840s a large number of Jewish writers and thinkers found themselves in the vanguard of the German political opposition. This was unsurprising. Barred by the state from a wide range of trades and professions, many educated Jewish Germans turned to writing and journalism in an effort to make a living. Denied even the limited civil and political rights granted to their non-Jewish compatriots, they were attracted to the growing Liberal and Radical opposition movements. Heinrich Heine and Karl Marx are two of the best-known examples. Even those Jews, such as Heine and Marx, who converted to Christianity in order to become eligible for state employment remained particularly sensitive to the iniquities of the repressive political situation in Germany’s absolutist states. Far from restricting themselves to the theme of political emancipation for Jews, Jewish-German writers also participated actively and visibly in contemporary debates about the nature of German identity and the desirability of political unity. From the end of the eighteenth century, increasing exposure of the Jewish community to non-Jewish social and intellectual influences led many German Jews to reject the notion that they owed their first allegiance to the concept of the Jewish nation. Jewish writers and publicists engaged in the contemporary struggle for Jewish emancipation, such as the Hamburg lawyer Gabriel Riesser, repeatedly emphasised that they were German nationals of Jewish persuasion. Judaism would determine their confessional, but no longer their national, identity (Brenner 251–61). Subsequently, most Jewish-German writers felt free, and indeed realised that it was important, to participate in the shaping of a collective German identity whilst it was still in a state of flux.

1 Recent examples include Jansen 234–59, Vick 83–109, Walser Smith 230–55. For a critique of this approach, see Lässig 110–11, 457, 665.

Jews for Germany

101

However, the now politically charged concept of German national identity presented Germany’s Jews with potential problems as well as opportunities. The concept of the Kulturnation, the vision of a German nation bound together by a shared cultural heritage, provided Jews with a theoretical opportunity to win admission to the imagined national community by demonstrating their loyalty to the German language and cultural tradition. Bildung, or secular selfcultivation, represented to many German Jews not only the prospect of social and economic mobility, but also the possibility of a sense of belonging. Some Jewish-German writers such as Heine and Börne, however, were more skeptical. They urged caution and questioned whether adherence to increasingly influential concepts of German national identity could guarantee the freedoms, in the form of civil and political rights, and the acceptance they sought. Some anticipated that despite the link being forged between the concepts of “freedom” and national “unity,” such increased emphasis on the issue of national unity could place new and potentially threatening obstacles in the way of social and cultural integration. This chapter explores the various ways in which a selection of prominent nineteenth-century Jewish-German writers and publicists, Ludwig Börne, Moritz Hartmann, and Berthold Auerbach, actively sought to shape the nationalist discourses of their age. It analyses their response to the changing face of the German national movement which became linked to demands for political and constitutional reform in the first half of the nineteenth century but took on increasingly aggressive forms during the revolution of 1848. The chapter will focus in particular on the fraught interaction in their writings between their hopes for political freedom from oppressive monarchical and oligarchic forms of government and their desire for national unity and the creation of a German nation state. 2

Ludwig Börne

The “brillante Essayist” [brilliant essayist; Stern 10] and founder of the modern German feuilleton, Ludwig Börne, was born in the Jewish ghetto of ­Frankfurt in 1786 as Juda Löw (Löb) Baruch (see Jasper 9). He was educated in Berlin and at the universities of Halle, Heidelberg, and Giessen, and was able to take advantage of the civil rights granted to the Jews of Frankfurt by the French, who occupied the city from 1806 to 1813. Unlike previous generations of Jews in the city, Börne was given the opportunity to seek state employment and he worked in police administration in Frankfurt from 1811. In 1813, however, the French were expelled. The Jews’ newly-acquired rights were revoked

102

Bunyan

as a vestige of French rule, and in March 1815 Börne was dismissed from his post: an experience that made a profound impression on him. Three years later, he changed his name and converted to Christianity in order to qualify for employment in the public service. Ironically, however, he soon turned to the free profession of journalism where he found an outlet for his increasingly radical political views. His first enterprise was the literary and political journal Die Wage [The Scales] which he produced almost singlehandedly from 1818 until 1821, when it was suppressed (Jasper 116). After the French revolution of 1830, he settled in Paris where he continued to work as a political journalist and gained a reputation as an uncompromising and controversial critic of the political restoration in Germany. His Parisian exile was to be relatively short, for he died in 1837, but it was also productive and his bestknown work, Briefe aus Paris [Letters from Paris; 1831–34], and the famous polemical tract Menzel der Franzosenfresser [Menzel, He Eats French People; 1837] were published during this period.2 His conversion to Christianity notwithstanding, Börne’s Jewish origins and experience clearly continued to have a profound influence on both his radical demands for political rights and his attempts to shape contemporary discourse about the national question. In the seventy-fourth of his Briefe aus Paris, written fourteen years after his conversion, he explicitly acknowledged the link between his Jewishness and his commitment to the concept of freedom: [Ich] weiß das unverdiente Glück zu schätzen, zugleich ein Deutscher und ein Jude zu sein, nach allen Tugenden der Deutschen streben zu können und doch keinen ihrer Fehler zu teilen. Ja, weil ich als Knecht geboren, darum liebe ich die Freiheit mehr als ihr. Ja, weil ich die Sklaverei gelernt, darum verstehe ich die Freiheit besser als ihr. [How well I appreciate my undeserved good fortune to be both a ­German and a Jew, to be able to aspire to all the virtues of the Germans without sharing any of their faults. Indeed, because I was born in bondage, I love freedom more than they do. Indeed, because I experienced slavery, I understand freedom better than they do; Briefe 450.] However, his commitment to political freedom transcended the question of Jewish emancipation. It was fuelled by his belief that the political repression exercised by the absolutist sovereigns of the German Confederation demeaned and stunted the potential of the German people. The refusal to share power 2 For a discussion of Ludwig Börne’s model of enlightened form of patriotism influenced by French politics, see Ernest Schonfield’s chapter in this volume.

Jews for Germany

103

and the withholding of political rights reduced “das gebildetste, geistreichste, tüchtigste und tugendhafteste Volk der Welt” [the most educated, intelligent, able and virtuous nation in the world] to “verächtlichen Sklaven und lächerlichen Schulbuben” [contemptible slaves and ridiculous schoolboys; Menzel 896–97.] Moreover, he argued, political repression prevented the German “Volk” or nation from making its potentially valuable contribution to the development of humanity: “Nur die Freiheit vermag alle Kräfte eines Volkes zu entwickeln, daß es das Ziel erreichte, welches ihm auf der Bahn der Menschheit vorgesteckt worden” [Only freedom can develop all the strengths of a nation and enable it to reach its preordained human destiny; Menzel 943]. In the absence of a politically progressive political establishment, Börne believed that it fell to the writer to shape national discourse and make the German people aware of the values of political freedom and justice, which he associated with the oppositional concept of the nation. Indeed, he compared writers to flies or irritants, humming about the ears and tickling the face of a dozing nation in an attempt to wake it up: “Wir wollen das deutsche Volk nicht ändern, wir wollen es aufwecken, denn es schläft. Wir sind seine Fliegen, die ihm um die Ohren summen und im Gesichte herumkitzeln” [We do not want to change the German nation, we want to rouse it, for it sleeps. We are the flies that hum in its ears and tickle it in the face; Menzel 932–33]. Börne’s most impassioned, indeed vitriolic, defence of the cause of political freedom appeared in his polemical tract Menzel der Franzosenfresser. In the mid-1830s, German literary culture was rocked by the socio-political and aesthetic provocations of a disparate, and often mutually antagonistic, group of writers loosely associated with the concept of “Young Germany.” Heinrich ­Heine, Börne, and Karl Gutzkow were the most prominent and productive of these writers who communicated “a powerful feeling of the intolerableness of the world” in which they lived (Sammons 3). In 1835, the conservative journalist and literary critic Wolfgang Menzel launched a series of savage attacks on the literary radicalism and cosmopolitan liberalism of the Young Germans, presenting them as subversive agents of “French” and “Jewish” influence (­Menzel 56–64). Menzel’s insinuation that what he regarded as rootless cosmopolitan Jews were seeking to undermine all things German, and his demand that Jews who hoped to be granted civil and political emancipation should condemn and distance themselves from their radical co-religionists, led Börne to address the nature and function of German national identity in his polemical response. This war of words between Menzel and Börne involved, among o­ ther things, a battle over who had the right to speak for the nation. It was a cultural struggle between one of the most influential cultural conservatives of the age, and a prominent representative of a new generation

104

Bunyan

of educated Jewish Germans. This new generation of Jewish Germans dramatically claimed their place in the German public sphere by writing and publishing not, as their predecessors had done, in Hebrew for a Jewish readership, but in German for the reading nation as a whole. In Börne’s view, by denouncing the political opposition as unpatriotic and somehow un-German, Menzel was manipulating and instrumentalising national loyalties as cynically as German rulers had done during the German Wars of Liberation against the Napoleonic occupation. By condemning as unpatriotic any challenge to the political status quo, Börne argued, and by claiming that their own, essentially self-interested, policies were in the national interest, German rulers had developed a powerful instrument of social and political control. German patriotism was such a powerful instrument because the nation, or German Fatherland, was imbued with an almost sacrosanct quality: Ich halte den Patriotismus, ganz wie Herr Menzel, für etwas Angeborenes, Natürliches und Heiliges. Er ist ein angeborner Trieb, und darum natürlich, und darum heilig, wie alles, was von der Natur kommt. […] Wenn Herr Menzel sagt, für das Vaterland handelt man immer schön, so ist das eine alberne Floskel, albern und lästerlich zugleich. Nein, man handelt nur schön für das Vaterland, wenn man das Gerechte will, man handelt nur schön für das Vaterland, wenn es das Vaterland ist, für das man sich bemüht, nicht aber ein einzelner Mensch, ein Stand oder ein Interesse, die durch Ränke und Gewalt sich für das Vaterland geltend zu machen wußten. [Just like Mr. Menzel, I believe Patriotism to be something innate, natural and sacred. It is an innate instinct and therefore natural and sacred, like everything that comes from nature. […] Mr Menzel’s statement that actions in the name of the Fatherland are always good is a fatuous cliché, both fatuous and malicious. No, actions in the name of the Fatherland are good only when they are just, actions in the name of the Fatherland are good only when they are undertaken in the interest of the Fatherland and not that of an individual, an estate or a cause that asserts itself by schemes or violence in the name of the Fatherland; Menzel 917–19.] For Börne, national loyalty was not a construct, but a natural, or essentialist, emotion and therefore a particularly potent force, vulnerable to political manipulation. Börne’s personal experience of the German Wars of Liberation against ­Napoleon from 1813 to 1815 had alerted him to the paradoxical manner in which nationalist rhetoric could induce people to risk their lives for a cause which

Jews for Germany

105

does little to further their real interests. Börne’s brother had enlisted with the Frankfurt volunteers to fight the French but, as he relates in Menzel der Franzosenfresser, while his mother feared that one son might die fighting for the cause of German freedom, the German “Liberators” revoked the French emancipation legislation and dismissed her other son, Ludwig himself, from his post in the public service because he was Jewish: Es hatten eine grosse Menge Juden gegen Napoleon die Waffen ergriffen und für die Freiheit ihres deutschen Vaterlandes gekämpft. Doch als sie unter den Siegern zurückgekehrt, wurden sie gleich wieder unter die Heloten gesteckt, trotz der gerühmten deutschen Treue und Rechtlichkeit. Ja man wartete nicht einmal überall bis sie zurückgekehrt. Es geschah in Frankfurt, dass während die jüdischen Freiwilligen im Felde waren, man ihren Vätern zu Hause die bürgerlichen und politischen Rechte wieder entzog, die sie unter dem Einflusse der französischen Gesetzgebung genossen hatten. [A great many Jews took up arms against Napoleon and fought for the freedom of their German Fatherland. Yet when they returned as victors, they were promptly enslaved again, German loyalty and rectitude notwithstanding. Indeed, in some cases one didn’t even wait until they returned. In Frankfurt, while the Jewish volunteers were on the battlefield, their fathers back home were deprived once again of the civil and political rights they had enjoyed, courtesy of French legislation; Menzel 955.] Despite seeking to shape the debate by warning publicly about the political malleability of nationalist rhetoric, Börne never ceased to regard himself as a national German, rather than a regional patriot. He looked forward to the day when blind regional patriotism would be replaced by a more widespread sense of national civic community (Briefe 41).3 Moreover, he believed that only then would Germany, in co-operation with France, be in a position to fulfil what he regarded as its providential and historic destiny as a leader of nations: In den Werkstätten der Menschheit finden wir zwei Völker, welchen die Vorsehung die Aufgabe gemacht zu haben scheint, die Arbeiten aller anderen Völker zu übersehen und zu leiten […]; es sind die Franzosen und die Deutschen. Den ersteren wurde die Leitung der praktischen Arbeiten,

3 On the relationship between regional patriotism and nationalism in Germany before the Wars of Liberation, see Demel.

106

Bunyan

der Künste und Handverrichtungen, den anderen die Leitung der theoretischen Arbeiten, der Wissenschaften und Spekulation anvertraut. [In the workshop of humanity, there are two nations which Providence appears to have enlisted to oversee and lead the work of all other nations, […] they are the French and the Germans. The former was entrusted to lead in the realms of practical work, the arts and crafts; the latter, to lead in the realms of theoretical work, scholarship and speculation; Menzel 904.] Nevertheless, Börne also argued that until the Germans destroyed petty absolutism and developed free political institutions, they could never take any real pride in their nation. In repulsing the French, the Germans had merely exchanged “ein Joch von ausländischem Holze […] und den glänzenden Despotismus Napoleons” [a yoke made of foreign material […] and the brilliant despotism of Napoleon] for “die Scheidemünze seiner armseligen Zwergtyrannen” [the small change of its pathetic petty-tyrants; Menzel 909]. The rhetoric of national unity and the national interest, Börne argued, should never be allowed to take precedence over the more precious goal of what he termed universal political freedom, which he defined as an absence of repression and tyranny (Oellers 22). Indeed, the greatest nation of all was, in his view, the nation of freedom-lovers, and its greatest national enemy the opponents of freedom: “Alle Feinde der Freiheit reden die nämliche Sprache, denn sie gehören zu einem Volk, und der Eigennutz ist ihr gemeinschaftliches Vaterland” [All enemies of freedom speak the same language, for they constitute a nation, and self-interest is their common Fatherland; Menzel 944]. Börne died almost a decade before the revolution of 1848 provided liberal and radical Germans, both Jewish and non-Jewish, with an opportunity to attempt to translate their political and national aspirations into reality. Yet at the same time, the nationalist aspirations of a younger generation of JewishGerman writers were to be severely tested as they were forced to confront the harsh realities of revolution. As the cases of Hartmann and Auerbach reveal, the delicate balance between calls for national unity and political freedom, insisted upon by Ludwig Börne, was not easy to maintain in practice. 3

Moritz Hartmann

The political poet Moritz Hartmann was born in Bohemia in 1821. As a German speaker, he identified with the German minority in Bohemia whilst retaining a deep affection for the multi-ethnic country of his birth. The grandson of a

Jews for Germany

107

Rabbi, Hartmann nevertheless converted to Catholicism at the age of seventeen and went to study at Prague university. In the 1840s, he worked as a writer in Vienna, Leipzig, Paris, and Prague, becoming increasingly involved in the radical movement which sought the overthrow of monarchical rule, and advocated sovereignty of the people and national self-determination. He became politically active as a supporter of the Czech political opposition to the rulers of the Habsburg Empire, believing that they sought political rights for Czechs in the Habsburg lands rather than Czech national self-determination. This illusion was shattered by his experiences in the revolution of 1848 in which he took an active part. He was elected to the Frankfurt parliament where he supported the demands of the radicals, whilst bitterly opposing any attempts on the part of either Germans or Czechs to exclude Bohemia from a constitutional German nation state. In October 1848, he joined Robert Blum and Julius Fröbel on the barricades in Vienna, only narrowly avoiding execution. Undaunted, he then took part in the radical uprising in Baden in 1849, and—after its brutal suppression—took refuge in Switzerland. He remained in exile until 1863 when a political amnesty permitted him to return to Germany. For a year, he edited the influential Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung [The Augsburg Gazette] before returning for the first time to Austria in 1868 as editor of the Neue Freie Presse [New Free Press], a role he held until his death in 1872 (Haacke 737–38). Although he published several collections of prose after 1848, Hartmann gained a reputation among his contemporaries as a political poet. Hartmann’s poetry is not memorable for its literary quality, but it is a revealing testimony to the aspirations and disappointments of his generation of Jewish Germans from the Habsburg Empire. Völkerstimmen [National Voices], a series of poems from the collection Kelch und Schwert [Chalice and Sword] of 1845, reveal Hartmann’s antipathy towards aristocratic absolutism. Interestingly, like ­ Börne, Hartmann’s republican views appear to have been shaped by his consciousness of the betrayal of the Jewish community after the Wars of Liberation. Unlike Börne, of course, he had no personal experience of the wars, but they constituted part of the collective and cultural memory of his community.4 He interpreted the experience less as an example of the susceptibility of nationalist rhetoric to political manipulation and more as a simple abuse of aristocratic power, and a betrayal of what he regarded as the true will of the people. In the poem “Bei Waterloo” [At Waterloo] he represents the experience of a Jewish soldier who fights and dies for Germany during the Wars of Liberation, 4 For a discussion of the collective memory of the Wars of Liberation, see the contribution by Dirk Göttsche in this volume.

108

Bunyan

but whose sacrifice ultimately goes unrewarded. The poem concludes with the observations of the poetic speaker: Du theurer Held! o schlummre gut! Wohl hast du besiegelt mit deinem Blut Des vielversprochnen Kontraktes Blatt; Doch leer ist’s geblieben und öd und glatt. [Beloved hero! Oh sleep well! How well you have sealed with your blood The page with its contract full of promise But empty is the promise, hollow and false; “Bei Waterloo,” Gesammelte Werke 33–34.] Even a blood sacrifice for the nation, the poem intimates, fails to guarantee the Jews emancipation while princes remain in power. Whether it might guarantee admission to the national community is not made clear. Betrayed by their rulers, Hartmann argues, the German people must fight for their freedom and seal it through political unification of the German states. The theme of political liberation from aristocratic absolutism dominates Hartmann’s political poetry, as does his advocacy of national self-determination for oppressed nations such as Poland. When it comes to Bohemia, however, the poet does not advocate self-determination for the Czechs. In a series of Bohemian elegies published in Kelch und Schwert, Hartmann laments the suffering endured by his oppressed homeland. But the poet’s solution to Bohemia’s plight is the highly controversial suggestion of the twelfth elegy: that Bohemia should abandon old hatreds and turn to liberal Germany for support and consolation. In other words, it should allow itself to be absorbed politically into the German nation: An Deutschlands Halse wein’ dich aus, An seinem schmerzverwandten Herzen, Geöffnet steht sein weites Haus Für alle großen, heil’gen Schmerzen. [Shed all your tears on Germany’s breast, For its heart is also full of pain, Wide open lies its vast house For all profound and sacred suffering.] Moreover, the poet envisages his role as that of a herald for his Bohemian fatherland in the German lands, as a mediator between the two nations because of his affiliations to both German culture and Bohemian territory, and as someone who actively shapes—rather than passively observes—events and attitudes:

Jews for Germany

109

Vergiß, vergiß den alten Groll – Mein deutsches Herz kann dir verkünden: Auch Deutschland fühlt, das Maß ist voll, Und büßet seine alten Sünden. Laß mich dein treuer Herold sein, Mein Vaterland, in deutschen Landen! Laß mich mein treues Lied dir weihn Und deinem Weh, das ich verstanden. [Forget, forget the grudge of yore – My German heart proclaims to you, Germany can go on like this no more, And seeks to atone for its sins of old. Let me your loyal herald be, My Fatherland, in German lands. Let me dedicate my song to you And to your sorrow, that I well understand; Gesammelte Werke 67.] The revolution of 1848 proved a severe blow to Hartmann’s nationalist aspirations. As an active member of the Prague National Committee, he drew up a manifesto in which he promised the Czechs freedom within a Greater German or “großdeutsch” German nation state, which would include Austria and ­Bohemia. Indeed, in his memoirs Hartmann recalled pointing out to the National Committee in Prague what he regarded as the valuable role played by Bohemia as a “Vermittler der deutschen Zivilisation nach Osten” [Agent of German civilisation in the East; Revolutionäre Erinnerungen (Revolutionary Memoirs) 16]. He had been of the opinion that the Germans of Bohemia who possessed the money and the education, the industry and trade, had up until then reacted lethargically to the active and consequential efforts of the Slavs (Revolutionäre Erinnerungen 14). He also poured scorn on what he regarded as the mediocre efforts of the Czech cultural revival: Vor allem ging man an die Ausbildung der Sprache, und teils aus Mangel an Produktivität, teils aus Takt begann man mit Übersetzungen aus allen Zungen; jedes selbst mittelmäßige Talent wurde mit Liebe gepflegt und anerkannt und, selbst wenn es nur der Widerschein des aus der Fremde Angeeigneten war, mit patriotischer Selbsttäuschung für original gehalten. [Above all, they worked on developing the language and, partly due to a lack of productivity, partly due to tactfulness, they began with translations from all tongues; every talent, however mediocre, was lovingly cultivated and recognised and, even if it was merely a reflection of what

110

Bunyan

they had appropriated from another culture, it was, due to patriotic selfdeception, held up as original; Revolutionäre Erinnerungen 7.] The Czechs were not convinced by promises that they would enjoy political rights in a German nation state and, though loyal to the Habsburg Emperor, demanded national self-determination and the complete separation of ­Bohemia from Germany (Sperber 129–31). Hartmann subsequently broke with the Czech nationalists, declaring Bohemia to be an inviolable and integral part of Germany, and as such part of any future German nation state. His anti-Slav sentiments were intensified during the revolution by anti-­ Semitic incidents perpetrated by the Czech populace in Prague.5 Hartmann’s memory of his confrontation with an anti-Semitic Czech crowd, which attacked Prague’s Jewish quarter, looms large in his impressionistic recollections of the revolution. Hartmann’s memoir describes how he and various students, including Czechs, ventured out to try to defend the Jewish quarter: “Ich werde nie das wutblasse Gesicht eines Maurerpoliers vergessen, der einer der Massenführer war, immer neben uns einherlief und schnaubend, beinahe schäumend wiederholte: ‘Ich bin auch ein gebildeter Mensch, aber dass man Juden beschützt, das habe ich nie gehört!’” [I will never forget the face of a mason, pale with anger, who was one of the leaders of the mob and who ran alongside us, snorting and almost foaming at the mouth, while repeating the words: I’m also an educated person, but that I should protect the Jews? I’ve never heard such a thing! Revolutionäre Erinnerungen 26.] This “Judenhetze” [anti-Jewish rabble-rousing] which Hartmann claimed was tolerated, if not incited, by Czech nationalists rendered the revolution in Prague “erbärmlich, gemein, widerwärtig” [pathetic, mean and unsavoury] rather than edifying, noble, and great. The experience impressed on Hartmann the contradictions of progress and modernity: “Man sah, dass sich Prag regte, und damit war man zufrieden; in jeder Bewegung, die damals immer als eine revolutionäre vorausgesetzt wurde, sah man einen Zuzug, eine Hilfe, ohne weiter zu fragen, wohin diese Bewegung strebte” [Prague had stirred itself and people were content with that; one saw in every movement, at that time always presumed to be revolutionary in nature, a form of progress, a liberation, without considering its aims; Revolutionäre Erinnerungen 20]. Such experiences may have convinced at least some Bohemian Jews that Germans and Jews should unite in the face of a common enemy. Ignaz Kuranda implied this idea in his choice of words when he observed in the Frankfurt National Assembly that the Germans in Bohemia were treated as “geduldete Fremdlinge” [tolerated aliens] (Wigard 1:665). ­Hartmann stated it explicitly when he reminisced that “Die Deutschen waren 5 On the wider context of these riots, see Brenner 280–84.

Jews for Germany

111

nicht beliebter als die Juden, und gegen Deutsche sprachen sich tschechische Parteigänger so offen aus und mit bewusstem Hasse wie der Pöbel gegen die Juden” [The Germans were no more popular than the Jews, and Czech partisans spoke out just as openly and with as much conscious hatred against the Germans, as the rabble did against the Jews; Revolutionäre Erinnerungen 28]. In the Frankfurt Parliament, Hartmann vehemently opposed the “LittleGerman” or “kleindeutsch” proposals put forward by Heinrich von Gagern and supported by the Vice President of the Assembly, Gabriel Riesser (the prominent Jewish lawyer and publicist from Hamburg), which excluded Austria and Bohemia from the future German nation state.6 In a passionate speech to the assembly on 18 December 1848, Hartmann declared: “Wir Österreicher sind nicht hierhergekommen, um Eingang in das Vaterhaus zu betteln. Wir sind hier zu Hause und haben ein Recht, hier zu sitzen wie die anderen Deutschen. Wir werden uns nicht hinausstoßen lassen, nicht fein, nicht grob, nicht durch Ränke, nicht durch Gewalt” [We Austrians have not come here to beg to be admitted to the family home. We are at home here and have the right to remain, like other Germans. We will not allow ourselves to be pushed out, either subtly or roughly, either by schemes or by violence; Wigard 6:4236]. In the Frankfurt Parliament, it fell to Riesser to defend the cause of the Prussian-led nation state in a long and carefully considered speech in March 1849. In October 1848, Riesser had described the creation of a German nation state as “der feurige Traum unserer Jugend” [the fiery dream of our youth]. Referring to “die hohe Verheißung des deutschen Genius, auf deren Erfüllung wir vertraut haben” [the great promise of German genius, in which we had invested our hopes], Riesser described German unity as something preordained by history, and initially hoped that the Austrian Empire could be divided to allow for the inclusion of Austria into the German nation state (Wigard 4: 2911). But afraid that the opposition of the Austrian government might torpedo the creation of the German nation state, he came to support the “kleindeutsch” option for pragmatic reasons. The belief, shared by Hartmann, in the concept of a ­German cultural mission to the East was also used by supporters of the “kleindeutsch” model of German unification, who argued that Austria could best fulfil this role within the Habsburg Empire. Riesser was one of many delegates who embraced the concept of Germany having a cultural mission, but he warned in October 1848 that the Austrians must decide for themselves whether they wished to take on this role:

6 On the concept of the “Little-German” and the “Greater-German” nation state, see Siemann 192–97.

112

Bunyan

Jene großartige Anschauung gibt dem deutschen Element Oesterreichs die Mission, die Sitte und Bildung Deutschlands nach dem fernen Osten hin zu tragen und mächtig zu vertreten. Wir müssen aber zu diesem Ende doch die Ueberzeugung haben, daß das deutsche Element Oesterreichs diese Kraft sich zutraue, daß es diese dornenvolle Mission übernehmen wolle, und daß es vollends in seiner größeren Entfremdung von ­Deutschland den undeutschen Elementen des eigenen Landes nicht zu erliegen fürchte. [That splendid perspective bestows upon the Germans of Austria the mission to spread the customs and culture of Germany far eastwards, and there powerfully to represent them. To this end, however, we must be convinced that the German element in Austria has confidence in its strength, that it wishes to take on this thorny mission and that, especially in its greater estrangement from Germany, it does not fear succumbing to the un-German elements in its own country; Wigard 4: 2912.] Such statements must, of course, be interpreted in the knowledge that all the Jewish deputies of the Frankfurt National Parliament were convinced that ­German national unity embodied the victory of the principles of progress and Enlightenment. Nationalism was for them, above all, an anti-absolutist ideology that, as the deputy Johann Jacoby argued, struck a blow against the “Selbstsucht und kleinliche Souveränitätseitelkeit [der] Fürsten” [the princes’ egoism and petty vanities about sovereignty; Rede 268]. German nationalism was the only ideology that seemed capable of securing political reform and justice. The “Sache der Deutschen” [German cause], Ignatz Kuranda claimed, is the “Sache der Freiheit und der gesetzlichen Ordnung” [cause of freedom and the rule of law; Wigard 1: 666]. And this was not just empty rhetoric. Most of the Jewish deputies spoke specifically of their concern to grant political equality and cultural autonomy to all national groups, albeit within the framework of a G ­ erman nation state. Nevertheless, the limits of Hartmann’s professed belief in national selfdetermination for all were soon exposed. In this clash of irreconcilable nationalist aspirations, he was prepared to go to war to protect German national interests from what he regarded as the threat from Slav nationalisms in the East, and, invoking memorable imagery, he reminded the Frankfurt assembly, “Deutschlands Pflicht ist es, die Slawen nicht so weit vorrücken, nicht in ­Böhmen festen Fuß fassen zu lassen. Denn Böhmen ist ein Keil, eingetrieben in die deutsche Eiche, um sie zu spalten. Es ist eine Kriegsfrage” [It is Germany’s duty to prevent the onward march of the Slavs and to stop them from gaining a foothold in Bohemia. For Bohemia is a wedge, driven into the German oak in

Jews for Germany

113

order to divide it. It is a question of war; Wigard, 1: 241]. Moreover, Hartmann even advocated repressive methods similar to those he had fought against by demanding the military surveillance of Bohemia in response to the summoning of a Slav assembly in Prague in June 1848. Hartmann’s widely-read verse satire, Reimchronik des Pfaffen Maurizius [The Rhyming Chronicle of Pastor Maurice], begun in January 1849 and published anonymously, reflected his increasing preoccupation with the question of national unity, more often than not at the expense of the question of political freedom. Claiming to be the objective revolutionary chronicle of an “armer, simpler Reimchronist” [poor and simple rhyming chronicler; Reimchronik 4], the verse satire is highly partisan and attacks Hartmann’s former colleagues in the Frankfurt parliament for thwarting his dream of a united Greater Germany. Gagern, for example, is castigated for abandoning the Austrian and Bohemian Germans to the Slavs. In a tone of despair and bitterness, the chronicler lamented the martyrs of the revolution and the disappointed hopes of his fatherland. As the name suggests, Maurice the chronicler was a mouthpiece for Moritz the author. In reality too, the lofty aspirations of Hartmann’s German nationalist ideals did not survive the harsh realities and political choices of the revolutions of 1848, and gave way to intolerance and profound disillusionment. 4

Berthold Auerbach

A similar process of disenchantment can be observed in the case of Berthold Auerbach, Germany’s bestselling author of the mid-nineteenth century, and a Jewish-German Liberal whose cosmopolitan national ideals were also severely tested by the stark political realities and choices of 1848. Auerbach was born in 1812 in the Black Forest village of Nordstetten. He turned to writing as a career when his plans to become a Rabbi had to be abandoned after a spell in prison, as a result of his involvement in a “Burschenschaft” [student fraternity] at the University of Tübingen. Although he developed increasingly unorthodox religious views, Auerbach never actually converted from Judaism. Like Börne and Hartmann, however, he sought actively to influence German nationalist discourse. Rather like Hartmann’s image of himself as a national herald, ­Auerbach regarded himself as a “Volksschriftsteller” [national writer], as a champion of the “Volksgeist” [national spirit], and as a spokesperson of the “Volk” [people of the nation]. In 1845, he even turned down the offer of a position as head librarian at the court of Weimar because he feared it would prevent him from pursuing this vocation. “Ich habe grosse, schwere Pflichten gegen das Volk, ich will suchen ihnen zu genügen” [I have a great and onerous duty to the nation,

114

Bunyan

which I wish to try to fulfil; Briefe an Jakob 1: 54], he wrote in 1846. Auerbach’s perception of his age as a time of social, political and intellectual dislocation fueled the concern with contemporary issues that is so evident in his work. In journalistic articles and pamphlets, he despaired of what he saw as the misery of contemporary conditions in Germany. For Auerbach, the deficient character of the age was epitomised not only by the political oppression of the period, but also by the lack of national unity and consciousness among the German people. Increasing poverty, unemployment and emigration exacerbated this sense of crisis for him. Of particular concern to him was the impression he had that German writers and intellectuals such as the “Young Germans” appeared utterly disconnected from the concerns of ordinary Germans. Searching for a new form of literature more relevant to the concerns of a wider range of contemporary Germans, Auerbach pioneered realist forms of literature such as the “Dorfgeschichte” [Village Tale] and the social novel, and sought to communicate his ideal of a German national consciousness to a popular readership through his widely-read calenders. In theory, Auerbach’s concept of national identity was liberal and cosmopolitan in nature. In a tract of 1843, entitled Der gebildete Bürger [The Educated Citizen], he defined his concept of national identity in terms reminiscent of Ludwig Börne which allowed for none of the negative implications of an aggressive, defensive nationalism: Das nationale Selbstgefühl, die National- und Vaterlandsliebe, nicht diejenige, die erst durch Nationalhaß, durch Gegenkampf gegen andere Nationen erweckt und genährt werden muß, sondern die gesunde, frische, echtmenschliche, in der wir Deutschen uns als die untheilbaren Glieder des einen und einigen Nationalkörpers betrachten, das ist eine hohe und edle Kraft der Seele. [National self-esteem, love of the nation and the Fatherland, not that which must be aroused and sustained by antipathy to other nations, but rather that which is healthy, good and truly humane, where we Germans regard ourselves as the indivisible parts of the one, unified national body. That is a great and noble spiritual force; Der gebildete Bürger 89.] It was above all, he believed, the common spirit of humanity and freedom as it finds expression in national diversity that must prevail. National identity and universal humanism should not be regarded as mutually exclusive. Indeed, as Auerbach maintained several years later in his tract Schrift und Volk [Writing and the Nation], national identity was only healthy if imbued with the spirit of humanity: “[denn] die Nationalitäten sind kein Hinderniß für die Einheit der Menschheit unter sich: die Einheit in der Mannichfaltigkeit gilt auch hier als

Jews for Germany

115

höchstes Gesetz der Harmonie” [Nationalities are not an obstacle to the unity of humanity: here too unity in diversity is the highest law of harmony; Schrift und Volk 55]. Nevertheless, Auerbach maintained that the appeal to a common humanity did not dispense with the need for a national identity. He contended that all nations were merely constituent parts of the body of humanity, but added, rather naively, that any strengthening of national consciousness, power and dignity on the part of individual nations would contribute inexorably to the development of all humanity. Universal humanism, in other words, was rooted firmly in the spirit of the nation. As he outlined in an article of 1843, published in the liberal journal Europa: Wenn man neuerdings wiederum das Nationale, das Besondere und Eigentümliche, als den Lebenskern im Daseyn der Völkergemeinschaften festhält, so ging diesem die richtige Erkenntniss vorauf, daß nur aus dem Besondern sich das Allgemeine entwickle und lebenskräftig erhalte, nicht aber umgekehrt; daß somit aus dem Individuellen, Nationalen, sich das rein Menschliche herausbilde. [If, as lately, people determine that the national element, that which is particular and peculiar, constitutes the essence of the international community, they base this notion on the insight that the universal can develop and sustain itself only on the basis of the particular, not vice versa, that thus the purely universal evolves from the individual or national element; Europa 130.] However, Auerbach’s experience of the revolutions of 1848–49 was to put his liberal-humanist and cosmopolitan concept of national identity to the test. He witnessed the revolution in Vienna and published an account of his experience in Tagebuch aus Wien [Viennese Journal]. Like Hartmann, his ­fervent hope had been that the revolution would bring about German national unity as well as political freedom. His first-hand encounter with revolutionaries in Vienna, however, brought him face to face with “das hart verknotete österreichische Rätsel” [the unyielding and knotty Austrian conundrum; Tagebuch aus Wien 26], as he termed it. The realities of the revolution impressed upon him the complexities of the Greater-German solution to the question of German unification. If Austrian and Bohemian territory were to be incorporated into a German nation state, the Habsburg empire would have to be dismembered. He found little clear support among the Austrians for this solution, an attitude that had also distressed Hartmann greatly. Auerbach concluded that Austrians should not be excluded from the German nation state as, like Hartmann, he feared for the fate of the German

116

Bunyan

Austrians in an empire dominated by the burgeoning nationalisms of the Czech and Slav peoples. His derisive, if clearly envious, attitude towards the growing national consciousness of the Slav opposition is revealed in the following passage from Tagebuch aus Wien: Die czechisch-slavische Nationalbewußtsein hat sich schon unter ­Metternich als verdeckte politische Opposition ausgebildet und jetzt ist die erste offene Ausbreitung um so kecker und mutvoller. Die czechischslavische Nationalität ist eine aufgestachelte, gespannte und ohne in den Mitteln wählerisch zu sein, eine nach allen Seiten hin in beständiger Agitation gehaltene. Fehlt es ihr auch gegenüber der deutschen an jenem großen Bildungsinhalte, so weiß sie das an kriegerischer Aufreizung, Er­ oberungsgelüsten u.s.w. zu ersetzen. [The Czech-Slavonic national consciousness had already developed in Metternich’s time as a clandestine political opposition and now that it is publicly visible for the first time, is all the more precocious and confident. The Czech-Slavonic nationality is one that is incited, forced, indifferent to its methods and, on all sides, in a state of constant agitation. What it lacks in cultivation in contrast to the German nation, it compensates for in bellicose incitement, craving for conquest, etc.; Tagebuch aus Wien 212–13.] The equitable cosmopolitan vision of a community of nation states living peacefully in harmony with one another was subjected to intense pressure in regions where the German national interest clashed with the political aspirations of rival national groups. Auerbach’s response to this conflict reveals that the magnanimous gestures towards the rights of other national communities would be withheld from those who threatened German national aspirations, which he regarded as culturally superior. 5 Conclusion The brutal suppression of the Frankfurt parliament in 1849, and with it the dream of a united Germany, presented a new set of challenges to German nationalists. In the post-revolutionary era, the so-called “Forty-Eighters” had to choose whether to cooperate with a conservative Prussian establishment if they wanted to realise their vision of a German nation state. As was the case with so many liberals of his generation, Auerbach’s nationalist aspirations were ultimately to impose limits on his liberal humanism and cosmopolitanism. Like many liberals after 1848, he chose the goal of unification under

Jews for Germany

117

­ russian leadership over the establishment of political freedom, promoting P the “Little-German” cause as editor of the influential Deutsche Blätter [German Pages], the feuilleton of the bestselling Gartenlaube [The Arbour] magazine. Yet, Auerbach retained his optimistic belief that once unification had been achieved, the introduction of a liberal constitutional monarchy for all ­Germans, based on that agreed by the Frankfurt parliament in 1849, would inevitably follow. He tried to suppress his concerns about the increasingly aggressive drive towards national unity between the Austro-Prussian war of 1866 and the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. His delight in the achievement of unification in 1871 was to be short-lived, however, as he was taken aback by the emergence of increasingly racial forms of nationalism and by the growing respectability of anti-Semitic views among his educated contemporaries in German and Austrian society. In Hartmann’s case, disillusionment with German nationalist ideology had replaced optimism at a much earlier stage. Austria’s military defeat in the ­Austro-Prussian war of 1866 deepened Hartmann’s bitterness towards Prussia and the supporters of its drive for leadership in a united Germany. In the defeat of 1866, he saw nothing but the victory of military might and aristocratic rule and the sacrifice of Germany’s “innere Freiheit” [internal freedom; Briefe 143]. In view of the later development of an increasingly chauvinistic nationalism and the concomitant rise of anti-Semitism, Hartmann’s warnings served as an uncomfortably accurate presentiment of developments in imperial Germany. In a letter of 1866 he declared: Alle Welt ist bereit, sich mit Macht und Glorie zu trösten, Niemand ­denkt daß die Freiheit zu Grunde gegangen ist, Niemand, daß nicht die deutsche Nation, sondern das Junkertum gesiegt hat. Deutschland wird (vielleicht) stärker, aber nur auf Kosten seiner Freiheit, seiner Zukunft und einer edleren Bildung—und die Deutschen werden Chauvinisten, das Schlimmste was man werden kann. […] Was mich betrifft so möchte ich der neuen Größe und Einheit Deutschlands am liebsten aus dem Wege gehen, und bekäme ich jetzt irgend einen Ruf nach Van Diemans­ land, ich würde ihn mit Vergnügen annehmen. [The whole world seeks comfort in power and glory. No one considers that freedom has perished or that it is not the German nation but the Prussian Junkers who have won. Germany will, perhaps, be stronger, but only at the expense of its freedom, its future and its more noble cultivation— and the Germans will become chauvinists, the worst thing that one can be. […] As for me, I would rather give Germany’s new greatness and unity a wide berth, and were I now to be offered a position in Van Diemensland, I would accept it with alacrity; Briefe 154.]

118

Bunyan

Earlier than Auerbach, then, Hartmann perceived that Börne’s worst premonitions were to be realised and that the cause of political freedom (that is, freedom from despotic aristocracy) had indeed been sacrificed to an ideology of national unity that was now exploited by Germany’s rulers. Börne’s absolute commitment to political freedoms and his remarkably farsighted sensitivity to some, but not all, of the pitfalls of nationalism were thus not shared by this younger generation of Jewish Germans. They were prepared to sacrifice political freedoms when they came into conflict with the ideal of German national unity and were also ill-equipped to deal with the competing claims of other nationalisms in mid-nineteenth-century Central Europe, such as those of the Czechs. Their blind faith in the ideal of the German nation contrasted starkly with Börne’s prescient insight into the essential egotism of national collectives and their competing demands: Die Nationen sind nicht weniger Egoisten als die Individuen; sie achten gewöhnlich nicht viel auf die Leiden anderer Völker und langweilen sich bald bei ihren Klagen. Sie sind aller Zeit bereit, ihre eigne glückliche Lage ihrem Mute, ihrer Beharrlichkeit, ihrer Geschicklichkeit zuzuschreiben; und das Mißgeschick der andern Völker deren Schwäche, Unbeständigkeit oder Tölpelei. [Nations are no less egotistical than the individual; they generally pay little attention to the sufferings of other peoples and quickly tire of their complaints. They are always ready to ascribe their fortunate situation to their own courage, persistence and skill and the bad fortune of others to the weakness, instability or haplessness of those nations; Menzel 906.] Like Börne, then, Hartmann and Auerbach sought actively as writers, editors and political activists to shape the nationalist discourse of their age, but unlike him, their ideological blindspots reflected those of educated Jewish-Germans and of the German liberal movement as a whole (Sheehan 272–78). Works Cited Primary

Auerbach, Berthold. Briefe an seinen Freund Jakob Auerbach, edited by Jakob Auerbach, Rütten und Loening, 1884. Auerbach, Berthold. Der gebildete Bürger. Buch für den denkenden Mittelstand. Bielefeld Verlag, 1843.

Jews for Germany

119

Auerbach, Berthold. “Über den Zustand und Zukunft des deutschen Volksliedes im Volke selber.” Europa. Chronik der gebildeten Welt 3 (1843), pp. 129–42. Auerbach, Berthold. Schrift und Volk. Grundzüge der volkstümlichen Literatur angeschlossen an eine Charakteristik J.P. Hebel’s. Brockhaus, 1846. Auerbach, Berthold. Tagebuch aus Wien. Von Latour bis auf Windischgrätz. ­Schletter, 1849. Börne, Ludwig. “Briefe aus Paris.” Sämtliche Schriften, vol. 3, edited by Inge and Peter Rippmann, Joseph Melzer Verlag, 1977, pp. 3–867. Börne, Ludwig. “Menzel der Franzosenfresser.” Sämtliche Schriften, vol. 3, edited by Inge and Peter Rippmann, Joseph Melzer Verlag, 1977, pp. 871–984. Hartmann, Moritz. Briefe. Edited by Rudolf Wolkan, Rikola, 1921. Hartmann, Moritz. Gesammelte Werke. Cotta, 1874. 10 vols. Hartmann, Moritz. Revolutionäre Erinnerungen. Edited by H.H. Houben, Klinkhardt Verlag, 1919. Jacoby, Johann. “Rede vor den Wahlmännern und Wählern des vierten Berliner Wahlbezirks,” 14.4.49. Politik und Taktik der Gagern-Liberalen in der Frankfurter Nationalversammlung, edited by Gunther Hildebrandt. Akademie Verlag, 1989, p. 268. Menzel, Wolfgang. “Unmoralische Literatur.” Politische Avantgarde 1830–1840. Eine Dokumentation zum “Jungen Deutschland,” edited by Alfred Estermann, Athenäum Verlag, 1972, pp. 56–64. Wigard, Franz, editor. Stenographischer Bericht über die Verhandlungen der deutschen constituierenden Nationalversammlung. Sauerländer, 1848–49. 6 vols. Wirth, Johann Georg August. Die politische Reform Deutschlands: Noch ein dringendes Wort an die deutsche Volksfreunde. Wirth, 1832.

Secondary

Brenner, Michael. “From Subject to Citizen.” German-Jewish History in Modern Times: vol. 2: Emancipation and Acculturation: 1780–1871, edited by Michael A. Meyer, Columbia UP, 1997, pp. 251–76. Brenner, Michael. “Between Revolution and Legal Equality.” German-Jewish History in Modern Times: vol. 2: Emancipation and Acculturation: 1780–1871, edited by Michael A. Meyer, Columbia UP, 1997, pp. 279–318. Demel, Walter. “Landespatriotismus und Nationalbewusstsein im Zeitalter der Aufklärung und Reformen.” Archivalische Zeitschrift 88.1 (2006), pp. 79–98. Haacke, Wilmont. “Hartmann, Moritz.” Neue Deutsche Biographie 7, 1966, pp. 737–38. Jansen, Christian. “The Formation of German Nationalism, 1740–1850.” The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History, edited by Helmut Walser Smith, Oxford UP, 2011, pp. 234–59.

120

Bunyan

Jasper, Willi. Ludwig Börne. Keinem Vaterland geboren. Eine Biographie. Aufbau Verlag, 2003. Lässig, Simone. Jüdische Wege ins Bürgertum. Kulturelles Kapital und sozialer Aufstieg im 19. Jahrhundert. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004. Oellers, Norbert. “Collum liberum. Ludwig Börnes Freiheitsbegriff—das eindeutige Besondere.” Norbert Oellers: Überzeugung durch Poesie. Zur deutsche-jüdischen Literatur von Ludwig Börne bis Else Lasker-Schüler, edited by Hartmut Steinecke and Volker C. Dörr. Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2016, pp. 11–26. Rippmann, Inge. “Freiheit ist das Schönste und Höchste in Leben und Kunst”: Ludwig Börne zwischen Literatur und Politik. Aisthesis, 2004. Sammons, Jeffrey. Six Essays on the Young German Novel. U of North Carolina P, 1975. Schulze, Hagen. The Course of German Nationalism. From Frederick the Great to Bismarck 1763–1867. Cambridge UP, 1991. Sheehan, James. German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century. U of Chicago P, 1978. Siemann, Wolfram. Die deutsche Revolution von 1848/49. Suhrkamp, 1985. Sperber, Jonathan. The European Revolutions 1848–1851. Cambridge UP, 1994. Stern, Frank, editor. Ludwig Börne. Deutscher, Jude, Demokrat. Aufbau, 2003. Vick, Brian E. Defining Germany: The 1848 Frankfurt Parliamentarians and National Identity. Harvard UP, 2002. Walser Smith, Helmut. “Nation and Nationalism.” Germany 1800–1870, edited by Jonathan Sperber, Oxford UP, 2004, pp. 230–55.

Chapter 6

Moses Hess: One Socialist Proto-Zionist’s Reception of Nationalisms in the Nineteenth Century Alex Marshall 1 Introduction The socialist and proto-Zionist Moses Hess (1824–1875) offers uniquely interesting insights into the nationalisms of the nineteenth and even twentieth century for a number of reasons.1 Firstly, pre-dating the more famous Theodor Herzl by a generation, he was the first Jew to propose a Jewish state in Palestine on (broadly) secular grounds.2 Secondly, as a lifelong communist, former ­German patriot, and passionate advocate of Franco-German reconciliation, he allows us to see the development of an emergent nationalism in relation to other ideas and identities with which it might otherwise be expected to clash. Finally, the unpleasant experiences that seem to have caused his rejection of German in favour of Jewish nationalism took place decades before this development. Unusually among Zionists, the main trigger for his switch in allegiances seems to have been not a negative shock but a positive inspiration: the “Rome” in the title refers not to the Vatican or ancient Empire but the (as yet purely symbolic) capital of the newly unified Italian state. Hess therefore offers an opportunity to understand the emergence of a national identity, by application of the principle of nationalism to an existing identity, as well as the draw of nationalism to those otherwise dedicated to universalist, internationalist causes. This chapter frames Hess’s proto-Zionism partly as a response to the growth of anti-Semitic German nationalism and the failure of Jewish assimilation, but also as reflecting the successes of nationalist movements in the mid-­nineteenth century. In doing so, I explore how a solution that aligns with the nation-state model of politics and identity won out over solutions that challenged and resisted it, such as socialism and internationalism. Following short outlines of Zionism, of Hess’s life and of his philosophy, I examine which nations and 1 For further discussions of Jewish writers on German patriotism, see the chapters by Anita Bunyan and Ernest Schonfield in this volume. 2 For more on Hess and other predecessors, see Vital, Origins of Zionism, 23–49.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004426108_008

122

Marshall

­ ational movements served as inspirations to him, before exploring which n ­nations dropped in and out of his favour over time, paying particular note to his relationship to his own Jewishness. I then draw on Ken Koltun-Fromm’s reading of Hess as best understood on an emotional level, and identify the dominant emotion as anxiety around perceived internal divisions provoked by experience of anti-Semitism. I conclude that this anxiety, combined with the presumption that nations are both homogeneous and the primary historical actors, led Hess to see proto-Zionism as his best option for a role in the emancipatory path of human history. Hess was not the first to suggest a Jewish return to Palestine: Jews traditionally sing “Next Year in Jerusalem” during Passover, several religious groups, including the famous “false messiah” Shabbatai Zevi and the traditionalist ­Lithuanian Perushim had travelled there with the intent of settling, and Zvi Hirsch Kalischer made a comprehensive, religious case for settlement the same year that Hess did. Furthermore, Hess himself quotes two Christian sources—a clergyman in Melbourne (Hess 435–36) and the pamphlet by the French civil servant Ernst Laharanne, which Hess includes as a whole section of his book Rom und Jerusalem [Rome and Jerusalem, 1862, translated by Meyer ­Waxman]—which both proposed Jewish statehood ahead of him. However, Hess’s was the first call for a revival of Jewish nationhood in Palestine as a secular nationalist project to be made by an actual Jew, though it seems to have had little effect on history. “Entzückt und erhoben” [enraptured and uplifted], the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, referred to Hess as “ein hoher edler Geist” [an exalted, noble spirit] in 1901, writing: “Alles, was wir versuchten, steht schon bei ihm” [everything that we have tried is already in his book; Briefe und Tagebücher, vol. ii, 240–41, translated by Harry Zohn]. However, this was some five years after Herzl had independently reached the same conclusions. Despite a little interest in his proposition during his lifetime and its revived importance to Israeli socialists, Hess’s “Jewish Patriotism” died with him and essentially lay dormant until Zionism had already taken off with little input from him. He is, however, a useful source for the study of nationalism. He represents, as Herzl implies, an early microcosm of Zionism, and Zionism in turn can be understood as a microcosm of one turning point in the rise of nationalism: namely, when established groups which do not fit the nationalist model of collective identity begin to experience pressure to conform to it. As such, Hess and Zionism offer further insights not only into how ideologies and their associated systems disseminate themselves, but also into how they ascend to dominance and ubiquity. As one of the first German communists, Hess offers an opportunity to see the mutual draw of nationalist and socialist principles to

Moses Hess and Nineteenth-Century Nationalism

123

each other. In addition, he reveals a moment at which universalist, transformative solutions to anti-Semitism which address it through broader fights for justice give way to limited, identitarian ones attempting to remedy or mitigate Jewish suffering directly. Moses Hess was born in 1812 in Bonn, then under Napoleonic rule. He was raised in Yiddish and, like his friend, contemporary, and hero Karl Marx, received a religious education from his grandfather. Unlike Marx, however, he did not complete secular university studies and was a self-taught political, religious, and natural philosopher. A number of identities coexisted in Hess, who was to some extent French, German, Jewish, Atheist, and Christian, but this sort of overlap in identities was not especially unusual for the time. As a thinker, Hess was, however, remarkably capable of allowing opinions to coexist. While his work can be inconsistent, contradictory, and often deliberately vague, it is constantly striving, not to address and reconcile its myriad contradictions, but to craft a unified worldview in spite of them. He is at once materialist and idealist, proposing a return to Judaism while still calling himself an atheist (Hess 437). An anti-utopian and wildly optimistic socialist, he was also a pacifist, revolutionary, nationalist (at times Jewish, at times German), and internationalist. Isaiah Berlin describes him as “a man who abandoned no belief unless he had convinced himself by rational methods that it was false” (242), and this trait resulted in him stacking multiple, often seemingly incongruous ideas and idealisms into one philosophy. Fittingly, perhaps the only consistently recurring theme within his work is not just political and social, but ideological unity, anticipating the convergence of a disordered world into smoothly ordered oneness, a long progression towards a utopian vision where the peoples of the world have awakened and liberated themselves, and live in a state of peaceful and equal coexistence. Die heilige Geschichte der Menschheit [The Holy History of Mankind, 1837, translations mine] outlines a rough dialectic whereby an age of Judaism beginning with Adam and an age of Christianity beginning with Jesus resolve into an age of Socialism, beginning with Spinoza. Die europäische Triarchie [The ­European Triarchy, 1841, translations mine] imagines German philosophy, French revolutionary action, and English practicality liberating Europe by respectively bringing about freedom of thought, deed, and policy. Rom und Jerusalem changes the focus to a single nation and religion, however, like much of Hess’s work it still culminates in unification, parallels, and homogeneous processes. Not only assigning the Jewish nation a role in history and calling for it to awaken and found a state in Palestine, this book is also an assertion that this nation exists, and is a nation. The resulting unification is to be an age where organic, social, and cosmic levels of existence align in a harmonic state of utopian maturity.

124 2

Marshall

Hess the Observer

Hess is not only interesting for the nationalism he originated and participated in, but for those nationalisms that he reacted to. He began his life in ­Napoleonic France, and lived it out on a continent still reeling from the upheavals of 1789. Hess then watched, primarily from Paris, the upheavals of the 1840s and the aftermath of 1848. The latter culminated in the Risorgimento [‘resurgence’ or ‘revival’] and Italian unification in 1861, which Hess observed unfolding from Berlin. This meant Hess was either a first- or second-hand witness to some of the most significant national revolutions of his century, and developed his philosophy in the shadow of events in France that not only shook the continent and redefined what was seen as politically possible, but saw the word “nation” “burst into political usage” (Leerssen 86). Hess, accordingly, defines historical roles largely by country. In Die europäische Triarchie, England brings “sozial-politische Freiheit” [social-political freedom]. Germany, “the land of poets and thinkers,” brings “sozial-geistig” [social-intellectual] freedom, while the revolutionaries and men of action in France bring “sozial-sittlich” freedom [social-cultural; 112]. While it is intuitive for Hess to portray Germany and France as countries of philosophy and action respectively, and although the English have long been understood as a mixture of Norman and Saxon, they sit slightly incongruously between the binaries of Roman/Germanic and thought/deed. Hess seems to struggle to find a precise freedom for England’s much-admired practicality to usher in. However, rather than a country having been awkwardly added to a binary of thoughts and deeds to make a neat three, the triarchy is produced by removing other states. Avineri explains it as a response to the well-established conservative idea of a “pentarchy” incorporating Russia and Austria (47). According to a short coda in Hess’s work, ­Russia’s role in this grand project is delayed, rather than dismissed, and, since its position straddles both continents, this role will be to spread Europe’s liberation to Asia after completion (109). However, Hess never explains his removal of Austria. Most likely, it has been neatly subsumed into a greater ­German nation, and, like any classification system, Hess’s often suppresses or ignores the kind of internal diversity that was central to the Bismarckian kleindeutsch [lesser German, as opposed to großdeutsch, greater Germany] division between the two states. Movers in Die europäische Triarchie are nations not states, and Hess is not describing the Realpolitik of international relations but rather the romanticism and aspirations of peoples. He makes this explicit in Rom und Jerusalem, stating “Der Rassenkampf ist das Ursprüngliche, der ­Klassenkampf das Sekundäre” [The race struggle is the primal one, the class struggle secondary; 317].

Moses Hess and Nineteenth-Century Nationalism

125

Even a role in internationalism for Hess is implicitly dependent on nationhood, and to a certain extent models internationalism that involve unity or cooperation between nations presuppose, in one form or another, their existence in the first place. Wenn ich für die Wiedergeburt meines eigenes Volkes arbeite, so habe ich darum meine humanitären Bestrebungen nicht aufgegeben. Die heutige nationale Bewegung ist nur ein neuer Anlauf auf dem Wege, den die französische Revolution seit ihrem Beginne eingeschlagen hat. [When I labor for the regeneration of my own nation, I do not thereby renounce my humanistic aspiration. The national movement of the present day is only another step on the road of progress which began with the French Revolution; Hess 232.] Joep Leerssen describes a mood of solidarity between nationalists, “an international network […] where activists in Hungary or Poland would support movements in Italy or vice versa” (152), while Hugh Seton-Watson draws attention to a tendency among mid-nineteenth-century nationalisms towards “a sort of Messianism which transcends the normal pattern of nationalist rhetoric and arrogance,” conferring on the nation a “divine mission” as the “bearer of universal values” (89). The self-realisation of nations supposedly leads to greater selfrealisation for humanity. The great thinker of the Italian Risorgimento Giuseppe Mazzini explicitly stated, in what is both an affirmation and tacit postponement of internationalism, “Before men can associate with the nations of which Humanity is composed, they must have a national existence” (60). While Hess rarely addresses contradictions in his worldview head-on, in this passage the one aspect can be reconciled with its seeming opposite as a component part. Indeed, the path beaten by the French Revolution referred to by Hess seems not to refer to internationalism alone but to the principle of revolution as a whole. While nations are the main movers of history for Hess, his conception of what one specifically is, however, can be difficult to pin down. Despite ­maintaining a neatly Linnaean system of subdivisions within humanity,3 his usage of “race,” “nation,” “Volk” [people or nation], and “Stamm” [tribe] is only 3 Hess, for example, posits “Semitic” and “Indo-Germanic” (295), “Roman”, and “Germanic” (85) as supranational categories. Joep Leerssen outlines how anthropology systematised humans at the same time as biology created taxonomies of organisms in general and was itself codified as a science (52–57). The former pairing is an appropriation of linguistic categories for racial groupings first critiqued by Ernest Renan (16).

126

Marshall

­semi-consistent.4 Hess variously applies all four to Jews, and all but “Stamm” to Germans. In Rom und Jerusalem he writes “Von Deutschland ist für die nationale Wiedergeburt der Völker nichts zu hoffen” [The cause of national regeneration of oppressed peoples can expect no help and sympathy from Germany; 316], implying that Volk and nation are distinct, that Völker exist prior to this renaissance, that “national” is a quality to be won through political upheaval, and that individual nations have roles to play in the awakening of them all. While self-awareness and awakening of a Volk as a nation is possible, national rebirth is a particular variant and far from a given. There are three further, illdefined concepts internal to Volk and nation: “Nationalität” [nationality], “­Staatsbürgertum” [(state) citizenship], and “Solidarität” [solidarity]: Trotz aller Aufklärung und Emancipation wird doch der Jude im Exil, der seine Nationalität verleugnet, nicht die Achtung der Nationen gewinnen, in deren Mitte er wohl als Staatsbürger naturalisiert, aber nicht der Solidarität mit seiner Nation enthoben werden kann. [In spite of enlightenment and emancipation, the Jew in exile who denies his nationality will never earn the respect of the nations among whom he dwells. He may become a naturalised citizen but he will never be able to convince the gentiles of his total separation from his own nationality; Hess 243.] Here, “Nationalität” is an existing fact to be acknowledged or denied, “Staatsbürgertum” a political category into which Jews can be naturalised, and “Solidarität” the visceral bond with a pre-existing nation. While Hess may seem to use terms haphazardly, they have their own relative meanings. Compared to “Volk,” “nation” is official and political. Compared to “Staatsbürgertum,” nationality is a bond of community. What is consistent is not a specific meaning but a distinction between pre-existing communities of solidarity and their political realisation. For Hess, these bonds of collective national solidarity exist before and outside the political structures of nationhood. Actors in history, and in future history, change over time in Hess’s thought. Rom und Jerusalem was a late work in Hess’s political development, and by the time of its publication, the only member of the triarchy still remaining as a force in the redemption of humanity was France: “Der Völkerfrühling hat mit der französischen Revolution begonnen; das Jahr 1789 war das 4 Horst Zilleßen notes concurrent, but distinct development of the terms “Volk,” “Nation,” and “Vaterland” in German-language contexts, all three of which varied and mutated, both in their connotations and their relationship to the political sphere (21–30).

Moses Hess and Nineteenth-Century Nationalism

127

F­ rühlingsäquinoxium der Geschichtsvölker” [Springtime in the life of nations began with the French Revolution; Hess 223]. It is clear here that between the two works, Hess has been greatly impressed by the events of 1848. He characterises these national revolutions as “die Auferstehung der Toten” [the resurrection of the dead] which, while a characteristic metaphor for Hess, is a potent one. Hess saw the French as the catalyst for these national revolutions, not simply because they were the first nation to revolt in February 1848, but by their very nature as a people, as first shown in in 1789. Furthermore, they and the Jews are analogous. Hess states: “Der sympathische Franzose assimiliert mit einer unwiderstehlichen Anziehungskraft jedes fremde Rassenelement. Auch der Jude ist hier Franzose” [The sympathetic Frenchman assimilates with irresistible attraction every foreign race element. Even the Jew is here a Frenchman], then quotes Thomas Jefferson as saying “Jeder Mensch hat zwei Vaterländer, zuerst sein eigenes, sodann Frankreich” [every man has two fatherlands, first his own and then France; Hess 242]. Hess later compares this explicitly to the function he imagines for Jews: Franzosen und Juden! Allerdings sie sind füreinander geschaffen. Bei aller Ähnlichkeit in ihren humanen und nationalen Bestrebungen unterscheiden sie sich in denjenigen Eigenschaften, die sich ergänzen, aber nicht vereint in einem und demselben Volke sein können.—Das französische Volk hat vor dem jüdischen die Leichtigkeit voraus, seinem humanen, sympathischen Wesen alle Elemente zu assimilieren; das jüdische hat mehr sittlichen Ernst als das französische und drückt mehr seinen eignen Typus seiner Umgebung auf, als es fremden Typen ge­ stattet, sein eignes Wesen umzugestalten. [Frenchmen and Jews! It seems that in all things they were created for one another. They resemble one another in their humane and national aspirations, and differ only in such qualities as can only be complemented by another nation, but which are never united in one and the same people. The French people excel in alertness, in the humanistic and sympathetic quality to assimilate all elements; the Jews, on the other hand, possess more ethical seriousness than the French, and in meeting other types, the Jew will rather impress his stamp on his environment than be molded by it; Hess 287.] Hess views the ubiquity and diversity of the Jewish people as a defining quality yet, in addition, he gives this internationalism an importance by associating it with the revolutionary predecessor, France. The internationalism that Hess

128

Marshall

celebrates in the French further extends to an ability to spread revolution to other nations. He continues his analysis of the “Springtime of the Peoples” beginning in 1789: Die Auferstehung der Toten hat nichts Befremdendes mehr zu einer Zeit, in welcher Griechenland und Rom wieder erwachen, Polen von neuem aufatmet, Ungarn zum letzten Kampfe rüstet und eine gleichzeitige Erhebung aller jener unterdrückten Rassen sich vorbereitet, die, abwechselnd von asiatischer Barbarei und europäischer Zivilisation, von stupi­ dem Fanatismus und raffinierter Berechnung mißhandelt, mißbraucht und ausgesogen, dem barbarischen und zivilisierten Hochmute der herrschenden Rassen im Namen eines höhen Rechts das Herrscherrecht streitig machen. [Resurrection of nations becomes a natural phenomenon at a time when Greece and Rome are being regenerated. Poland breathes the air of liberty anew and Hungary is preparing itself for the final struggle of liberation. Simultaneously, there is a movement of unrest among the other subjected nations, which will ultimately culminate in the rise of all the peoples oppressed both by Asiatic barbarism and European civilisation against their masters, and, in the name of a higher right, they will challenge the right of the master nations to rule; Hess 223.] It is not only the egalitarian and universalist nature of the French that draws Hess to them, but what he sees as their capacity for success. Furthermore, this shows Hess drawing associations between the character of Jews and that of a people who, having undertaken a revolution, were themselves indelibly associated with radical social transformation and successful emancipatory politics. We also see Hess make this effort in relation to Italy, demonstrating that it is also the possibility of this social transformation as well as its nature that inspired him. Indeed, it is not just as republicans and revolutionaries that Hess admires the French, but for their ability to intervene in and shape the political geography of the Middle East, essentially, as imperialists. He gives much of the eleventh letter of Rom und Jerusalem over to the potential mutual benefits of French support for a Jewish state, and expects France to easily recognise these benefits, writing “Oder zweifeln Sie etwa noch, daß Frankreich den Juden die Hand bieten werde zur Gründung von Kolonien, welche von Suez bis J­ erusalem und von den Ufern des Jordans bis zu den Küsten des Mittelmeeres ihr Netz ausbreiten könnten” [Do you still doubt that France will help the Jews to found colonies which may extend from the banks of the Jordan to the Coast of the Mediterranean; Hess 277].

Moses Hess and Nineteenth-Century Nationalism

129

In an addendum to this letter, he includes the aforementioned pamphlet La nouvelle question d’Orient; empire d’Egypte et d’Arabie; reconstitution de la nationalité juive [The New Oriental Question; an Empire of Egypt and Arabia; Reconstruction of the Jewish Nation], written in 1860 by Ernest Laharanne as an insert. Little is known of Laharanne except that he was a pamphleteer, private secretary to Napoleon iii and editor of the republican newspaper L’Etat. The pamphlet itself proposes a Jewish state from Suez to Smyrna. Yet Hess still found in this work a non-Jewish supporter for a Jewish state in Palestine who pre-dated his own writing by two years. The notes to Rom und Jerusalem also recognise the geopolitical usefulness of a Jewish state in Palestine. In a footnote, Hess cites a report in December 1861 in the Hebrew newspaper Hamagid of a meeting in Melbourne: Sodann sprach ein christlicher Geistlicher für die Wiederherstellung des jüdischen Staats: “Welcher Macht,” sagte er, “kann schließlich das Heilige Land als Erbteil zufallen? […] Niemand anders als die rechtmäßigen Erben, die Juden, werden das Erbteil antreten, welches ihre Väter mit der Hilfe Gottes erworben haben.” [Then a Christian minister addressed the audience on behalf of the restoration of the Jews. “To which nation,” he exclaimed, “should the Holy Land fall as in inheritance? […] No one should inherit it but the Jews, who will thus come into their own patrimony, the land which their ancestors had acquired with the assistance of God; Hess 435–36.] Before completing Rom und Jerusalem, Hess seems to have been well aware of this tendency among Christians and politicians interested in questions of the Orient, where Jewish settlers to Palestine were seen, in this case by French imperialists, as a potentially useful proxy for a time when the Ottoman Empire was declining and genuine questions arising as to what the power map of the region would come to look like. This is a role which Hess seems eager for his people to fulfil, if only for the sake of having a historical role. This, unusually practical for Hess, shows him envisaging a way in which cooperation between the Jews and the French, two historic nations, might actually function. 3

Germany and Anti-Semitism

By contrast, Hess changed his view of Germany quite drastically over the two decades between 1841 and 1862. While in Die europäische Triarchie he writes: “Der Deutsche soll mehr eine universale Tendenz haben, denn sein

130

Marshall

Eigentümliches, der Geist, ist universeller Natur” [The German supposedly has a more universal tendency, as his quality, the mind, is of a universal nature; Hess 120], in Rom und Jerusalem twenty years later he is convinced of the opposite, drawing very negative comparisons between Germany and the cosmopolitan French. Hess writes: “Der Deutsche dagegen möchte alle seine Vaterländer und Landesväter ganz allein besitzen. Ihm fehlt die erste Bedingung jeder chemischen Assimilation: die Wärme” [The German […] would be perfectly happy if he could possess all his fatherlands and dominions for himself. He lacks the primary condition of every chemical assimilative process, namely, warmth; 242]. The result of this is, as noted previously, that little help should be expected from Germany in the liberation of oppressed peoples (316). Hess wrote in Germany during a period of rising anti-Semitism, and states that “Der Deutschtümler liebt in seinem Vaterlande nicht den ­Staat, sondern die Rassenherrschaft” [The Teutomaniac, in his love of the Fatherland, loves not the State but the race dominance; 242]. Yet, while the players have changed, Rom und Jerusalem maintains a very similar worldview: the entirety of human society is to be transformed by the collective actions of certain peoples within the resurrection-like Springtime of the Peoples. Nations, not the individuals and groups that compose them, nor the classes and supranational groups that criss-cross them, are the primary historical actors in Hess’s worldview. As Hess defines himself less and less as a German and more and more as a Jew, Rom und Jerusalem simply reassesses which nations are to be instrumental in the liberation of humankind: Germany has forfeited its place, Jews have acquired one. Despite the growing anti-Semitism in ­Germany, the above passages follow not a description of the anti-Semitism of the 1860s but something two decades earlier. He recounts his former German patriotism, asking: War nicht seit Mendelssohn das ganze Streben der deutschen Juden stets dahin gerichtet, deutsch zu sein, deutsch zu denken und zu fühlen? Haben sie nicht sorgfältig jede Erinnerung an ihre antike Nationalität auszumerzen gesucht? Zogen sie nicht in den “Befreiungskrieg?” Waren sie nicht Deutschtümler und Franzosenfresser? Sangen wir nicht noch gestern mit Nikolas Becker: “Sie sollen ihn nicht haben, den freien deutschen Rhein?” Habe ich nicht selbst die unverzeihliche Dummheit begangen, eine musikalische Komposition dieser “deutschen Marseillaise” dem Verfasser einzusenden? [Was not the entire effort of the German Jews, since the days of Mendelssohn, directed toward becoming wholly Germanised, to thinking and feeling as Germans? Have they not striven carefully to eradicate every

Moses Hess and Nineteenth-Century Nationalism

131

trace of their ancient nationality. Have they not fought in the “War of Liberation?” Were they not Teutomaniacs and French devourers? Did we not chant but yesterday with Nicolas Becker, “They shall not possess it, the free German Rhine?” Did I myself not commit the unpardonable stupidity of sending a musical composition of this “German Marseillaise” to the author of this song?; Hess 241–42.] Hess recounts sending Becker his own musical arrangement of this poem, “Rheinlied” [“Rhine Song,” 1840] and receiving a coldly dismissive reply with “Du bist ein Jud” [You’re a Jew] scrawled on the back (Hess 241–42). Hess, not best pleased, explicitly identifies the aggression and anti-Semitism, writing “Ich nahm Beckers Hep Hep als eine persönliche Beleidigung auf” [I, on the other hand, took Becker’s Hep, Hep, as a personal insult; 242]. The term he uses to refer to this insult is particularly telling. The Hep Hep riots, named after the perpetrators’ rallying cry (Vital, A People Apart 212), were a series of anti-Jewish riots in 1819, only a few years after the end of the Napoleonic wars and expulsion of French troops from the Rhineland. The fact that the Germans had so recently fought the French before these riots adds an extra layer of emotional resonance. Hess leads into the anecdote by summing up what were presumably the intellectual fashions of the time, asking mockingly whether formerly patriotic German Jews were not “Teutomaniacs and French devourers.” The patriotic poem in question focused on the border and conflict with France, and as such the casual anti-Semitic abuse that accompanied it undermined Hess, not just as a German and a German patriot, but as an enemy of the French. In the next letter, he argues that it is not, as is usually asserted, the French or Russians, but the Jews who are the “Erbfeinde” [hereditary enemies] of German liberalism (245), that it is against the internal enemy, the Jews, not against the external threat from the French, that Germany defines itself—a conclusion in which Hess was far ahead of his time. Hess associates this rejection with violence, indeed the Hep Hep riots were specifically violence by a German population victorious over the French. This rejection as an enemy of the French invokes an instinctual, physical fear of being involuntarily classed alongside them in the ranks of Germany’s enemies. Yet Hess’s reaction, looking back on an event he first recounted in writing in 1840, is intriguing. Unsurprisingly, he regrets this incident, implicitly defending Becker, and declaring “Die Beleidigung war offenbar keine persönliche” [It was by no means intended as a personal insult; 242]. The incident now is, not an insult on Becker’s part but an “unforgivable stupidity” on his own. The tone is one of embarrassment, looking back sheepishly at his attempts to be a German patriot, although it seems at least partly because he finds such “Teutomaniacs”

132

Marshall

ridiculous. Hess’s unforgivable blunder was not patriotism itself, but patriotism to the wrong patrie. Later, having published earlier works under the less conspicuous name of Moritz Hess, he writes: “Ich habe mir vorgenommen, ihnen die bequeme Waffe noch bequemer zu machen, indem ich fortan meinen alttestamentarischen Namen Moses adoptieren werde, und bedaure nur, daß ich nicht Itzig heiße” [I have made it easy for them to wield their weapon by adopting my Old Testament name, Moses. I regret exceedingly that my name is not Itzig;5 Hess 250]. Now a proud Jewish patriot, “Du bist ein Jud” ceases to be an insult to Hess but becomes instead a simple, factual confirmation of his identity. Similarly, he explicitly phrases critiques of inequality through language previously used against Jews: Ein gemeinsamer, heimatlicher Boden ist für sie erste Bedingung gesünderer Arbeitsverhältnisse. Der gesellige Mensch bedarf, wie die geselligen Pflanzen und Tiere, zu seinem Gedeihen und Fortkommen eines weiten, freien Bodens, ohne welchen er zum Schmarotzer herabsinkt, der sich nur auf Kosten fremder Produktion ernähren kann. [The social man, just as the social plant and animal, needs for his growth and development a wide, free soil; without it, he sinks to the status of a parasite, which feeds at the expense of others; Hess 286.] This metaphor seems to have been taken directly from Johann Gottfried Herder: Das Volk Gottes, dem einst der Himmel selbst sein Vaterland schenkte, ist Jahrtausende her, ja fast seit seiner Entstehung eine parasitische Pflanze auf den Stämmen andrer Nationen; ein Geschlecht schlauer ­Unterhändler beinah auf der ganzen Erde, das Trotz aller Unterdrückung nirgend sich nach eigner Ehre und Wohnung, nirgend nach einem Vaterlande sehnet. [The people of God, whose country was once given them by Heaven itself, have been for thousands of years, nay almost from their beginning, parasitical plants on the trunks of other nations; a race of cunning brokers, almost throughout the whole World; who, in spite of all oppression, have never been inspired with an ardent passion for their own honour,

5 ‘Itzig’ is a diminutive of ‘Isaac’ used in German as an anti-Jewish slur.

Moses Hess and Nineteenth-Century Nationalism

133

for a habitation, for a country, of their own; Herder 450, translated by ­Ernest A. Menze.] It is important to note that, while this is part, if not the origin, of the antiSemitic trope of Jews as parasites, it is both semi-sympathetic,6 and a plant, rather than animal metaphor. The latter quality, while not dulling the accusation, invokes less disgust as an image and, more importantly, introduces soil, rather than instinct or behaviour, as the dominant factor. This makes it far more suitable for re-appropriation by Zionism, as a description of a problem that can be easily solved with a nation state. Herder had also proposed, tentatively, the re-establishment of the Jewish Volk in Palestine (245), seemingly whether they desire such a thing or not. Hess, of course, removes Herder’s assertion that Jews do not long for their own homeland. Indeed, the entire work and the very concept of Zionism serve as a refutation of a key part of this anti-Semitic image: that Jews do not want to be self-sufficient. Hess ceases to be a German patriot in favour of Jewish patriotism. Additionally, in at least three cases we see Hess either implicitly or explicitly take anti-Semitic statements by his countrymen, not as a degradation of his status and political function as a German, but as an affirmation of his Jewishness and uniquely Jewish role in history. Hess’s other recollection of anti-Semitism is the Damascus Affair, a scandal in 1840 in which an anti-Semitic blood libel case in Syria (among the first outside Europe) developed into a full-blown international incident (see Frankel). There was much debate in the European press over whether the men were innocent, whether the centuries-old myths of Jewish blood-drinking and ritual sacrifice were in fact true, and whether these supposed practices were the work of the entire Jewish religion or a minority of fanatics.7 Hess refers to the incident as evoking “ein ebenso bitteres wie gerechtfertigtes Schmerzgefühl in allen jüdischen Herzen” [in the hearts of the Jews a bitter feeling of agony; Hess 240], and writes, to what would largely be a German-Jewish readership: In jenen Ländern, welche den Okzident vom Orient scheiden, in Rußland, Polen, Preußen, Österreich und der Türkei, leben Millionen unserer Stammesgenossen, die Tag und Nacht die inbrünstigen Gebete für die Wiederherstellung des jüdischen Reiches zum Gotte der Väter ­emporsteigen 6 Instead of religious conversion, Herder “calls for a form of integration that would turn Jews into productive and virtuous citizens (implicitly presuming they are not presently), so that ‘their Palestine is then there where they live and nobly work, everywhere.’” (Sikka 245). 7 Consensus tended to favour a minority of fanatics, leaving the majority of Jews ignorant of the gory and far-fetched practice (Frankel 265).

134

Marshall

l­assen. Sie haben den lebendigen Kern des Judentums, ich meine die jüdische Nationalität, treuer bewahrt als unsre okzidentalen Brüder, die alles im Glauben unserer Väter neu beleben möchten, nur nicht die Hoffnung, die diesen Glauben geschaffen und durch alle Stürme der Zeiten hindurch lebendig erhalten hat, die Hoffnung auf die Wiederherstellung unserer Nationalität. [In those countries which form a dividing line between the Occident and the Orient, namely, Russia, Poland, Prussia, Austria, and Turkey, there live millions of our brethren who earnestly believe in the restoration of the Jewish kingdom and pray for it fervently in their daily services. These Jews have preserved, by their belief in Jewish nationality, the very kernel of Judaism in a more faithful manner than have our Occidental Jews. The latter have endeavored to revive much of our religion, but not the great hope which created our faith and preserved it through all storms of time, namely, the hope of the restoration of Jewish nationality; Hess 244.] Concern and admiration for Jews to the East, be that in Poland, Prussia or ­Syria, is not rare among Zionists: Herzl (e.g. Gesammelte zionistische Werke vol.  v, 297) expressed similar sentiments, and his friend and successor Max Nordau (39; 52) frequently addressed the issue in very emotive terms. By invoking this image of authentic Jewry and emphasising its externality to his reader, Hess shames Western, assimilated Jews for their inauthenticity, while inviting them to compare themselves to and feel solidarity with Jews outside the lands of their birth and citizenship. 4

Jewish National Regeneration

Other foundational moments of Zionism tended to be direct reactions to antiSemitism. Herzl insisted that it was the Dreyfus Affair of the 1890s which made him a Zionist (Gesammelte zionistische Werke vol. i, 374), although this turn also coincided with the rise of Karl Lueger and other prominent anti-Semitic demagogues. Similarly, the Russian Zionist Leo Pinsker wrote in direct response to the wave of pogroms between 1881 and 1884, an even more direct reaction to very real and very material anti-Semitic violence. Yet, although Hess does invoke two occasions of Jewish suffering in Rom und Jerusalem, both incidents are from twenty-two years earlier, rather than an immediate, ongoing situation convincing him of the need for a nation-state as remedy. Hess’s Proto-Zionism is unique among Zionism’s various points of origin in that it directly followed and made reference to a victory. The positive inspiration is

Moses Hess and Nineteenth-Century Nationalism

135

Italy, and Rome and Jerusalem’s parallel roles are not as religious centres but as capitals of resurrected nations. However the resonance of Italy for Hess is not simply its success, but the perceived nature of its opponent: Auf den Trümmern des christlichen Roms erhebt sich das wiedergeborene italienische Volk.–Wie das Christentum, so hat auch der Islamismus nur die Resignation gelehrt; und wie Österreich zu Italien, so verhält sich die Türkei zu Palästina.–Das Christentum und der Islamismus sind die Inschriften auf den Grabsteinen, welche barbarischer Druck auf die Gräber der Nationen gewälzt hat.–Solange die Österreicher in Italien, die Türken im heiligen Lande unsrer Väter herrschten, konnten das italienische und jüdische Volk nicht wieder zum Leben erwachen. [On the ruins of Christian Rome there rises the regenerated Italian people. An influence similar to that of Christianity is exerted by Islam in the East. Both religions teach resignation and submission, and Turkey follows the same policy in regard to Palestine that Austria exercises in Italy. Christianity and Islam are both only inscriptions in the tombstones which barbaric oppression erected on the graves of weaker peoples. But the soldiers of civilisation, the French, are gradually sweeping away the dominance of the barbarians; and with their strong Herculean arms will roll off the tombstones from the graves of the supposedly dead peoples and the nations will awaken once more; Hess, 243.] The First, Second, and Third Wars of Italian Independence were all fought against the Austrian Empire, which had held control of the kingdom of ­Lombardy-Venetia since the Congress of Vienna in 1815. With Turkey too, Hess sees an old religious Empire standing over the grave of a dormant nation. Imperialism here is paired with religion, national awakening with freedom, and nations are seen as pre-dating their oppressors. Hess uses very reminiscent imagery in reference to Judaism, whereby “Die starre orthodoxe Eiskruste” [The rigid crust of orthodox Jewry] is melted away by “der Funke des jüdischen Patriotismus” [the spark of Jewish patriotism] as part of the “Springtime of the Peoples” (291), as Hess and others referred to 1848. This is not an expression of hostility to religion, however. Rather, Hess assigns it a vital historical role: Die starren Formen des orthodoxen Judentums, die bis zum ­Jahrhundert der Wiedergeburt vollkommen berechtigt waren, werden nur von Innen heraus, durch die Keimkraft der lebendigen Idee der jüdischen ­Nationalität und ihres Geschichtskultus, naturgemäß gesprengt. Nur aus der nationalen Wiedergeburt wird das religiöse Genie der Juden, gleich

136

Marshall

dem Riesen, der die Muttererde berührt, neue Kräfte ziehen und vom heiligen Geiste der Propheten wieder beseelt werden. [The rigid forms of orthodoxy, the existence of which was justified before the century of rebirth, will naturally, through the productive power of the national idea and the historical cult, relax and become fertile. It is only with the national rebirth that the religious genius of the Jews, like the giant of legend touching mother earth, will be endowed with new strength and again be reinspired with the prophetic spirit; 244.] Demonstrating even further commitment, the childless atheist Hess states that he would have raised his hypothetical family as Jewish, both publicly and by celebrating holidays in private (254). Furthermore, by recalling imagery from Heinrich Heine’s poem Deutschland: Ein Wintermärchen,8 Hess unambiguously associates a revivification of the Jewish religion with dreams of ­German national liberation, positing a vision of future Jews better understood as a suppressed and awakening people than a faith. The fate of Orthodox Judaism in Hess’s visions of future liberation is not a replacement by “Jewish Patriotism,” but revivification by it. As is characteristic of his anticipations, the tensions between these two sides of Jewish identity– religious traditions and secular identity–are dissolved as the contradictions between religious and national identification resolve themselves into unity. Again looking eastward to the Russian Pale of Settlement,9 Hess sees some of this injection of life and heat coming from the Hassidic movement that began in the 1700s: Die Chasidäer beobachten nicht pedantisch die Vorschriften des jüdischen Gesetzes, obgleich sie sich prinzipiell so wenig von der mündlichen, wie von der schriftlichen Thora lossagen; aber sowohl die schriftliche wie mündliche Lehre hat für sie nur Geltung als Ausdruck des Geistes. [The Chasidim do not observe pedantically all the minutiæ of Jewish law, although they do not deny nor question in the least, the authority of both the written and the oral law [referring to the Hebrew Bible, and the Mishna and Talmud respectively] are an expression of the spirit; 425.] 8 “Seit ich auf deutsche Erde trat/Durchströmen mich Zaubersäfte–/Der Riese hat wieder die Mutter berührt,/Und es wuchsen ihm neu die Kräfte”; [Since I on Germany’s ground have trod,/I’m pervaded by magical juices;/The giant has touch’d his mother once more,/And the contact new vigour produces; Heine 399]. 9 This was the region of the Russian Empire between 1791 and 1917 in which Jews were permitted to settle. (For more information see Vital, A People Apart, 80–98; 300–01).

Moses Hess and Nineteenth-Century Nationalism

137

For Hess, Chassidism’s concern for the spirit over the letter of Judaism not only breathes life into the religion but into the people, since “die Folgen des Chasidäismus sind unberechenbar, wenn sich die nationale Bewegung seiner bemächtigt” [The great good which will result from a combination of Chasidism with the national movement is almost incalculable; 425–26]. Hess sees the stiffness, ice crusts, gravestones, and rubble of old empires and old religions giving way to the warming spring, blazing fires, and incalculable possibilities of the resurrected Italian and Jewish nations. Hess’s simplistic, even reductive understanding of the Ottoman Empire ironically helps prevent the Orientalist tendency towards othering and exoticisation. Edward Said defines what is largely an academic discipline as “a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made be­ tween ‘the Orient‘ and (most of the time), ‘the Occident’” (2). Hess, however, rather than treating the Orient as radically different and incomprehensible, applies exactly the same historical processes (with his typical neat symmetry) to Turkish Islam as to Italian and Austrian Catholicism. The Orient, for Hess, lacks any kind of “special place in European Western experience” (Said 1), indeed his reductive model is more prone to presuming the Orient to be easy to understand and function identically to Europe. The romanticising, Orientalist viewpoint, as noted above, turns a little more to his fellow Jews abroad, who he understands as more spiritual and as such more authentic as Jews, having preserved “den lebendigen Kern des Judentums” [the very kernel of Judaism; 244]. Certainly, Hess uncritically assumes a number of components of Orientalism: racial determinism (Said 206–07), conflation of ethnic and linguistic categories such as Semitic and Indo-European (Said 99), and the idea of an ahistorical “timeless Orient” (Said 234), where “Asien ist wohl das Land des Anfanges, aber nicht des Fortganges” [Asia may well be the land of beginnings, but not of continuations; 86].10 Yet it is difficult to place Hess wholly within the standard Orientalism which a reader might expect of his contemporaries, and particularly of later Zionists, since Hess does not share the Orientalist’s burning curiosity for the mysterious East. Existing inhabitants of Palestine are, as is often the case with early Zionists, conspicuous by their absence from Hess’s writing, rather than denigrated or romanticised. Even the Jewish population of the region is mentioned only in passing as being “in Turkey,” alongside those of Eastern Europe. Indeed, Oriental peoples are as rare in Rom und Jerusalem—­ directly concerned with the Middle East—as in Die europäische Triarchie. While Rom und Jerusalem briefly concerns itself with the landscape and plant 10

Like many of Hess’s ideas and assumptions, this one seems to come from Hegel (Avineri 52).

138

Marshall

life of the Orient, references to Turks are rare, and Arabs, Persians, and Kurds are entirely absent.11 Hess’s Orientalism is marked less by dismissiveness, exotic fantasy or a fervent desire to document and categorise, than it is by indifference, indeed it is only with the half-European, half-Asian character he attributes to Jews that Hess begins to take an interest in ideas of supposedly different Oriental and Occidental traits. A timeless and ahistorical land or people exerts no fascination for Hess, for whom peoples and lands are defined by their historical function. When Turkey finds a role in history, Hess, knowing next to nothing about it, simply treats it as part of Europe: that is, as one of the stiff and dilapidated multinational empires to be overturned by the Springtime of the Peoples. However, it is only European nations that have this historical task. To be outside this alliance of European nations, whether as the now static museum piece to the West, America, “der Zufluchtsort derer, die des Kampfes müde sind” [a refuge for those tired of fighting], or Africa, which, “mit seinen schwarzen Bewohnern […] außerhalb aller Historie [fällt]” [with its black inhabitants, falls outside all of history; 88] is to be without a historical role. Die europäische Triarchie does, however, assign the Jews a function of sorts in history: So war der jüdische Stamm das auserwählte Volk von Gott dem Vater, und der Schauplatz der heiligen Geschichte im Altertum auf Palästina beschränkt, während er sich im Mittelalter über das römisch-germanische Europa ausdehnt, weil eben diese Welt für die Mystik, wie die jüdische für die Prophetie, empfänglich und daher die von Gott dem Sohne auserwählte war. [Thus the Jewish tribe was the chosen people of God the Father, and the theatre of sacred history in antiquity limited to Palestine, while in the Middle Ages it spread across Roman-Germanic Europe, since this world was receptive to mysticism in the same way the Jewish world was for prophecy, and so was chosen by God the Son; Hess 85.] This makes the Jews an exception among Asiatic peoples, due to their presence in Europe and function as go-betweens. Hess, referring to a putative and mostly punning origin of the word “Hebrew,” explains as follows: “weil es, wie schon sein Name besagt, von drüben herüber zu uns kam und den Westen mit dem Osten vermittelte” [because, as their name suggests, they came to us from there 11

Even where Hess discusses Semitic peoples only the Jews are specifically named, and whether speakers of Turkic or, like Kurds and Persians, Indo-Iranian languages would fit this category is not addressed.

Moses Hess and Nineteenth-Century Nationalism

139

to here, and connected the West with the East; 86]. This role, however, is broadly in the past and, like Russia’s transmission of European revolution to Asia, it is one of mediation, not action. 5

Emotional Readings

As well as the aforementioned inconsistency in Hess’s use of terms around statehood and nationhood, there remains the question of why Italian national liberation caused Hess to rediscover Jewishness, why events of the 1840s resurface to drive his philosophy in 1862, or why ideologies which often seem to clash not only coexist easily in Hess, but are envisaged as bringing mankind together. In Moses Hess and Modern Jewish Identity, Koltun-Fromm attempts to understand Hess and all his contradictions, not as a unified, methodically argued system of thought, but as broadly consistent on an emotional level, while inconsistencies unavoidably reflect an “ambiguous, uncertain and fragmented religion” (125). This emotional thesis of Hess’s philosophy and relationship to his Jewishness is best illustrated with a recollection of his grandfather: Mein Großvater zeigte mir einst Oliven und Datteln: “Diese Früchte,” belehrte er mich mit leuchtenden Blicken, “wachsen in Erez Jisroel” (in Palästina).–Alles, was an Palästina erinnert, wird mit demselben Gefühl der Liebe und Verehrung gleich uralten Erinnerungen des väterlichen Hauses von den frommen Juden angeschaut. [My grandfather once showed me some olives and dates, and remarked, with beaming eyes, “These were raised in Eretz Yisroel.” Everything that reminds the pious Jew of Palestine is as dear to him as the sacred relics of his ancestral house; Hess, 237.] This argument for emotional attachments is itself made via emotional attachments: the childhood memory of an old man, beaming as he instructs his young grandson on the subjects of faith, heritage, and exotic fruits. Indeed, for assimilated or secularised Jews or their children, this image of their grandfathers’ generation, not embarrassed or indifferent but excited at the thought of being Jewish, would be a pleasantly compelling one. The olives and dates here could be easily replaced with soil, a map of the Levant, or a Torah pointer. It is not the specific objects that strike a reader, or even the excitement over Palestine. Rather, it is the emotional attachment to the fact, not the implications of being Jewish. Hess offers these familial bonds a central role in his views of the future, both secular and eschatological, saying: “Aus der unversteigbaren

140

Marshall

Quelle der jüdischen Familienliebe stammen die Erlöser des Menschengeschlechts” [Out of this inexhaustible fountain of [Jewish] family love have the redeemers of humanity drawn their inspiration; 227] and, again, later: “Das Judentum trennt nirgends das Individuum von der Familie, die Familie von der Nation, die Nation von der Menschheit, die Menschheit von der organischen und kosmischen Schöpfung und diese vom Schöpfer” [Judaism has never drawn any line of separation between the individual and the family, the family and the nation, the nation and humanity as a whole, humanity and the cosmos, nor between creation and the Creator; 230]. An emotional reading of Hess—where emotions cause not just his ­attraction to nationalism, but the bonds that constitute nationhood and his attraction to those bonds in turn—is a very productive one. It explains both the mechanism whereby a triumphant Risorgimento causes memories of anti-Semitism to become relevant, and the continued theme of convergence and future harmony despite the turbulent times he lived through. However, despite the inspirational imagery of resurrected nations, Italian tricolours, and misty-eyed grandfathers, the emotional resonance that primarily drives Hess’s thought is, I wish to argue, a negative one. Recalling the indifference of non-Jewish Germans to the plight of Damascene Jews, Hess recalls: Es [wurde] mir mitten in meinen socialistischen Bestrebungen zum ­ersten Male wieder recht schmerzlich ins Gedächtniss zurückgerufen, dass ich einem unglücklichen, verleumdeten, von aller Welt verlassenen, in allen Ländern zerstreuten, aber nicht getödteten Volke angehöre[.] [D]amals schon hatte ich, obgleich ich dem Judenthum bereits fern stand, meinen jüdisch-patriotischen Gefühlen Ausdruck geben wollen in einem Schmerzensschrei, der jedoch bald wieder in der Brust erstickt worden ist durch den grössern Schmerz, den das europäische Proletariat in mir erweckte. [Then it dawned upon me for the first time, in the midst of my socialistic activities, that I belong to my unfortunate, slandered, despised and dispersed people. And already, then, though I was greatly estranged from Judaism, I wanted to express my Jewish patriotic sentiment in a cry of anguish, but it was unfortunately immediately stifled in my heart by a greater pain which the suffering of the European Proletariat evoked in me; 240.] Rather than understanding anti-Semitism or the Eurocentric indifference of his countrymen as interrupting his emancipatory work, it is his membership of a dispersed and unhappy people that Hess perceives as the interruption, with

Moses Hess and Nineteenth-Century Nationalism

141

one cry of empathic pain clashing with another. On a deep emotional level we see Hess’s Jewishness come into conflict with his Socialism, a moment of simultaneous political and internal disjuncture, and one that could be neatly resolved by a resurgent Jewish nation of the future stepping forward to liberate the workers of Europe. Koltun-Fromm further draws attention to the section of Rom und Jerusalem entitled Polen und Juden [Poles and Jews], containing the account of the B ­ ecker incident and reprised by Hess from 1841, demonstrating that a revival of Jewish nationhood had long been on Hess’s mind, or at least presented as such. Yet Koltun-Fromm also makes a case that the earlier text was tampered with, edited to fit Rom und Jerusalem, in an attempt to create the appearance of consistency in his philosophy where there is none (53). Koltun-Fromm sees (particularly Jewish) identity as “not something one owns, but an image one struggles with and often against” (12), meaning that “an identity in crisis is not incoherent or episodic but an inescapable experience of modern life” (9). Hess, by contrast, “struggles to unite conflicting accounts of identity because he is mired in the Hegelian legacy that seeks unity, coherence and reconciliation, even as he tries to revise that tradition by noting the fragmentary, ambiguous relations” (11). This urge towards unity, coherence, and reconciliation comes not from an intellectual tradition, but an emotional position, and Hess’s utopian vision is one where all aspects of his worldview work in harmony without contradiction. Yet rather than a striving towards unity, or (in the case of the sly edit of Polen und Juden) an imposition of consistency, this urge for coherence is better suited by the phrase used by Koltun-Fromm: a “repression of discontinuity” (56). Hess is drawn not towards homogeneity, but away from heterogeneity. Arguably, Communism’s fight against inequality already mirrors a rejection of heterogeneity. Equality within nationalism must, in order to function, posit a nation of which all members are united as equals.12 For Hess, therefore, to be both socialist and nationalist makes the draw of homogenisation, and the association of internal social differentiation with the worst excesses of capitalism, even stronger. As a Jew, he must find his way within a heterogeneous and fractured identity which blurs faith and ethnicity, yet as a German and a member of the European Triarchy, he must work within a nationalism which sees the Jews as a disruption of its own homogeneity. 12

The Italian communist and nationalist thinker Mazzini, for example, writes in 1898: “Rights no doubt exist; but when the rights of one individual happen to clash with those of another, how can we hope to reconcile and harmonise them, if we do not refer to something which is above all rights? And when the rights of an individual, or of many individuals, clash with the rights of the country, to what tribunal shall we appeal? […] Will you demand it in the name of the country, of Society, of the multitude, your brothers?” (11).

142

Marshall

6 Conclusion Hess’s identity as a Jew is not a source of anxiety because he rejects it, for as early as 1837 he had assigned Judaism a vital historical role. Rather, his identity is a source of anxiety because it is unavoidably fractured. Hess treats Becker’s letter, not as a moment of trauma, but as a mistake to be learned from, almost a youthful indiscretion. It is a moment when a man of heterogeneous identity, a German patriot of Jewish origin, is forced by rejection by German countrymen to assume the more homogeneous position of Jewish patriot instead. Hess’s definitions of nationhood, Volk, Stamm, Staatsbürgertum, and Solidarität are ill-defined and inconsistent, but their meanings relative to each other always reveal a chasm between national identity, sentiment, or belonging and the nation as a political entity—a chasm which is a source of discomfort to him and which he dreams of closing. Hess must posit categories for reconciliation that are whole and internally consistent, even if this means glossing over tensions and variations, due to his deep horror of internal contradiction. Yet this emotional aversion to division and internal contradiction is also a rational position for Hess to take. His anxiety around heterogeneity stems from his own experience as a minority, where despite his best efforts and at times embarrassing enthusiasm, he found himself both implicitly and explicitly rejected from the project of German nationhood. His understanding of nations as the main historical actors is perhaps not the orthodox Marxist line, but it is consistent with how the world of geopolitics looks, and especially with how nations portray themselves and their histories, and political discourse surrounding them. The Risorgimento inspired Hess to rediscover his Jewishness, not by returning to the religion but by a change of nationalisms, a way which offers him a workable historical role. While Die heilige Geschichte der Mensch­ heit or Die europäische Triarchie do both assign Judaism a role, it is an ancient one, now completed, now relegated to the status of a religion during the Springtime of the Peoples and an age of growing secularism, or as mediators in a bygone age. But if we, as Hess seems to, understand Becker’s cold reply as a dismissal of Jews as fellow countrymen, this role becomes unavailable to Hess. The socialistic proto-Zionism of the later work Rom und Jerusalem is the only way for a German Jew such as Hess to find a role within his understanding of history, and his only route to a model of nationalism which is, in turn, his only possibility of participating in internationalism. While his discovery of Jewish patriotism is prompted by hope, at its heart it is a tale of despair. This turning point in Hess’s thought reveals several important factors in nationalism. Firstly, its narratives and rhetoric of liberation and equality, of peoples struggling against empires and the ancien régime, of unity and solidarity

Moses Hess and Nineteenth-Century Nationalism

143

and of modernisation, are inherently appealing to revolutionaries and socialists, especially considering the central role of nationalist sentiments in the revolutions of 1848. Yet nationalism is also exclusive and limited. Whether by intention or simply in practice, this solidarity ends at the border. Where these borders are internal, whether the colour bar or the walls of the ghetto, there are minorities and diasporas who are shut out or left behind. To be excluded from national solidarity is also to be excluded from revolution and modernisation, not only from the community’s shared benefits and solidarity, but from its shared destiny and future achievements. For Hess, who seems far keener to be a liberator than to be liberated himself, it is this exclusion that is the most painful. However, this limited membership is not only a failing of nationalism, as we see with Hess’s assertion of a new, Jewish national sentiment, but also helps to explain its spread. Even a hugely disparate group with neither a common language nor shared territory feels an immense pressure (including, it must be stressed, a very real threat of violence) to conform to the nation-state model of collective liberation. With the additional promise of a role for national movements in overturning the old oppressions and building a better world, and even the implicit need of a nation to participate in internationalism, nationalism is easily painted as a means to achieving emancipatory, universalist aims, while its exclusivity and even outright hostility to minorities such as Jews in fact enables its transmission, and forms the basis of its appeal to them.

Works Cited

Primary

Heine, Heinrich. Sämtliche Werke, vol. 1. Theodor Knaur, 1906. Heine, Heinrich. Germany: A Winter Tale. Translated by Edgar Alfred Browning, Mondial, 2007. Herder, Johann Gottfried. Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit. Werke, vol. 6, Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1989. Herder, Johann Gottfried. Johann Gottfried Herder on World History: An Anthology, edited by Michael Palma and Hans Adler. Translated by Ernest A. Menze, Routledge, 2015. Herzl, Theodor. Briefe und Tagebücher. Edited by Alex Bein, Propyläen, 1996. 7 vols. Herzl, Theodor. Gesammelte zionistische Werke. Jüdischer Verlag, 1923. 5 vols. Herzl, Theodor. The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl. Edited by Raphael Patai, translated by Harry Zohn, Herzl Press, 1960. 5 vols. Hess, Moses. Ausgewählte Schriften. Edited by Horst Lademacher, Joseph Melzer Verlag, 1962.

144

Marshall

Hess, Moses. Rome and Jerusalem: A Study in Jewish Nationalism. Translated by Meyer Waxman, Bloch, 1918. Mazzini, Joseph. An Essay On the Duties of Man Addressed to Workingmen. Funk & Wagnalls, 1898. Nordau, Max. Zionistische Schriften. Jüdischer Verlag, 1923.

Secondary

Avineri, Shlomo. Moses Hess: Prophet of Communism and Zionism. New York UP, 1985. Berlin, Isaiah. The Life and Opinions of Moses Hess. W. Heffer, 1959. Frankel, Jonathan. The Damascus Affair: “Ritual Murder,” Politics, and the Jews in 1840. Cambridge UP, 1997. Koltun-Fromm, Ken. Moses Hess and Modern Jewish Identity. Indiana UP, 2001. Leerssen, Joseph Theodoor. National Thought in Europe: A Cultural History. Amsterdam UP, 2006. Renan, Ernest. Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?: Conférence faite en Sorbonne, le 11 mars 1882. Calmann Lévy, 1882. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. Penguin, 2003. Seton-Watson, Hugh. Nations and States: An Enquiry into the Origins of Nations and the Politics of Nationalism. Methuen, 1977. Sikka, Sonia. Herder on Humanity and Cultural Difference: Enlightened Relativism. Cambridge UP, 2011. Vital, David. The Origins of Zionism. Clarendon Press, 1975. Vital, David. A People Apart: A Political History of the Jews in Europe 1789–1939. Oxford UP, 1999. Zilleßen, Horst, editor. Volk–Nation–Vaterland. Der deutsche Protestantismus und der Nationalismus. Mohn, 1970.

Part 4 Looking Back, Looking Forward: Nineteenth Century Contests of Memory and Progress

∵

Chapter 7

Nationalism, Regionalism, and Liberalism in the Literary Representation of the Anti-Napoleonic “Wars of Liberation,” 1813–71 Dirk Göttsche 1

Introduction: The Shifting Politics of Memory around the AntiNapoleonic Wars

The Napoleonic Wars—in particular the battle of Jena and Auerstedt in 1806, in which Napoleon defeated Prussia, and the anti-Napoleonic Wars of 1813–15, seen as “Wars of Liberation” from French occupation with the Battle of Nations (Völkerschlacht) near Leipzig in October 1813 as a decisive turning point— arguably play a defining role in the history of German nationalism in the nineteenth century. They were regarded as one of the foundational political and historical experiences of Germany (“ein Urerlebnis im politischen Erfahrungsschatz der Deutschen”; Dipper 504), before National Socialism, World War ii, and the Holocaust rewrote the map of historical memory. Referencing Pierre Nora’s concept of national lieux de mémoire, a recent comparative volume on the Napoleonic Wars in European memory underlines their significance “als wesentlicher deutscher Erinnerungsort” [as principal German site of memory; Klausing and Wiczlinski 24] through to 1945 and, in the case of the German Democratic Republic, even up to 1990. Public and literary engagement with the theme on the occasion of the bicentenary of 1813 in 2013 highlights that these once defining events are now just one historical theme amongst others. In the nineteenth century, however, a wealth of political poetry created in the immediate context of what is now seen as the “myth of the Liberation War” (“Mythos vom Befreiungskrieg”; Planert), a myriad of memoirs and both scholarly and popular histories, and more than one hundred novels and novellas published through to 1914 (see Göttsche, “Erinnerungsarbeit”) testify to the seminal role of this historical theme in the contested politics of memory that shape the history of German nationalism and of German ideas about national identity up to and beyond 1871. In their analysis of the Napoleonic Wars as a crucial German lieu de mémoire, Caroline Klausing and Verena von Wiczlinski (24) note that conservatives and liberals, Protestants and Catholics alike engaged in memory discourses about

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004426108_009

148

Göttsche

this turning point in European history, indicating the range of aspects and narratives that kept this past alive for subsequent generations. Indeed, the significance of the anti-Napoleonic Wars for Germany’s politics of memory was from the very beginning based precisely on their contested reading. Historian Helmut Berding (395) found that in the renewed political conflicts and social antagonisms after 1815 all parties projected their particular political visions onto the Prussian uprising of 1813, seen as a national liberation movement. The anti-Napoleonic Wars quickly became the subject of a public battle for the right kind of memory (“Kampf um das richtige Gedächtnis”), which, according to Heinrich August Winkler, defines the politics of memory that the German language calls “Geschichtspolitik” [politics of history; 12] and that negotiates the significance of the past for the present. Focusing on one prominent aspect of this debate—the anniversaries of the Battle of Nations in the city of Leipzig until 1913—Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann has mapped out the cornerstones of the politics of memory about the antiNapoleonic Wars to show how this historical event became a “national myth” (111–12), whose defining elements were nevertheless subject to constant rereading and renegotiation. The relevant “memory contests” (Fuchs et al.) of the period between 1813 and 1871 are defined by competition (in Berding’s terminology; 386, 388) between, on the one hand, a conservative and dynastic approach, which saw the “Volkserhebung” [popular uprising] of spring 1813 as a struggle for “König und Vaterland” [king and country] rather than for a nation state and liberal political participation, and a liberal-reformist approach on the other hand which interpreted 1813 as an emancipatory struggle for national independence and constitutional rights on the part of the middle classes, the Bürgertum. These conservative and liberal narratives also intersected, certainly well into the 1830s, with the older rivalry between national and regional concepts of nationhood—“Reichsnationalismus” [nationalism focused on the Holy Roman Empire] versus “Territorialnationalismus” [regionalist nationalism; Burgdorf 184–45]—concepts that can be traced back to the eighteenth century and indeed to the early modern period. For the early and mid-nineteenth century the contested politics of memory in relation to the anti-Napoleonic Wars are reflected to some extent in the competition between the older and often liberal notion of a “Freiheitskrieg” [war for freedom], which links the war against Napoleon back to the American War of Independence and the bourgeois struggle for political participation, and the more recent term “Befreiungskrieg” [war of liberation], which oscillated between the newly emerging idea of a German nation state and the politics of Restoration. This latter reading came to dominate historical terminology after 1871 (see Dipper 504–05). Prussian colonel Philipp von Müffling certainly

Literary Representation of the “Wars of Liberation”

149

had older monarchical concepts in mind when he coined the term “Völkerschlacht” [Battle of Nations] for the battle of Leipzig (see Hoffmann 112, and Hofbauer and Rink). Yet this term, acknowledging the role of popular recruitment and sentiment in the defeat of Napoleon, then became emblematic of the new bourgeois (in the sense of bürgerlich) nationalism and pride which, following liberal and national intellectuals such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Ernst Moritz Arndt, inspired the educated and urban elites to celebrate the first anniversary of the battle in October 1814 as a “Volksfest” [people’s festival] all over Germany. By contrast, the official Leipzig celebrations, for example, only honoured the “Eintracht der verbündeten Monarchen” [the unity of the allied monarchs; Hoffmann 112–13, 116]. As Hoffmann points out, the memorialisation of the anti-Napoleonic Wars as a national victory that called for ­national unification—along with the quasi-religious interpretation of the ­Napoleonic years as a cycle of national humiliation in 1806 redressed by the popular uprising in 1813, of Sündenfall and Wiedergeburt [fall from grace and rebirth]—set the pattern for a historical narrative which, although initially just one amongst several, ultimately came to dominate the national and liberal politics of memory in the context of the fiftieth anniversary of 1863, subsequently feeding into the nationalist narrative after 1871. By the time the Battle of Nations memorial opened for the centenary celebrations of 1913, the nationalist narrative had become pervasive (Planert 619) and the anti-Napoleonic Wars of Liberation were seen as the “Geburtsstunde des deutschen Volkes” [the hour of birth of the German nation; Hoffmann 125]. This is not at all the case in the early literature on the anti-Napoleonic Wars, which paints a much more differentiated picture and reflects the competition between alternative though intersecting historical narratives. Indeed, one of the most interesting aspects of the literature engaging with the wars of 1813–15 up to the 1850s is the plurality of views and voices, and the representation of experiences that later fall away once the national-liberal narrative becomes fully established. All of the literary sources in question portray the Napoleonic Wars as a major turning point in German and European history, but there was no established narrative yet of how to tell this story. The various literary formats therefore also reflect different memories and politics of memory. These different politics of memory go along with conflicting notions of Germany reflecting different strands of nationalism, if we understand “nationalism” before the nation state more broadly as a combination of discourses about German nationhood that include the underlying idea of the German-speaking lands as a Kulturnation [nation of culture], diverse notions of German statehood based on Germany’s very strong federal history reflected in the multiplicity of German states between 1806 and 1871, the legacy of the first German Reich

150

Göttsche

(the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation), and anticipations of future national unification. This chapter will first use Wilhelm Hauff’s novella Das Bild des Kaisers [The Emperor’s portrait/image; 1827] for a case study in the range of conflicting memory discourses about the Napoleonic period in the wake of the anti-­ Napoleonic Wars and their significance for competing notions of German nationhood. I will then provide an overview of key developments in the literature about the anti-Napoleonic Wars from 1813 through to 1871, highlighting the ways in which different strands of nationalism, liberalism, and regionalism interact before the national-liberal discourse becomes dominant in the Nach­ märz period of the 1850s. The final part of this study considers novels from the context of the fiftieth anniversary of 1813 in 1863: Gustav von Struensee’s Vor fünzig Jahren [Fifty years ago; 1859] and Wilhelm Raabe’s Nach dem großen Kriege [After the great war; 1861]. Both illustrate the continuing diversity and debate within the liberal memory discourse ahead of the nationalist politics of memory promoted by the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71. 2

Memory Discourse and Nationhood in Wilhelm Hauff’s Das Bild des Kaisers

Hauff’s contribution to the period’s increasingly popular engagement with the late French emperor Napoleon, who had died in exile in 1821, links the contested memory of the Napoleonic Wars directly to competing notions of ­Germany. Das Bild des Kaisers is a socio-political portrait of the 1820s in the condensed form of a novella about the contested legacy and memory of ­Napoleon in Restoration Germany. Its title is at one level a reference to JacquesLouis David’s famous painting Bonaparte crossing the Alps (painted in five versions between 1800 and 1802), which acts as a leitmotif in the story; at a second, metaphorical level it indicates Hauff’s literary technique of portraying the period through its competing images of Napoleon (see Göttsche, Zeiterfah­ rung, 232–36). Applying Jan Assmann’s terminology of collective memory (48– 59), Barbara Beßlich has shown how the novella maps out a multiperspectivist representation of the period’s politics of memory: Unterschiedliche Napoleon-Mythisierungen treten in den Gesprächen der Figuren zueinander in Konkurrenz. Dabei werden persönliche Erinnerungen des kommunikativen Gedächtnisses mit offiziellen Deutungsmustern des kulturellen Gedächtnisses konfrontiert. [In the characters’ conversations different versions of the myth of N ­ apoleon compete with one another. In the process, the personal

Literary Representation of the “Wars of Liberation”

151

­ emories of communicative memory are confronted with the official inm terpretations of history in cultural memory; Beßlich 179.] Hauff develops this memory contest by adapting Ludwig Tieck’s recent innovation of the Dialognovelle, a novella almost fully set in dialogue. In Das Bild des Kaisers this is the dialogue between the members of a small circle of family and friends attached to a carefully constructed Württemberg setting on the River Neckar, designed to convey the period’s typical sense of being torn between the old and the new, tradition and modernity. Citing the corresponding motifs from Achim von Arnim’s influential “Zeitroman” Gräfin Dolores [Countess Dolores; 1810], the medieval castle of Thierberg on the wooded mountains of the northern river bank and the modern Renaissance-style palace of Neckar­ eck amidst the vineyards on its southern bank contrast sharply, “wie Bilder der alten und neuen Zeit” [like images of the old time and the new time; H 592];1 they are emblematic of the period’s transitional position in history. The two sides of this Zeitlandschaft [historically emblematic temporalised setting] are reunited by the undulating bends of the River Neckar acting as the river of time that runs through and beyond the conflict of the old and the new (H 593), suggesting that the Restoration period of the 1820s has effectively already moved on from the clash symbolised by the two castles. Indeed, the entire chronotope is cast as the perception of the young Prussian Albert von Rantow, visiting his relatives in the castle of Thierberg, whose romantic gaze at the supposedly exotic sites of southern Germany is subject to narrative irony throughout. Nevertheless, the conflict between the old and the new plays a significant role in the politics of memory and nationhood in the novella, and there is a marked parallel between the mediating role of the river between the two opposing worlds on its banks and the role of the only female protagonist, Anna von Thierberg, who, going back and forth between the two families in the two castles, similarly achieves reconciliation in the political conflicts separating the male members of this small circle that represents the discourse at the time. There is thus a gendered element in Hauff’s poetics of memory which goes hand in hand with the therapeutic and political function of dialogue at a time when political conflict tears families and society apart: “gibt es denn in diesem Jahrhundert auch nur eine Familie, die nicht, wenn man sie einzeln durchginge, die verschiedensten Gesinnungen in sich schlösse?” [is there even one single family in this century which doesn’t include the most diverse views, if you look at all its members?; H 626], asks Albert von Rantow. His own family on Thierberg illustrate the point, in that they represent “dreierlei Parteien” [three different parties] but include only “drei Personen” [three people; H 629]. 1 Page numbers from Hauff’s Das Bild des Kaisers are given using the abbreviation H.

152

Göttsche

The novella’s multiperspectivist poetics of memory and its literary debate about German nationhood are cast as a response to what the author clearly saw as one of the key challenges of the 1820s: reconciling widely diverse and hostile political views so as to enable Germany to move on from the traumas of the Napoleonic period. The character arrangement that represents these conflicts is organised along the lines of generational and political division. In the parental generation the owners of the two castles, Freiherr von Thierberg and General von Willi, in their mid-60s and mid-50s respectively, represent two stages of the past and two visions of Germany’s future that stand in stark opposition. As a Freiherr [baron] of ancient lineage who boasts of the freedom he enjoyed as a ruler of his own little principality in the Holy Roman Empire, Thierberg stands for the ancien régime of the old empire, whose balance of national cohesion and federalism he would like to see restored. Having lost his wealth and his dignity along with his political power under Napoleon’s dissolution of smaller principalities into larger territorial states—in this case the newly elevated Kingdom of Württemberg—he is a sworn enemy of Napoleon and his followers, but equally disappointed by the Restoration which failed to reinstate the Holy Roman Empire and its socio-political order. This nostalgic form of eighteenth-century Reichsnationalismus contrasts sharply with General von Willi’s continuing adoration and equally melancholy memory of Napoleon and his imperial grandeur, since it was in Napoleon’s army that he made his career and his fortune. A member of the new meritocracy and widower of a bourgeois wife, the general, whom we meet reading Ségur’s account of Napoleon’s ­Russian campaign for the sixth time (H 596), stands for a break with the ancien régime and for Napoleon’s politics of modernisation, whose European vision has little room for ideas of a German nation state. The three young characters, all in their twenties, move beyond this opposition of anti- and pro-Napoleonic views, nostalgia for the Holy Roman Empire and melancholy memory of Napoleonic imperialism. The general’s son, Robert von Willi, translates his father’s reformism and cosmopolitanism into a blend of liberalism and nationalism that links the political legacy of the Enlightenment with the new national agenda of the anti-Napoleonic Wars as Wars of Liberation. Although from Württemberg, he emphatically conceives of 1813 as an “Aufstand des ganzen Deutschlands” [uprising of all of Germany; H 598] and argues—like old Thierberg, but for very different reasons—against the territorial “Zersplitterung” [fractioning] of Germany (H 579). Having been to London, Paris and Rome in his youth, where he met with “Lafayette und Foy,” proponents of the American War of Independence, and “die Herren von der linken Seite” [the gentlemen of the political left; H 606], he also associates with the oppositional student fraternities of the post-Napoleonic period, the

Literary Representation of the “Wars of Liberation”

153

“deutschen Radikalreformer” [radical German reformers; H 606], as his father calls them, the young liberals demanding a German nation state. His political arrest, the first turning point in the story, references the so-called Demagogen­ verfolgung [persecution of demagogues] in the wake of Metternich’s Karlsbad decrees of 1819. Robert von Willi thus represents an ambivalent memory of Napoleon and the Napoleonic period along with a new liberal German nationalism tempered, however, by his cosmopolitan upbringing and cautious political moderation. Not directly involved in student activism—“Ich habe nur gedacht, nie gehandelt” [I only thought, I never took action; H 627]—he is released from prison after only three weeks, during which he is said to have discovered that his love of Anna was in fact “ein höheres, reineres Interesse” [a higher, purer interest] than his “politisch[e] Träume” [political dreams; H 628]. This shift prepares the ground for the eventual reconciliation between the two fathers and families. It has also given rise to a debate in research about the extent to which Hauff may have watered down his criticism of Restoration politics in line with censorship requirements and Biedermeier sentiment (see Kittstein; Neuhaus; Beßlich 178–206). Set against Robert’s liberalism and nationalism is the Prussian patriotism (Territorialnationalismus) of his new Prussian friend Albert von Rantow. The two meet in the opening chapter on the fast coach from Frankfurt to Stuttgart and discuss contemporary Germany. Albert shares with Robert the glowing memory of the anti-Napoleonic uprising of 1813 as a source of strength against the disappointments of the Restoration period, but sees himself as a Prussian first and foremost, not as a German (H 566–67, 601). If Robert represents the liberal narrative of the Wars of Liberation and the idea of a future German nation state, Albert identifies with the conservative reading of the 1813 uprising and Prussian leadership in German politics, even when Thierberg reminds him that he was in fact too young to have participated as a volunteer himself (H 579). Unlike in the case of his uncle, Albert’s hatred of Napoleon is thus the result of political discourse rather than historical experience, and contrasts sharply both with Robert’s liberal nationalism and the nostalgic Reichsnatio­ nalismus of Thierberg. Albert’s regionalism also leaves little room for wider German nationalism, but it does not share General von Willi’s cosmopolitanism. These four opposing and interlinking political positions, all combining a particular memory discourse about the Napoleonic period and the Wars of Liberation with conflicting notions of Germany’s nationhood, are essentially left without reconciliation. Resolution is only achieved through a novelistic trick, a surprising turning point that also addresses the challenges of a society torn apart by political antagonism: Robert’s release from prison, his engagement with Anna, and a copy of David’s portrait of the young Napoleon crossing the Alps that Anna keeps in her room as Robert’s birthday present for his

154

Göttsche

father. Reuniting all protagonists in Anna’s private room, the female space of social mediation, Thierberg finds that the portrait shows the only Frenchman he was ever able to appreciate, a young officer who rescued him from an attack by pillaging French soldiers in the Alps as he hastened from Italy back to ­Württemberg in 1800 at the onset of Napoleon’s Italian campaign. Obviously, it turns out that this young officer was Napoleon himself; in fact Thierberg’s earlier retrospective account of his war adventure concludes with what is effectively an ekphrasis of David’s portrait: […] er gab mir noch einige Verhaltensregeln, drückte mir lächelnd die Hand, und unter dem “Marchons, ça ira!” setzte er den Berg hinan. Noch heute steht dieser liebenswürdige, interessante junge Mann vor meinen Augen, wie er den Fuß der Alpe hinanritt, der Wind in seinem Mantel, in seinen Federn wehte und er grüßend noch einmal sein geistreiches Ge­ sicht nach mir umwandte. [“He gave me some parting advice on how to conduct myself, shook my hand smiling, and, calling out ‘Marchons, ça ira!,’ charged up the mountain slope. I see this charming and interesting young man before my eyes even today, as he rode up the foothills of the alpine mountain, the wind stirring in his coat and his feathers while he turned his bright face back towards me one more time for a final farewell”; H 614.] All characters can now agree that at least the young Napoleon was “ein großer Geist” [a great mind/figure; H 641]. Anna turns out to be at least as strong an admirer of Napoleon as her fiancé, and the novella concludes with the exclamation “Vive l’Empereur!” (H 644). This final emphasis on the myth of N ­ apoleon as a voice of liberal promise in the face of Restoration politics balances the much-debated depoliticisation that is needed to achieve the happy ending at the level of the plot. Hauff prioritises liberalism over nationalism, which is typical of the period and contrasts with the opposite hierarchy seen widely in the context of the fiftieth anniversary of the anti-Napoleonic Wars in 1863. 3

Literary Engagement with the Wars of Liberation between 1813 and 1871: An Overview

Outside of Prussia, the urban and educated elites in other parts of Germany often also subscribed to the liberal and monarchical discourses marked by the Prussian-led myth of the Wars of Liberation supported by a popular national uprising. However, Restoration politics meant that memory of 1813 was heavily censored in many German states, and also competed with the very different

Literary Representation of the “Wars of Liberation”

155

memory of the wars as “die Katastrophe schlechthin” [the catastrophe per se], as Ute Planert puts it (114), which reflected the human and material cost of the wars as well as the typhoid outbreak and other epidemics that followed the repeated and devastating movements of troops across the German-speaking lands. As late as 1898, Karl Goedecke calls the period “die Zeit des Weltkrieges” [the time of world war] in the title of the relevant parts of his bibliography of German literature. Building on these tensions in memory discourse, a brief look at the period’s memoirs and historiographies of the anti-Napoleonic wars further helps to set out the political and discursive context of literary engagement with the theme. Early historiography of the wars mostly promotes the bourgeois-national narrative of a national uprising, as seen e.g. in Philipp Boye’s history of the Hanseatic Legion (1815). Boye claims that “Alles wetteiferte der Erste zu seyn, um an dem heiligen Kampfe für Freiheit, für Vaterland und für Recht, Theil zu nehmen” [everyone competed to be the first to participate in the holy struggle for freedom, fatherland, and the restitution of rights; 2]. He anticipates the later national-liberal discourse by suggesting that “die Millionen, die in Deutscher Zunge reden” [the millions speaking in the German tongue] would be “unüber­ windlich […], wenn sie einig sind” [invincible if they were unified; 223]. Other examples of the early alliance between liberalism and bourgeois nationalism include Carl Venturini’s history of the Wars of Liberation of 1816–19, which celebrates the anti-Napoleonic Wars as “Völkerkrieg” [a war of the people; iv, 650] and “Aufstand der deutschen Nationalkraft” [uprising of German national strength; ii, vii]. As a result, Prussian censorship banned the book in 1819 (Akaltin 83). By the mid-1830s the liberal critic of Prussia’s politics of memory, Wilhelm Zimmermann, is even more outspoken in combining the demand for “Selbständigkeit und Einheit” [independence and unity; 3] with the expectation of political participation, casting the wars as part of a “neuer, ganz anderer Befreiungskampf, dessen Ende in der Zukunft liegt” [a new and very different war of liberation whose end lies in the future; 765]. In historical lectures first held in 1842/43, the renowned liberal historian Johann Gustav Droysen casts the anti-Napoleonic Wars as the climax of a “Zeitalter der Freiheitskriege” [epoch of wars of freedom; 1], which started with the American independence struggle and illustrates the “Entfaltung der Freiheit in der Geschichte” [unfolding of freedom in history; Kraus 81] right through to the 1840s, when the “Freiheitskriege” were allegedly in danger of being forgotten. At the same time, the late 1830s and 1840s mark the generational threshold between communicative and cultural memory, which produces a wealth of memoirs and personal witness accounts designed to remind the German public of this defining turning point in German history and to intervene in the period’s politics of memory. This new wave of cultural interest shapes the

156

Göttsche

memory discourse on the theme around the fiftieth anniversary of 1813, at a time when National Liberalism became the dominant bourgeois voice in ­political discourse and Prussia’s New Era prepared the ground for Bismarck’s so-called “Wars of Unification.” Highly political popular histories of the antiNapoleonic Wars by authors such as Heinrich Beitzke, Ferdinand Schmidt or Eduard Große and Franz Otto, who published an illustrated Vaterländisches Ehrenbuch [Book of patriotic honours] on the Wars of Liberation, are evidence of the now dominant national-liberal discourse which acts as a foil for more critical counter-narratives in the period’s fiction (see Göttsche, “Erinnerung,” 546–53; Paulus 148–56). The fictional representations of the anti-Napoleonic Wars published between 1813 and 1871 are far more varied than this brief summary of historical literature and memoir suggests, however. To begin with, the catastrophic narrative highlighted by Planert plays a much more prominent role. One early example is Ludwig von Baczko’s novel Die Familie Eisenberg oder die Gräuel des Kriegs [The Eisenberg family or the terrors of war; 1815], which signals its intervention against heroic narratives and the emerging national myth in its very title. Focusing on East Prussia and the battle at Preußisch Eylau in 1807, Baczko portrays the Napoleonic Wars as a deeply destructive tragedy in which most of the Eisenberg family lose their lives and property. Carl Bonde’s novella Die Königs-Scheibe oder die Ahndungen: Eine Familiengeschichte aus dem deutschen Befreiungs-Kriege [The royal target, or the premonitions: a family history from the German War of Liberation; 1820], set in Saxony in the vicinity of the 1813 battles of Großgörschen and Leipzig, takes unsettling counter-narratives one step further by focusing on the cost of ongoing war for the civilians, on a radical critique of the new myth of the Wars of Liberation, and on the devastating typhoid epidemic that Napoleon’s defeated troops brought back with them from Russia. Although some of the protagonists engage in the popular nationalism of 1813, all of them die, either on the frontlines or as victims of typhoid fever, leaving no one alive to celebrate Germany’s liberation from Napoleonic rule. At one level, Bonde endorses the national and liberal sentiment of 1813 when the volunteer corps indicate the hope that “Deutschland” as a whole might “durch Einheit der Kraft uns Freiheit erringen, unsere Ehre als Nation zu retten” [achieve our freedom through unity of strength, salvage our honour as a nation; 75–76]. However, the characters’ belief in “Freiheit und National­ sinn” [freedom and national pride; 112] is tied to the traditional formula of “die Rechte der Fürsten und Völker” [the rights of the monarchs and nations; 84] and does not imply the demand for a German nation state. At the same time, a visit to the Großgörschen battlefield with its “Tausende von Leichen” [thousands of corpses; 115] paints a stark picture of war atrocities; the “große und herrliche Zeit” [great and wonderful time; 75] of national uprising in the

Literary Representation of the “Wars of Liberation”

157

spring of 1813 quickly deteriorates into “eine schreckliche Zeit” [a terrible time; 154] confirming the apocalyptic “Ahndungen” [premonitions] of the story’s title, which amount to a veto against both the official and the liberal politics of memory. E.T.A. Hoffmann’s earlier story Die Vision auf dem Schlachtfelde bei Dresden [Vision on the battlefield near Dresden; 1813] illustrates that such catastrophic narratives were not restricted to authors from the late Enlightenment context, such as Baczko and Bonde. Wilhelm Raabe’s novella Im Siegeskranze [In the victor’s laurels; 1866] is a late echo of this memory tradition. Bonde’s references to the conservative and regionalist narratives are part of a larger field that often feeds into Biedermeier-style compromises with Restoration conditions. Carl Gottlob Cramer’s Das eiserne Kreutz: Ein kriegerischer HalbRoman aus den Jahren 1812, 1813 und 1814 [The iron cross: a war-related quasi-novel from the years 1812, 1813 and 1814; 1815] represents the emerging myth of the Wars of Liberation as a national uprising under Prussian leadership, while Cramer also ties this national narrative back to the paternalistic patriotism of the Prussian Enlightenment and the conservative concept of the “good King” (i, 341).2 A similar form of conservative patriotism can be seen in Charlotte von Ahlefeld’s Mirthe und Schwert [Myrtle and sword; 1819], which celebrates the political restoration of 1815 as a moral and social restitution of the supposedly natural harmony between the good king and his nation, illustrated by a war narrative that includes a vignette of the King “mitten unter uns” [right amongst us; 128], fighting with his people. Caroline de la Motte Fouqué’s Edmund’s Wege und Irrwege: Ein Roman aus der nächsten Vergangenheit [Edmund’s paths and mistaken turns: a novel from the most recent past; 1815] is probably the first to conceive of Prussia’s defeat at Jena and Auerstedt in 1806 and the victory against Napoleon in the Leipzig battle of 1813 as the beginning and end of a period marked by national humiliation, the “bange Prüfungszeit” [anxious time of trials] of Napoleonic rule and eventual rebirth in the Wars of Liberation (ii, 85; iii, 190–91). The liberal and national narrative that recalls the popular movement of 1813 to express the hope for future national unification and liberal reform can be seen, for example, in Carl Ludwig Nicolai’s multiperspectivist epistolary novel Robert von der Osten: Eine Begebenheit aus den Zeiten der neuern Kriege [Robert von der Osten: an event from the times of the recent wars; 1817], and Johann Heinrich Ludwig Fischer’s Kriegerische Abentheuer und Schicksale eines preußischen Freiwilligen in den Feldzügen von 1813 und 1814 [War adventures and fortunes of a Prussian volunteer in the military campaigns of 1813 and 1814; 1823]. Fischer develops a genuine poetics of memory that sets the memory of “die große Zeit hoher Begeisterung und inniger Hingebung” [great time of 2 On the novels presented in this section and further related sources see Göttsche, Zeit im Roman, 304–31.

158

Göttsche

high-spirited enthusiasm and deep commitment] against disillusionment in the “wieder dunkel gewordene[n] Zeit” [renewed time of darkness; i, iii–iv] of the Restoration, appealing to collective memory (“Gedächtnis”) to sustain the expectation of political “Freiheit” [freedom; i, vi]. Nicolai embeds his similarly liberal account in a broader discussion of the period’s transformations and the conflict between the legacies of the Enlightenment and the socio-political conditions of the Restoration. Whereas Fischer focuses on a Prussian perspective, Nicolai’s cosmopolitan European panorama, echoing Hauff, prioritises liberal ideas over national concerns, casting North America as the only safe haven for his protagonists once they are exposed to political persecution in Europe. However, some of the most interesting accounts do not fall neatly into any of the established memory narratives and they also appear later than the first wave of literary engagements with the anti-Napoleonic Wars discussed so far, which peters out during the early 1820s. A highlight in the corpus is Willibald Alexis’s first novella Iblou, published in 1823 and revised in 1830. This is based on the author’s own experiences as a sixteen-year-old (!) volunteer in the second War of Liberation of 1815, when he was deployed in the Prussian siege of persistent French fortifications in the Ardennes mountains from September to December 1815, i.e. after the decisive battle of Waterloo. Referencing the patriotic “Sturm der Begeisterung” [storm of enthusiasm], which, according to the first-person narrator, emptied “die oberen Classen der Gymnasien” [the higher classes of the grammar schools] in Northern Germany again in 1815, his account, explicitly written as an autobiographical memoir seven years later, moves on to give a stark description of the hardship, anxiety, and futility of this last phase of the war, which brought with it “alle Beschwerden des Krieges ohne seinen Glanz und seine Reize” [all the troubles of war without its glamour and attraction; Alexis [1823] - according to your system on the next pages 3–4]. The novella’s politics of memory uses the discrepancy between the national sentiment of the spring of 1813 and the harsh reality of war experience in autumn 1815 for an emphatic intervention against heroic war narratives and the Prussian myth of the national Wars of Liberation. Alexis’s young volunteer—­ not an officer like many protagonists of the other novels—experiences the last phase of the war as dirty, pointless, and angst-ridden, a sentiment reflected in the Gothic style of the fictional plot which harks back to the unresolved legacies of the French Revolution. This powerful critique of both Prussian monarchical and liberal narratives goes along with a poignant poetics of memory that also responds to the development of the politics of memory about the anti-Napoleonic Wars through to 1830. On the one hand the narrator casts his retrospective account as an intervention against collective forgetting in the 1820s, a period marked by oppressive Restoration politics and Biedermeier-style retreats into the private sphere:

Literary Representation of the “Wars of Liberation”

159

[S]elten verweilt das Gedächtniß bei der großen, bewunderungswürdigen Zeit selbst; denn der Sturm der Begeisterung ist vorübergebraust, und wo nicht andre Stürme die Erinnerung an jene verlöscht haben, scheint wie in nie gestörter Ruhe Feld und Flur zu lächeln und von der Betrachtung des Vergangenen zurückzuhalten. [Memory rarely dwells on the grand, admirable time itself; the storms of enthusiasm have run their course, and where it is not the case that other storms of memory have eclipsed the earlier one, fields and pastures appear to smile as though their peace had never been disturbed, holding us back from the contemplation of the past; Alexis (1823), 89]. The second version of 1830 intensifies critical engagement with the period’s politics of memory, e.g., through ironic references to “Berlin’s poetischen Patriotismus” [Berlin’s poetic patriotism; Alexis (1830), 29] and the debate about the name of the battle of Waterloo (called “Belle Alliance” in Prussian discourse through to the 1870s; Alexis (1830), 4). The memory of devastating and traumatic war experiences—“nie vergesse ich diesen Anblick” [I’ll never forget this sight; Alexis (1830), 97]—conveys a political message that questions popular “Franzosenhass” [hatred of the French] and the “new order” (“neue Ordnung”) of the Restoration (Alexis [1830], 82). Alexis reconfirmed this highly ambivalent account of the Wars of Liberation in his later autobiographical essays of 1844–46, which revisit very much the same experiences and motifs, preparing the ground for his influential “vaterländische Romane,” his liberal and yet patriotic historical novels of the 1850s, such as Ruhe ist die erste Bürgerpfli­ cht [The citizens’ duty is to stay calm; 1852]. Alexis’s essays of the mid-1840s are part of the wave of memoirs and popular histories about the Wars of Liberation which emerged as fictional engagement with this theme lost currency before regaining ground in the course of the 1850s, when the renewed popularity of historical fiction coincided with bourgeois self-assertion after the defeat of the 1848 revolution. Two historical novels demonstrate that the literary memory discourse about the anti-Napoleonic Wars remained more contested and polyphonic around 1840 than it would become later in the 1860s. These two works are the Walter Scott-style historical novel 1813 (1838) by Ferdinand Stolle, an author from Dresden who went on to become a co-founder of the famous journal Gartenlaube, and Alexander von Ungern-Sternberg’s Jena und Leipzig (1844), which combines elements of Romanticism with the intellectualism of the 1830s Young German movement. In its very title, Stolle’s 1813 is cast as a quasi-sequel to Ludwig Rellstab’s popular historical novel 1812 (1834) about Napoleon’s Russian campaign. As the first of Stolle’s six novels about Napoleon, 1813 is an example of the historicisation and revitalisation of the myth of Napoleon in German literature since the

160

Göttsche

1830s, which, according to Beßlich, “[transportiert] Napoleon aus dem kommunikativen Gedächtnis an dem staatlich offiziellen Desinteresse vorbei in das kulturelle Gedächtnis der Deutschen” [moves Napoleon from communicative memory into the cultural memory of the German people, bypassing the states’ official lack of interest in the theme; Beßlich 175]. Combining European history with a fictional plot that stretches from December 1812 to the aftermath of the Leizpig battle in October 1813, 1813 is also more outspoken than Alexis’s Iblou in criticising both the Prussian-patriarchal and the liberal-national discourses about the Wars of Liberation from a pronounced liberal perspective, which—as in Nicolai’s Robert von der Osten twenty years earlier—leaves the protagonists no choice in the end but to flee Restoration politics for America. Set in Paris and Dresden, the novel combines a regionalist focus, which foregrounds the battle of Dresden in August 1813, with a decidedly cosmopolitan perspective reflected in the way the plot interweaves French and German characters and counters anti-French chauvinism. Whereas Hauff’s Das Bild des Kai­ sers tries to reconcile 1813 nationalism and cosmopolitanism, the two discourses are increasingly at odds in Stolle’s novel, which criticises the “furchtbare Kluft […], die der Hass zwischen die beiden Völker gestellt hat” [terrible chasm which hatred has produced between the two nations; iii, 178], and leads to outspoken criticism of the nationalist ideology of “deutsche Freiheit, die jetzt überall proclamirt wird” [German freedom as it is now being proclaimed ­everywhere; iii, 227]. Despite referencing key elements of the myth of the Wars of Liberation, such as “die Begeisterung der gesammten deutschen ­Nation für die Befreiung des Vaterlandes” [the enthusiasm of the entire German ­nation for the liberation of the fatherland; iii, 224], Stolle’s analysis of ­Germany’s prospects after the Leipzig battle is therefore deeply pessimistic, and it also includes elements of the older catastrophic narrative in the grassroots account of suffering and death. Stolle’s 1813 oscillates between a regionalist subversion of the myth of 1813 and the endorsement of the myth of Napoleon as the icon of liberal cosmopolitanism despite his expansive imperialism. Ungern-Sternberg’s Jena und Leipzig is similarly ambivalent in its representation of the Napoleonic Wars and the nationalism of 1813, juxtaposing a male discourse of war heroism, which celebrates the myth of the Wars of Liberation, with a female counter-discourse in the tradition of the catastrophic narrative seen in Baczko and Bonde. Jena und Leipzig is probably the first novel that uses the two battles of 1806 and 1813 explicitly to demarcate its memory narrative. However, Ungern-Sternberg’s poetics of memory, influenced by the Young German conception of the novel as “zeitgeschichtlicher Sittenroman” ­ (­Wienbarg; see Göttsche, Zeit im Roman 506–15), i.e. as moral and social ­critique, is less interested in the narrative of national humiliation and patriotic

Literary Representation of the “Wars of Liberation”

161

rebirth than in a broader portrait of the period as a time of radical transformation, as previously seen in Nicolai’s Robert von der Osten. Ungern-Sternberg’s account of the intellectual and social elite in 1806/07 is deeply critical, portraying a society that is doomed to fail, not just in military terms, and in dire need of the renewal that begins in the wake of Prussia’s defeat and culminates in the popular uprising against Napoleon. For example, Ungern-Sternberg includes a subplot unconnected with the main story in a letter by a thirteen-year-old volunteer from rural Pomerania, who joins the volunteer corps in Breslau in the spring of 1813 along with his grandfather so that “wir drei, Großvater, Vater und Sohn” [the three of us, grandfather, father and son] jointly demonstrate the claim that “das ganze Land” [the whole country] joined the movement (ii, 228, 214). There is clearly some humorous detachment from the myth of the Wars of Liberation, and Prussia’s preparatory “Tugendbund” [Association of the Virtuous] of 1810 is given similarly cautious treatment as in Stolle’s 1813. Nevertheless, the novel notes the significance of 1813 in bringing state and nation into line for one historical moment: “Zum erstenmal sehen wir […] die Sache der Nation eng verknüpft mit dem Interesse des Königshauses” [For the first time we see the concerns of the nation closely intertwined with the interest of the royal family; ii, 229]. Also, the “Volksbegeisterung” [popular enthusiasm; ii, 236] of 1813 is seen as indicative of a deeper social transformation. At the same time, although the Leipzig battle is again portrayed as achieving the liberation of Germany, it is also presented as a deeply tragic event: both of the protagonists, Franz von Selbitz and Andreas Walt, die of the wounds sustained, and their typically Romantic “Zerrissenheit” [feeling of being torn apart] also casts them as critics both of the ancien régime and the Restoration. As in Baczko’s novel, it is the battle of Preußisch Eylau in February 1807 that is treated in detail and from the female perspective of Walt’s eighteen-year-old fiancée, as a drastic reminder of the brutality of war. Like Alexis using Gothic imagery, ­Ungern-Sternberg continues the older catastrophic narrative for a deeply disturbing representation of war as “Bild des Schreckens” [an image of horror; ii, 108] in which the “entseelte Schaar” [the soulless band] of the soldiers combat each other “wie ein Trupp Automaten” [like a troop of automatons; iii, 109], infected with the “Kuß der Hölle” [kiss of hell; ii, 114] and leaving a “Teppich […] von zuckenden verblutenden Herzen” [carpet of twitching hearts bleeding to death; ii, 115–16]. There is thus stark unresolved contrast between the chapters “Die Schlacht von Eylau” [The battle of Eylau; ii, 89–126] and “Aufruf zu den Waffen” [Call to arms; ii, 209–40] about the Prussian uprising of spring 1813. The battle of Preußisch Eylau is clearly presented as the danse macabre of a dying epoch, and Jena und Leipzig is also the only novel in my corpus to acknowledge desertion as a problem (see i, 224, 226, 246). While nationalism

162

Göttsche

and liberalism do not fall apart, as they do in Stolle’s 1813, there is clearly a tension, similar to that in Hauff’s Das Bild des Kaisers, between the appreciation of 1813 nationalism and the cosmopolitan and liberal legacy of the Enlightenment that the novel also promotes. The fact that during the 1830s Karl ­Gutzkow equally conceived of the nationalism of the Wars of Liberation as the catalyst of a new “Universalismus” (74–75) further underlines the period’s debate about the relationship between nationalism and cosmopolitanism. 4

Nationalism and Liberalism in Gustav von Struensee’s Vor fünfzig Jahren and Wilhelm Raabe’s Nach dem großen Kriege

A comparison of Ungern-Sternberg’s Jena und Leipzig with Gustav von ­Struensee’s Vor fünfzig Jahren illustrates the change that had been gathering pace in the memory discourse about the anti-Napoleonic Wars since the late 1830s, culminating in the dominance of the national-liberal narrative by the fiftieth anniversary of 1813 in 1863. In line with its publication date in 1859, Vor fünfzig Jahren, whose title cites the subtitle of Alexis’s Ruhe ist die erste Bürger­ pflicht, looks back primarily at resistance and rebuilding during the Napoleonic period. Nevertheless, the story begins in the immediate aftermath of the Prussian defeat in 1806 and ends with an account of the popular patriotic uprising in spring 1813. The plot runs through the history of the anti-Napoleonic Wars and concludes with an epilogue in October 1815 when the second anniversary of the Leipzig battle coincides with the double marriage of the two male protagonists, civil servant Ulrich von Venner and army officer Rudolf von Erbach, and their middle-class brides. Himself a senior civil servant in Prussia who came to Breslau in 1848 as Oberregierungsrat [a senior role in regional government] and served as liberal Member of the Prussian Parliament in 1863–66, Struensee represents the mainstream of the newly dominant liberal and national politics of memory, in which the Prussian defeat of 1806 is seen as a national humiliation leading to a rebuilding process that is constantly under threat from three sides: French rule reflected in political persecution; domestic sympathisers of Napoleon cast as opportunists working only for their personal gain; and intransigent Prussian hardliners stuck in Frederick ii’s eighteenth century. By contrast, the protagonists and their small circle of family and friends are part of the both patriotic and reformist core of Prussian society engaged in rebuilding the country despite Napoleonic supremacy, preparing the ground for the national movement and then Wars of Liberation of 1813. At the same time, Vor fünfzig Jahren adds its own original perspective to the national-liberal discourse. It is very much a regional novel, set in and

Literary Representation of the “Wars of Liberation”

163

around Breslau and charting in detail Prussian and European history between 1806 and 1815 from this Silesian perspective. The fact that it was in Breslau where King Frederick William iii issued his famous proclamations “An mein Volk” [To my people] and “An mein Kriegsheer” [To my army] and where the volunteer corps were formed in 1813, facilitates the blending of regional, national, and European history in the novel. Struensee’s originality also lies in his homage to the Prussian reformer Freiherr vom Stein, whose political activity and fate is closely interwoven with the fictional story. The civilian protagonist Venner even works directly for him, while his friend Erbach starts setting up free corps in resistance to Napoleonic occupation as early as 1807, later joining Duke Frederick William von Braunschweig-Oels’s volunteer corps and serving in the King’s German Legion in Portugal and Spain, before returning to join first Lützow’s famous volunteer corps and then the regular Prussian army. Reformist liberalism and Prussian patriotism thus go hand in hand in this novel. By contrast there is little room in the main story for wider German nationalism. However, the author’s preface to the second edition of 1867, i.e. after ­Bismarck’s wars against Denmark and Austria, moves from Prussian patriotism to German nationalism, reflecting significant changes in the political landscape and the sense that German unification was becoming a real possibility. Lack of political unity across Germany is now seen as the overarching reason for ­Germany’s downfall in 1806: “Das große, mächtige, in seiner Einigkeit unbesiegbare Deutschland war in sich zerfallen und strebte selbstmörderisch dem Untergang zu” [Germany, large, powerful and invincible in unity, had fallen out with itself and was heading for a suicidal demise; i, viii]. It is true that the novel itself deplores Germans fighting Germans, but the text of 1859 does not reflect the new nationalist sentiment of the preface: “Zuerst einig, zuerst stark und unnahbar gegen die Anmaßung und Raublust unserer Nachbarn, ein einiges, mächtiges, nicht kleinlicher Interessen wegen in sich selbst zerfallenes Volk, und dann rüstig das Gebäude der inneren Selbstständigkeit und Freiheit aufge richtet” [First united, first strong and unassailable by our neighboursʼ presumptious claims and their eagerness for conquest, a united and powerful nation free of petty in-fighting, and then we shall construct the edifice of our internal independence and freedom; i, viii]. Nationalism clearly takes priority over liberalism in 1867, reversing the hierarchy in the liberal memory discourse before the 1850s and also shifting the internal balance achieved in the construction of Struensee’s own novel. The preface thus prepares the ground for the nationalist hardening of the memory discourse about the Wars of Liberation after 1871, and indicates the foil against which Wilhelm Raabe positioned his own take on the theme.

164

Göttsche

Raabe’s Nach dem großen Kriege (1861) similarly buys into the national-­ liberal memory discourse in the run-up to 1863. However, like Struensee’s novel it also develops its own agenda which amounts in parts to a counter-narrative, although less obviously so than Im Siegeskranze, Raabe’s return to the catastrophic narrative. Raabe, who joined the liberal Deutsche Nationalverein while working on Nach dem großen Kriege, echoes the now dominant liberal politics of memory by casting the anti-Napoleonic Wars as national Wars of Liberation in anticipation of a future German nation state. This is evident in the protagonist Friedrich Wolkenjäger’s anachronistic anticipation in October 1816 that “das ganze neunzehnte Jahrhundert [werde] wohl noch über die Wehen [hingehen], welche das deutsche Volk ins Licht der Welt gebären sollte” [all of the nineteenth century was likely to pass in labour until the birth of the ­German nation would see the light of day; R 127].3 A poem, presented as a student Wan­ derlied [hiking song] in memory of the liberal and nationalist student movement, is even more outspoken: Ans Werk, ans Werk mit Herz und mit Hand, Zu bauen das Haus, das Vaterland! […] Mit Händen hart, mit Händen weich Behauen die Steine zum Bau für das Reich [To work, to work with heart and hand, / To build the house, the fatherland! / With hard hands, with soft hands / Cut the stones for the building of the Reich; R 137.] War memory thus has direct relevance for the 1860s readership, who are encouraged to remember and reclaim the national and liberal hopes defeated by the Restoration. As in other novels, Raabe uses a contrapuntal arrangement of characters and voices to reflect (in this case) the challenge of coping with political disappointment without giving up on the underlying emancipatory visions and values. The author of the letters that make up this one-sided, Werther-style epistolary novel, Wolkenjäger [chaser of clouds]—nomen est omen—represents a Romantic idealism curiously blended with bourgeois and Biedermeier elements that enable hope for “unsere deutsche Zukunft” [our German future] and trust in “ein einiges, starkes, freies Volk” [a united, strong, free nation; R 20, 132] to persist in the face of disappointment. His silent friend and respondent, Sever, on the other hand, represents political despair, exile, and the equally Romantic trope of “Zerrissenheit” previously seen in UngernSternberg. Raabe references the myth of popular uprising in 1813 explicitly: 3 References to Nach dem großen Kriege are given using the abbreviation R.

Literary Representation of the “Wars of Liberation”

165

“Die jungen Leute sind meistens alle draußen gewesen und haben den Kehraus in Deutschland und den Sturm durch Frankreich mitgemacht” [The young people have mostly all been abroad and were involved in the clean-up in Germany and the storm through France; R 14]. However, his focus is on the aftermath of the war and on its human cost. Napoleon, the Prussian uprising of spring 1813 and the Battle of Nations near Leipzig are never even mentioned, and despite Wolkenjäger’s strategic naiveté most of the motifs relating to the wars are traumatic. Examples include some of the male characters who fought in the wars, but crucially also three women characters who continue to suffer from its impact: a mother who went mad waiting for her son to return; a younger women whose fiancé was shot in the 1809 uprising; and Wolkenjäger’s eventual wife, the nineteen-year-old orphan Ännchen, whom a German lieutenant rescued in the battle of Talavera during the Spanish war in 1809 and took home. It is only seven years later, at the climax of the story, that she remembers her original name and identity in a cathartic scene of rebirth that finally enables closure. Such resonances of the catastrophic narrative question the dominant liberal memory discourse as well as heroic conceptions of history (see Paulus 171). They are complemented by Raabe’s striking deviation from the standard narrative of national humiliation in 1806 and cathartic rebirth in 1813 (Göttsche, “The Place”). His novel is unusually set after the anti-Napoleonic Wars, between May 1816 and August 1817, considering the personal, social, and political impact of the wars rather than rehearsing their development. In addition, he echoes Struensee in focusing on resistance during the Napoleonic period, notably 1809, rather than on the anti-Napoleonic Wars of 1813–15, in which Wolkenjäger and Sever served. Historical references are to Ferdinand von Schill’s uprising in 1809, Duke Frederick William von Braunschweig-Oels’s volunteer corps, and the British-led German Legion fighting Napoleon in Spain, rather than the established military trajectory from Napoleon’s Russian campaign through to the battles of Leipzig and Waterloo. The novel’s historical references thus highlight a history of endurance and persistence in adversity rather than endorsing the simplifications emerging in the myth of the Wars of Liberation as a successful national uprising. Even Raabe’s closest engagement with the newly dominant politics of memory thus reflects his overarching historical scepticism (see Aust). 5 Conclusion Memory discourse about the anti-Napoleonic Wars is a prominent theme in German literature between 1813 and 1871; it includes debate about German

166

Göttsche

nationhood and nationalism as a leitmotif. The literary memory of the socalled Wars of Liberation is also more varied than the national-liberal discourse of the 1850s and post-1871 nationalist discourses would suggest. A polyphony of voices and narratives is a central feature of this discourse through to the 1850s. It takes several decades, well into the 1860s, before the mythical narrative of a popular uprising feeding into a national War of Liberation based on Prussian leadership comes to dominate the literary politics of memory, now anticipating Germany’s as-yet unachieved unification. Moving across the historical threshold between communicative and cultural memory, literary memory is concerned throughout with conflicting historical views and the processing of at times traumatic experience in a collective memory discourse that is at odds with the official politics of memory during the Restoration period—most notably in the recurring reference to the catastrophic narrative of the wars and their aftermath. Indeed, literary engagement with the anti-Napoleonic Wars in part reflects and in part responds to the historiography on the theme—which is more clearly aligned with the political faultlines of the period—and political commemoration, or the lack of it. Literary memory forms part of the middle-class (in the sense of bürgerlich) opposition to Restoration politics before 1848 and of bourgeois self-assertion after the defeat of the 1848 revolution. The more serious literary works combine differentiated accounts with a fictional modelling of historical experience that questions established narratives and promotes further memory work. All accounts of the Napoleonic period and the Wars of Liberation discussed in this chapter involve visions and critiques of German nationhood, but the idea of a German nation state clearly remains a contested work-in-progress in the decades between 1806 and 1871. The national-liberal narrative that traces its origins back to anti-Napoleonic resistance between 1806 and 1815 only moves to the forefront once bourgeois liberalism gathers pace as a political movement from the late 1830s onwards, culminating in the foundation of the liberal Nationalverein of 1859. Before 1848, the literary visions and critiques of G ­ erman nationhood associated with the anti-Napoleonic Wars are as varied and contested as the memory narratives themselves. In this context, regionalism has its prominent place as a marker of authenticity and historical perspectivism in a country whose political landscape was defined by federalism; authors create characters as participants, victims and witnesses of history who experience the anti-Napoleonic Wars from particular regional or local perspectives. Regional differentiation can reflect the internal tensions of the memory discourse (Ungern-Sternberg) and play traditional regional patriotism off against the new idea of a nation state (Hauff). In the liberalism of literary Realism after 1850, regionalism and nationalism often work hand in hand: Prussian n ­ arratives

Literary Representation of the “Wars of Liberation”

167

may use regionalism as a springboard towards nationalism (Struensee), but regional angles also offer scope for cautious detachment from and critique of national-liberal and, later, nationalist narratives (Raabe). At the same time, the Enlightenment legacy of cosmopolitanism as an alternative to nationalism, a crucial element of oppositional memory discourse during the Restoration period, loses currency after 1850. However, it is only during the 1860s, in the face of Bismarck’s “Wars of Unification,” that nationalism, in the sense of the demand for a German nation state, begins to take precedence over liberalism. It will effectively take until 1945, in some respects until the bicentenary of the anti-Napoleonic Wars in 2013, for the late nineteenth-century alliance between the memory of the Wars of Liberation and German nationalism to unravel.

Works Cited

Primary

Ahlefeld, Charlotte von [Pseudonym Elisabeth Selbig]. Mirthe und Schwert. Goedsche, 1819. Alexis, Willibald. “Iblou, eine Novelle.” Frauentaschenbuch auf das Jahr 1823, edited by Friedrich Rückert, Schrag, 1823, pp. 89–163. Alexis, Willibald. “Iblou.” Gesammelte Novellen. Duncker & Humblot, 1830, vol. 1, pp. 1–100. Baczko, Ludwig von. Die Familie Eisenberg oder die Gräuel des Kriegs. Ruff, 1815. Beitzke, Heinrich. Geschichte der deutschen Freiheitskriege in den Jahren 1813 und 1814. Duncker & Humblot, 2nd ed. 1859. 2 vols. Bonde, Carl. Die Königs-Scheibe oder die Ahndungen: Eine Familiengeschichte aus dem deutschen Befreiungs-Kriege. Wilhelm Lauffer, 1820. Boye, Philip. Feldzug der Hanseaten in den Jahren 1813 und 14 oder die authentische Ge­ schichte der von den freien Städten Hamburg, Lübeck und Bremen errichteten Legion. Bernhardt, 1815. Cramer, Carl Gottlob. Das eiserne Kreutz: Ein kriegerischer Halb-Roman aus den Jahren 1812, 1813 und 1814. Vollmer, 1815. 3 vols. Droysen, Johann Gustav. Vorlesungen über die Freiheitskriege, vol. 1, Universitätsbuchhandlung [Kiel], 1846. Fischer, Johann Heinrich Ludwig [Pseudonym C. Roderich]. Kriegerische Abentheuer und Schicksale eines preußischen Freiwilligen in den Feldzügen von 1813 und 1814: Zweite Ausgabe der Erinnerungen aus dem Jahren 1813 und 1814. Kollmann, 1823. 2 vols. Fouqué, Caroline de la Motte. Edmund’s Wege und Irrwege: Ein Roman aus der nächsten Vergangenheit. Fleischer, 1815. 3 vols.

168

Göttsche

Große, Eduard and Franz Otto. Vaterländisches Ehrenbuch: Schilderung der wichtigsten Ereignisse aus der Zeit der Befreiungskriege: In Bildern aus den Jahren 1813 bis 1815. Otto Spamer, 2nd ed. 1863. Gutzkow, Karl. Die Zeitgenossen: Ihre Schicksale, ihre Tendenzen, ihre großen Charak­ tere, edited by Martina Lauster, 2010. Gutzkows Werke und Briefe: Kommentierte digi­ tale Gesamtausgabe, general editors, Editionsprojekt Karl Gutzkow Exeter und Berlin, series “Schriften zur Politik und Gesellschaft,” vol. 3, Oktober, 2001–. Hauff, Wilhelm. “Das Bild des Kaisers.” Werke, edited by Bernhard Zeller, vol. 1, Insel, 1969, pp. 561–644. Nicolai, Carl Ludwig. Robert von der Osten: Eine Begebenheit aus den Zeiten der neuern Kriege. Schütz, 1817. Raabe, Wilhelm. Nach dem großen Kriege. Unseres Herrgotts Kanzlei. Edited by Karl Heim and Hans Oppermann, 1969. Sämtliche Werke, general editor, Karl Hoppe, vol. 4, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2nd ed. 1960–94. Schmidt, Ferdinand. Geschichte der Freiheitskriege. Lobeck, 1864. Stolle, Ferdinand. 1813: Historischer Roman. 1854. Ausgewählte Schriften, vols. 10–12, Keil, 1853–65. Struensee, Gustav von [Pseudonym Gustav vom See]. Vor fünfzig Jahren: Roman in drei Bänden. 1867. Gesammelte Schriften, vols. 10–12, 2nd ed., Trewendt, 1867–68. Ungern-Sternberg, Alexander von. Jena und Leipzig: Novelle in zwei Theilen. Buchhandlung des Berliner Lesecabinetts [Berlin], 1844. Venturini, Carl. Rußlands und Deutschlands Befreiungskriege von der Franzosen­ herrschaft unter Napoleon Bonaparte in den Jahren 1812–1815. Brockhaus, 1816–19. 4 vols. Zimmermann, Wilhelm. Die Befreiungskämpfe der Deutschen gegen Napoleon. Prieger, 1835/36.

Secondary

Akaltin, Ferdi. Die Befreiungskriege im Geschichtsbild der Deutschen im 19. Jahrhundert. Verlag Neue Wissenschaft, 1997. Assmann, Jan. Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen [1992]. Beck, 2005. Aust, Hugo. “Raabes Geschichtsbild.” Raabe-Handbuch: Leben—Werk—Wirkung, edited by Dirk Göttsche, Florian Krobb, and Rolf Parr, Metzler, 2016, pp. 272–79. Berding, Helmut. “Das geschichtliche Problem der Befreiungskriege 1813–1814.” Politik, Gesellschaft, Geschichtsschreibung: Gießener Festgabe für František Grus zum 60. Ge­ burtstag, edited by Herbert Ludat and Reiner Christoph Schwinges, Böhlau, 1982, pp. 380–402. Beßlich, Barbara. Der deutsche Napoleon-Mythos: Literatur und Erinnerung 1800–1945. WBG, 2007.

Literary Representation of the “Wars of Liberation”

169

Burgdorf, Wolfgang. “‘Reichsnationalismus’ gegen ‘Territorialnationalismus’: Phasen der Intensivierung des nationalen Bewußtseins in Deutschland von der Reformation bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg.” Föderative Nation: Deutschlandkonzepte von der Ref­ ormation bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg, edited by Dieter Langewiesche and Georg Schmidt, Oldenbourg, 2000, pp. 157–89. Dipper, Christof. “Der Freiheitsbegriff im 19. Jahrhundert.” Geschichtliche Grundbe­ griffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, edited by Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, vol. 2, 3rd ed., Klett-Cotta, 1992, pp. 488–538. Fuchs, Anne, Mary Cosgrove, and Georg Grote, editors. German Memory Contests: The Quest for Identity in Literature, Film, and Discourse since 1990. Camden House, 2006. Goedecke, Karl. Grundriß zur Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung: Aus den Quellen, vols 6–7: Zeit des Weltkrieges (1790–1815). Akademie-Verlag, 1898–1900. Göttsche, Dirk. Zeit im Roman: Literarische Zeitreflexion und die Geschichte des Zeitro­ mans im späten 18. und im 19. Jahrhundert. Fink, 2001. Göttsche, Dirk. “Zeiterfahrung und literarische Gedächtnispolitik in Novellen der Restaurationsepoche (1815–1830).” Oxford German Studies, vol. 40, no. 3, 2011, pp. 221–39. Göttsche, Dirk. “The Place of Romanticism in the Literary Memory of the Anti-­Napoleonic Wars (1848–1914): Roquette, Raabe, Jensen.” Realism and Romanticism in German Literature, edited by Dirk Göttsche, and Nicholas Saul, Aisthesis, 2013, pp. 341–84. Göttsche, Dirk. “Erinnerungsarbeit und Geschichtspolitik: Die literarische Modellie­ rung der Befreiungskriege zwischen Restauration und Vormärz (1815–1848).” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie, vol. 132, no. 4, 2013, pp. 543–61 and vol. 133, no. 2, 2014, pp. 217–45. Hofbauer, Martin, and Martin Rink, editors. Die Völkerschlacht bei Leipzig: Verläufe, Fol­ gen, Bedeutungen 1813–1913–2013. De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2017. Hoffmann, Stefan-Ludwig. “Mythos und Geschichte: Leizpiger Gedenkfeiern der Völ­ kerschlacht im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert.” Nation und Emotion: Deutschland und Frankreich, edited by Etienne François, Hannes Siegrist, and Jakob Vogel, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1995, pp. 111–32. Kittstein, Ulrich. “‘Vive l’Empereur!’ Napoleon und Württemberg in Wilhelm Hauff’s Novelle Das Bild des Kaisers.” Wilhelm Hauff: Aufsätze zu seinem poetischen Werk: Mit einer Bibliographie der Forschungsliteratur, edited by Ulrich Kittstein, Röhrig, 2002, pp. 147–67. Klausing, Caroline, and Verena von Wiczlinski. “Kollektives Gedächtnis oder kollektives Vergessen? Perspektiven der Geschichts- und Erinnerungskultur zum Zeitalter der Napoleonischen Kriege.” Die Napoleonischen Kriege in der europäischen Erinne­ rung, edited by C. Klausing, and V. von Wiczlinski, Transcript, 2017, pp. 13–44.

170

Göttsche

Kraus, Hans-Christof. “Die historische Entfaltung der Freiheit: Bemerkungen zu Droysens ‘Vorlesungen über die Freiheitskriege.’” Johann Gustav Droysen: Facetten eines Historikers, edited by Klaus Ries, Steiner, 2010, pp. 79–97. Neuhaus, Stefan. Das Spiel mit dem Leser: Wilhelm Hauff: Werk und Wirkung. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002, pp. 80–86. Paulus, Dagmar. Abgesang auf den Helden: Geschichte und Gedächtnispolitik in Wilhelm Raabes historischem Erzählen. Königshausen & Neumann, 2014. Planert, Ute. Der Mythos vom Befreiungskrieg: Frankreichs Kriege und der deutsche Süden: Alltag—Wahrnehmung—Deutung 1792–1841. Schöningh, 2007. Winkler, Heinrich August. “Einleitung.” Griff nach der Deutungsmacht: Zur Geschichte der Geschichtspolitik in Deutschland, edited by H.A. Winkler, Wallstein, 2004, pp. 7–13.

Chapter 8

Learning from France: Ludwig Börne in the 1830s Ernest Schonfield In memory of Timothy McFarland1

∵ 1 Introduction The journalist Ludwig Börne (1786–1837) is a key witness in debates about ­German nationhood in the 1830s. He was born Juda Löw Baruch in the Jewish ghetto in Frankfurt am Main. As a young man, he witnessed the German “Wars of Liberation” against Napoleon, and soon discovered that the so-called “liberation” of 1815 meant increased political repression. The German ­Confederation (Deutscher Bund) created by the Congress of Vienna to replace Napoleonic rule was described by the liberal politician Hans Victor von Unruh (1806–86) as “eine allgemeine Polizei- und Versicherungsanstalt gegen die eigenen Völker” [a police and insurance institution directed against its own people; Wehler 2: 367].2 Metternich’s Europe was an institution designed to guard against ­democracy; as such it was the principal target of Börne’s political activism. The Karlsbad decrees of 1819 set up a system of political repression and censorship in order to combat the spread of democratic ideas in the German Confederation. Having converted to Protestantism in 1817, Börne worked as a radical ­liberal journalist from 1818 onwards, arguing that German unification and a truly democratic constitution could only be achieved by the overthrow of the existing political order. Börne’s first journal, Die Wage. Eine Zeitschrift für Bürgerleben, Wissenschaft und Kunst [The Scales: A Newspaper for Civic Life, Science and Art], was suppressed in 1821. Börne moved to Paris after the July 1 Timothy McFarland taught medieval German literature at University College London (ucl) from 1965–2000. He died in 2013 at the age of 76; his obituary is on the Guardian website. In 2011, when I was a Teaching Fellow at ucl, he told me: “If you’re interested in Heine, then you have to read Börne.” This essay is dedicated to his memory, in gratitude for his collegiality and for his generosity in insisting that I inherit his Ludwig Börne books. 2 Unless otherwise noted, all English translations in this chapter are by myself.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���� | doi:10.1163/9789004426108_010

172

Schonfield

Revolution of 1830, and remained there until his death in 1837.3 Living in Paris gave Börne a frame of reference from which to judge the political backwardness of German lands, and in the early 1830s he was the leading voice of ­German republicanism in exile. Börne’s political radicalism and his public attacks on Goethe and Heine have always polarised critical opinion, with the result that his contribution to German political culture has often been sidelined.4 Heine’s polemic against Börne in Ludwig Börne. Eine Denkschrift (1840) [Ludwig Börne: A Memorial] has distorted much of Börne’s subsequent reception, and obscured the close affinities between the two authors. Indeed, much literary criticism simply rehearses Heine’s presentation of himself as a sensualist and Börne as spiritualist. It is undeniable that the two men had profoundly different outlooks on life. In 1835 Börne reviewed Heine’s De l’Allemagne [On Germany], objecting to Heine’s diatribe against Christianity and his aristocratic airs (2: 885–903). While Börne disliked Heine’s provocative inconsistency, Heine disliked Börne’s remorseless ideological consistency. While Börne was drawn to practical political commitment, Heine’s highest loyalties were to art and freedom of thought. Their dispositions were also reflected in their literary tastes: Heine preferred Goethe, Börne favoured Jean Paul. These viewpoints could perhaps be traced to their formative years: as Markus Joch points out, Heine was raised in Düsseldorf, which had no Jewish ghetto, while Börne spent his childhood confined in the Frankfurt ghetto, where he experienced anti-Semitism first hand (Joch 28). Nevertheless, Heine’s literary memorial “has tended to obscure Börne’s achievements as a stylist and to let us forget the great influence he enjoyed in his lifetime” (Sagarra 133). As Gert Sautermeister points out, the much-cited antithesis between “spiritual” Börne and “sensual” Heine is based on a misunderstanding which both authors sought to promote; in fact their travel writings share very close similarities (Sautermeister 133). Heine’s admiration for Börne’s wit is evidenced in a letter to Moses Moser of 1 July 1825: “Nur dann ist mir der Witz erträglich wenn er auf einem ernsten Grunde ruht. Darum trifft so gewaltig der Witz Börnes, Jean Pauls u des Narren im Lear” [I only find wit bearable when it rests on a foundation of seriousness. That is why the wit of Börne, Jean Paul and the 3 Biographies of Börne began to appear soon after his death: the first was Eduard Beurmann’s (1837), followed by Karl Gutzkow’s biography (1840), and Heine’s memorial (1840). These were followed by Conrad Alberti (1886), Michael Holzmann (1888), Ludwig Marcuse (1929), Helmut Bock (1962), and Willi Jasper (2003). The most readable one is Marcuse’s, which was reissued in 1968 and is still in print today. 4 In 2004, Christoph Weiß edited a collection of Börne’s criticism of Goethe (see the bibliography).

Learning from France: Ludwig Börne in the 1830s

173

Fool in Lear hits home with such power; Werke 20: 203, letter 138]. Wit, for Börne, was an essential aspect of his persona as a political commentator; it was always linked to his calls for political action. To quote Carl Hill: “Tell a joke, change the world” (Hill 230). In the service of his political agenda, Börne developed an astonishing array of rhetorical fireworks. According to Peter Uwe ­Hohendahl: “[For Börne], the critical act is a dialogue with the public. Börne’s style […] is designed to accord with this goal: it is terse, sparing but effective in the use of rhetorical features; it avoids abstract formulations whenever an ­example can make a point more concretely” (Hohendahl, Criticism 224). This chapter discusses Börne’s two masterworks, Briefe aus Paris [Letters from Paris, 1832–34] and Menzel der Franzosenfresser [Menzel: He Eats French People, 1837], setting them within the political and intellectual context of their time.5 It seeks to affirm the continued relevance of Börne’s work and his cosmo­ politan version of German national identity. The central argument of this chapter is that Börne calls upon his fellow Germans to learn from the progressive politics of the French. He therefore represents a German patriotism that rejects nationalism, seeing France as an example worthy of emulation. Indeed, Börne regards close political partnership between France and Germany as a precondition for the spread of democracy in Europe as a whole. Furthermore, this chapter aims to let Börne speak as much as possible in his own words. All too often, critics have regarded Börne through the prism of Heine. One of the purposes of this chapter is to show that Börne is well worth reading in his own right. 2

Loving France in Germany’s Interest

Börne draws on the heritage of the Enlightenment and sees the French Revolution of 1789 as a vital step towards the practical realisation of the Enlightenment project. For him, France embodies the political modernity that Germany has yet to catch up with. In the 1830s Börne planned a history of the French Revolution, for which he produced around a hundred pages of notes. In the section entitled “Französische Revolution überhaupt, Vergangenheit, Gegenwart, Zukunft” [The French Revolution in General: Past, Present, Future], he writes:

5 For a discussion of how Börne and other Jewish writers contributed to nationalist discourses in nineteenth-century Germany, see Anita Bunyan’s chapter in this volume.

174

Schonfield

Man darf die französische Revolution nicht als eine isolierte geschichtliche Erscheinung betrachten, die sich in Frankreich allein begab, so daß man die spätere Revolution anderer Länder nur als deren Folgen, als Nachahmung, Ansteckung erklärt. Die französische Revolution war ­gleich vom Beginne an europäisch. Frankreich war nur das Glied des euro­päischen Körpers, an dem jene innere Bewegung zuerst sichtbar ward. […] Betrachtet man die französische Revolution als eine europäische Angelegenheit, so ergibt sich, daß sie durch Napoleon nicht unterbrochen, sondern befördert worden. Er nahm den ganzen Vorrat der französischen Freiheit, ihn als Saatkorn in Europa auszustreuen. [We must not regard the French Revolution as an isolated historical phenomenon which only took place in France, so that we explain subsequent revolutions in other countries only as knock-on effects, imitation, or contagion. From the very beginning, the French Revolution was a ­European one. France was only the limb of the European body which first displayed this inner movement. […] If we consider the French Revolution as a European affair, it follows that it was not interrupted by Napoleon, but promoted by him. He took the whole stock of French freedom and scattered it across Europe like seed corn; 2: 1095.] This explains why Börne was so interested in France and its politics: because he saw it as a remedy for the German Misère, and for Europe as a whole. Incidentally, Börne only admired Napoleon in so far as he propagated the values of the French Revolution. Unlike Heine, however, Börne had no sympathy for Napoleon as a political leader, rejecting him as a dictator. Instead, he hoped for a future in which France and Germany would eventually become equal partners in the context of a democratic Europe. In Menzel der Franzosenfresser, he writes: “Frankreich und Deutschland müssen, um mächtig und unabhängig zu sein, einander ihre Kräfte leihen und eines von dem andern abhängen” [In order to be independent and strong, France and Germany must lend each other their strengths, and depend upon each other; 3: 910]. Paul Michael Lützeler argues that, in his activity as a cultural mediator, Börne hoped to achieve a synthesis between the revolutionary, destructive talents of the French and the constructive energies of the Germans (106).6 Hence the titles of his journals, 6 This is a reference to a passage in Menzel der Franzosenfresser, where Börne writes: “Es ist die Aufgabe der Franzosen, das alte baufällige Gebäude der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft zu zerstören und abzutragen; es ist die Aufgabe der Deutschen, das neue Gebäude zu gründen und aufzuführen” [It is the task of the French to demolish the dilapidated building of bourgeois society and clear it away; it is the task of the Germans to plan and construct the new building; 3: 905].

Learning from France: Ludwig Börne in the 1830s

175

Die Wage and La Balance, suggesting a political equilibrium between the two countries. While Börne admired French political progress, however, he also loved ­Germany and celebrated the virtues of the German Geist [spirit]. As he put it in 1835: “Aux Allemands le génie, aux Français le talent” [The Germans have ­genius and the French have talent; 2: 891]. In other words, Börne’s cosmopolitanism was not entirely free of a cultural bias. This bias is perhaps most evident when he denounces the slippery qualities of the French language itself: “cette langue façonnée et corrompue depuis deux siècles par les rois, les diplomates et les aristocrates de toute l’Europe, cette dangereuse langue qui est polyglotte pour le mensonge et bègue pour la vérité” [this language fashioned and corrupted for two centuries by kings, diplomats and aristocrats from all over ­Europe; this dangerous language which is polyglot when it comes to lying, but stammers to tell the truth; 2: 888]. As one French critic cleverly observed, Börne “liebte Frankreich im Interesse Deutschlands” [Börne loved France because it was in Germany’s interest to do so; Marcuse 190]. The use of France as a model can be traced back to Börne’s early writings. In an essay of 1808 entitled “Über Theorie und Praxis in der Politik” [On Theory and Praxis in Politics], Börne observes the drastic liberal reforms taking place in Prussia. Baron von Stein (1757–1831), recently appointed Prussian interior minister, had announced the abolition of serfdom on 9 October 1807, to come into effect three years later. Börne comments: Unser prosaisches Vaterland hat sich plötzlich der Genialität hingegeben, hat abgeworfen den Reifrock und die steife Schnürbrust, in der seine Staats­verfassung bis jetzt ängstlich keuchend einherging. […] Doch der Leier des gallischen Orpheus konnte keiner widerstehen, und sogar die deutschen Bären tanzten. [Our prosaic Fatherland has suddenly succumbed to brilliance; it has thrown off its farthingale and the stiff corset in which, until now, its ­political constitution went wheezing about fearfully. […] Yet no one could resist the lyre of the Gallic Orpheus, and even the German bears have started dancing; 1: 155.] Börne’s point is clear: the Prussians have only liberated their serfs because their hand was forced by Napoleon’s liberation of the serfs in the Duchy of Warsaw and in the Kingdom of Westphalia (Bock 83). Prussia’s liberal reforms were simply a response to the Napoleonic threat. As soon as Napoleon was defeated, promises of further reforms soon evaporated; Stein’s liberal

176

Schonfield

s­uccessor, Karl August von Hardenberg, died in 1822, his modest proposals thwarted by Metternich. Börne’s satire was sometimes vicious, but so was the repressive political system he opposed. Indeed, Börne justifies political militancy and revolutionary agitation by arguing that the authorities have left the liberals no other choice but to break the law (Marcuse 202). Marcuse tells us that Börne wanted to emancipate the Germans “aus dem Ghetto ihrer Sklavenart” [from the ghetto of their servility; 23]. Some of Börne’s formulations are almost Brechtian in their simplicity; for example, in the thirteenth letter from Paris, on the subject of the Belgian Revolution of 1830–31, we read: “Man muß sich nur immer fragen: wem gehört [ein] Land? Gehört es dem Volke oder gehört es dem Fürsten?” [you have to keep on asking: Who owns a country? Does it belong to the people or does it belong to the prince?; 3: 63]. The question of property is central in The Communist Manifesto; Brecht asks it too in Kuhle Wampe (1932). Börne, however, lacked the intellectual weight of Heine, Marx, and Brecht. It was as a publicist that he excelled, and in terms of his influence as a moral authority he is perhaps most comparable to G.E. Lessing (Marcuse 32–33; Jasper 26). With these points in mind, let us now turn to Börne’s Briefe aus Paris. 3

Briefe aus Paris (1832–34)

Börne moved to Paris in September 1830, shortly after the July Revolution which put the so-called “bourgeois monarch” Louis Philippe on the throne. The first few Briefe document Börne’s excitement as he makes the journey from Karlsruhe to Paris. Once there, he writes his reports almost on a daily basis, like a barometer, tracking the shifts in French politics and beyond. Initially, extracts from the letters were published in liberal journals such as Wirth’s Deutsche Tribüne. The letters were first published in book form by Julius Campe in Hamburg. In order to avoid censorship, they appeared with a fake title page giving a false place of publication (Offenbach) and an imaginary publisher (L. Brunet) (Jasper 198). Such precautions were necessary, because progressive German publishers in the 1830s risked a variety of reprisals, including losing their licence to publish, arrest, or even banishment (Kortländer 13–14). Gert Sautermeister argues that Börne’s Parisian letters are structured in terms of a double perspective: as the narrator walks through Paris, his mind reflects continually on the political conditions back home in Germany: “Nur im Spiegel des Pariser Lebens kann die ganze Schmach der deutschen Verhältnisse offenbar werden” [only in the mirror of Parisian life can the full disgrace of the conditions in Germany be revealed; Sautermeister 132]. The rhetorical

Learning from France: Ludwig Börne in the 1830s

177

term for this technique is synkrisis (σύγκρισις), the comparative juxtaposition of people and things, in Latin, comparatio. Through its “agonal element,” synkrisis is “related to the genre of debate, both in prose and verse” (Gärtner). As Börne’s text moves continually back and forth between France and Germany, it opens up a space for wide-ranging political debate. Every new political development in France is weighed up in terms of its implications for Germany. ­German conditions are tested against French conditions, but at the same time the frequent references to the situation “back home” in Germany reveal Börne’s true loyalties: the French example shows that liberal democracy in Germany is not a pipe dream, but a realistic prospect. Börne’s political programme is clear: he wants the abolition of aristocratic rule in the German Confederation and the establishment of a liberal democracy. In the service of this aim, he develops a vivid, vernacular style, full of unexpected twists and turns, and enlivened by unexpected, entertaining set ­pieces. Readers whose picture of Börne derives solely from Heine’s Atta Troll (1841), where Börne is lampooned as a clumsy bear, or the Denkschrift, where Börne is cast as a puritan prude, are likely to be surprised if they read Börne’s Parisian letters, which are full of grace, elegance, and wit. The fraternal resemblance between the two rival authors is indeed remarkable. In the fourth letter, for example, Börne mocks the unbelievable patience of the Germans, their tendency to put up with their oppression. He uses the dramatic conceit of addressing Patience herself, whom he apostrophises as the goddess of the ­Germans and of tortoises. He begs her to hang his hopes with lead weights, and he promises to be loyal to her and to wait patiently, in all weathers, for many years, outside the Frankfurt Federal Convention until the deputies come out and ­announce press freedom (3: 12–13; letter 4). And Börne has some great ­epigrams as well, e.g.: “taub wie das Gewissen eines Königs” [as deaf as the conscience of a king; 3: 16; letter 4]. The opening letters from Paris are characterised by a sense of euphoria. Börne delights in the achievements of the French and wants to thank them for championing the cause of liberty in Europe. Such is his sense of optimism that he even proposes the unification of France and Germany. He points out that a thousand years ago, long before “France” and “Germany” existed, their territories belonged to a much larger political entity called the Kingdom of the Franks, which was transformed by Charlemagne into the Carolingian Empire. Three decades after Charlemagne’s death, in August 843, the Carolingian Empire was divided by the Treaty of Verdun into three kingdoms (West Francia, Middle Francia and East Francia). Börne thinks that after a millennium of separation, it is time for a rapprochement between these territories:

178

Schonfield

In wenigen Jahren wird es ein Jahrtausend, daß Frankreich und Deutschland, die früher nur ein Reich bildeten, getrennt wurden. Dieser dumme Streich wurde, gleich allen dummen Streichen in der Politik, auf einem Kongresse beschlossen, zu Verdun im Jahre 843. […] Ich hoffe, im Jahre 1843 endigt das tausendjährige Reich des Antichrists, nach dessen Voll­ endung die Herrschaft Gottes und der Vernunft wieder eintreten wird. Wir haben nämlich den Plan gemacht, Frankreich und Deutschland wieder zu einem großen fränkischen Reiche zu vereinigen. Zwar soll jedes Land seinen eigenen König behalten, aber beide Länder eine gemeinschaftliche Nationalversammlung haben. Der französische König soll wie früher in Paris thronen, der deutsche in unsrem Frankfurt und die ­Nationalversammlung jedes Jahr abwechselnd in Paris oder in Frankfurt gehalten werden. [In a couple of years it will be a millennium since France and Germany were separated; until then they formed one empire. This stupid trick was, like all stupid tricks in politics, agreed upon at a Congress, at Verdun in the year 843. […] I hope that in the year 1843 the thousand-year empire of the Antichrist will end, after which the reign of God and reason will be restored. We have made a plan to reunite France and Germany into a great Frankish empire. Each country will retain its own monarch, but both countries will have a shared National Assembly. The French king will sit on the throne in Paris as before, the German one in Frankfurt, and the National Assembly will meet on an annual basis, alternating between Paris and Frankfurt; 3: 26–27; letter 6.] On the basis of this paragraph alone, Börne deserves to be credited as one of the intellectual pioneers of the European Union. It is worth noting, however, that at this point, 19 September 1830, Börne was still in favour of a constitutional monarchy in both France and Germany. As we shall see, it took a year before he became disillusioned with the July monarchy. In the autumn of 1830, though, Börne was still enjoying the honeymoon ­period of the July Revolution. He admired the swiftness of the revolution and the absence of reprisals, then also contrasted the mildness of the French people with the viciousness of the (German) princes: Schnell haben sie gesiegt, schneller haben sie verziehen. Wie mild hat das Volk die erlittenen Kränkungen erwidert […]! Nur im offenen Kampfe, auf dem Schlachtfelde hat es seine Gegner verwundet. Wehrlose Gefangene wurden nicht ermordet, Geflüchtete nicht verfolgt, Versteckte nicht aufgesucht, Verdächtige nicht beunruhigt. So handelt ein Volk!

Learning from France: Ludwig Börne in the 1830s

179

Fürsten aber sind unversöhnlich, und unauslöschlich ist der Durst ihrer Rache. [They were quick in their victory, and even quicker to forgive. How mildly the people have responded to the insults they have suffered […]. They only wounded their opponents on the open battlefield. Unarmed prisoners have not been murdered, fugitives and those in hiding have not been pursued, those under suspicion have not been disturbed. That is how a people behaves! But princes are implacable, and their thirst for revenge is inextinguishable; 3: 28; letter 6.] The mercy and forbearance shown by the French people gives the lie to those commentators who try to depict the revolutionaries as vicious beasts: “Mich empört die niederträchtige Unverschämtheit der Fürstenschmeichler, welche die Völker als Tiger, die Fürsten als Lämmer darstellen” [I am disgusted by the malicious impudence of the flatterers of princes, who portray the people as tigers and the princes as lambs; 3: 29; letter 6]. Börne keeps coming back to the immorality of princes; he is convinced that justice is on the side of the liberals: “das ist die Fürstennatur, die sich hier gezeigt, die wahnsinnige Ruchlosigkeit, die meint, ihrem persönlichen Vorteile dürfe man das Wohl eines ganzen Volkes aufopfern” [it is the nature of princes that reveals itself here, the crazed infamy which thinks that one can sacrifice the welfare of an entire people to one’s own advantage; 3: 54–55; letter 12].7 Although Börne is vocal in his opposition to the German princes, he nevertheless admits that he is scared by the prospect of a German revolution. Perhaps Germany is not yet ready for such an upheaval: Möchte es nur bei uns friedlich abgehen; denn eine Revolution der Deutschen wäre selbst mir ein Schrecken. Diese Menschen wissen noch gar nicht, was sie wollen, und das ist das Gefährlichste. Sie wären imstande und metzelten sich um einen Punkt über das I [sic]. [May it all go peacefully in our German lands; a German Revolution would be terrifying, even for me. These people do not even know what they want, that is what is most dangerous. They would be capable of butchering each other over a dot on the i; 3: 85–86; letter 18.] Such moments of doubt and desperation often recur in the Paris letters, as Börne swings back and forth between optimism and pessimism. His spirits are alternately lifted and crushed by the constantly changing fortunes of the 7 For other German responses to the July Revolution in France, see Wehler (2: 345–62).

180

Schonfield

­ rogressive, liberal cause. The Belgian declaration of independence is a high p point; the Polish Uprising of November 1830 gives rise to initial optimism, which is later crushed. Gradually, an increasing sense of disillusionment with the July monarchy creeps into the letters. The sixtieth letter from Paris, dated 30 November–4 December 1831, shows Börne at his most radical. The letter starts with a glimmer of optimism, as Börne pays tribute to his colleague Johann Georg August Wirth, the publisher of the Tribüne, who has moved to the Rhineland-Palatinate in order to evade censorship, because French laws were still in place there (3: 370; letter 60).8 The sixtieth letter was, however, written against the background of the Lyon silk weavers’ revolt (Canut revolt) of October–December 1831. The revolt had ­begun in October when the poverty-stricken silk weavers (canuts) had asked the government prefect to intervene in their negotiations to establish a fixed rate for their products, but the manufacturers refused to come to an agreement. On 22 November 1831 the silk weavers attacked Lyon and held the city for ten days, proclaiming their slogan “Live free working or die fighting.” The rising was put down by 20,000 troops at a cost of 600 military and civilian casualties (­Goldstein 147).9 The uprising revealed the clash of interests between workers and the bourgeoisie, and in his sixtieth letter, Börne expresses his disappointment with the July Monarchy, and his recognition that another social revolution is still to come: Hier geht es schlecht, man hat die Suppe kalt werden lassen, und dabei rufen die Väter des Volks demselben wie einem Kinde noch ganz ironisch zu: verbrenne dich nicht! Das gute Volk hat sich mit Blut und Schweiß die Freiheit erworben, und die spitzbübische Kammer, die in Pantoffeln in ihrem Comptoir saß, sagte ihm: Ihr wißt mit dem Gelde doch nicht umzugehen, wir wollen es euch verwalten. Und ich sehe nicht, wie die Sache besser werden kann, außer durch eine Art neuer Revolution. Nach dem bis jetzt bestehenden Wahlgesetz wählen nur die Reichen, also die aristokratisch Gesinnten, und nur die Reichsten können Deputierte werden. […] das Wahlgesetz [müßte] geändert, demokratischer gemacht werden.

8 In order to enjoy the privilege of French-style laws, the inhabitants of this province were forced to pay higher taxes by the Bavarian government. As a result, the region became a centre for the republican opposition within Germany, and in May 1832 the Hambach festival was held there, with Börne as one of the guest speakers. 9 The July monarchy reacted to strikes with repression: “Troops were frequently used to break strikes, and over a thousand strikers were jailed between 1830–4” (Goldstein 147). On the Canut revolt of 1831, see also Mason 25–46.

Learning from France: Ludwig Börne in the 1830s

181

Allein die Kammer votiert die Gesetze und wird natürlich kein Wahlgesetz genehmigen, das ihnen die Macht aus den Händen zieht. [Things are going badly here, they have let the soup go cold, and yet the patricians address the people as if they were children and, with complete irony, they tell them: Don’t burn yourself! The good people have earned their freedom with their sweat and blood, and the villainous Chamber, sitting in its office in slippers, tells them: You do not know how to handle your money, we will look after it for you. And I do not see how this matter can be improved unless there is some kind of new revolution. According to the existing electoral law, only the rich can vote, those who are aristocratically minded, and only the richest can become deputies. […] The electoral law must be changed and made more democratic. But the Chamber votes on the laws and of course it will never pass an electoral law which removes power from its own hands; 3: 113; letter 24.] The image of the revolutionary soup gone stone cold, while the patricians instruct the people not to burn themselves on it, is a sensual image worthy of Heine. It contradicts the cliché of the puritan, ascetic Börne. Like Heine, Börne envisages the revolution in terms of food, in the knowledge that sometimes only hunger can drive people to rebel (Reed 23–24). In a manner similar to Heine, Börne conveys his point graphically, depicting the aristocratic deputies lounging around in their slippers, while the people are condemned to sip cold soup. And the passage also alludes to the tutelage (Bevormundung) that Kant had criticised in his famous essay on Enlightenment, Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung? [Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?; 1784], in which Kant urges his readers to have the courage to use their own reason. Börne echoes Kant, condemning the patronising attitude of the ruling classes who infantilise their citizens, claiming to know what is best for them (i.e. cold soup). The workers’ uprising in Lyon gives Börne an insight into the phenomenon of revolutionary class struggle that would later be theorised by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Börne declares that there is now a war going on between the rich and the poor (3: 370–72; letter 60). The people will no longer be fobbed off by empty promises: “das Volk gibt keine Bratwurst für die allerhuldvollsten Redensarten, es will bares Geld sehen” [the people don’t give a sausage for the most elegant-sounding phrases, they want to see cash; 3: 370; letter 60].10 Börne’s insights about class warfare were occasioned by a damaging slip by the 10

There is a similar rhetorical move in Heine’s later poem “Die Wanderratten,” although Heine’s poem emphasises food rather than money.

182

Schonfield

French Minister of the Interior, Casimir-Pierre Perier (1777–1832). Perier, who had refused to make any concessions to the people of Lyon, had let slip an explosive truth, that there is a class struggle taking place between the rich and poor. Börne regards Perier’s admission as an embarrassing tactical error: Es sei nichts weiter als ein Krieg der Armen gegen die Reichen, derjenigen, die nichts zu verlieren hätten, gegen diejenigen, die etwas besitzen! Und diese fürchterliche Wahrheit, die, weil sie eine ist, man in den tiefsten Brunnen versenken müßte, hielt der wahnsinnige Mensch hoch empor und zeigte sie aller Welt! [We hear that it is nothing more than the war of the poor against the rich; those who have nothing to lose against those who own property! And this terrible truth, which, because it is true, should be buried at the bottom of the deepest well, this lunatic has held it aloft and displayed it to the entire world; 3: 371; letter 60.] By presenting himself as the champion of the middle classes against the poor, Perier has effectively let the cat out of the bag. His admission that the political interests of the bourgeoisie and those of the workers are irreconcilably opposed has revealed the existence of the class struggle that the July monarchy had attempted to conceal. Perier would have been wiser to have concealed this “terrible truth […] at the bottom of the deepest well.” But now that this truth has been revealed, it challenges the very legitimacy of the July monarchy, exposing it as a plutocracy that serves the interests of the rich against the French people. Börne goes on to consider the full implications of this truth: Es ist wahr, der Krieg der Armen gegen die Reichen hat begonnen, und wehe jenen Staatsmännern, die zu dumm oder zu schlecht sind, zu begreifen, daß man nicht gegen die Armen, sondern gegen die Armut zu Felde ziehen müsse. Nicht gegen den Besitz, nur gegen die Vorrechte der Reichen streitet das Volk; wenn aber diese Vorrechte sich hinter dem Besitze verschanzen, wie will das Volk die Gleichheit, die ihm gebührt, anders erobern, als indem es den Besitz erstürmt? [It is true, the war of the poor against the rich has begun, and woe betide those statesmen who are too foolish or too wicked to understand that one must not combat poor people, but poverty itself. The people do not contest property, they only contest the privileges of the rich; but if these privileges become entrenched behind property, then how can the people win the equality that is their due, except by storming property? 3: 371–72; letter 60.]

Learning from France: Ludwig Börne in the 1830s

183

Instead of combating poverty, Perier has chosen to combat the poor, and Börne can already see that the writing is on the wall for the July monarchy. The July Revolution of 1830 stands exposed as a plutocratic coup; a genuinely egalitarian social revolution has yet to be achieved. The Revolution of 1848, a decade after his death, proved him right. But although Börne observes the reality of a class war, he stops short of any Marxist conclusions. He does not want the bourgeoisie and the workers to fight each other. On the contrary, he wants both classes to unite and oppose the continuing power of the aristocracy: Diese Furcht und diesen Hochmut [der Bürger] wissen die Aristokraten in Frankreich und England sehr gut zu benutzen. Den Pöbel hetzen sie im stillen gegen die Bürger auf und diesen rufen sie zu: Ihr seid verloren, wenn ihr euch nicht an uns anschließt. Der dumme Bürger glaubt das und begreift nicht, daß seine eigene Freiheit, sein eigener Wohlstand schwankt, solange das arme Volk nicht mit ihm in gleiche Freiheit und gleichen Wohlstand eintrete; er begreift nicht, daß, solange es einen ­Pöbel gibt, es auch einen Adel gibt und daß, solange es einen Adel gibt, seine Ruhe und sein Glück gefährdet bleibt [sic]. [The aristocrats in France and England know very well how to use this fear and arrogance of the bourgeoisie. In secret they stir up the rabble against the bourgeoisie and then they tell the middle classes: You are lost if you do not join forces with us. The foolish citizen believes it and does not realise that his own freedom, his own prosperity is at risk as long as the poor people do not also enjoy the same freedom and prosperity; he does not understand that as long as there is a rabble, there is also an aristocracy; and as long as there is an aristocracy then his own freedom and fortune are in danger; 3: 372–73; letter 60.] Börne thus appeals to the bourgeoisie, arguing that the aristocracy threatens their interests more directly than the workers do, and pointing out that an egalitarian society has no need to fear a revolution. These are the insights that Börne derives from his observation of French politics in late 1831. Meanwhile, Börne was coming under fire from moderate liberal authors in Germany, to whom his radicalism was something of an embarrassment. Börne was censured, for example, by the Prussian novelist Willibald Alexis. In a r­ eview of the first volume of Börne’s Briefe aus Paris published on 1 December 1831, Alexis wrote: “Mich dünkt, so etwas von erschütternd Nichtigem, in einer abschreckenden Gestalt, ist noch nicht dagewesen, wenigstens in der deutschen Literatur” [It seems to me that this sort of shocking nullity, in a such a disagreeable form, has never been seen before, at least not in German ­literature; Jasper

184

Schonfield

209]. Börne retaliated with a biting caricature of Alexis in his seventy-fourth letter from Paris, subtitled “Herings-Salat” [herring salad], a reference to A ­ lexis’s real name G.W.F. Häring (3: 523–61). Börne and Heine were also criticised by the Jewish author Berthold Auerbach, who felt that their inflammatory rhetoric was bringing the Jewish minority in Germany into disrepute; Auerbach thus took care to distance himself from the “libertinism” of Junges Deutschland (­Bunyan 70–71). In the seventy-fourth letter, before launching into his caricature of Willibald Alexis, Börne defends himself against the charge that he is not a German patriot: Wenn ich den Deutschen sage: […] eignet euch die Vorzüge der Franzosen an; und ihr werdet das erste Volk der Welt–habe ich denn damit erklärt, daß die Deutschen Zwerge sind und die Franzosen Riesen? Austauschen, nicht tauschen sollen wir mit Frankreich. Käme ein Gott zu mir und spräche: Ich will dich in einen Franzosen umwandeln mit allen deinen Gedanken und Gefühlen, mit allen deinen Erinnerungen und Hoffnungen–­ich würde ihm antworten: Ich danke, Herr Gott. Ich will ein Deutscher bleiben mit allen seinen Mängeln und Auswüchsen; ein Deutscher mit seinen sechsunddreißig Fürsten, mit seinen heimlichen Gerichten, mit seiner Zensur, mit seiner unfruchtbaren Gelehrsamkeit, mit seinem ­Demute, seinem Hochmute, seinen Hofräten, seinen Philistern – – [If I tell the Germans: […] acquire the virtues of the French, and you will be first among the nations of the world–have I thereby declared that the Germans are dwarves and the French giants? We should exchange ideas with France, not change places with them. If a god came to me and said: “I will transform you into a Frenchman with all your thoughts and feelings, all your memories and hopes”–I would reply: “No thank you, Lord. I want to remain a German with all his faults and deformities; a ­German with his thirty-six princes, with his secret courts, with his ­censorship, his fruitless erudition, his humility, his arrogance, his court counsellors, his philistines – –”; 3: 513; letter 74.] Börne thus explains that he is indeed a true patriot, because he wants his fellow Germans to enjoy the same benefits of modern political democracy as the French. Heine’s own definition of patriotism in his preface to Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen [Germany. A Winter’s Tale, 1844] is much more radical in terms of its secularism.11 Whether or not such arguments had any effect on Börne’s 11

“[W]enn wir die Dienstbarkeit bis in ihrem letzten Schlupfwinkel, dem Himmel, zerstören, wenn wir den Gott, der auf Erden im Menschen wohnt, aus seiner Erniedrigung

Learning from France: Ludwig Börne in the 1830s

185

many opponents is another matter. At this point, 7 February 1832, Börne was still able to shoulder such attacks relatively easily. Things were very different four years later, however, when Börne’s patriotism was called into question by his close ally Wolfgang Menzel. 4

Menzel der Franzosenfresser (1837)

In early 1836, Ludwig Börne and Wolfgang Menzel, who had been colleagues for years, publicly broke with each other. Until 1835, Menzel had often published Börne’s articles in his periodical, Cotta’s Literatur-Blatt, the literary supplement of the Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände [Morning Paper for the Educated Classes]. The two critics’ united front against Goethe had concealed fundamental differences in their approaches, for, while Börne accused Goethe of political conservatism and support of censorship, Menzel’s real target was Goethe’s cosmo­politanism. The collaboration between the two men broke down when Menzel, in the autumn of 1835, published a vicious review of Karl Gutzkow’s Wally, die Zweiflerin [Wally the Doubter, 1835] which condemned Gutzkow and his colleagues in Junges Deutschland [Young Germany]. Although Gutzkow and his friends had previously contributed to the Literatur-Blatt, Menzel was infuriated by their intention to launch a new periodical, the Deutsche Revue. The hatchet job on Gutzkow was therefore an attempt to ward off a competitor. Menzel’s denunciation served as the pretext for a Prussian ministerial decree of 14 November 1835, banning the writings of Junges Deutschland and Heine. Worse still, certain aspects of Menzel’s attack on Gutzkow and Heine drew on Börne’s own review of Heine’s De l’Allemagne, published in the Réformateur on 30 May 1835 (2: 885–903; on this point, see also Weber 10). Menzel exempted Börne from his denunciation, hoping that he could drive a wedge between Börne and Gutzkow. But Börne chose instead to defend the Young Germans, and responded at first in French with “Gallophobie de M. Menzel” [The Gallophobia of Mr Menzel], published in January 1836 in his own Paris-based journal, La Balance (2: 952–60). This was the definitive break between the two men, as Menzel now turned his fire on Börne himself in an article of 11 April 1836, “Herr Börne und der deutsche Patriotismus” [Mr Börne and German Patriotism]. It contained a number of personal attacks—Menzel claimed that Börne retten, […] ganz Frankreich wird uns alsdann zufallen […]. Das ist mein Patriotismus” [If we destroy subservience even in its very last refuge, heaven itself, if we rescue from degradation the God who lives on earth in the form of human beings, then all of France will fall at our feet […]. That is my patriotism; Sämtliche Schriften 4: 574–75].

186

Schonfield

was a turncoat and a sick man who, from an excess of spleen, had sworn to take revenge on his German fatherland. But the article also embodies the ideological parting of the ways between the two men: Menzel rejects Börne’s cosmopolitan republicanism, proclaiming that only patriotism can guarantee freedom. Menzel also defends the monarchy and advocates only gradual, piecemeal constitutional reform: “langsame Evolution” [slow evolution; Menzel 147]. In response to this provocation, Börne decided to settle his accounts with Menzel. In a letter to Karl Theodor Welcker of 16 May 1836, he says that he wants “eine Fackel unter die Nachtbuben […] schleudern” [to throw a torch among the nocturnal rogues; 5: 787]. Börne’s definitive polemic against Menzel was published as Menzel der Franzosenfresser (1837). The end of the alliance between Börne and Menzel heralded the division of German liberalism into two opposing camps, republican and nationalist. ­Menzel’s political strategy aimed at separating German liberalism from its French counterpart; he feared French expansionism more than the political repression of the German confederation. Börne, in contrast, feared a German national renewal without political liberation, as he had already experienced in 1815 (Hohendahl 197). While Menzel prioritised national unity, contenting himself with moderate political reform and the gradual transition towards a constitutional monarchy, for Börne the project of radical democratic reform took precedence. And while Menzel’s nation-building project rejects French republicanism as a foreign import, Börne warns against a blind patriotism that would leave the oppressive political structures of the ancien régime intact. In the words of Peter Uwe Hohendahl: Ein Nationalismus, der auf die liberalen Freiheiten der Bürger verzichtet, ist in den Augen Börnes ein verzerrter Patriotismus, der den Fürsten in die Hände spielt. Aus diesem Grunde hält Börne am Paradigma Frankreichs fest, denn das postrevolutionäre Frankreich ist ihm eine Garantie dafür, daß Deutschland seine Unabhängigkeit von den Fürsten erreichen wird. [A nationalism that sacrifices the liberal freedoms of the citizenry is, in Börne’s view, a distorted patriotism that plays into the hands of the princes. For this reason, Börne remains attached to France as a paradigm, because he regards post-revolutionary France as a guarantee that ­Germany will achieve its independence from the princes; Hohendahl, ­Kosmopolitischer Patriotismus 197–98.] In spite of his disillusionment with the July monarchy, Börne still stresses the importance of learning from political developments in France, and still

Learning from France: Ludwig Börne in the 1830s

187

b­ elieves that Germany and France should work closely together in order to usher in a new age of democracy in Europe. In Menzel der Franzosenfresser, Börne adopts an Enlightenment position with respect to nationalism, seeing enlightened debate and tolerance to be more important than particularism. His principal target is nationalist vanity (Eitelkeit), which he regards as a flaw that will play into the hands of the conservative reaction. He points out that the egoism of a country is just as damaging as the egoism of an individual: “Ist der Egoismus eines Landes weniger ein Laster als der eines Menschen?” [Is the egoism of a country less of a vice than that of a person? 3: 905–06]. He also declares: “Was mich betrifft, so war ich, Gott sei Dank, nie ein Tölpel des Patriotismus; dieser Köder des Ehrgeizes, sei es der Könige, sei es der Patrizier oder der Völker, hat mich nie gefangen” [As for myself, thank God, I have never been a fool for patriotism; it is a snare for the ambitious that has lured kings, patricians, and peoples, but I never fell for it; 3: 906]. This critique of nationalist vanity resonates with Voltaire, who, in the entry on “Patrie” [country, fatherland] in his Dictionnaire Philosophique (1764), observed: “Il est triste que souvent, pour être bon patriote, on soit l’ennemi du reste des hommes” [It is sad that to be a good patriot one must often become the enemy of the rest of humanity]. Thus, for Voltaire, nationalism is a dangerous imposture, one that has a detrimental effect on humanity in general. Writing in 1945 at the close of the Second World War, George Orwell made some similar observations, arguing that nationalism tends towards the abandonment of morality and reasoned debate. Orwell defines nationalism as “power hunger tempered by self-deception” (4) and points out that, for nationalists, “actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage […] which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side” (13). This means that a nationalist tends to interpret everything in ideological terms: any argument or fact that obstructs or diminishes national pride is simply dismissed, and morality is subordinated to the so-called “national interest.” Voltaire, Börne, and Orwell therefore agree that the moral and intellectual integrity of nationalists becomes compromised to such an extent that they will tend to avoid rational debate.12 In Menzel der Franzosenfresser, Börne quotes Menzel’s accusations against him in detail, including the claim that Börne is guilty of slandering his own country. Börne responds that speaking the truth is more important than flattering national vanity: 12

On Bismarck’s arrogance and national pride, see Snyder 134–35.

188

Schonfield

Für jeden redlichen Mann ist es eine Qual, durch die Wahrheit gezwungen zu werden, von seinem Vaterlande übel zu sprechen; die Landsleute, die Fremden selbst sehen darin nur eine strafbare Verräterei. Allein hören Freimütigkeit und Unparteilichkeit auf, Tugenden zu sein, sobald man sie auf einen Gegenstand seiner Liebe wendet? Die Deutschen haben, seit sie Frankreich mit Erfolg bekämpft, eine Nationaleitelkeit bekommen, von der sie früher frei waren. [For any honest man it is agonising to be forced by the truth to speak ill of your fatherland; your fellow countrymen, even foreigners regard it as punishable treachery. But do frankness and impartiality stop being ­virtues if they are applied to the object of your love? Ever since the ­Germans defeated the French they have acquired a national vanity they once lacked; 3: 909.] Sometimes the truth hurts. Like Orwell in 1945, Börne is defending the importance of reasoned, balanced debate. He opposes the logos of rational argument to the pathos of Menzel’s egoistic cult of Germanness. And Börne adds that there is even something childish about Menzel’s inability to tolerate any criticism of Germany and its culture: “Und dann, ist nicht in jeder Nationaleitelkeit etwas Kindisches, ja selbst Unsinniges?” [And doesn’t every form of national vanity have something childish, even nonsensical about it?; 3: 909]. Like ­Orwell, Börne sees that nationalism has a tendency to lead to the abdication of reason, and the acceptance of tutelage. Menzel had called Börne a disgrace to his country, but Börne responds: “es ist eine Schande, in seinem Vaterlande Sklave zu sein” [it is a disgrace to be a slave in one’s own Fatherland; 3: 913]. Thus, according to Börne, political freedoms and nationalist dogma are essentially incompatible. Börne had attended the Hambacher Fest (Hambach festival) in May 1832, a peaceful democratic assembly which took place in the Rhineland-Palatinate (at the time, part of Bavaria). The festival featured speeches by many leading liberals including Börne, Wirth, and Siebenpfeiffer. (Unfortunately, in the aftermath of the festival, laws on censorship were tightened and all such assemblies were prohibited.) Börne knew from first-hand experience that some of the liberals present at Hambach were also nationalists who were hostile to France, making frequent references to the Wars of Liberation in their speeches. Some of the speeches had even called for Alsace-Lorraine to be returned to Germany. Barer argues that many of the participants at the Hambach festival were “rabid nationalists”: although they “paid lip-service to a cosmopolitan federated Europe,” they also demanded the return of Alsace, and were the first to resort to “folksy Fatherland slogans” in order to prevail over the “democrats”

Learning from France: Ludwig Börne in the 1830s

189

(Barer 346). In Menzel der Franzosenfresser Börne touches on the controversial status of Alsace-Lorraine. In the spirit of democracy, he suggests asking the Alsatians themselves which country they would prefer to belong to: […] fragt die Elsässer, ob sie einwilligen, wieder Deutsche zu werden, ob sie sich glücklich schätzen würden, ihren König gegen einen der deutschen Bundesfürsten, ihre Deputiertenkammer gegen die Frankfurter Bundesversammlung, die Freiheit der Presse gegen die schändliche Zensur, die Nationalgarde gegen die Gendarmerie, die Öffentlichkeit der gerichtlichen Verhandlungen gegen geheime Tribunäle, die Jury gegen abhängige Richter und die Gleichheit der Stände gegen den Hochmut und die Unverschämtheit des Adels und der Satrapen zu vertauschen. [Ask the Alsatians if they are willing to become Germans again. Ask them whether they would count themselves lucky to exchange their king for one of the German confederate princes, their Chamber of Deputies for the Frankfurt Federal Convention, their press freedom for disgraceful censorship, the National Guard for the Gendarmerie, their public legal proceedings for secret tribunals, their juries for dependent judges, and the equality of social classes for the arrogance and outrageous impudence of the aristocracy and the satraps; 3: 912–13.] Börne thus uses the example of French rule in Alsace-Lorraine as a means to illustrate the benefits that France has to offer, such as press freedom and public legal proceedings. At the centre of Börne’s critique of Menzel’s “patriotism” is the distinction between external and internal threats to a country: the ruling powers encourage patriotism if it is directed against an external threat, but they oppose and criminalise patriots whenever they attempt to improve the domestic situation. Börne urges his readers to distinguish between these two types of patriotism. Patriotism is virtuous if it seeks to ameliorate domestic conditions, but it is immoral if it is used only to advance the interests of individuals or a particular social class. This leads us to Börne’s key argument, namely, that being a patriot does not give you the right to dispense with your conscience: Wenn Herr Menzel sagt, für das Vaterland handelt man immer schön, so ist das eine alberne Floskel, albern und lästerlich zugleich. Nein, man handelt nur schön für das Vaterland, wenn es das Vaterland ist, für das man sich bemüht, nicht aber ein einzelner Mensch, ein Stand oder ein Interesse, die durch Ränke und Gewalt sich für das Vaterland geltend zu machen wußten.

190

Schonfield

[When Mr Menzel says “any action in service of the Fatherland is beautiful,” that is a silly cliché, silly and malicious too. No, you only act beautifully for the Fatherland if you are making your efforts for the ­Fatherland itself, but not if you serve a single individual, a class or an ­interest group, who, by means of violence and intrigue, have managed to assert that they represent the Fatherland; 3: 919.] Börne thus warns his readers not to sacrifice their conscience on the altar of “the national interest,” particularly when it is merely a mask for the opportunism of a narrow elite. The analysis of the debate between Börne and Menzel has shown how the two men represent radically different versions of liberalism which are, in turn, informed by opposing conceptions of history and national identity. Menzel regards Germany with almost religious fervour; for him it is a destiny, a sacred imperative which, he thinks, will evolve gradually and organically from within, and which must be defended from French aggression at all costs. The reaction to the French occupation is, of course, the keynote of modern German national identity. Louis Snyder argues that German nationalism was shaped by political Romanticism: In essence it was a reaction against the democratic rationalism expressed in the French concepts of liberty, equality, and fraternity. The French Revolution, it was said, was an explosion of immoderate forces, a tragic watershed which would not be repeated on the German scene. Germans would stress law, order, security and legitimacy (59–60). While Menzel adheres to an essentially Romantic form of nationalism that postulated the organic unity of the German people, and views patriotism much like an unquestioning religious faith, Börne remains attached to a more enlightened, rational version of political progress informed by the French model. Thus he argues that Germany can only achieve true political emancipation if it cooperates closely with France and its other European neighbours. Furthermore, actions are only truly patriotic if they genuinely aim at domestic improvements which would benefit all citizens, and especially the poorest ones. Actions are certainly not patriotic if they exploit people’s vanity and prejudices in order to benefit the careers of a handful of opportunists. 5

Conclusion: Börne Today

At the time of writing, shortly after the AfD-related Chemnitz riots of 1 September 2018, with right-wing populism and nationalism on the rise again in

Learning from France: Ludwig Börne in the 1830s

191

Europe and elsewhere, Börne’s work has great contemporary resonance. As his biographer Ludwig Marcuse points out, Börne was a decent man who campaigned for the practical realisation of the values of the Enlightenment (32– 33). In the face of rising German nationalism, Börne took a stand for universal values: political franchise, parliamentary democracy, liberty, fraternity and social equality. It must be conceded, however, that in the final years of his life, Börne retreated from his Enlightenment positions, translating the radical Catholic author Lamennais (1782–1854) into German. It is ironic that Börne, an admirer of Voltaire, was drawn by the religious extremism of Lamennais. Börne justified this about-turn by claiming that Voltaire’s criticisms of the Catholic Church had been necessary in order to change the constitution of the Church and shift the power balance from the pope and his bishops to the laity (2: 898). But this ignored Lamennais’s deference to ultramontanism, and the rise of papal absolutism in the first half of the nineteenth century under a series of reactionary popes, culminating in Pope Gregory xvi (1830–1846) (Wehler 2: 471). Börne’s turn to radical Catholicism may have been motivated by his dedication to the cause of social revolution, and by his desperation at the reactionary climate of the mid-1830s. Social Catholicism was (and still is) a force to be reckoned with, particularly in the Rhineland and southern regions of Germany, and Börne observed that the Catholicism of the Polish people did not prevent them from playing a leading role in European liberation struggles (2: 894). Catholicism also sustained the Irish liberation struggle. Even if Börne’s support for social Catholicism was motivated by the best of intentions, it still seems like an error of judgement, one that risked exchanging one form of absolutism for another.13 Despite this lapse, Börne’s prose works of the 1830s are still a model of cosmopolitan intellectual engagement. Two centuries after Metternich’s restoration, and a century after the First World War, Börne’s writings are to be recommended: he is one of the most lucid antidotes to nationalism in the whole of German literature.

Works Cited

Primary

Börne, Ludwig. Sämtliche Schriften. Edited by Inge and Peter Rippmann. Melzer, 1964– 68. 5 vols. Börne, Ludwig. Börnes Goethe-Kritik. Fundstücke, edited by Christoph Weiß, Wehrhahn, 2004. Heine, Heinrich. Sämtliche Schriften, edited by Klaus Briegleb, Hanser, 1978. 6 vols. 13

George Orwell regards both political Catholicism (as exemplified by G.K. Chesterton) and Communism as forms of “transferred nationalism” (9, 20).

192

Schonfield

Heine, Heinrich. Werke-Briefe-Lebenszeugnisse. Säkularausgabe. Akademie Verlag/ Editions du CNRS, 1970–84. 27 vols. Menzel, Wolfgang. “Herr Börne und der deutsche Patriotismus.” Literatur-Blatt, 11 Apr. 1836, pp. 145–48.

Secondary

Barer, Shlomo. The Doctors of Revolution: 19th-Century Thinkers Who Changed the World. Thames & Hudson, 2000. Bock, Helmut. Ludwig Börne. Vom Gettojuden zum Nationalschriftsteller. Rütten & Loening, 1962. Bunyan, Anita. “Volksliteratur und nationale Identität. Zu kritischen Schriften Berthold Auerbachs.” Deutschland und der europäische Zeitgeist: Kosmopolitische Dimensionen in der Literatur des Vormärz, edited by Martina Lauster, Aisthesis, 1994, pp. 63–89. Gärtner, Hans Armin. “Synkrisis.” Brill’s New Pauly, 25 June 2018, http://referenceworks. brillonline.com/entries/brill-s-new-pauly/synkrisis-e1127330. Goldstein, Robert J. Political Repression in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Croom Helm, 1983. Hill, Carl. The Soul of Wit: Joke Theory from Grimm to Freud. U of Nebraska P, 1993. Hohendahl, Peter Uwe. “Kosmopolitischer Patriotismus: Ludwig Börne und die Identität Deutschlands.” “Die Kunst—eine Tochter der Zeit.” Neue Studien zu Ludwig Börne, edited by Inge Rippmann and Wolfgang Labuhn, Aisthesis, 1988, pp. 170–200. Hohendahl, Peter Uwe. “Literary Criticism in the Epoch of Liberalism, 1820–70.” A History of German Literary Criticism, edited by Peter Uwe Hohendahl, translated by Franz Blaha et al., U of Nebraska P, 1988, pp. 179–276. Jasper, Willi. Ludwig Börne. Keinem Vaterland geboren. Eine Biographie. Aufbau, 2003. Joch, Markus. Bruderkämpfe. Zum Streit um den intellektuellen Habitus in den Fällen Heinrich Heine, Heinrich Mann und Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Winter, 2000. Kortländer, Bernd. “‘Censur muß sein.’ Heine, die Zensur, das Archiv.” Zensur im 19. Jahrhundert. Das literarische Leben aus Sicht seiner Überwacher, edited by Bernd Kortländer and Enno Stahl, Aisthesis, 2012, pp. 11–20. Lützeler, Paul Michael. Die Schriftsteller und Europa. Von der Romantik bis zur Gegenwart. Piper, 1992. Marcuse, Ludwig. Ludwig Börne. Aus der Frühzeit der deutschen Demokratie. 1929. 3rd ed., Diogenes, 1977. Mason, Paul. Live Working or Die Fighting: How the Working Class Went Global. Vintage, 2008. Orwell, George. Notes on Nationalism. 1945. Penguin, 2018. Reed, T.J. “Heines Appetit.” Heine-Jahrbuch, vol. 22, 1983, pp. 9–29.

Learning from France: Ludwig Börne in the 1830s

193

Sagarra, Eda. Tradition and Revolution: German Literature and Society 1830–1890. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971. Sautermeister, Gert. “Reiseliteratur als Ausdruck der Epoche.” Zwischen Restauration und Revolution 1815–1848, edited by Gert Sautermeister and Ulrich Schmid, 1998. Hansers Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur vom 16. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, general editor Rolf Grimminger, vol. 5, Carl Hanser, 1980–, pp. 116–50. Snyder, Louis L. Roots of German Nationalism. Indiana UP, 1978. Weber, Johannes. Libertin und Charakter. Heinrich Heine und Ludwig Börne im Werturteil deutscher Literaturgeschichtsschreibung 1840–1918. Winter, 1984. Wehler, Hans-Ulrich. Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte. Beck, 2003. 5 vols.

Index anti-French sentiment 3, 49, 63-64, 70–71 anti-Semitism 41, 110, 117, 134, 172 Auerbach, Berthold 113–116 Auerbach, Berthold, works by Der gebildete Bürger 114 Europa 115 Schrift und Volk 114–115 Tagebuch aus Wien 115–116 Becker, Rudolph Zacharias 34–37 Becker, Rudolph Zacharias, works by Das Fragebuch für Lehrer 36 Das Friedensfest, wie solches zu Mildheim gefeiert worden 46 “Die Mildheimische Sittentafel” 36 Leiden und Freuden in siebzehnmonatlicher Gefangenschaft 48–50 Mildheimisches Liederbuch 36, 38, 46–50 “Mildheim System” 36, 38 Noth- und Hülfsbüchlein für Bauersleute 36–38 “Versuch über die Aufklärung des Landmannes” 35, 36 Börne, Ludwig 101, 191 Börne, Ludwig, works by Briefe aus Paris 102, 105, 185 Menzel der Franzosenfresser 103–106, 118, 174, 190 “Über Theorie und Praxis in der Politik” 175 cosmopolitanism 33, 44, 103, 113, 160, 167, 175, 191 and nationalism. See nationalism and cosmopolitanism and patriotism. See patriotism and cosmopolitanism Enlightenment 34, 37, 63, 152, 162, 173 and nationalism. See nationalism and Enlightenment and war 45 Volksaufklärung 34, 36

Frederick II 19, 24, 27 gender 76-81 femininity 81 Hartmann, Moritz 113 Hartmann, Moritz, works by Briefe 117 Gesammelte Werke 108–109 Revolutionäre Erinnerungen 109–111 Hauff, Wilhelm, works by Das Bild des Kaisers 150, 154, 162 Herder, Johann Gottfried 2, 60, 132 Hess, Moses 121, 123–124 Hess, Moses, works by Die europäische Triarchie 123–124, 129, 137 Rom und Jerusalem 122–23, 141 Jews and Jewishness 41, 100–01, 103–05, 107–08, 112, 121–23, 127–29, 131–36, 139, 141–43 Jewish Nationalism 100, 121–23, 128, 137 Kleist, Heinrich von 58, 70, 72 Kleist, Heinrich von, works by Die Hermannsschlacht 71 “Fragment eines Schreibens aus Paris” 73 Sämtliche Briefe 70 liberalism 2, 65, 87, 90, 100, 106, 113, 167, 175, 177, 180, 183, 186 memory 15, 107, 167 Napoleon, Emperor 48, 50, 150, 152, 154, 159 nationalism 124, 142 and chauvinism 14, 16, 117 and cosmopolitanism 153, 160, 162 and Enlightenment 33, 35, 187 and militarism 3, 47 and national stereotypes 73, 77, 93 and nature 93

196 nationalism (cont.) and patriotism. See patriotism and nationalism and Enlightenment. See Enlightenment and war and religion 14 and Romanticism 58, 190 and travel writing 77, 84–85, 90 and war 33, 38, 40, 47, 105, 112, 147, 156 and Zionism 122 Czech 107, 110 Jewish 100, 121–123, 128, 137 pacifism 35, 39, 46, 123 patriotism 12–13, 16, 39, 51, 64, 104, 131, 142, 157, 173, 184, 187, 189 and cosmopolitanism 33 and nationalism 12, 16, 29, 33 and religion 17, 26, 40 and revolution 40 and war 14, 16, 38 regional 100, 105, 166 propaganda 15–17, 26–27, 71 Prussia 14, 16, 18, 20, 24, 29, 63, 153, 156, 163, 175 Raabe, Wilhelm, works by Nach dem großen Kriege 165 revolution 125, 179 and patriotism. See patriotism and revolution French Revolution 2, 35, 37, 40, 47, 68, 125, 173 Industrial Revolution 84 July Revolution 178, 183 Revolution of 1848 106–107, 159, 183 Romanticism 62, 67, 72, 90 and capitalism 57, 60, 67, 72 and nationalism. See nationalism and Romanticism Russia 82–90, 124

Index Schlegel, Friedrich 58, 64, 67–68 Schlegel, Friedrich, works by “Briefe” 60–61 Europa 58, 60, 63 “Reise nach Frankreich” 58, 64, 71–72 socialism 122–123, 141, 143 Spalding, Johann Joachim 14, 20–24 Spalding, Johann Joachim, works by Lebensbeschreibung 23 Kriegs-Gebeth 18–23, 28–29 Tarnow, Fanny 78, 85 Tarnow, Fanny, works by Briefe auf einer Reise nach Petersburg an Freunde geschrieben 79–81 unification, German 1, 84, 90, 99, 107–108, 112, 115, 124, 149, 171 von Struensee, Gustav, works by Vor fünfzig Jahren 162–63 war 46 and Enlightenment. See Enlightenment and war and nationalism. See nationalism and war and patriotism. See patriotism and war and religion 18, 26, 41, 46 of Bavarian Succession 16, 18 Coalition Wars 16 Wars of Liberation 17, 38, 47, 49, 63, 104, 107, 167 Napoleonic Wars 43, 131, 147, 150, 160 Seven Years’ War 16, 29, 41 Zionism 122, 133–134 and nationalism. See nationalism and Zionism Zionism. See also Jewish nationalism