History of German Literature Georg Lukacs 1947
It is in line with the development of Germany that the decisive turns in its history and also in its literature are determined from outside. The stifling darkness of the Restoration and the dominance of Romanticism, which was becoming more and more reactionary, was abruptly interrupted by the July Revolution of 1830 in Paris, after external events such as the Greek uprising, had triggered protests against the oppression of the peoples. But it was not until the February Revolution of 1848 that the rotten system of the Holy Alliance was shaken so decisively that the entire German ideological development began to break new ground.
Of course, this turnaround has its economic foundations in Germany itself: in advancing on the road to modern capitalism, which admittedly is taking place much more slowly than in western countries. However, despite all the reactionary intentions of the restoration, to a certain extent behind the backs of those in power (and also of the people), the process is unstoppable. With it the first unconscious steps towards the real unification of Germany are taken. Even the constitutions of the individual states in the Restoration period are, as far as they came into being, economic and political consequences of the confusion of the “historical” small states left by the Napoleonic period. The states newly created by the Congress of Vienna had to do away with their medieval tax and customs regulations as far as possible in order to be able to live as states at all. This applies primarily to Prussia, which was randomly thrown together from economically and politically very different parts. And precisely Prussia was forced by its situation to extend the inevitable process of unification beyond its borders. In 1828 the conclusion of the Prussian-Hessian customs treaty created the basis for the later Zollverein. Its rapid development made the later German Reich economically a unified area before Bismarck became the political and military executor of the economic development that had already taken place.
Under these conditions, the effect of the Paris Revolution of 1830 in Germany was quite different and more profound than that of the much more powerful events of 1789. The revolution was now having an effect on politically unprepared, immature people. But definite progress can be seen everywhere. For all its naivety and helplessness, the Hambach Festival has a completely different political physiognomy than the professors’ and students’ demonstrations at the Wartburg; the Frankfurt storming of the police precinct and especially the illegal preparatory work for a revolution by Buechner in Hesse have a different meaning than the assassination attempt on Kotzebue. This turn is clearly reflected in the literature. In this context it is almost symbolic that the peak figures of the past period barely survived the July Revolution (Hegel died in 1831, Goethe in 1832). Even more significant, as a prelude to the dissolution of Hegelianism in Hegel’s lifetime, is the Master’s clash with one of his favorite disciples, E. Gans, over the assessment of revolutionary events in France and Belgium: the younger generation of Hegelians begins their departure from the “end of history”, from the system of rules, it begins to see a signpost to the future in historical dialectics, namely a means of socio-political upheaval.
Another personal student of Hegel, Heinrich Heine, coined the fortunate term end of the art period for this turning point: “Present-day art must perish because its principle is still rooted in the defunct, old regime, in the Holy Roman Imperial past. Therefore, like all withered remnants of this past, it stands in the most unpleasant contradiction with the present. This contradiction, and not the movement of the times themselves, is so harmful to art; on the contrary, this movement of the times should even become beneficial to it, as it once was in Athens and Florence, where art is at its most glorious in the wildest war and party storms. Of course, those Greek and Florentine artists did not lead an egoistically isolated artistic life, their idle poetic souls hermetically sealed against the great pains and joys of the time; on the contrary, their works were only the dreamy reflection of their time, and they themselves were whole men whose personality was just as powerful as their creative power ... However, the new age will also give birth to a new art, which will be in enthusiastic harmony with itself, which need not borrow its symbolism from the faded past and which must even produce a new technique, different from that of the past. Until then, with colors and sounds, the self-intoxicated subjectivity, the world-deprived individuality, the god-free personality with all its zest for life may assert itself, which is always more fruitful than the dead illusory nature of the old art.”
It shows Heine’s prudence and insight into the real connections that he regards the immediate future as a transitional period. He knows very well that the great periods of art must be times of profound objective realism. But at the same time he knows that this is not to be expected in the Germany of his present. While in countries where social development has produced at least a vanguard of political maturity such transitional periods give rise to a literature of socio-critical realism (think of the Russian novel of the mid-nineteenth century), this is objectively impossible in nationally torn Germany. That is why Heine proclaims a period of transition as a literary period whose most significant phenomenon is his own lyrically ironic, subjective art. Attempts, even on the part of considerable talent, to create a socially critical realism in Germany naturally existed. But the Germans, pressed into philistinism by the German misery, nationally dismembered, not yet living in the midst of a people that had become a nation, were unable to find either the suitable material or the appropriate form for a socially critical realism in the life around them.
If the abrupt turn of events in German literature formulated by Heine was triggered by the revolutionary events of 1830, it was only explosives that had been around for a long time that exploded. Not only were the ideological leaders of the literary revolution, above all Boerne and Heine, well-known oppositional writers at the time, but also dissatisfaction with the Restoration period and its dominating form of literary expression, Romanticism, arose everywhere.
For our previous analysis of Romanticism has already shown that although it was the leading literary trend in the period between 1806 and 1830, its dominance was always attacked from the most varied quarters. There are those among the writers who, both personally and in terms of their creative method, often show a more or less deep affinity with Romanticism, there are also those who neither politically nor ideologically participated in the obscurantism of fully developed Romanticism, who more or less clearly and decisively put work at the service of progress.
Chamisso’s work is often closely related to Romanticism, although his Schlemihl is more of a forerunner of Hoffmann’s fantasy than a parallel phenomenon to Tieck or Arnim. And his poetry, which reflects the folksy-plebeian tendencies of the time (admittedly more in content than in form) happily accepts to be, in its main line, accusatory or ironically directed against the feudal absolutist, against the oppressed-bourgeois German poverty. More complicated is the development of Immermann. He is always striving to find himself poetically, the more so as his Prussian seriousness, his Prussian clumsiness completely lacks the light hand of a Tieck or Brentano. The contact with Romanticism also prevents him from finding intellectual connection with classical philosophy. Immermann traveled a difficult path before he was able to realistically raise the question of a comprehensive representation of German reality in his great novels and, after a break of decades, to take up the threads of Wilhelm Meister again under completely different conditions. After a long time, Immermann leads the depiction of German life out of formal experiments and provincialism. His solutions are often more than fragile; but precisely their inorganic, fragmentary nature is a reflection of the condition in which German civil society found itself at the time.
The third important transitional figure is of a completely different nature: Platen. He was an ardent opponent of Romanticism, not only politically but also artistically. Platen fought against the Romantic dissolution of form and mysticism. Platen resumes the classical strictness of form and, what is very important, by no means with an academic antiquated content, but with the genuine, future-oriented pathos of the citoyen, with the pathos of love of freedom and hatred of tyrants. This inexorability determines its meaning and its limit. Its poetic greatness is the strictly closed form even for the most complicated, most modern sentiments. His limit lies in the fact that these feelings are often neglected in his work, precisely because of the rigidity of his form.
Here again the inner contradiction of Romanticism as a general art and ideological current is shown. In European and also in German literature, it was neither an unfortunate coincidence nor a simple aberration. The search for expression for specifically modern ways of feeling for life, the striving for renewal of popular forms, especially for the reproduction of such experiences, are an inevitable stage in the development of European literature in the first half of the nineteenth century. It is a German peculiarity that in this tendency the reactionary elements, which were never entirely alien to it, were given such preponderance. If Platen now heroically opposes these efforts and their reactionary and decadent excesses, which are typical of Germany, he loses at the same time many positive things that others could draw from them. The abstractness of his citoyen-pathos and his literary tragedy in general account for the fact that he stands alone, both literary and politically, in Germany during the Restoration. As Herwegh, his great admirer, rightly remarked about his fate, Platen had “passed passionately throughout his life for the participation of the people and found it nowhere but in the circles of the aristocracy, which must have been so repugnant to his proud sense”.
The contradictions that appear in the creation of these important transitional figures can also be found at a higher level in the literary leaders of the period leading up to the democratic revolution in Germany: from Platen to Boerne, from Immermann to Heine.
Just as Platen was the greatest citoyen poet of this period, so Boerne was the first real citoyen publicist in nineteenth-century Germany. But in Börne the Jacobin citoyenism becomes much more serious and closer to reality than in Platen, although for that very reason it is much more contradictory. Boerne takes the plebeianism of Jacobinism very seriously, while Platen only had the obligatory horror for Marat. In this way, Boerne advanced to a real Jacobinism; to a real one, because it is no longer satisfied with formal freedom and equality, no matter how radically carried out, with the complete annihilation of the feudal remnants. He sees the problem of poverty in developed bourgeois society as seen by the most radical Jacobins, Marat, Robespierre and Saint-Just; he wants to fight poverty as well as they do, but, like them, he finds no way to do so. Like them, he puts virtue on the agenda, preaches popular abstinence, regards everything that comes from “above” with revolutionary-alert distrust, be it politics, ideology, or poetry, adjoining the pseudo-socialism of Lamennais, which shimmered into the reactionary.
So Börne, unlike Hölderlin a quarter of a century before him, is a belated Jacobin. Since the belatedness is socially far advanced, its tragedy already bears individual caricaturistic traits, which later came to the fore so harshly in the French epigones of 1793 in the 1848 revolution. But it is on this basis that the problematic of his literary position arises. By seeking an ideological and stylistic connection with the anti-aristocratic and popular traditions of Germany, Börne played Jean Paul off against Goethe. With this turn, however, Börne separates himself from the most important progressive movement principles of German ideological and literary development. He renews the petty-bourgeois arguments in Herder’s late Goethe polemic against his immorality, and by resuming Herder’s struggle against the dominance of the aesthetic standard in literature and life, he often develops a decidedly anti-artistic tendency. The contradictions that arise are so profound that he, the most bitter enemy of reactionary Romanticism, virtually renewed Novalis’ criticism of Goethe; He, too, mourns the defeat of the “poetic” principle in Wilhelm Meister, and in this sense he too takes a stance on emotional anarchy and formlessness against Goethe’s allegedly anti-life severity (taking sides with Bettina von Arnim against Goethe in the review of Goethe’s correspondence with a child).
The ascetic severity of the Jacobin-plebeian revolutionary and the chaotic indulgence of the philistine from the German misery could never achieve harmony in Boerne, not even a contradictory unity, as in his great stylistic role model, Jean Paul.
Boerne’s literary fate clearly shows how much – for all the conservative limitations of the system – Hegel’s philosophy, which he hated and fought just as much as Goethe’s poetry, is in terms of the essence of its method, as Herzen said, the “algebra of the revolution”.
This realization lay behind all the contradictions that separated Heine from Boerne and his other radical contemporaries. As a revolutionary, Heine is always aware that he was basically the first to “spill the school secret” of Hegelian philosophy. He is the first revolutionary thinker and poet in Germany who is at the height of European development, and alongside Goethe and Hoffmann the only German writer of the nineteenth century who has had a world literary impact in the true sense of the word.
The importance of Heine’s prose writings rests on such insights, whose deep insights into German history, especially into German literary history, are hidden from many by their playful and witty form and their often too strong subjectivism. As we have seen, Heine soberly and correctly recognized the deep crisis in which the whole of German intellectual life, and with it the literature of his time, found itself; He was also not mistaken about his presence as a transitional stage, including his own literary position in it. He was looking (here is his contrast to Boerne and all other contemporary critics of the past of German literature) a way into the future, which should be a German one in the deepest sense of the word; that is, he wanted to be intellectually and politically on the level of his best Western contemporaries and at the same time wanted to preserve the immortal achievements of the Enlightenment and the Classics, even the popular aspirations of Romanticism, purified of the reaction, preserved in Hegel’s sense. That is why his critique of Goethe, Hegel and Romanticism, his polemics against Platen, Boerne and contemporary political poetry (apart from a few subjectivist deviations) are also trend-setting for later developments.
His poetry also grows out of this reason for living. It is that of a universal, modern German revolutionary and at the same time the inner suffering of modern man, of modern Germans in all their inner contradictions; his lyrical self-portrait, in all its self-deprecating subjectivity, gives a picture of the world at the same time: the picture of the people of this time in their inner turmoil, with all their hopes and disappointments; a world-view that embraces the whole extensive and intensive totality of life, from love to politics. And this so decidedly modern poetry rises from the soil of German folklore: Heine saved the popular traditions of the Enlightenment and Romanticism for the contemporary.
Heine’s universalism was later flattened by his liberal admirers and studiously rejected by his reactionary opponents. It has not been recognized that the subjectivistic, lyrically ironic form of his poetry, even in his greater poetic and prosaic works, was the only artistic possibility to create great art comprehensively, realistically, without provincialism and without the conflicting tendencies in Germany at that time arising from false Romanticism. In the old, objectively backward, but for that very reason more closed Germany of the Classics, an objective realism was still possible, albeit, as we have seen, with many utopian elements. Now that the misery still existed, but was being sucked into the whirlpool of revolutionary transformation, both internally and externally, the lyrical and ironic form of the Travel Pictures (also Germany. A Winter’s Tale is a travel picture) was the only artistic path to universalism.
In this period of preparation for the democratic revolution, Heine stands alone intellectually and artistically. In particular, the Young Germany movement that immediately followed him and Boerne almost only adopted the manners of both of them. There are political and ideological reasons for this. Even Gutzkow, the most important figure of the movement in every respect, is not much more than a German liberal with all local German narrow-mindedness, with all political, intellectual and artistic limitations; he is neither a plebeian Jacobin like Boerne nor a comprehensive revolutionary dialectician like Heine. Of course, the Franco-German line of Boerne and Heine is also present in Young Germany, the effort to secure German literature’s connection to the most progressive Western European tendencies and at the same time to renew those German traditions that can enable an appropriate expression of the new content. But while Heine went to the essentials in both directions, drawing from the real depths, both remained on the surface in Young Germany. The Young Germans took over from France above all the tendentious literature in the novel and especially in the drama, i.e. a form of drama which served as the theatrical proof of certain current theses, but as a rule did not aim at the dramatic formulation of the problems, but only worked through theatrical-rhetorical scenes, through daily allusions, etc. Its roots in the native literary traditions were mostly eclectic -superficial, more accidental renewals of certain topical content than a fruitful recourse to content and forms that would have been worthy of rebirth (Reimarus, Schleiermacher, etc. with Gutzkow). This was why the whole movement (with the exception of a few plays by Gutzkow perhaps) faded after a short time and very few of its works remain alive in a literary sense today.
In the 1830s there was only one writer who, in his short life, was literary influential, appearing and disappearing like a meteor, who really stood at the height of the epoch: Georg Buechner. His Death of Danton is not only the most important drama of the time, but also the only major step that German drama has taken since modern historical drama was created by Goethe and Schiller. Buechner’s realism, however, goes beyond theirs. His renunciation of beauty (the stepping out of the art period) the more decided Shakespeareization is only the external side; Buechner succeeds above all in the tragic juxtaposition of Danton and the revolution in creating all their greatness, their weaknesses and limitations in a purely dramatic way, translating them into characters and situations. From the social to the ideological problems of the greatest democratic revolution, everything is cast in action here. Buechner, who experienced these questions in their entire theoretical and practical scope in the short period of his illegal Hessian propaganda, created the greatest artistic preparatory work for the armament of the German intelligentsia in this period of fermentation. It is characteristic of the ideological development of Germany that this drama and the other equally important works of Buechner were very seldom appreciated for their true content, although they quickly became known; the profound self-criticism of the democratic revolution was even more than once interpreted directly as counter-revolutionary. The lack of understanding for the critical depth of Heine and Buechner is just as much a symptom of Germany’s literary and political immaturity in the period leading up to the democratic revolution as the shallowness and lack of substance of Young Germany.
Immaturity shows itself in all areas of literature, in its large as well as in its small manifestations. The constant aggravation of the political situation received a jolt with the accession of Friedrich Wilhelm IV. For the first time since the existence of Prussia there was a monarch who was interested in German art, philosophy and literature and who wanted to be their patron. However, his attempts to cultivate a new Romanticism failed, most blatantly in the field of literature. While the Romantic reaction in scholarship he promoted could at least draw heads of the importance of old Schelling and Stahl to Berlin, all attempts by the Berlin court to place literature at the service of political Romanticism proved futile. No matter how deeply the reactionary ideology of Romanticism had penetrated wide circles, it could no longer be awakened to poetic fruitfulness.
On the other hand, there was a renewal of the old, progressive Germany, precisely where the art period was also great: in the poetry and philosophy of the upswing of German political poetry. What the Young Germany was not able to give arose from the process of decomposition of classical German philosophy: an ideological critique of the status quo. At first (Gans, Heine) the criticism is hinted at rather than developed; in the 1830s, however, David Friedrich Strauss appeared with his criticism of religion, followed by Ruge’s Hallische Jahrbuecher, then in quick succession Bruno Bauer, Feuerbach, the young Marx and the young Engels. Naturally, this process cannot be discussed in detail here It should only be pointed out that it is by no means limited to the radical left wing and to extreme reaction. Vischer, Rosenkranz and others developed an ideology of liberalism from this process of dissolution, just as Johann Jacoby developed an energetic democratic radicalism from the philosophical camp of the Kantians.
Political poetry developed parallel to this process and in many cases in struggle with it. In Freiligrath and Herwegh in particular, it achieves an effect unprecedented in Germany and at the same time a not inconsiderable poetic height. It is strange and at the same time significant that here too Platen’s abstract pathos and Boerne’s abstract democratism are more effective than the more developed political ideology and poetry of Heine, which had already reached Germany. The naive cosiness of the utopianism of Freiligrath’s Ca ira, and the often unrealistic verve of Herwegh’s poetic activism, shows that the awakening of the German intelligentsia was still a long way from any clarity of political goals, from any insight into the situation and its tasks. For example, it was, under German conditions, a creditable act that Herwegh confessed to partisan poetry, that he passionately rejected the “higher view” of Freiligrath. But when Herwegh goes against the non-partisan program of Freiligrath:
Er beugt sein Knie dem Helden Bonaparte,
Und hoert mit Zuernen d’Enghiens Todesschrei:
Der Dichter steht auf einer hoehern Warte
Als auf den Zinnen der Partei.
(He bows the knee to Bonaparte, the hero,
yet d’Enghien’s death-cry arouses his wrath:
the poet observes from a higher watch-tower
than the battlements of party.)
he develops his own, but his call remains one for taking sides in general, which in itself could also be reactionary:
Oh, waehlt ein Banner, und ich bin zufrieden,
Ob’s auch ein andres denn das meine sei...
(Oh, pick a banner and I’m content,
Whether it’s something else than mine...)
No matter how great the enthusiasm of Germany’s progressive poets for Beranger had been since Chamisso, the conditions in Germany could not produce his concrete, rebellious solidarity with the people. That is why Heine’s ironic criticism applies to a large extent to the most enthusiastic pieces of political poetry:
Blase, schmettre, donnre taeglich,
Bis der letzte Draenger flieht
Singe nur in dieser Richtung,
Aber halte deine Dichtung
Nur so allgemein wie moeglich.
(Blare out, bellow, thunder, man
Till the last oppressor flees!
Make your verses strong and biting ...
But make sure you keep your writing
Just as general as you can.)
If one disregards the highest ideological leaders of the time, Heine, Buechner and the young Marx, one sees the old weaknesses and barriers of German development everywhere in a new light; however, due to the ever-worsening situation, which also pushes people who were originally not inclined to activity into battles, even in an aggravated way, since the (however confused) approach to public life necessarily reveals all inner contradictions of personality and world-view driven to the top. Nobody can therefore shut himself off completely from this mood of the times; if that is attempted, a similar intensification of the contradictions arises purely internally.
This is most clearly visible in one of the greatest lyrical talents of the nineteenth century, Eduard Moerike. In his nature he is an idyllic, Romantic talent, in which, as earlier with Eichendorff, the popular tendencies demanding folkishness of the past, quieter art period are expressed with rare purity:
Lass, o Welt, o laaa mich sein!
Locket nicht mit Liebesgaben,
Lasst dies Herz alleine haben
Seine Wonne, seine Pein!
(Let me, oh world, oh let me be!
Do not tempt with gifts of love,
Let this heart alone have
Its joy and its pain!)
His artistically pure poetry, perfectly formed in the truest sense of the word, grows on this basis: a song of idyllic renunciation. “Is art,” he asks in his novel Maler Nolten, “anything other than an attempt to replace what reality denies us?” The philistine peacefully and lovingly embraces and devours Romanticism, which once went out against him so belligerently. In his life one of his modern admirers finds “the full reflection of Romantic philistinism”. Moerike thus forms the beginning of a German development, the literature of flight from present-day life, which we will later encounter, in a more torn, unfortunate form, as a flight into Romantic eccentricity. Moerike himself still managed, at least in his poetry, in his successful poems and in a few short stories (Mozart on the Journey to Prague), to create something well-rounded on an artificially limited basis, without polemics and without inner turmoil. That is why the reactionary literary history made him the hero of this period, the antithesis to Heine, who was first degraded and then expatriated from German literature by fascism. Despite this falsification, Moerike’s poetic power must be explored.
In stark contrast to this storm-tossed idyll is the poetry of Lenau, the other important lyric poet of the time. Here, too, it is important for literary history to destroy legends that have formed, especially about Lenau’s individual instability, about his metaphysical pessimism. Lenau himself spoke out clearly about the real reasons for this pessimism, especially in the time of his maturity:
Woher der duestere Unmut unserer Zeit,
Der Groll, die Eile, die Zerrissenheit? –
Das Sterben in der Daemmerung ist schuld
An dieser freudearmen Ungeduld;
Herb ist’s, das lang ersehnte Licht nicht schauen,
Zu Grabe gehn in seinem Morgengrauen.
(Whence springs the dark discontent of our age, the anger, haste and divisiveness? Dying in the twilight is to blame for this impatience so bereft of joy; it is a harsh fate not to glimpse this long-awaited light, to go to the grave by the grey light of dawn.)
Lenau’s greatness lies at earlier stages of his development in the unclear passion of the search, in the touchingly sincere expression of disappointment, longing, bitterness and despair, but in his last days in the broad and brave fighting mood. With him we see a path (if not an arrow straight, but certainly a sure one) from locally restricted Romantic poetry (first in Austria, then following the Swabian School) to a nationally progressive choice of subject matter and form. It is significant that Lenau, who remained lyrical, was driven beyond mere lyric poetry and that the material of his maturity came from the international liberation movement of mankind (Savonarola, Die Albigenser). The inclination, the unfavorability of the German past for poets who seek the national progressive overcoming of this past through such a choice of subject connects Lenau with Georg Buechner, despite all their individual differences, just as he, again with all their individual differences, is connected with Heine by transcending the lyric into a realistic totality.
In this we recognize the difficult situation for realists who cannot ignore the unfavorable nature of German material in the past and present. Buechner brilliantly found his themes in the Death of Danton and in Woyzeck. Grabbe wandered back and forth between a generally world-historical “hero search” and an extremely problematic national topic (Hermannsschlacht, Hohenstaufen). And in stark contrast to the widespread legends of German literary history, this “down-to-earthness” this rootedness in local traditions does not point in the right direction, it even makes it difficult for talented writers to develop a really high level of realism.
Willibald Alexis not only had real gifts of a true realist, but also aesthetic insights that go far beyond the usual formalism. He is the only German who understood the epoch-making qualities of Walter Scott’s historical novel. Nevertheless, his attempt to present Prussian history in Scott’s realistic-historical style was bound to fail, not because of his individual limitations as a writer, but because he failed to see through the petty wretchedness of Prussian history. Gutzkow rightly criticized the illusion of a “transformation of Brandenburg’s local history into Reich history”, and Fontane correctly complements this criticism when he declares that “no effort ... ever (will) lead to making Brandenburg that Promised Land, which from the beginning ... had the promise of Germany”. As a result of such self-deceptions, Alexis could, if one disregards details, only partially achieve real development, where from the outset he confined himself to the local and its humorous treatment. Of course, this meant that Walter Scott’s shot was wasted.
The greater a writer, the more the contradictions of his time come to light in his work. Of course, the greater he is, the more he succeeds in combining them into a flexible and moving unit in his work. The greatest poetic talent in Germany, who appeared in the 1840s, is primarily suited to size in the first sense. Friedrich Hebbel said of himself, “Great talents come from God, small ones from the devil,” and Hebbel always sharply and modestly emphasized the distance that separates him from the great poets.
Now who is that devil who turned the powerful Hebbelian gift into a problematic one? Above all, again the philistinism of the German misery. Hebbel was not only a profound human shaper, a spontaneously strong tragedian, but also a profound artistic thinker. Of the writers of the time, he was without question most fruitfully touched by their most important ideological movement, the dissolution of Hegelian philosophy, the contemporary application of dialectics to contemporary life. His drama is part of this intellectual preparation for the 1848 revolution.
Hebbel is often compared to Kleist. But Hebbel was never a reactionary without an understanding of progress like Kleist. He felt the deep crisis of his time and wanted to put his drama at the service of its healing. He explains: “Dramatic art should not overthrow the world-historical process that is going on in our day and which aims to overthrow the existing institutions of the human race, political, religious, moral, but to establish them more deeply, i.e. to secure them from overthrow.” This political-historical-philosophical assessment of the situation at that time stands in a sharp contradiction to Hebbel’s view of art, something that he himself did not recognize. Because in assessing the development of the drama he rightly regards Goethe as the originator of the new period, because he “threw the dialectic directly into the idea itself, he showed the contradiction that Shakespeare only showed in the ego, in the center around which the ego moves”. The tragedian Hebbel sees the basis of the present tragedy in the contradictions of the ultimate basis of reality itself, and yet he believes that the truth that emerges in the drama, i.e. the disclosure of the contradictions in the foundations of society, will bring about the salvation of the same society.
In the case of great realists, the motives for uncovering the contradictions of reality are often of little importance. Rather, it depends on what means are available to them, how far and deep their universality of thinking and design reaches. And here the devil of the German misery comes into its own with Hebbel. Hebbel has full depth as far as the most important inner problems of modern individuality are concerned; contact with the intellectual upheaval of his time opened up great world-historical prospects for him. But these two lines of worldview diverge in their drama and can only be linked artificially. Hebbel was never able to let world-historical conflicts really grow organically out of the individual fates of his heroes. Hence the sought-after, bizarre, often pathological nature of his conflicts, his fables and characters, which the great admirer of his talent, Gottfried Keller, sharply criticized in him.
Hebbel’s most important creation before 1848, Maria Magdalena, his most organic drama, gives the key to this enigmatic dichotomy. Here Hebbel moves on a ground he has known from birth, on the terrible narrowness of German petty-bourgeois life. Hebbel is able here, which he otherwise never succeeded in doing, to develop a series of shockingly real and deep tragedies from the mere fact of life. In its tragic unity, this work is unique in German literature of the nineteenth century (and in the world literature of this time only a parallel phenomenon exists: Ostrovsky’s Thunderstorm). But Hebbel’s poetic victory is won here at the price that the poetry refutes the perspectives of its creator. The closed circle of tragedies in this drama shows that real uncovering of the deepest contradictions of German life cannot lead to a reconsolidation of the foundations, but would have to be a call for their radical destruction, for a final blocking of the sources that produce that stuffy air, the conditions that murder human dignity. But the fact that Hebbel never voiced that citoyen pathos for the destruction of the rotten that lives in Emilia Galotti and Kabale und Liebe, that is the German devil of philistinism, which has made a “small” talent out of him.
Thus the entry of old Germany into the process of European renewal destroyed the old, quiet, contemplative spectator role from the art period and thus created a new literature, which, however, was only really up to date in exceptional figures, such as Heine and Buechner, while in the art period when the whole existence of Germany from a European point of view was a great anachronism, poetry and philosophy became signposts for the development of mankind. This statement comes from a young writer of the time, Karl Marx. Marx also wrote the prophetic-pessimistic words about Germany around the same time:
“But if Germany only accompanied the development of the modern peoples with the abstract activity of thought, without taking any active part in the real struggles of this development, on the other hand it shared the suffering of this development without sharing its pleasures, without earning its partial satisfaction. Abstract suffering on the one hand corresponds to abstract activity on the other. Germany will therefore one day find itself at the level of European decay before it has ever been at the level of European emancipation.”
But this gloomy prediction comes from a fighter who did everything in his power to ensure that it did not come true. The work of the young Marx, from the articles in the Rheinische Zeitung to the Deutsch-Franzoesische Jahrbuecher (here together with Friedrich Engels) to the Communist Manifesto and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, is not just one major political event in the development of democratic ideas in Germany that has by no means been adequately appreciated, but at the same time a chapter in German literary history that has yet to be written. Not since Lessing has there been such a journalism in the German language that has put the highest, self-created results of art and aesthetics, philosophy and social science so urgently at the service of the “demand of the day”, the free renewal of Germany. Heine has spilled that school secret of Hegelian philosophy, Marx has formed a spiritual power of upheaval and rebirth from the radical transformation of its true core. The founder of scientific socialism certainly grows far beyond the borders of German history (and even more so of German literary history), but this growing out has an indestructible German basis: the deepest self-awareness and knowledge of the world that the German spirit has ever had, both with regard to the tragic failure of its modern development and with regard to the paths that can lead to regeneration. Not only because of their classical language form, but It is mainly because of this content that the works of the young Marx close and crown the preparatory period of the 1848 revolution in German literature.