Fontane and Cultural Mediation: Translation and Reception in Nineteenth-Century German Literature: 8 (Germanic Literatures) [1 ed.] 9781909662544, 1909662542

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Fontane and Cultural Mediation Translation and Reception in Nineteenth-Century German Literature

LeGeNda leenda , founded in 1995 by the european Humanities Research Centre of the University of Oxford, is now a joint imprint of the Modern Humanities Research association and Routledge. Titles range from medieval texts to contemporary cinema and form a widely comparative view of the modern humanities, including works on arabic, Catalan, english, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Yiddish literature. an editorial Board of distinguished academic specialists works in collaboration with leading scholarly bodies such as the Society for French Studies, the British Comparative Literature association and the association of Hispanists of Great Britain & Ireland.

The Modern Humanities Research Association ( ) encourages and promotes advanced study and research in the field of the modern humanities, especially modern European languages and literature, including English, and also cinema. It also aims to break down the barriers between scholars working in different disciplines and to maintain the unity of humanistic scholarship in the face of increasing specialization. The Association fulfils this purpose primarily through the publication of journals, bibliographies, monographs and other aids to research.

Routledge is a global publisher of academic books, journals and online resources in the humanities and social sciences. Founded in 1836, it has published many of the greatest thinkers and scholars of the last hundred years, including Adorno, Einstein, Russell, Popper, Wittgenstein, Jung, Bohm, Hayek, McLuhan, Marcuse and Sartre. Today Routledge is one of the world’s leading academic publishers in the Humanities and Social Sciences. It publishes thousands of books and journals each year, serving scholars, instructors, and professional communities worldwide. www.routledge.com

GERMANIC LITERATUREs Editorial Committee Chair: Professor Ritchie Robertson (University of Oxford) Dr Barbara Burns (Glasgow University) Professor Jane Fenoulhet (University College London) Professor Anne Fuchs (University of Warwick) Dr Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen (University College London) Dr Almut Suerbaum (University of Oxford) Professor Susanne Kord (University College London) Professor John Zilcosky (University of Toronto) Germanic Literatures includes monographs and essay collections on literature originally written not only in German, but also in Dutch and the Scandinavian languages. Within the German-speaking area, it seeks also to publish studies of other national literatures such as those of Austria and Switzerland. The chronological scope of the series extends from the early Middle Ages down to the present day. appearing in this series 1. Yvan Goll: The Thwarted Pursuit of the Whole, by Robert Vilain 2. Sebald’s Bachelors: Queer Resistance and the Unconforming Life, by Helen Finch 3. Goethe’s Visual World, by Pamela Currie 4. German Narratives of Belonging: Writing Generation and Place in the Twenty-First Century, by Linda Shortt 5. The Very Late Goethe: Self-Consciousness and the Art of Ageing, by Charlotte Lee 6. Women, Emancipation and the German Novel 1871-1910: Protest Fiction in its Cultural Context, by Charlotte Woodford 7. Goethe’s Poetry and the Philosophy of Nature: Gott und Welt 1798-1827, by Regina Sachers 8. Fontane and Cultural Mediation: Translation and Reception in Nineteenth-Century German Literature, edited by Ritchie Robertson and Michael White 9. Metamorphosis in Modern German Literature: Transforming Bodies, Identities and Affects, by Tara Beaney 10. Comedy and Trauma in Germany and Austria after 1945: The Inner Side of Mourning, by Stephanie Bird 11. E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Orient: Romantic Aesthetics and the German Imagination, by Joanna Neilly

Managing Editor Dr Graham Nelson, 41 Wellington Square, Oxford ox1 2jf, UK www.legendabooks.com

Helen Chambers at Loch Lomond, photographed by Willi-Peter Hummel

Fontane and Cultural Mediation Translation and Reception in Nineteenth-Century German Literature ❖ Essays in Honour of Helen Chambers Edited by Ritchie Robertson and Michael White

Germanic Literatures 8 Modern Humanities Research association and Routledge 2015

First published 2015 Published by the Modern Humanities Research Association Salisbury House, Station Road, Cambridge cb1 2la and Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

LEGENDA is an imprint of the Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© Modern Humanities Research Association and Taylor & Francis 2015 ISBN 978-1-909662-54-4 (hbk) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, including photocopying, recordings, fax or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher. Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Disclaimer: Statements of fact and opinion contained in this book are those of the author and not of the editors, Routledge, or the Modern Humanities Research Association. The publisher makes no representation, express or implied, in respect of the accuracy of the material in this book and cannot accept any legal responsibility or liability for any errors or omissions that may be made.

Contents ❖



Introduction ritchie robertson and michael white

1

part i: Fontane and Genetic Studies 1 Wenn Texte wandern: Von Tietz zu Fontane regina dieterle 7 2 ‘Eine gemalte Landschaft’? Landscapes in Theodor Fontane’s Novel Quitt (1890) james n. bade 23 3 Die Krautentochter: Plädoyer für eine Rangerhöhung gotthard erler 49 part ii: Translation Studies 4 ‘All the fruits of fancy’: The British Reception of Hermann von Pückler-Muskau’s Tutti Frutti (1834) peter james bowman 5 Schiller’s ‘Glocke’ — Mangan’s Bell: Mediating German Culture in Ireland, 1835–1846 andrew cusack 6 Searching for the Ultimate German Austen: Recent Translations of Pride and Prejudice norbert bachleitner 7 Herder and Fontane as Translators of Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry: The Ballad ‘Edward, Edward’ michael white

65

78

90

107

PART III: Germany and the British Isles 8 Nietzsche and the Scottish Enlightenment ritchie robertson 120 9 Between Yesterday and Tomorrow: London in the Eyes of Richard Friedenthal (1896–1979) rüdiger görner 134 10 The Franco-Prussian War: War Reporting in the Irish Print Media, 1870–1873 eda sagarra 145

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Contents

PART IV: Germany and Europe 11 Bertha von Suttner’s Die Waffen nieder!: The Roots and Reception of a Pacifist Manifesto barbara burns 12 ‘Ich hätte so geschrieben’: Fontane’s Reception of Zola patricia howe 13 Nineteenth-Century Literary Networks and the ‘Unheroic’ Man of Letters: Victor Aimé Huber and Friends carol tully

182



195

Index

158 170

This book is dedicated to Helen Chambers, Professor of German at the University of St Andrews from 1999 to 2009, in gratitude for her work as teacher and colleague, and in honour of her outstanding contribution to scholarship in nineteenth-century German literature.

Introduction v Ritchie Robertson, University of Oxford, and Michael White, University of St Andrews In thinking of a suitable focus for a volume of essays to appear in honour of Professor Helen Chambers we, the editors and colleagues of the School of Modern Languages at St Andrews, were faced with a difficult task: to engage with a research profile ranging from motifs of superstition in Fontane’s prose to female Faust figures, while producing a coherent volume worthy of the recipient which would demonstrate the significance of her research for modern scholarship. It was inevitable that Fontane would occupy a prominent place in it. In a long series of publications, most notably the standard work The Changing Image of Theodor Fontane and the translations with Hugh Rorrison of Unwiederbringlich and Effi Briest, Helen Chambers has shaped and analysed both the scholarly and the modern literary reception of the nineteenthcentury German author with the greatest international resonance. At the same time, much of Helen Chambers’s work has focused on less canonical authors, on the processes of reception, adaptation, and translation, and has ranged beyond fiction and poetry to encompass journalism and marginalia. Throughout there is the concern to balance detailed textual analysis with an awareness of the men and women who write, rewrite, read, and transmit the texts we study, and a consistent returning to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writing as a point from which these issues might profitably be explored. The essays received for Theodor Fontane and Cultural Mediation: Translation and Reception in Nineteenth-Century German Literature testify to the actuality of this research programme. As a translator, a Prussian anglophile of Huguenot descent, and a novelist of European stature, Fontane is an essential starting point for the consideration of agents and patterns of cultural exchange in European letters in the nineteenth century. And although Fontane may have been positively valued by twentieth-century scholars because he seems an exception to the nationalism of Wilhelmine Germany on the one hand and to the provincialism of Poetic Realism on the other, his own life, correspondence, and writing should be seen as evidence against a prejudice which has since become a significant problem for nineteenthcentury studies, namely the frequent characterization of the epoch as narrowly national. In his unpublished fragment on translation, for example, Fontane argues that no-one translates more than the Germans, ‘Es wird nirgends so viel übersetzt wie in Deutschland’, positing nineteenth-century Germany as a special locus of literary translation and reception. Accordingly, the present volume aims to correct this prejudice, demonstrating that literary life and production in the nineteenth century were governed by complex networks of intercultural exchange, inf luence,

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Ritchie Robertson and Michael White

and translation. In so doing, this book not only offers a nuanced appreciation of literary production and reception in the nineteenth century, but also demonstrates the continued relevance of that period for Germanists today. In three essays on Fontane the first section explores the notion of literary adaptation, addressing the question Regina Dieterle poses in her study: ‘wie wird ein Text zu einem Fontane-Text?’. Dieterle’s essay examines Fontane’s practice of editing and rewriting in the context of nineteenth-century journalism through the specific study of his ‘Spreeland’ chapter, ‘Berlin in den Tagen von Großbeeren’. Through detailed comparison with Fontane’s source material, Friedrich Tietz’s Bunte Erinnerungen (1854), which is only indirectly acknowledged, Dieterle uncovers the potentially porous nature of Fontane’s texts; her analysis also reveals Fontane’s stylistic adaptations, giving valuable insights into the creation of Fontane-Ton. James Bade’s contribution on the relatively neglected Quitt (1890) is similarly genetic in focus. On the basis of extensive research into the novel’s setting, especially that of the second half which takes place in America, Bade refutes early criticisms about the novel’s realism. These early criticisms have def lected attention not only from the novel’s realistic portrayal of the North American setting, but also from the function of the Mennonite community as a critique of contemporary Prussian society. With Gotthard Erler’s essay on Charlotte von Arnstedt we return to the Wanderungen, this time to Fünf Schlösser. Erler relates the story of Charlotte, née von Kraut, thrice married, whose life, through her husbands and social connections, unites Scotland (Hugh Elliott, her first husband), Prussia (Rittmeister von Arnstedt, her third husband), and the mondain, francophile world around Prince Henry, brother of Frederick the Great. Tracing the complex genesis of the piece, Erler notes not only Fontane’s evolving views of Frau von Arnstedt, but also the interwovenness of his research and ref lection with his novelistic and journalistic production, and his personal ethics of tolerance. The second section focuses on the study of translations, beginning with Peter James Bowman’s analysis of Hermann von Pückler-Muskau’s Tutti Frutti and its trans­lation into English by Edmund Spencer. Bowman’s analysis of Spencer’s trans­ lation choices reveals misunderstandings, expansions, and adjustments to render the book more morally respectable. The work’s short-lived success, Bowman argues, is, of course, the result of its transient subject matter, but also provides valuable insight into Anglo-German literary relations in the ‘golden age of the British periodical press’. Andrew Cusack’s contribution on James Clarence Mangan’s translation of Schiller’s Lied von der Glocke for the Dublin University Magazine analyses the relationship between translation and literary and cultural life more broadly. Considering the place of the Dublin University Magazine in Dublin as a city of translation, and the special attraction of Germany as a prominently literary nation, Cusack argues that Mangan makes translation a means of engaging with and complicating the politics of Irish national identity. The next two essays in the section are concerned with translations and reception of English literature in Germany. Norbert Bachleitner’s study of recent translations of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is a detailed stylistic comparison of three versions of the novel in German by Helga Schultz, Andrea Ott, and Katrin von Schab

Introduction

3

and Isabella Fuchs. In a discussion ranging from obvious faults to the replication of manners, and which pays particular attention to the differentiation of speech, Bachleitner explores the issue of progress in translation and the eventual elusiveness of a an ultimate, ideal translation. The problems and potentials offered by situating a text within a translation history are the object of Michael White’s comparative analysis of Herder’s and Fontane’s treatments of the ‘Edward’ ballad from Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. Fontane wrote his translation of ‘Edward’ in part as a response to Herder’s earlier version. Translating the Reliques constitutes thus not only an engagement with English literature for Fontane, but also serves as a means of positioning himself within a German canon. In this reading Fontane’s text emerges as an alternative, not a replacement translation, something that appears to have given Fontane the freedom, and the need, to offer new renderings and inter­ pretations, often moving his text further from the original, rather than closer to it. In section III the volume addresses Scottish, English, and Irish-German literary relations more broadly. In a contribution on Nietzsche and the Scottish Enlightenment, Ritchie Robertson explores a range of questions and philosophical positions adopted by Nietzsche which may profitably be considered a continuation of the Enlightenment tradition, principally Nietzsche’s critique of religion, his concern with developing instead an ‘understanding of humanity as it is’, and his related sense of the limits of knowledge. In exploring Nietzsche through the Enlightenment, Robertson at the same time problematizes homogeneous characterizations of the period as the ‘Age of Reason’. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century heritages occupy an important place in Rüdiger Görner’s essay on Richard Friedenthal’s London zwischen Gestern und Morgen (1960). Görner explores the ‘quasi-biographical’ cultural history of London as a ‘culmination of [Friedenthal’s] previous work on English themes’. While seeking to transmit knowledge and a specific view of English culture to a post-war German readership, Friedenthal’s study positions itself between the London of yesterday and the possible London of the future, analogously to Zweig’s Die Welt von Gestern to which Friedenthal’s title appears to pay homage, and uses the representation of nineteenth-century history to deal with present and personal concerns. Eda Sagarra’s contribution on the Franco-Prussian War in Irish print media considers the reports on the conf lict in the context of changes in newspaper production, distribution, and readership, but also from a political perspective. Despite a concern to create political distance, in practice Irish newspapers were almost entirely dependent on London agencies for their reports, Sagarra observes, lacking both the reporters and the in-depth understanding to set the agenda on their own terms. Irish reports instead offer more insight into political issues closer to home and were shaped by the increased commercialization of the press. The final section turns from the British Isles to reception of and in Europe, and begins with Barbara Burns’s reassessment of another treatment of nineteenthcentury wars. Though little known today, Bertha von Suttner’s Die Waffen nieder! (1889) was translated into sixteen languages and gave its author an international reputation through which she could further her pacifist agenda, resulting ultimately in her being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1905. A fictional biography about a woman who questions national patriotism as a result of personal loss through

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Ritchie Robertson and Michael White

war, Die Waffen nieder! is presented by Burns as a document of the kind of inter­ nationalism that eventually led to the founding of the League of Nations. Patricia Howe’s essay on Fontane’s reception of Zola analyses Fontane’s judgements of Zola’s writing, Fontane’s rewriting of Zola’s opening of La Conquête de Plassans, and compares La Conquête de Plassans and Effi Briest, and La Curée and L’Adultera. As Howe demonstrates, Fontane’s writings about Zola in isolation reveal, in part, a concern to defend his own brand of Realism against the younger, and talented, competitor and Zola gains in stature when Fontane compares him with other, less gifted writers. Ultimately, however, the engagement with Zola emerges as part of Fontane’s own creative development, which can then be retraced in the common ground of both authors’ fiction. The volume closes with a study of literary networks in Europe. Carol Tully’s essay on the gentleman scholar as cultural mediator takes the German man of letters Victor Aimé Huber as a case study of the amateurs who operated in the rapidly expanding world of translation, reviewing, and literary scholarship in the nineteenth century, demonstrating how these literary engagements were underpinned by a belief in education and the sense of belonging to a ‘Bildungsaristokratie’. In this essay, the nineteenth century emerges, however, not just as an age of bookmen, but of readers with ‘Bildungswilligkeit’, the desire to educate themselves about men and worlds beyond their own sphere. The editors and contributors share the conviction that the literature and culture of nineteenth-century Germany continue to be an essential part of German studies, and that nineteenth-century Germany, far from being dominated by provincialism or nationalism, was fully integrated into wider European cultural networks. Our conviction has been strengthened by the work of Helen Chambers, to whom this volume is a tribute. We thank the University of St Andrews for its generous contribution to the publishing costs of this volume.

PA RT I

v

Fontane and Genetic Studies

C h ap t e r 1

v

Wenn Texte wandern: Von Tietz zu Fontane Regina Dieterle, Zurich Wie wird ein Text ein Fontane-Text? Theodor Fontane, ein leidenschaftlicher Zeitungsleser von Jugend auf, war recht eigentlich prädestiniert zum Journalisten. Als er mit etwa 30 Jahren den Apothe­ kerberuf an den Nagel hängte, um sich fortan journalistisch zu betätigen, brachte er all diejenigen Voraussetzungen mit, die das neue Metier verlangte: ein breites Allgemeinwissen, Lesehunger, Neugier, rasche Auffassungsgabe, Kontakt­freudigkeit, große sprachliche Ausdrucksfähigkeit, Mehrsprachigkeit (neben der Mutter­sprache Deutsch auch anständige Französisch- und Englischkenntnisse, zudem nicht wenig Schullatein), Sorgfalt, Präzision und vor allem die Fähigkeit, unter Zeitdruck Texte zur Druckreife zu bringen. In seinen Jahren zwischen 30 und 50 hat Fontane in stupender Virtuosität und in routiniertester Weise hunderte von Texten, dar­ unter viele Fremdtexte, redaktionell auf bereitet, umgeschrieben, eingepasst, gekürzt, erweitert und ihnen stilistischen Schliff gegeben.1 Im Rahmen ihrer Edition der Unechten Korrespondenzen,2 die Fontane in der Zeit von 1860 bis 1870 für die Berliner Kreuzzeitung verfasste, beschreibt Heide StreiterBuscher das damals übliche journalistische Verfahren, und zwar am Beispiel von Manuskripten des Redaktionskollegen George Hesekiel, der wie Fontane für die Auslandredaktion Artikel zu schreiben und zu redigieren hatte. Es sei damals üblich gewesen, so macht sie uns bewusst, ‘bereits gedruckte Kurzmitteilungen aus anderen deutschen Zeitungen’ zu benutzen, die man ‘entweder unverändert übernahm oder unwesentlich ergänzte bzw. kürzte’.3 Die Überschriften, so StreiterBuscher, wurden dann neu formuliert und der Artikel selber, je nach Platzverhält­ nissen, zusätzlich mit einem eigenen Kommentar versehen. Das Verfahren war im 19. Jahr­hundert bei praktisch allen Zeitungsschreibern gängig. Aber das unauto­ risierte Über­nehmen von Texten war doch, wenn es in allzu offensichtlicher Weise geschah und von Zeitungskollegen bemerkt wurde, in der Regel für Verfasser und Blatt diskredi­tierend.4 Wie nun Fontane seine journalistischen Korrespondenzen ‘zusammen­schusterte’ — gelegentlich wohl mit Schere und Klebstoff wie sein Kollege Hesekiel — lässt sich am Beispiel kaum mehr zeigen, da seine Zeitungs­ manuskripte nicht überliefert sind.5 Das ist äußerst bedauerlich, hat er doch sein schriftstellerisches Verfahren an journalistisch aufzubereitenden Texten jahrelang

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Regina Dieterle

geübt und verfeinert. Wüssten wir also mehr über seine Arbeitsweise bei der Zeitung, würden wir wahrscheinlich auch ein besseres Verständnis dafür gewinnen, wie aus einem Text ein Fontane-Text wird. Nun bin ich kürzlich auf ein Fontane-Feuilleton gestoßen, eines mit dem berühmten ‘Fontane-Ton’,6 das aber ursprünglich eben gar nicht von ihm stammt. Die Vorlage, die er benutzte, ließ sich überraschend leicht finden.7 Dies gibt uns nun die Gelegenheit, den Ursprungstext und den Fontane-Text miteinander zu ver­g leichen und dabei mitzuverfolgen, wie und was letzterer veränderte, bis er den redigierten Text schließlich als einen eigenen begriff. Ob ihm nach heutigen Maßstäben ein Plagiatsvorwurf gemacht werden müsste? Die Frage ist nicht ganz einfach zu beantworten. Denn gewiss ist, dass auch das Redigieren eine Kunst ist und Fontane diese Kunst vollendet beherrschte, ja vielleicht sogar als lustvolles Spiel begriff. Wie er es aber zu bewerkstelligen wusste, dass aus dem Text eines anderen ein Fontane-Text wird, dies sei das eigentliche Interesse meiner kleinen Untersuchung. Die Vorlage Im Jahre 1854 erschien im Berliner Verlag von Leopold Lassar das Buch Bunte Erinnerungen von Friedrich Tietz.8 Das Buch hat der Verfasser dem damaligen konservativen Ministerpräsidenten Otto von Manteuffel zugeeignet. Es enthält verschiedene selbsterlebte Erinnerungen, Anekdoten und Schilderungen aus dem früheren Berlin, vor allem aus der Zeit der 1820er-Jahre. Doch beginnt der Band mit einem Feuilleton zu den Ereignissen im August 1813, als vor den Toren Berlins, bei Großbeeren, die für Berlin und Brandenburg entscheidende Schlacht der Befreiungskriege geschlagen wurde. Wann genau Fontane die Bunten Erinnerungen zum ersten Mal zur Kenntnis nahm, wissen wir nicht, doch muss es spätestens im August 1860 gewesen sein. Damals wurde er von Wilhelm Schwartz9 auf den Band aufmerksam gemacht. Schwartz war ein Berliner Philologe und Sammler märkischer Sagenstoffe, der bis 1864 als Professor am Friedrich-Werderschen Gymnasium wirkte. Schwartz und Fontane, beide fast gleich alt, kamen im Laufe der Jahre noch öfters zusammen. Wilhelm Schwartz wurde nämlich 1864 Direktor des Friedrich-Wilhelms-Gymnasiums in Neuruppin, stand also jenem Gymnasium vor, das Fontane in seinem Heimatort einst selber besucht hatte, bevor er an die Gewerbeschule nach Berlin kam. Schwartz blieb bis 1872 Gymnasialdirektor in Neuruppin und gehörte schließlich mit in die Schar jener Lehrer und Professoren, die Fontane als ‘Mitarbeiter’10 seiner Wanderungen bezeichnet hat, weil sie ihm bei seinen Recherchen kenntnisreich behilf lich waren. Mit Schwartz hat Fontane denn auch gelegentlich gemeinsame Wanderungen unternommen.11 Bunte Erinnerungen, auf die Wilhelm Schwartz verwies, muss Fontane interessiert haben, insbesondere aber der Text Allerlei vom 23. August 1813 (Erinnerung aus Berlin), der die Sammlung eröffnet.12 Geschildert wird hier, wie die Berliner Bevölkerung in der Zeit der Befreiungskriege auf die offizielle Bekanntmachung vom 18. August 1813 reagierte, nämlich, dass die preußischen Truppen mobilisiert worden seien,

Wenn Texte wandern

9

um der erneut gegen Berlin anrückenden französischen Armee militärisch ent­ gegen­zustehen. In der Folge kam es am 23. August 1813 zum Sieg Preußens bei Großbeeren, was für den weiteren Verlauf des Herbstfeldzuges gegen Napoleon und seine Grande Armée von erheblicher Bedeutung war, weckte diese gewonnene Schlacht doch eine größere Siegesgewissheit. Doch hätte es auch anders kommen können. Und von dieser Ungewissheit, vom Schwanken zwischen der Angst vor dem Feind und der patriotischen Siegesgewissheit, handelt der Text von Tietz. Allerdings ist er aus der Erinnerung geschrieben, also im Bewusstsein, dass letztlich Preußen und die alliierten Mächte Russland, England, Österreich, Schweden gegen die napoleonische Grande Armée gesiegt hatten. Als Fontane seine Wanderungen schrieb, hatte die Schlacht bei Großbeeren schon längst Eingang in die deutschen Schulbücher gefunden und gehörte mit zu den großen patriotischen Erzählungen. Für Fontane selbst aber hatte Großbeeren auch eine ganz persönliche Bedeutung, worauf ich gerne später zu sprechen komme. Fontanes Wanderungen-Texte zu Großbeeren Einen ersten Prosatext über Großbeeren schrieb Fontane seinerzeit unter dem Titel Geist von Beeren. Er erschien in der Kreuzzeitung vom 22. und 23. August 1860,13 also just zum 47. Jahrestag des historischen Ereignisses. Dasselbe Feuilleton nahm Fontane dann auf in seinen ersten Band Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg (1862). Zwanzig Jahre später kam er auf dieses Kapitel zurück, um es nach neuem Ordnung­sprinzip und in gekürzter Form seinem vorläufig letzten WanderungenBand, dem Band Spreeland, einzuverleiben. Er umrahmte es jetzt aber mit zwei neuen Kapiteln zum selben Themenkomplex. Vor Geist von Beeren kam im Spreeland-Band das ausführlichere Kapitel ‘Die Schlacht bei Großbeeren’ zu stehen, das rechtzeitig fertig geworden war, um am 23. August 1881, zum 68. Jahrestag der nunmehr legendären Schlacht, in der Vossischen Zeitung vorabgedruckt zu werden und ein entsprechendes Honorar einzuspielen. Geist von Beeren nachgestellt aber wurde das ebenfalls neu geschriebene Kapitel ‘Berlin in den Tagen der Schlacht von Großbeeren’. Von diesem dritten Fontane’schen Großbeeren-Text gibt es keinen Zeitungsvorabdruck, auch nirgends einen Hinweis, wann Fontane ihn geschrieben haben könnte. Gotthard Erler und Rudolf Mingau vermuten deshalb in ihrer fundiert und kenntnisreich kommentierten Ausgabe der Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg, Fontane habe dieses Feuilleton ‘wahrscheinlich im Herbst 1881 eigens für den Spreeland-Band hinzugeschrieben, in dem es zum ersten Mal veröffentlicht wurde’.14 Dieser dritte Großbeeren-Text ist eben derjenige, den Fontane den Bunten Erinnerungen entnommen und in einen Fontane-Text verwandelt hat.15 Er fügte sich kom­posi­torisch gut in den Spreeland-Band ein, wo alle drei Kapitel schließlich ihren Platz unter der zusammenfassenden Überschrift Links der Spree gefunden haben. Das erste Kapitel, ‘Die Schlacht bei Großbeeren am 23. August 1813’, umfasst gut zehn Seiten.16 Fontane zeigt sich hier als erfahrener Kriegsbuchautor, der es versteht, Strategie und Verlauf von historisch bedeutsamen Schlachten einem breiteren Publikum verständlich darzustellen. Das zweite Kapitel, ‘Geist von Beeren’, erzählt

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auf knapp acht Seiten das seltsame Gebaren des Hans Heinrich Arnold von Beeren, genannt der Geist von Beeren. Dieser merkwürdige Mann mit seinen eigenartigen Geschichten war zwar ein durchaus brauchbarer Anekdotenstoff, aber als solcher ganz ohne Bezug ‘zur Zeit der Groß=Beerener Schlacht’.17 Es fehlte Fontane für seinen Großbeeren-Komplex also jener dritte und tiefer berührende Text, der zu schildern vermochte, welches menschliche Drama sich hier in den Augusttagen 1813 abgespielt hatte. Dieses Manko muss dem Autor bei der Zusammenstellung seiner Arbeiten für den Band Spreeland bewusst geworden sein. Und so fügte er diesen dritten Text hinzu. Oder besser: Und so erinnerte er sich an Allerlei vom 23. August 1813 von Friedrich Tietz, studierte den Text, kürzte ihn in journalistischer Manier auf sieben Seiten und setzte einen neuen Titel drüber: ‘Berlin in den Tagen der Schlacht von Großbeeren’.18 Journalistisches Handwerk, Zeitdruck und Geldnot Die Vorlage war geschickt gewählt. Doch nur wer sich aufs Redigieren versteht, konnte sie auch passend machen. Fontane als professioneller Redakteur verstand es offensichtlich, innerhalb kürzester Zeit einen fremden in einen eigenen Text zu verwandeln. So jedenfalls stellt es sich dar, wenn man die Bedingungen berücksichtigt, unter denen er die Kapitel für seinen Spreeland-Band zusammenstellte oder neu schrieb. Er hatte den Vertrag für diesen vierten Band seiner Wanderungen am 20. Februar 1881 unterschrieben und wollte ihn nun bis spätestens zum Weihnachtsgeschäft desselben Jahres im Verkauf wissen. Da er noch andere Arbeiten liegen hatte, stand er unter einem gewissen Zeitdruck. Hinzu kam ein finanzieller Engpass, der ihn zwang, seinen Verleger Wilhelm Hertz um Vorschuss zu bitten. Am 10. Mai 1881 richtete er folgende Zeilen an ihn: Wenn Ihre Güte mir à Conto meines für Band IV. [Spreeland] bewilligten Honorars, jetzt schon 300 Mark zugehen lassen wollte, würd’ ich Ihnen sehr zu Dank verpf lichtet sein. — Ich stecke jetzt ganz drin, in lauter neuen Kapiteln, und hoffe das M. S. bis 1. Juli fertig zu haben.19

Die 300 Mark übersandte Hertz noch gleichentags.20 Am 8. August 1881, nur wenige Tage später als in Aussicht gestellt, fragte Fontane dann bei ihm an: ‘Paßt es Ihnen, daß wir nunmehr den Druck von Band IV [Spreeland] beginnen lassen?’21 Zu diesem Zeitpunkt war zwar erst ein Teil der Texte druckfertig, doch Fontane ging davon aus, dass er bis September alles liefern und zugleich die ersten Druckbogen korrigieren werden könne. Wie es scheint, wurde dieser Plan so ziemlich eingehalten, denn am 26. November 1881, also noch rechtzeitig für das Weihnachtsgeschäft, hielt Fontane die ersten gedruckten Exemplare von Spreeland in der Hand. Dabei hatte er die Kapitel zu Großbeeren wahrscheinlich am längsten zurückgehalten, denn über den Abdruck der beiden Zeichnungen, die zur Illustrierung von Die Schlacht bei Großbeeren am 23. August 1813 dienen und den Verlauf der Schlacht darstellen sollten, wurde noch bis Ende September verhandelt.22 Dieser Umstand könnte ein Hinweis darauf sein, dass Fontanes dritter Großbeeren-Text wirklich innert kürzester Zeit entstand und vielleicht ein glücklicher Einfall in letzter Minute war. Jedenfalls war keine Zeit mehr, ihn einer Zeitung zum Vorabdruck anzubieten. Vielleicht wäre es

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auch nicht gegangen, weil der eine oder andere Kenner — zum Beispiel Wilhelm Schwartz — die Stirn gerunzelt hätte ob so viel Tietz in einem Fontane-Text? Fontane selber hatte offensichtlich keine Skrupel. Erstens verwies er ja — zwar etwas undurchsichtig — auf seine Quelle, zweitens war der Autor von Bunten Erinnerungen unterdessen verstorben, drittens war aus einem Tietz-Text tatsächlich ein Fontane-Text geworden. Pikant immerhin ist, dass er auch jene Klage überging, die Tietz an so prominenter Stelle eingerückt hatte. Im seinem Vorwort zu Bunten Erinnerungen bemerkte er nämlich: Es ist mehreren dieser kleinen Skizzen die Ehre widerfahren, nachdem sie theilweise von mir in einem Berliner Blatte ohne meinen Namen veröffentlicht worden, in anderen Blättern nachgedruckt zu werden, ohne daß man sich dabei die Mühe gegeben, wenigstens zu sagen, woher sie genommen. Ich erwähne dies nur deshalb, damit der geneigte Leser nicht etwa auf den Gedanken geräth, als wäre ich der Nachschreibende.

Tietz selber monierte also durchaus seine Autorschaft und wandte sich hier, im Jahre 1854, gegen die herrschende Praxis des unautorisierten Kopierens. Über Fontanes Redigierstil, an Beispielen illustriert Redigieren bedeutete zu Fontanes Zeit in der Sprache der Journalisten: ‘einen Artikel druckfertig machen’.23 Diese Bedeutung gilt noch immer, heißt doch redigieren heute: ‘einen Text für die Veröffentlichung vorbereiten’.24 Wer als Redakteur den Text eines anderen redigiert, überprüft ihn nach inhaltlicher, sprachlicher und stilistischer Korrektheit und bereitet ihn für einen bestimmten Publikationsort mit einer bestimmten Leserschaft vor. Am Ende dieses Prozesses steht in der Regel noch immer der Name des Autors über dem Text, nicht derjenige des Redakteurs, eine Regel, die im Zeitungswesen des 19. Jahrhunderts aber gerne auch anders gehandhabt wurde, etwa dann, wenn es galt, wie bereits skizziert, Korrespondentenberichte zu simulieren. Fontane als Journalist und Redakteur sowie als kritischer Zeitgenosse war mit der Technik, Autorschaft zu simulieren oder sie zu cachieren bestens vertraut.25 Doch interessiert an dieser Stelle weniger das Spiel mit der Autorschaft als das Handwerk des Redigierens. Wer einen Artikel redigiert, hat in der Regel einen Text vor sich, der vom Autor oder der Autorin bereits für gut befunden wurde und nun — vor Drucklegung — der letzten Überprüfung harrt. Der Redakteur greift in diesem Falle nicht mehr in die Gesamtkomposition ein, sondern überprüft einzig die Stimmigkeit des Ganzen und layoutet den Text. Ist er zu lang, ist das einfachste Verfahren das Kürzen, was bedeuten mag, dass Übergänge neu formuliert werden. Redigieren im engeren Sinne heißt dann, einen Text im Dienste des Autors, des Publikationsortes und der Leserschaft druckfertig zu machen, so dass er — ohne Rechtschreibe- oder Flüchtigkeitsfehler — in gut lesbarer Form erscheinen kann. In einem weiteren Sinne kann redigieren aber auch heißen, einen Text umzugestalten, zu verbessern, zu vervollkommnen und ihm den letzten Schliff zu geben. In beiden Fällen muss der Redigierende über die entsprechende Sachkenntnis und die dem Text gemäße sprachlich-stilistische Ausdrucksfähigkeit verfügen.

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Inwieweit kann man nun sagen, dass Theodor Fontane den Text von Friedrich Tietz ‘redigiert’ hat? Folgende Verfahren hat er angewendet: Er übernimmt den Text als Ganzes, streicht ihn aber für seine Zwecke von etwa 3500 auf 2000 Wörter zusammen. Gekürzt werden längere Schilderungen zum Kriegsverlauf und Zahlen zum Krieg. Dies gewiss deshalb, um Doppelungen zu vermeiden, geht dem redigierten Text doch sein eigenes ausführliches Kriegskapitel ‘Die Schlacht bei Großbeeren am 23. August 1813’ voraus. Fontane streicht aber auch, und zwar ersatzlos, einzelne eingestreute Anekdoten und folglich eine ganze Anzahl von Personen-Namen. So wird seine Textfassung stringenter, konzentriert sich auf weniger Personen und Schauplätze und erhält eine größere Eindringlichkeit als der Tietz-Text. Die Streichungen zwingen Fontane sodann, die Erzählperspektive anzupassen, aus dem ‘wir’ wird ein ‘man’ oder ein ‘ich’. Auffallend ist auch, dass Fontane manche Passagen zwar inhaltlich übernimmt, sie aber sprachlich verdichtet und verknappt. In zahlreichen Fällen verbessert er stilistisch: Er stellt die Syntax um zugunsten eines leichteren, f ließenderen Stils, er ersetzt Wörter und Wendungen, präzisiert und pointiert, auch fügt er Wörter ein, die typisch sind für seinen eigenen Stil (‘und’, ‘aber’, ‘denn überhaupt’, ‘blos’ [sic!], ‘zuletzt auch’). Seine Eingriffe in den Text betreffen schließlich den Inhalt selbst: Er präzisiert die Sachverhalte und tilgt, was veraltet ist. So korrigiert er zum Beispiel Orts- und Zeitangaben, damit der Text für die Leser von 1882 an Anschaulichkeit gewinnt. Diese Redigierweise macht deutlich, dass Fontane auch in die Gesamtorganisation des Textes eingreift, dabei eine bestimmte Idee verfolgt und diese aus dem vorgegebenen Text herausarbeitet. Alles, was ihm daher überf lüssig erscheint, streicht er rigoros. Dabei ist ihm Verständlichkeit sehr wichtig, hat er doch einen Leser im Blick, der nicht nur leicht, sondern auch gern folgen können soll. Insgesamt zeigen die Texteingriffe, wie versiert Fontane im Umarbeiten einer Vorlage ist; sie machen auch deutlich, dass er den Tietz-Text nicht nur im engeren, sondern auch im weiteren Sinne redigierte. Unbestritten gewinnt dabei die Vorlage an erzählerischer Qualität. Aber Tietz blitzt doch in manchen Passagen wortwörtlich durch. Dazu drei ausgewählte Text-Beispiele, die mittels vergleichender Lektüre illustrieren sollen, welche Textteile Fontane unverändert von Tietz übernommen (recte) und welche er redigierend verändert (kursiv) hat. Text-Beispiel

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Es war am 19. August 1813 — so entnehm’ ich alten, durch F r i e d r i c h T i e t z*) ver­öffent­lichten Aufzeichnungen — als an den Straßenecken Berlins Plakate und in den damals nur dreimal wöchentlich erscheinenden und zugleich auch in der Vossischen und Spenerschen Zeitungen folgende Bekanntmachung erschien:26 [. . .]

Es handelt sich hier um die Anfangspassage von Fontanes Kapitel Berlin in den Tagen der Schlacht von Großbeeren, die mit wenigen Kürzungen ganz der Anfangspassage von Tietz’ Allerlei vom 23. August 1813 (Erinnerung aus Berlin) folgt. Wie deutlich wird, gibt Fontane zwar einen Hinweis auf seine Quelle, ohne jedoch irgendwie erkenn­bar zu machen, dass er Tietz zum Teil wortwörtlich übernimmt. Immerhin setzt er zu Tietz folgende Fußnote:

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*) F r i e d r i c h T i e t z, ein halbes Jahrhundert lang Berliner Publicist und Mitarbeiter an einer großen Zahl unsrer Blätter (Vossische, Fremden=Blatt, Kreuz=Zeitung), wurde am 24. September 1803 zu Königsberg i. Pr. geboren und starb am 6. Juli 1879 zu Berlin. Alles Beste was er geschrieben, sind Theater= und Lebens=Erinnerungen. Mitunter gelang ihm auch ein Gelegenheitsgedicht etc. Eins derselben — bei Gelegenheit der Geburt des Prinzen W il h e l m (27. Januar 1859) gedichtet — ist so gut, daß es in glücklichem Einfall und graziösem Humor der Ausführung als Musterstück gelten kann. Ich setz es hier her und bin der Meinung, daß der Verfasser desselben in nichts Besserem fortleben kann.27

Das von ihm gelobte Tietz’sche Gelegenheitsgedicht (Preußischer Frühling, Januar 1859) rückt Fontane dann ebenfalls als Fußnote ein. Doch ganz lauter kann man dieses Verfahren nicht nennen, sind doch die gereimten Zeilen recht schwach.28 Angemessener wäre gewesen, Tietz’ Anteil am Text über der Fußnote zu verdeutlichen. Ihn zu zitieren oder in der Paraphrase zu nennen, unterlässt Fontane jedoch durchwegs, ja er unterschlägt auch, dass mit den ‘Aufzeichnungen’ ein bestimmter Text, nämlich Allerlei vom 23. August 1813 (Erinnerung aus Berlin), gemeint ist. Friedrich Tietz, der Verfasser, gibt seinerseits an, dass er in eben diesem Feuilleton ausnahmsweise nichts Selbsterlebtes erzählt, sondern die Ereignisse den Tagebuchnotizen seines Vaters entnommen habe.29 Textbeispiel

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Schaarenweise standen die Berliner an den Ecken, um diese Bekanntmachung zu lesen. Enthusiastisch und mMit Hurrah wurde sie begrüßt, aber es muss doch auch zugestanden werden, daß es nicht an Vorsichtigen, um nicht zu sagen an Aengstlichen fehlte. und selbst den eingef leischtesten Philistern, deren Lieblingsspruch sonst war: “Ruhe ist die erste Bürgerpf licht”, sah man eine ungewöhnliche Erregtheit an. Es gab sich eine Begeisterung kund, wie sie wohl noch selten im preußischen Herzen entf lammt gewesen und wie wir sie zu erleben, seitdem nicht wieder Gelegenheit gehabt. Aber doch klang durch die laute Begeisterungsfreude manch heimlicher Seufzer. Den Familienvätern erschien die Nähe des Feindes gefahrdrohend für die Hauptstadt. Während die jüngere Generation kampfesmuthig eine Niederlage für unmöglich hielt, setzten jene eine solche Möglichkeit doch nicht ganz außer allen Zweifel. Einer Schlacht, südlich in der Nähe von Berlin, wo Reynier, der französische General, mit einem starken Truppencorps heranzog, sahen wir als unvermeidlich entgegen. Und siegte der Feind, so stand der Hauptstadt viel Schlimmes bevor. Da dachten wir denn daran, So wurden beispielsweise viele Frauen und Kinder, nach Norden zu die man nach Pommern und Mecklenburg hin in Sicherheit zu bringen und nicht wenige Familien wurden wollte, von den zurückbleibenden Hausvätern zum Frankfurter und Oranienburger Thore hinaus-begleitet [sic].30

Typisch für Fontanes Haltung und Sprachstil sind relativierende Wendungen wie ‘aber es muss doch auch zugestanden werden’ oder Formulierungen wie ‘daß es nicht an Vorsichtigen, um nicht zu sagen an Aengstlichen fehlte’ — sie beginnen dem Tietz-Text nach und nach einen Fontane-Ton zu geben. Außerdem lässt sich an diesem Beispiel beobachten, dass Fontane gezielt kürzt und verknappt und dabei die Erzählung versachlicht, den patriotischen Ton von Tietz also zurücknimmt. Auch wird deutlich, dass er, wie erwähnt, Angaben zum Kriegsverlauf streicht, geo­

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graph­ische Angaben hingegen präzisiert und endlich statt ‘wir’ ein ‘man’ setzt. Sein Text entsteht dabei ganz aus der Vorlage heraus, ist also nicht unabhängig von ihr. Textbeispiel

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Am 21. August gab man im kKöniglichen Schauspielhause — dem abgebrannten Vorgänger des gegenwärtigen — Kapellmeister Himmel’s ,,Fanchon”. Das Haus war voll, wie man sich denn überhaupt an allen öffent­ lichen Orten zusammendrängte, blos um Neuigkeiten zu erfahren hören. Der korpulente Himmel Kapellmeister dirigirte. stand dirigirend an seinem Pult und aAls G e r n (der Vater), alsin der Rolle des Abbé, sein das Lied sang: ,,Auf alle Namenstag’ im Jahr” anzustimmen begann und nun zuletzt auch zu dem auf die verewigte Königin Louise bezüglichen Couplet kam, brach erscholl ein donnernder Jubel im Publikum los ganzen Hause. H i m m e l ’s rothes Angesicht glühte wie die jetzige Prophetensonne; vor Erregung: ,,Tusch!, Tusch!” rief er dem Orchester zu. D, die Trompeten schmetterten los, die Pausen donnerten, und die Vivats wollten kein Ende nehmen. Zum Finale hatte Herklots, der damalige ,,königliche Theaterdichter” für die Bethmann, als Fanchon, ein auf die Zeit bezügliches Couplet gedichtet, bei dem sich der Jubel von vorhin wiederholte. — Als ich mit Herklots das Theater verließ, begegnete uns auf der Straße ich draußen einer ähnlichen Exaltation.: Truppen marschirten dem hHalleischen Thore zu, die von Bürgern begleiteten sie mit unter fortwährendem Hurrahrufe. begleitet.31

Das Beispiel zeigt die vielen kleinen Finessen von Fontanes Kunst des Redigierens. Die Veränderungen lassen sich leicht verfolgen, weil der Ursprungstext noch immer hell durchschimmert. Das Vorgehen zeigt: Namen, die dem gegenwärtigen Leser nicht mehr geläufig sind, streicht Fontane, andere, die er wichtig findet, erläutert er genauer. Das ‘wir’ wird aus erzählerischen Gründen zum ‘ich’. Der Text erhält hier einen spezifisch Fontane’schen Klang durch die eingefügten Partikeln ‘denn überhaupt’, ‘blos’, ‘zuletzt auch’. Eine Besonderheit ist zudem die virtuose Veränderung der Syntax durch nur wenige Eingriffe sowie das Ersetzen mancher Wörter durch einen schlichteren, psychologisch genaueren Ausdruck (die Metapher ‘glühte wie die jetzige Prophetensonne’ wird zu ‘glühte vor Erregung’). Weitere Textbeispiele würden zeigen, dass zu Fontanes Redigierstil auch ein recht freier Umgang mit dem Tempus oder der direkten Rede gehört und dass er sich hier unschwer von der Vorlage löst. Alle Beobachtungen, die aus dem Textvergleich gewonnen werden können, bestätigen in der Tendenz, was Clarissa Blomqvist in ihrer linguistischen Unter­ suchung an einem Korpus genreübergreifender Fontane-Texte herausgearbeitet hat.32 Es gibt sowohl auf der Ebene der Textorganisation wie der Syntax, Lexik und Rhetorik spezifisch Fontane’sche Eigenheiten, die seinen Ton ausmachen. Ein besonderes Stilmerkmal, wie er selbst hervorgehoben hat und wie zahlreiche Beispiele in seinen Texten zeigen, ist sein ‘und’-Stil, der eine Vorliebe für die Parataxe zum Ausdruck bringt.33 Hinzu kommt die ebenfalls bewusst gesetzte adversative Verknüpfung auf Satzebene mit ‘indeß’ bzw. ‘aber’. Fast alle ‘aber’ in Berlin in den Tagen der Schlacht von Großbeeren stammen von Fontane selbst, und nicht von Tietz: ‘aber34 es muss doch auch zugestanden werden’, ‘aber ich konnte

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nicht recht in Stimmung kommen’, ‘er aber extemporierte’ usw. Es ist ein ‘aber’, das entweder relativieren oder Gegensätze hervorheben will. Die zu ziehenden Schlüsse zum Fontane-Stil ähneln sich also, ob wir nun eine Anzahl Fontane-Texte miteinander vergleichen oder ob wir — wie hier — beobachten, wie Fontane als Redakteur in einen Fremdtext eingreift. Der Unterschied ist, dass sich im hier vorgelegten Textvergleich die Gelegenheit ergibt, Fontane über die Schulter zu blicken, wir also miterleben können, wie der Fontane-Ton allmählich entsteht.35 Gehalt und Humor Doch wie steht es mit dem Gehalt? Und wie mit dem Humor? Auch hier grundiert die Vorlage den Text, der zuletzt nach Fontane klingt. Dabei ist der Eindruck, dass Fontane das Redigieren und Umarbeiten des Tietz-Textes wirklich Vergnügen bereitete und ihm das Hineinschmuggeln eigener Vorstellungen ein ganz besonderer Spass war. Zwar ist es ein ernster Stoff, den die beiden behandeln, aber er kommt in der Form des Anekdotischen daher. Diese anekdotische Form hat durchaus etwas Sub­ versives. Denn zum einen richten beide, wenn sie von den Tagen der Schlacht bei Großbeeren erzählen, ihren Blick auf den antiheldischen Komponisten Himmel36 im taumelnden Berlin, was der Komik nicht entbehrt, und zum andern auf den jungen französischen Offizier auf dem Schlachtfeld bei Großbeeren, dem zuletzt das Mitleid gehört. In beiden Texten erscheint der Komponist Himmel als ein recht exaltierter Künstler, der heftig dem Wein zuspricht und am Sieg der Preußen durchaus zweifelt. Zum Vergleich seien hier beide, der Tietz- und der Fontane-Text, ne­benein­andergestellt: Tietz-Text Himmel war, wie gewöhnlich in exaltirter Stimmung, der Wein trug das Seine dazu bei. Auch bildete natürlich die bevorstehende Schlacht das Thema der Unterhaltung. Plötzlich springt der Fanchon-Papa auf, stürzt ins Schlafzimmer und kehrt dann wieder mit zwei Pistolen in den Händen. ,,Sie sind scharf geladen” — ruft er uns zu — ,,die eine für den ersten Franzosen, der mir heute ins Zimmer tritt, die andre für mich. Mit Preußen ist’s dann doch vorbei.” — Freund Gubitz37 behauptete dagegen: ,,Er wäre überzeugt, dass unsre Krieger heut den Sieg erfechten — so fest überzeugt, dass er sogleich eine kleine Fest=Cantate niederschreiben würde, Himmel solle rasch die Composition dazu liefern und morgen Abend könne sie dann im Theater gesungen werden.” — Gesagt, gethan! Gubitz setzt sich zum Schreibtisch, in einer halben Stunde ist die kleine Dichtung f e r t i g , aber der, der sie componiren soll, auch, denn Herr Patschke hatte neuen f lüssigen Vorrath gebracht, Himmel sich stark daran gehalten und schnarchte bereits im Nebenzimmer auf dem Bette.38 Fontane-Text Himmel war wie gewöhnlich in exaltirter Stimmung, zu der der Wein das Seinige beitrug. Auch hier bildete natürlich die bevorstehende Schlacht das Thema der Unterhaltung und ehe wir’s uns versahen, stürzte der berühmte Fanchon-Componist ins Nebenzimmer und kehrte mit zwei Pistolen

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Regina Dieterle zurück. ,,D ie s e für den ersten Franzosen, der mir heut ins Zimmer tritt, und d ie s e — für mich.” Beide waren wahrscheinlich nicht geladen, die z we it e gewiß nicht. Gleichviel indeß, Gubitz versicherte mit Emphase: ,,wir würden siegen, ja sein Glaube daran sei so fest, daß er gleich eine kleine Fest=Cantate niederschreiben wolle; Himmel solle sie componiren — sie könne dann am andern Tage schon im Theater gesungen werden. Und gesagt, gethan. Gubitz setzte sich sofort an den Schreibtisch und in einer halben Stunde war die kleine Dichtung fertig. Aber freilich d e r, der sie componiren sollte, war nicht mehr unter den Lebenden oder doch nicht mehr unter den Zurechnungs= und Leistungsfähigen. Er schlief in einem mit einer Tüllgardine verhängten Alkoven seinen Rausch aus [. . .].39

Komponist Himmel ist bei beiden Erzählern, bei Tietz wie bei Fontane, derjenige, der es zu verpassen scheint, die Festkantate für die siegreichen Preußen zu kom­ ponieren, weil er dem Wein zu stark zuspricht. Beide erzählen humoristisch, aber Fontane hat wohl noch ein besonderes Vergnügen, wenn er Tietz ‘auf bessert’. So etwa mit seinem freien Kommentar zu den geladenen beziehungsweise nicht-geladenen Pistolen des Antihelden oder mit seiner theatralisch-komischen Umformu­lierung von ‘schnarchte bereits im Nebenzimmer auf dem Bette’. Komponist Himmel, so heisst es beim fabulierenden Fontane, ‘schlief in einem mit einer Tüllgardine verhängten Alkoven seinen Rausch aus’. ‘Tüllgardine’! — man spürt geradezu, wie Fontane sich freut, das Wort hier schwungvoll einzufügen. Überhaupt hat seine Version eine federnde Leichtigkeit, die nicht zuletzt von der für ihn so typischen Doppelung herrührt (‘Diese [. . .] diese’) oder vom eingefügten ‘Gleichviel indeß’ bzw. ‘Aber freilich’. Gut rhythmisiert und geradezu musikalisch wirkt auch hier wieder das Fontane’sche ‘und’. Wenn es bei Tietz heisst ‘Gesagt, gethan!’, dann bei Fontane eben: ‘Und40 gesagt, gethan!’ Dass er die kleinen Einfügungen an den Satzanfang stellt, auch das ist es, was seinen Stil ausmacht. Ist Komponist Himmel eine komische Figur, so ist es sein Librettist Gubitz nicht minder. Tietz schildert dessen patriotischen Eifer allerdings liebevoller als Fontane, der sich hier sogar eine kleine Boshaftigkeit leistet. Gubitz war nämlich, als die Bunten Erinnerungen von Tietz erschienen, noch in Amt und Würden, unter anderem als Theaterkritiker der Vossischen Zeitung. Als Fontanes Spreeland-Band entstand, war Gubitz bereits verstorben und Fontane längst sein Nachfolger bei der Vossi­schen Zeitung geworden. Dass er seinen Kritiker-Kollegen irgendwie geschont hätte, davon kann keine Rede sein. Er hielt nämlich nicht viel von dessen Talent als Schrift­steller. Und dies lässt er auch hier wieder durchblicken, wenn er ihm nur Eifer und Emphase zuschreibt, aber kaum Sinn fürs Dichten. Ernst aber wird Fontane am Schluss. Ernster als Tietz. Den Kontrapunkt zu den beiden komischen Figuren Himmel und Gubitz bildet nämlich die Erzählung vom tödlich verwundeten französischen Offizier auf dem Schlachtfeld von Großbeeren. Tietz-Text Am frühen Morgen lud mich ein bekannter Schlächtermeister ein, auf seinem mit Wurst, Schinken und Brod beladenen Wägelchen Platz zu nehmen und mit ihm hinauszufahren. Ich ließ mir das nicht zweimal sagen. Den Anblick des blutigen Schauplatzes werde ich mein Leben lang nicht vergessen. Ein herzzerreißender Anblick, mit dessen Schilderung man Bogen

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füllen könnte. Unfern der Mühle lag ein blutjunger französischer Offizier, die Brust von einer Kartätschenkugel zerschmettert. Aus der zerrissenen Uniform blickte vorne zwischen den Knöpfen eine rothe Brieftasche hervor. Wir öffneten dieselbe und fanden unter mehreren Briefen einen, noch nicht gesiegelten, aber bereits mit der Aufschrift in französischer Sprache versehen: ,,An Herrn Capuzzo, Mitglied des Criminalgerichts zu Genua.” Der sollte der Schwiegervater des Todten werden, wie aus dem Brief hervorging; beigelegt war ein verschlossenes Briefchen an die Braut des Jünglings. Das Schreiben schloß mit den Worten: ,,Ich hoffe, diesen Brief heut Abend auf die Post in Berlin zu geben.” Wenigstens thaten w i r es, nachdem wir an Herrn Capuzzo noch einige Worte hinzugefügt, wie wir den Schreiber des Briefes gefunden und daß wir ihm auf dem Felde wenigstens ein Grab haben graben lassen. Ob die Brieftasche — auch eine Locke lag darin — an die Adresse gekommen, haben wir nie erfahren!41 Fontane-Text Auf der Straße traf ich bald danach einen mir von alter Zeit her bekannten und damals zu den populärsten Figuren Berlins gehörenden Hofschläch­ termeister, der mich einlud, auf seinem mit Wurst, Schinken und Brod beladenen Wägelchen Platz zu nehmen und mit ihm hinaus zu fahren. Und ich ließ mir das nicht zweimal sagen. Aber freilich, den Anblick des Schlachtfelds werd’ ich all mein Lebtag nicht vergessen. Unfern der Mühle lag ein blutjunger französischer Offizier, die Brust von einer Kartätschenkugel zerschmettert. Aus der zerrissenen Uniform blickte vorne zwischen den Knöpfen ein rothes Portefeuille hervor. Wir öffneten es und fanden unter mehreren Briefen einen, der noch nicht gesiegelt aber bereits mit einer Aufschrift in französischer Sprache versehen war: ,,An Herrn C a pu z z o, Mitglied des Criminalgerichts zu G e nu a .” Der sollte, wie aus dem Briefe hervorging, der Schwiegervater des Todten werden, und beigelegt war ein verschlossenes Briefchen an die Braut: Es schloß mit den Worten: ,,Ich hoffe diesen Brief heut Abend auf die Post in Berlin zu geben.” Nun thaten w i r es.42

Fontane beschränkt sich hier auf das gezielte Kürzen, fügt ein ‘Und’ am Satzanfang hinzu, ersetzt das Wort Brieftasche durch ‘Portefeuille’, was durchaus angemessen wirkt, und gibt so der ganzen Passage den Ton des Ernstes und des Mitgefühls. Zudem lässt sich an diesem Beispiel verfolgen, wie er den Text strukturiert und proportioniert. Viel häufiger als Tietz setzt er Abschnitte, rhythmisiert dadurch die geschilderte Szene und setzt auch Pausen. Pausen für die Leserin, den Leser zum Nachdenken und Mitempfinden. Bezeichnend ist schließlich der Schluss. Während Tietz noch etwas weiter ausholt und patriotisch wird, begnügt sich Fontane mit wenigen abschließenden Zeilen, worin auch das Ungesagte — nämlich die Trauer um die Toten — mitschwingt. Wenn denn am Ende die Siegeskantate erklingt, dann weiß man wegen des Fontane’schen ‘aber’, dass es andernorts die Totenmesse ist: Abends am 24. aber sang man im Theater die Siegeskantate, die G u bit z am Tage vorher gedichtet und H i m m e l , als er seinen Rausch ausgeschlafen, in eine vortreff liche Musik gesetzt hatte.43

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Über die Kunst des Erzählens Als Fontane den Tietz-Text zu einem eigenen Text umarbeitete, war er bereits ein Erzähler. Ihm selber war zu diesem Zeitpunkt bewusst, dass er mit Spreeland Abschied nahm von seiner Zeit als ‘Wanderer’ durch die Mark Brandenburg. Er war bereits der Autor von Vor dem Sturm (1878), Grete Minde (1880), Ellernklipp (1881) und L’Adultera (1882) geworden, der sich dem Erzählen gewachsen fühlte. Aus der Zeit um 1880 gibt es interessanterweise einige handschriftliche Notizen, in denen Fontane über das Erzählen nachdenkt. Darin heißt es unter anderem: Wir müssen dem, was sich da vor uns vollzieht, in jedem Augenblick unter freudiger Zustimmung folgen können. Auf das Folgen-Können kommt es an. Man gleitet in einem Kahn den Fluß hinunter, immer angeregt, immer befriedigt durch die Bilder am Ufer. Stockt die Fahrt, gerät der Kahn auf eine Sandbank, so darf dieser Zwischenfall nicht zu lange währen; währt er nur kurze Zeit, so kann er den Reiz der Fahrt erhöhen.44

In seiner Bearbeitung des Tietz-Textes hat Fontane seine Idee von der Kunst des Erzählens en miniature durchgespielt. Alles, was die Fahrt ins Stocken bringen konnte, was den Erzählf luss, den er sich wünschte, behinderte, kürzte er weg. Gleichzeitig gab er dem Text durch zumeist minime, aber konsequente Eingriffe einen eigenen Klang und dieses gewisse Etwas. Am Ende jedenfalls folgen wir diesem Erzähler gern. — Und der großzügige Tietz? Er hätte vielleicht wenig dagegen gehabt, sich in einem Fontane-Text wiederzufinden. Denn immerhin leben hier die Bunten Erinnerungen, die heute vollkommen in Vergessenheit geraten sind, auf ihre Art weiter. Doch dass Fontane die guten Dienste, die sie ihm leisteten, so leichthin unterschlägt, dies allerdings ist — sagen wir es einmal vorsichtig — merkwürdig genug. Auch für Tietz, der sich offensichtlich nicht durchsetzen konnte mit seinem ‘wenigstens zu sagen, woher sie genommen’. Das Eigene im Fremden Jahre später kam Fontane noch einmal auf den Themenkomplex Großbeeren zurück. 1894, gefragt nach der Entstehungsgeschichte seines Erstlings, erzählte er, dass sein allererster Aufsatz, der vor dem Auge seines gestrengen Deutschlehrers Gnade gefunden hatte, dem Thema gewidmet gewesen sei ‘Das Schlachtfeld von Groß-Beeren’. Das sei nämlich so gekommen: Von Schulsorgen gedrückt, sei er eines Nachmittags losmarschiert, durch das Hallesche Tor hinaus Richtung Tempelhof und weiter bis Löwenbruch, wo er nach einem tapferen sechsstündigen Fußmarsch schließlich bei freundlichen Verwandten angelangt sei, die ihn wieder aufzumuntern vermochten. Auf dem Weg dahin aber habe er, als die Sonne schon unterzugehen begann, Rast gemacht ‘auf einem zusammengeharkten Haufen kleiner Chausseesteine’45 und sich unversehens auf dem Felde befunden, wo zwanzig Jahre zuvor die Schlacht von Großbeeren geschlagen worden sei. Er habe nicht viel darüber gewusst damals, aber doch so viel, dass es eine entscheidende Schlacht gewesen sei. Und er fährt fort:

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Mehr aber als all dies auf die Schlacht selbst Bezügliche war mir, aus frühesten Kindheitserzählungen her, ein kleiner Vorgang in Erinnerung geblieben, den meine Mutter, am Tage nach der Großbeeren-Affaire, persönlich erlebt hatte. Die war damals, noch halb ein Kind, mit auf das Schlachtfeld hinausgefahren, um den Verwundeten Hilfe zu leisten, und der erste, dessen sie gewahr geworden, war ein blutjunger Franzose gewesen, der — kaum noch einen Atemzug in der Brust — sich, als er sich plötzlich in seiner Sprache angeredet hörte, wie verklärt aufgerichtet hatte. Dann mit der einen Hand den Becher Wein, mit der andern die Hand meiner Mutter haltend, war er, eh er trinken konnte, gestorben.46

Fontane hat, so darf man dieser Erzählung entnehmen, im Text von Tietz nicht nur einen ihm sehr vertrauten Stoff gesehen — die Befreiungskriege — , sondern auch Eigenes darin wiedergefunden. ‘Großbeeren’, das bedeutete ihm Erinnerungen an die früheste Kindheit, Erinnerungen an die Erzählungen der Mutter, die selber als junges Mädchen von 15 Jahren die Ereignisse in Berlin miterlebt hatte. Doch nicht nur das, sie hatte auch zu denjenigen gehört, die — Jahrzehnte vor der Gründung des Roten Kreuzes — das Kriegselend zu lindern versuchten. Sie war offenbar, wie die Erzählung es schildert, nach der Schlacht mit hinausgefahren, um erste Hilfe zu leisten, gerade auch für die verwundeten Franzosen. Dabei wurde dieser humane Akt umso bewegender, als es unter den Helfenden auch Nachfahren der hugenottischen Réfugiés gab, die — wie Fontanes Mutter — traditionell noch des Französischen mächtig waren. ‘Großbeeren’ ist also in mehrerer Hinsicht ein Codewort für Fontane. Es schloss für ihn Erinnerungen an die Erzählungen der Mutter ein, es bedeutete ihm aber auch erstes Lob für einen Aufsatz, der, weil er in der Freizeit und zu einem selbstgewählten Thema geschrieben werden musste, den 13-jährigen Jüngling damals ernstlich bedrückte. Die unverhoffte Rast auf dem ehemaligen Schlachtfeld gab dann die zündende Idee und in der Folge das erste ‘Recht gut’. Fontanes Schluss daraus ist selbstironisch und ernst gesprochen zugleich: Daß meine ‘Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg’ auf dieses ‘Recht gut’ zurückzuführen seien, will ich nicht gerade behaupten, aber daß der Aufsatz, der den forschen Titel: ‘Auf dem Schlachtfelde von Groß-Beeren’ führte, meine erste Wanderung durch die Mark Brandenburg gewesen ist, das ist richtig.47

Der Text wandert weiter ‘Großbeeren’ als Stoff wandert also durch Fontanes Schaffen. Dass er den TietzText übernimmt und ihn sich anverwandelt, scheint nachgerade zu diesem Prozess zu gehören. Der Stoff allerdings ist so wichtig, dass auch Fontanes Text wieder weiterwandert. 1887 erscheint zu Unterrichtszwecken der Band Neues Berliner Lesebuch für mehrklassige Schulen, herausgegeben von Otto F. Schmidt und Hermann Schillemann.48 Darin findet sich, auf knapp zwei Seiten zusammengekürzt, der Text Berlin während und nach der Schlacht bei Großbeeren. Als Autor zeichnet Richard Schillemann, der freundlich vermerkt: ‘nach Fontane’.

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Notes to Chapter 1 1. Um einen Eindruck von dieser umfangreichen journalistischen Tätigkeit zu gewinnen, vgl. Wolfgang Rasch, Theodor Fontane Bibliographie. Werk und Forschung, i (Berlin und New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2006), Kapitel 7: ‚Veröffentlichungen in Zeitschriften und Zeitungen von 1839 bis 1898’, S. 277–834, Einträge 1512–4248 (mitaufgelistet sind hier auch die Zeitungs- und Zeitschriftenvorabdrucke seiner Werke). 2. Theodor Fontane: Unechte Korrespondenzen, hg. Heide Streiter-Buscher, Schriften der Theodor Fontane Gesellschaft, 1.1/2 (Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1996). 3. Theodor Fontane: Unechte Korrespondenzen, 1.1, Einführung, S. 35. 4. Vgl. Theodor Fontane: Unechte Korrespondenzen, 1.1, Einführung, S. 36–37. 5. Vgl. Theodor Fontane: Unechte Korrespondenzen, 1.1, Einführung, S. 30ff. 6. Den Begriff geprägt hat Thomas Mann in seinem Essay Der alte Fontane (1910). Vgl. dazu Clarissa Blomqvist, Der Fontane-Ton. Typische Merkmale der Sprache Theodor Fontanes, in Sprachkunst. Wien. 1. Halbband 2004, S. 23–34, hier S. 24. In ihrem aufschlussreichen Aufsatz referiert Blomqvist den Forschungsstand zur Auseinandersetzung mit Fontanes Schreibstil und präsentiert zudem eigene linguistische Untersuchungsergebnisse zum ‘Fontane-Ton’. 7. Die Vorlage ist heute nicht nur in gedruckter Form in Bibliotheken und Antiquariaten gut greif bar, sondern auch in digitaler Form in der Volltextbibliothek Google Books. 8. Der volle Titel lautet: ‘Bunte Erinnerungen an frühere Persönlichkeiten, Begebenheiten und Theaterzustände aus Berlin und anderswoher. Zusammengesucht von Fr.[iedrich] Tietz’. — Die Zueignung heißt im Wortlaut: ‘Sr. Excellenz dem Königlich Preußischen Minister-Präsidenten Herrn Otto Theodor Freiherrn von Manteuffel mit dem Ausdruck tiefster Verehrung gewidmet vom Verfasser’. 9. Brief von Wilhelm Schwartz an Theodor Fontane, 24. August 1860. Vgl. Theodor Fontane: Spreeland. Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg. Viertel Teil, hg. Gotthard Erler und Rudolf Mingau (Berlin: Auf bau Taschenbuch Verlag=ATV, 19982), Anmerkungen S. 599. 10. Fontane, Spreeland (ATV), Schlusswort, S. 437–47, hier S. 441. 11. Wilhelm Schwartz (1821–99) wurde 1872 von Neuruppin an das Friedrich-WilhelmsGymnasium in Posen berufen, 1882 kehrte er zurück nach Berlin, um als Direktor des LuisenGymnasiums zu wirken. 1894 trat er in den Ruhestand. Er starb 1899 in Berlin. Er ist Autor zahlreicher Publikationen zur brandenburgisch-preußischen Geschichte sowie zu Sagen und Mythen. Vgl. Annalen des Friedrich-Wilhelms-Gymnasium zu Neuruppin, S. 119–20. Vgl. auch Theodor Fontane: Die Grafschaft Ruppin. Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg. Erster Teil, hg. Gotthard Erler und Rudolf Mingau (Berlin, Auf bau Taschenbuch Verlag = ATV, 19982), S. 192f und Anmerkungen. 12. Tietz, S. 1–15. 13. Geist von Beeren erschien am 22./23. August 1860 in der Kreuzzeitung, vgl. Fontane, Spreeland (ATV), Anmerkungen S. 598–99. 14. Vgl. Fontane, Spreeland (ATV), Anmerkungen S. 599. 15. Spuren von Vorarbeiten zu diesem Text ließen sich auch aktuell nicht finden, weder in den Tage- noch in den Notizbüchern noch in anderen Handschriftenbeständen. Auch in den überlieferten Briefen gibt es keinen Hinweis auf die Entstehung dieses dritten GroßbeerenKapitels. 16. Die Angabe bezieht sich auf die Erstausgabe (=EA): Theodor Fontane: Spreeland. BeeskowStorkow und Barnim-Teltow. Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg. Vierter Theil (Berlin: Hertz, 1882), S. 291–301 (Die Schlacht bei Großbeeren am 23. August 1813). Vgl. auch Fontane, Spreeland (ATV), S. 288, 289–97. 17. Fontane, Spreeland (EA), S. 302–10, hier S. 302 (Geist von Beeren). Vgl. auch Fontane, Spreeland (ATV), S. 298–305, hier S. 298. 18. Fontane, Spreeland (EA), S. 311–18 (Berlin in den Tagen der Schlacht von Großbeeren). Vgl. auch Fontane, Spreeland (ATV), S. 306–12. 19. Theodor Fontane an Wilhelm Hertz, 10. Mai 1881, in: Theodor Fontane. Briefe an Wilhelm und Hans Hertz. 1859–1898, hg. Kurt Schreinert, vollendet u. mit e. Einl. vers. von Gerhard Hay (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Verlag, 1972), S. 246.

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20. Vgl. Fontane. Briefe an Wilhelm und Hans Hertz, Anmerkung S. 511. — Das Gesamthonorar für die 1. Auf lage von Spreeland betrug laut Vertrag 1500 Mark. Vgl. Fontane, Spreeland (ATV), S. 457 und 460 sowie Theodor Fontane und Martha Fontane. Ein Familienbriefnetz, hg. Regina Dieterle. Schriften der Theodor Fontane Gesellschaft, 4 (Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2002), S. 137 und Anmerkung. 21. Theodor Fontane an Wilhelm Hertz,8. August 1881, in: Theodor Fontane. Briefe an Wilhelm und Hans Hertz, S. 249. 22. Vgl. Theodor Fontane an Hans Hertz, 30. September 1881, in: Theodor Fontane. Briefe an Wilhelm und Hans Hertz, S. 361. 23. Meyers Konversations-Lexikon. Eine Encykoplädie des allgemeinen Wissens. 4. Auf lage, Bd. 12 (Leipzig und Wien: Bibliographisches Institut, 1888), Eintrag ‘Redigieren’, S. 638. 24. Vgl. Duden: — [eingesehen am 12. Oktober 2014]. 25. Zum Beispiel schrieb Fontane 1882 eine Rezension zu Wilhelm Raabes Roman Fabian und Sebastian (1882) unter dem Pseudonym Adolf Hermes. Sie erschien in: Das Magazin für die Literatur des In- und Auslandes (Leipzig), Bd. 101, Nr. 25, S. 339–40 am 17. Juni 1882. Vgl. Rasch, Bd. 1, S. 740, Eintrag 3862. 26. Vgl. Tietz, S. 1 und Fontane, Spreeland (EA), S. 311–12 bzw. Fontane, Spreeland (ATV), S. 306. 27. Fontane, Spreeland (EA), S. 311–12. Vgl. auch Fontane, Spreeland (ATV), S. 306–07. 28. Tietz und Fontane kannten sich wahrscheinlich nicht persönlich. Von den hier gelobten Theaterstücken scheint Fontane wohl nicht viel gehalten zu haben. Aus einer Tagebuchnotiz vom 21. September 1856 geht hervor, dass er an diesem Tag dessen patriotisches Stück Der Traum des großen Kurfürsten im Theater gesehen hatte. Sein Kommentar im Tagebuch: ‘Scheußlich’, in: Theodor Fontane: Tagebücher. 1852. 1855–1858, hg. Charlotte Jolles unter Mitarbeit von Rudolf Muhs (Berlin: Auf bau-Verlag, 1994), S. 171. 29. Vgl. Tietz, Vorwort, S. viii. 30. Vgl. Tietz, S. 1–2 und Fontane, Spreeland (EA), S. 313 bzw. Fontane, Spreeland (ATV), S. 307. 31. Vgl. Tietz, S. 3–4 und Fontane, Spreeland (EA), S. 313–14 bzw. Fontane, Spreeland (ATV), S. 308. 32. Vgl. Blomqvist, bes. S. 27ff. 33. Vgl. dazu Blomqvist, die die Untersuchungen zu Fontanes ‘und’-Stil zusammenfasst und ihn an eigenen Beispielen neu belegt. 34. Hervorhebung von ‘aber’ durchwegs von der Verfasserin. 35. Ebenso interessant ist es, will man etwas über Fontanes Sprachkunst erfahren, ihn beim Übersetzen zu beobachten. Vgl. dazu Helen Chambers: Fontanes Übersetzung des TennysonGedichtes ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, in: Helen Chambers: Fontane-Studien. Gesammelte Aufsätze zu Romanen, Gedichten und Reportagen, Fontaneana Bd. 11 (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2014), S. 141–67, bes. S. 154ff. 36. Friedrich Heinrich Himmel (1765, Treuenbrietzen–1814, Berlin); Komponist und Pianist, sein Singspiel Fanchon (1800) war einer seiner wenigen wirklichen Erfolge. 37. Friedrich Wilhelm Gubitz (1786–1870) studierte Theologie und war ein begabter Holzschneider. 1805 wurde er an die Berliner Akademie der Künste berufen und wirkte dort als Lehrer. Gubitz war auch Schriftsteller, Publizist und Herausgeber mehrerer Zeitschriften, verfasste Lustspiele und humoristische Erzählungen. Von 1832 bis 1866 bzw. 1870 war er Theaterkritiker an der Vossischen Zeitung. Fontane wurde 1870 sein direkter Nachfolger und war, während er den Band Spreeland zusammenstellte, noch fest als solcher im Amt. Von Gubitz’ dramatischer Begabung hielt er als Theaterkritiker nicht viel (vgl. die Kritik zu Gubitz’ Kaiser und Müllerin vom 18. Januar 1879, in: Hanser Fontane-Ausgabe. Werke, Schriften und Briefe, hg. Walter Keitel und Helmuth Nünrberger (München: Hanser, 1962–97 = HFA), iii/2, S. 387f. 38. Tietz, S. 8. 39. Fontane, Spreeland (EA), S. 314–15 bzw. Fontane, Spreeland (ATV), S. 309. 40. Hervorhebung von der Verfasserin. 41. Tietz, S. 14. 42. Fontane, Spreeland (EA), S. 317–18 bzw. Fontane, Spreeland (ATV), S. 312. 43. Fontane, Spreeland (EA), S. 318 bzw. Fontane, Spreeland (ATV), S. 312.

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44. Abgedruckt in: Fontane Blätter, Band 2, Heft 6 (Heft 14 der Gesamtreihe), 1972, S. 377f. Zur Datierung vgl. die dazugehörenden Nachbemerkungen, S. 386. 45. Theodor Fontane, Mein Erstling: ‘Das Schlachtfeld von Großbeeren’, in: HFA iii/4, S. 1029–31, hier S. 1030. Mein Erstling erschien erstmals in: Die Geschichte des Erstlingswerks. Selbstbiographische Aufsätze von Rudolf Baumbach, Felix Dahn, Georg Ebers [usw.]. Eingeleitet von Karl Emil Franzos. Mit den Jugendbildnissen der Dichter. (Leipzig: Verlag Titze, [1894]), S. 1–7. 46. Fontane, Mein Erstling, in: HFA iii/4, S. 1030f. 47. Fontane, Mein Erstling, in: HFA iii/4, S. 1031. 48. Vgl. Rasch, S. 901.

C h ap t e r 2

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‘Eine gemalte Landschaft’? Landscapes in Theodor Fontane’s Novel Quitt (1890) James N. Bade, University of Auckland Quitt is Fontane’s most controversial and least understood novel. Written at the height of his literary career, in the middle of the seventeen-year period in which his undisputed masterpieces appeared — Schach von Wuthenow (1883), Irrungen, Wirrungen (1888), Frau Jenny Treibel (1893), Effi Briest (1896), and Der Stechlin (1898) — it received mixed reviews from the moment it appeared and remains to this day the subject of considerable debate among critics. Critical debate tends to focus on the authenticity of the second part of the novel. Quitt is divided into two distinct halves, which mirror each other in content and theme. In the first half, set in the Silesian mountain village of Krummhübel, near the border with Bohemia, the main character, Lehnert Menz, is embroiled in a dispute with the local forest and game warden, Opitz, who, as his superior during the Franco-Prussian war, had blocked Lehnert’s eligibility for an Iron Cross. In spite of intervention by the local pastor Siebenhaar, the dispute continues to escalate, and Lehnert, disguised as a poacher, finally provokes Opitz into shooting him. When Opitz’s gun does not fire, Lehnert shoots Opitz and does not come to his aid when he later hears him calling for help. When the town authorities suspect him of murder and come to question him, Lehnert disappears. As the novel moves into the second part, six years have passed and we meet Lehnert crossing the Shawnee Hills heading for Fort Holmes, in the Indian Territory of the United States, where he hears about a German Mennonite settlement near Darlington. He proceeds to Darlington and is accepted into the group, which is led by Obadja Hornbostel. Lehnert asks Obadja for the hand of his daughter Ruth, but Obadja hesitates, implying that Lehnert must prove himself worthy of his daughter. Lehnert appears to have earned Obadja’s trust when he saves Ruth’s life after she is bitten by a snake, but fate intervenes: Lehnert stumbles and falls on mountainous terrain when he goes out in search of Obadja’s son Toby, and dies before the rescue party can reach him. He is buried in the Hornbostel family plot. Before he dies, Lehnert writes a note expressing the hope that his death will now compensate for the death that he caused in Silesia — and that he is now ‘quitt’ (‘even’; hence the title of the novel).

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The fact that Obadja’s tolerant, liberal, egalitarian, and pacifist Mennonite settle­ment is put forward by Fontane as a functioning alternative to the narrowminded, militaristic, and hierarchical Prussia of the first half of the novel makes Quitt Fontane’s most political novel and his most critical appraisal of the Prussianled German Empire of the 1880s. However, it was not the political content that upset the critics. It was the second half of the novel, which was regarded as being set in an unconvincing fictional America that was simply the product of Fontane’s imagination. The first official review of Quitt, by Paul Schlenther in the Vossische Zeitung of 21 December 1890, set the tone for the critical assessment of the novel down to the present day. Schlenther argued that it was obvious that Fontane had never been to the area of the United States that he writes about in the novel; whereas for the Silesian part it was clear that Fontane knew the region well and those who lived there, the American part was reliant on second-hand knowledge and had an invented, imaginary setting; while the first half was real, the second was painted landscape: ‘Und so unterscheidet sich der erste vom zweiten Theil wie eine wirkliche von einer gemalten Landschaft. Der Realist giebt zum Nachteil des Ganzen Raum dem Fabulanten.’1 Such views are typical of the novel’s reception. The American half of the novel has almost unanimously been condemned as ‘frei erfunden’ − pure fiction with no connection to reality.2 In his 1920 study, Kenneth Hayens3 criticizes ‘the unconvincingness of the settings in Quitt’ (p. 113), sees the section of the novel dealing with the Mennonite mission as ‘somewhat clumsily handled’ (p. 105), and concludes that Fontane’s Quitt is ‘one of his least successful novels’ (p. 120). Fritz K. Richter finds the American part of the novel simply not convincing: ‘ein Amerikaner findet die Schilderung des Indianer-Territoriums, des heutigen Oklahoma, nicht überzeugend.’4 Peter Demetz suggests that the second half of the novel owes too much to Bret Harte’s ‘wild west’ novels and to the writer Paul Lindau’s accounts of his time in America: ‘Fontanes Amerika ist (wenn ich das hier bemerken darf ) ein sehr buntscheckiges Derivat. Es ist zu einem Viertel aus Bret Harte, zu drei Vierteln aus Paul Lindau hergeleitet.’5 Stefanie Stockhorst agrees with the criticism of the second half, implying that it made Fontane look like a Brandenburg version of the German ‘wild west’ adventure writer Karl May: ‘Die Realitätsgestaltung in der Erzählung Quitt wurde in der Forschung wiederholt und auch mit guten Gründen beanstandet; gerade wegen der in Amerika spielenden Partien wurde Fontane gleichsam zum märkischen Karl May abgestempelt.’6 Lieselotte Voss goes further: she regards the American half of the novel as so unreal that it can only be interpreted as a dream, ‘als einen bewußt irrealen, gleichsam von Lehnert geträumten Raum’ (p. 225).7 There has also been some confusion among critics as to where exactly the American part of the novel is set. Helmuth Nürnberger postulates that it is set in Kansas — ‘im nordamerikanischen Kansas’8 — while Udo Wörffel hypothesizes that it is set in the south-eastern corner of Oklahoma at the border with Arkansas and Texas: ‘Nach den sonstigen geographischen Angaben, die Fontane im Roman macht, ist sie in Oklahoma zu lokalisieren, und zwar etwa dort, wo heute die Staaten Oklahoma, Arkansas und Texas zusammenstoßen.’9 This confusion is due to what is widely seen as a lack of topographical accuracy on Fontane’s part, which

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led Sylvain Guarda, for example, to interpret the ‘magic isle’ (‘Zauberinsel’, p. 87) of Hornbostel’s Mennonite community as a dream world which takes Lehnert on a mystical journey to the Elysian Fields of antiquity: Bei genauerer Betrachtung bildet Lehnerts Entrücken aus der schlesischen Gebirgs- in die amerikanische Traumwelt untergründig den Auftakt zu einer Unter­weltsfahrt [. . .] Was Fontane bei der Schilderung Amerikas an geo­ graphischer Weite erspart, weiß er durch eine geistig-seelische Tiefsinnigkeit auszu­g leichen, die unter der Regie des mennonitischen Friedensevangeliums himmelwärts bis in die Gefilde der Seligen hinaufreicht.10

The problematic nature of the second half of the novel caused one critic, Annalies Luppa,11 to ignore the American section almost entirely. Using as her justification Walter Müller-Seidel’s verdict that the first half of Quitt is a masterpiece in itself — ‘ein kleines Meisterwerk für sich’ (p. 68) − Luppa devotes only one paragraph to the American part of the novel in her seventeen-page analysis of the novel. A small minority of critics, notably Hans-Heinrich Reuter and Christian Grawe, have defended the novel. Reuter finds it almost incomprehensible that this fine product of Fontane’s narrative skill (‘Beleg der erzählerischen Meisterschaft des alten Fontane’), written when Fontane’s artistic talent was at its zenith (‘im Zenit von Fontanes Schaffen’), has been misjudged and even ignored by so many: ‘das bis in unsere Gegenwart reichende Verkennen, ja Ignorieren gerade dieses Romans’. He wonders whether the answer lies in the political nature of the novel.12 Christian Grawe notes that Quitt tends to be assigned by critics to Fontane’s less important crime stories, but points out that it does not fit the genre of ‘Kriminalerzählung’ at all and that by length alone it is Fontane’s fourth longest novel.13 The second section of the novel is more acceptable now, Grawe argues, because modern critics expect more than just accurate descriptions of milieux: ‘Die neuere Forschung läßt den Amerikaszenen größere Gerechtigkeit widerfahren, denn sie erwartet von ihnen nicht mehr einfach realistische Genauigkeit’ (p. 180). Fontane spent over five years researching and working on Quitt. His first notes on Quitt date back to June 1885 in Krummhübel, where he had gone to revise his manuscript for Cécile (1887), a novel which in many ways may be seen as a precursor of Quitt: both novels feature Newfoundland dogs and the associated theme of faithfulness; both have the Silesian mountain spirit Rübezahl in common; and the story of the game warden being shot by a poacher, which Fontane heard about in Krummhübel in 1885, first surfaces in Cécile.14 After completing Cécile, Fontane wrote a preliminary version of Quitt between June and December 1886, which was then revised between July 1888 and March 1889. After the publication of a shorter version in serial form in early 1890, Fontane further revised the manuscript in August 1890 before it appeared in its final full book form in November 1890.15 Contrary to the opinion of some critics, Quitt is a well-researched novel. Fort Holmes, Darlington, a Mennonite mission near Darlington, and another Mennonite mission north of Darlington which had been a military fort were not in any way fictional — all actually existed at the time that Fontane was writing the novel. It is Fontane’s misfortune that within a few years of Quitt’s appearance all his main American locales had disappeared from the map. The fact that Fort Holmes and Darlington, and indeed the Indian Territory, could not be found on contemporary

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maps, led critics to the conclusion that they were Fontane’s invention. Attempts by A. J. F. Zieglschmid16 and more recently Mark Jantzen and Ekart Pastor17 to defend Fontane’s portrayal of the Indian Territory in the 1880s seem to have fallen on deaf ears as far as mainstream Germanistik is concerned. It is time to set the record straight. The seventeenth chapter of the novel, set in 1884, opens with Lehnert crossing the Shawnee Hills, in the Indian Territories, south of Kansas, on his way from Fort MacCulloch to Fort Holmes. Fort Holmes and the Shawnee Hills were a prominent feature on maps of the Indian Territory at the time. Edward Freyhold’s 1879 ‘Map of the Territory of the United States, West of the Mississippi River’ held at the Berlin State Library shows Fort Holmes at the junction of the Canadian and Little Rivers facing the Shawnee Hills on the opposite bank, and ‘Ft. McCullock’ beyond them directly to the south.18 Fontane describes the view from the top of the Shawnee Hills, with the ‘Texas–Kansas–Missouri-Bahn’ crossing a large valley and ‘Station Darlington und Station Gibson’ in the distance (pp. 138–39). This railway, running from Galveston in the south to St Louis in the north, is mentioned several times in the novel (pp. 138, 146, 191). It appears in Freyhold’s 1879 map as the Missouri Kansas and Texas (MKT) Railroad passing to the east of the Shawnee Hills and proceeding through Fort Gibson into Kansas in the north. In actual fact the Shawnee Hills are not high enough to afford the view which Fontane describes, as Zieglschmid has pointed out (p. 228); and Darlington, in Fontane’s novel directly on the MKT line, was in fact located 172 kilometres to the west. G. P. Strum’s 1885 map of the Indian Territory,19 also held by the Berlin State Library, does show a branch line of the Atlantic & Pacific Railroad running along the northern banks of the Canadian River from the Little River junction to Fort Reno and Darlington, so it was possible to travel from Fort Holmes to Darlington by train, as Lehnert does, but not on the MKT line. For the purposes of the novel, Fontane has moved the MKT line to the west.

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Fig. 1 (above, and detail on facing page) Map of the Territory of the United States, West of the Mississippi River, prepared by authority of the Hon. The Secretary of War in the Office of the Chief Engineers by Edward Freyhold, 1879. The detail shows Fort Holmes at the junction of the Canadian and Little Rivers and the Shawnee Hills on the other side of the Canadian River, with Fort Gibson to the north and ‘Ft. McCullock’ to the south (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin — Preußischer Kulturbesitz, R 5230 Bl. 6).

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From the narrative point of view, the landscape description at this point successfully gives us Lehnert’s geographical location and introduces us to what is to be the main locale — Darlington. However, Fontane’s readership would have gained little from this topographical description, as Fort McCulloch is already indicated as abandoned in the 1879 Freyhold map, and troops demolished what remained of Fort Holmes when they expelled settlers hoping to claim land in that area (so-called ‘sooners’) before the official Land Run of April 1889, which opened up the Unassigned Lands for settlement, thus also marking the end of the Indian Territory in which the novel is set.20 By the time the novel came out, Fort McCulloch, Fort Holmes, and the Indian Territory as described by Fontane had ceased to exist. On the train to Darlington, Lehnert meets Tobias Hornbostel, the eighteenyear-old son of Obadja Hornbostel, whom Lehnert had met some six years earlier in a Dakota Mennonite village which he thinks may have been called Dirschau. Here Fontane is recording the origin of one of his main sources on Mennonites in the United States. His initial enquiries into Prussian Mennonites, as Jantzen points out,21 concentrated on the Mennonite community in Dirschau in West Prussia. Zieglschmid and Jantzen suggest that the name ‘Hornbostel’ may have been inspired by the Mennonite surname Oberholzer or Oberholt.22 The address on the label of the young man’s luggage is given as ‘Nogat-Ehre, Station Darlington, Indian-Territory’ (p. 141). Lehnert asks Toby (as he is known from now on) whether his father might have a place for him in his community. When they arrive at Darlington, which in the novel is no great distance from Fort Holmes,23 Toby is met by his sister Ruth with a horse and cart, and Lehnert undertakes to spend the night at Darlington station to give Toby time to explain Lehnert’s situation to his father. The occasional train breaks the monotony of Darlington Station, and Lehnert watches the night train from Galveston to St Louis disappear into the lights of what he is told is Nogat-Ehre in the distance. The next morning, Toby and Ruth collect him and take him to a small community, a ‘Mennonitenkolonie’ (p. 152) surrounded by cornfields which Toby refers to as ‘Mennonitenland’ (p. 150). Darlington did exist, and had a Mennonite community nearby. A map of Darling­ton from the 1890s held at the Oklahoma History Center24 shows a Men­ nonite Mission School consisting of four buildings adjacent to an Indian Camp about a mile north of Darlington, a township with a post office consisting of thirty buildings laid out in streets around the Cheyenne and Arapahoe Agency building and situated on the North Canadian River about two miles north-east of the military camp at Fort Reno and three miles south of the Cheyenne School at Caddo Springs. Strum’s 1885 Indian Territory Map, which Fontane may have seen, shows ‘Cheyenne & Arapahoe Agency or Darlington’ between Fort Reno and Caddo Springs on the stagecoach route to Wichita in Kansas. Darlington was named after Brinton Darlington, a Quaker who was in charge of the Cheyenne & Arapahoe Agency. In 1879, after the Mennonite missionary S. S. Haury had successfully established good relations with the Arapahoe Indians through the Arapahoe Chief Powder Face (the model for Fontane’s Gunpowder Face in Quitt),25 the Quakers decided to work only with the Cheyenne Indians and encouraged the Mennonites

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Fig. 2. Detail of Map of Darlington Agency Reserve, 1890s, showing the Darlington Cheyenne and Arapahoe Agency, with the Mennonite Mission School on the right (Research Division of the Oklahoma Historical Society, Indian Archives Maps, ITMap.0123).

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31

Fig. 3 (upper left). Darlington Buildings, 1886 (Research Division of the Oklahoma Historical, Joseph O. Hickox Collection, 9470). Fig. 4 (lower left). Darlington Indian Agency, c. 1890 (Shuck Collection 14, Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma Libraries). Fig. 5 (above). Group of Mennonite Missionaries and Native Americans, Darlington, c. 1890 (Shuck Collection 37, Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma Libraries).

to work with the Arapahoe Indians. Thus the Mennonite mission was established in 1880 and the mission school building was completed the following year.26 Fontane knew more than just the name of the settlement, though. This becomes clear when one realizes that there are a number of authentic names assoc­iated with Darlington among the Mennonites who attend the Mission School con­ fer­ence which Fontane describes in Chapter 24 — Krähbiel, Shelley, Nickel, Bartels, Stauffer, and Penner. Krähbiel is a reference to Rev. Christian Krehbiel, ‘an out­standing and inf luential elder of the Mennonites in the United States’,27 who founded the Mennonite Academy in Halstead, Kansas.28 In the novel, Ruth attended the Halstead School (p. 219) and she, Toby, and Obadja visit Halstead just before the con­ference (pp. 191, 197). Christian Krehbiel assisted the mission school in Dar­lington after a devastating fire there in 1881, engaging the assistance of the military at Fort Reno to help with temporary accommodation so that the mission school could continue.29 His son, Jacob S. Krehbiel, became superintendent of the Indian Mission School at Darlington.30 Anthony Shelley, a teacher at the Halstead

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Academy, reported that the Darlington mission school was regarded by the Indian Commission as a ‘model school’.31 Brother Nickel, according to S.S. Haury’s report dated 12 May 1881, was part of the Mennonite mission school in Darlington and had to leave temporarily to help his ageing father with the harvest.32 In the novel, Krehbiel and Nickel run the nearby mission schools (pp. 223, 246, 253). The other surnames that Fontane mentions — Bartels, Stauffer, and Penner — are wellknown Mennonite names.33 William I. Schreiber notes that Penner is the most frequently found surname among Prussian Mennonites descended from the Dutch refugees who came to Prussia in the sixteenth century.34 The Indian Mission School at Darlington became less relevant with the opening up of the Indian Territory to settlement in 1889. The township of Darlington also lost its importance as a trading place with the coming of the railway to nearby El Reno in 1889.35 Jacob S. Krehbiel resigned his post as Superintendent of the Indian Mission School in 1897 and it was replaced by a government Indian school the following year.36 As with Fort Holmes, Fontane’s carefully researched Darlington, once ‘quite a village’,37 was to disappear from the map within a few years of Quitt’s appearance. Fontane gives his fictional Mennonite community near Darlington the name ‘Nogat-Ehre’. It is not unusual for Fontane to have fictional settings among otherwise realistic landscapes: Schach’s castle in Schach von Wuthenow, for example, is an invention on Fontane’s part, and both Effi Briest and Der Stechlin are set in fictional villages;38 indeed, in the first part of Quitt he has Lehnert living on a fictitious island in Wolfshau.39 What is interesting here is the name. Although it is invented, it has clear associations with the Prussian Mennonites who emigrated to North America. Paul Lindau, whom Fontane knew well, had first-hand knowledge of the Mennonite missionary activities in the United States and wrote about them in his letters, which were published in 1885 as Aus der neuen Welt.40 Lindau’s letters evidently drew Fontane’s attention to the Mennonites of Darlington and their association with the Nogat Valley: Aber auch als Missionäre entfalten sie eine besondere Thätigkeit und Geschicklichkeit, und sie haben in dem benachbarten Indianer-Territorium in verhältnißmäßig kurzer Zeit schon Ansehnliches geleistet. Die Mission der Mennoniten namentlich unter den Cheyenner Indianern ist so erfolgreich gewesen, daß ihr von Seiten der Regierung das Fort Darlington vollständig zur Verfügung gestellt worden ist. Jetzt findet man auf mennonitischen Farmen nicht selten junge Indianer der wildesten Stämme, die sich als Knechte verdungen haben; und das ist ein Erfolg, der bis jetzt von keiner anderen Mission erzielt worden ist. Die günstigen Berichte der südrussischen Mennoniten aus Kansas hatten die Einwanderung von Mennoniten aus der Nogatniederung in Westpreußen zur Folge. Diese preußischen Mennoniten, die im Jahre 1876 auszuwandern begannen, sind für die Union bei Weitem die wichtigsten Ansiedler.41

Lindau must have provided the inspiration for the name Nogat-Ehre which Fontane gave to his fictional settlement, indicating that his Mennonite immigrants came from the Vistula Delta of West Prussia. Toby tells Lehnert that they had originally wanted to call their settlement Dirschau, the name they had given their earlier settlement in

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Dakota (p. 143). Dirschau, now the Polish town of Tczew, is on the Vistula River, which together with the Nogat River forms the Vistula Delta. The two pictures to which Toby draws Lehnert’s attention inside the mission house, commenting: ‘Sie sind das einzig preußische, was wir noch von alter Zeit her im Hause haben’ (pp. 163–64), are of the Oliva Monastery, near Danzig, West Prussia, and the castle in Marienburg, on the Nogat River. Before his Christmas sermon, Obadja speaks to Lehnert about his ‘alten heimischen Weichsel- und Nogatgegend’ and the pride he feels for his ‘Nogatheimat’ (250). This is historically correct: the Vistula Delta had a considerable number of Mennonite settlements, and Mennonites did emigrate from that part of West Prussia to North America. The map accompanying Schreiber’s study shows five Mennonite villages by the Nogat River, and seventeen on the Vistula Delta, making it a key centre of Mennonite culture; indeed, Peter J. Klassen writes that the land between the Vistula and the Nogat Rivers ‘became home to the largest concentration of Mennonites anywhere in Royal Prussia’ and estimates that they made up 16.5 per cent of the population.42 As far as emigration from that area is concerned, Cornelius Krahn gives West Prussia as one of the main lands of origin of the General Conference Mennonite Church in the United States,43 and Jantzen’s figures indicate that as many as a thousand Mennonites emigrated specifically from the Vistula Delta to the United States from the 1860s to the 1880s.44 Much of the action in the second half of the novel takes place in and around a former military fort, which Fontane calls Fort O’Brien. Fort O’Brien is first mentioned when Lehnert looks out of his upstairs window shortly after his arrival at Nogat-Ehre and notices a track leading up to a mountain range. There he can make out a dilapidated building known as old Fort O’Brien, and he has a premonition that his fate will be decided there, one way or the other: ‘zu Glück oder Unglück’ (p. 165). Some weeks later he goes on a horseback excursion to Fort O’Brien and finds that although the main building, not used for twenty years, is in poor shape, the palisades and tower are in good condition. From there he looks back to NogatEhre, two hours distant, and puts together a posy of wild f lowers for Ruth. As he moves on into the hills the landscape reminds him of Krummhübel, and for a moment he imagines Opitz lying there (pp. 186–89). Later on, in March, Ruth, so taken by Toby’s descriptions of the wild f lowers around Fort O’Brien, suggests they all go on a picnic there, and it is here that Ruth is bitten by a viper; Lehnert saves her life, and endangers his own, by sucking out the snake venom. Obadja has accompanied them, as he wishes to have another look at the Fort, which he is considering taking over from the government and turning it into a mission station (p. 259). This is the clue as to Fontane’s model for Fort O’Brien: it is Fort Cantonment, which was in fact offered to the Mennonites for use as a mission school. Historically, the United States government decided in June 1882 to abandon its military post at Fort Cantonment and offered its Fort Cantonment buildings to the Mennonites; in October the military vacated the fort, and by December 1882 all buildings but one had been transferred to the Mennonite mission.45 The buildings were, however, as noted by Fontane, mainly palisade structures, and not suitable for long-term use; a new brick mission school building to accommodate seventyfive children was erected, and opened in July 1890. This building was destroyed by

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fire in 1893 and rebuilt, but the Mission School at Cantonment was closed in 1901 and replaced by a government Indian school.46 Thus, from 1901, any references by Fontane to a Mennonite mission school in a former government fort would have meant nothing to readers. Fort O’Brien also features in Chapter 28, a chapter which in its atmospheric intensity, immediacy, and powerful imagery rivals the ‘Schnee-Kapitel’ in Thomas Mann’s Zauberberg. Here Toby, Lehnert, and Kaulbars leave Ruth behind with the Newfoundland dog Uncas to look after their horse and cart near Fort O’Brien while they venture into the forest to look for a suitable Christmas tree, but in a sudden snowstorm they become disoriented. It is only Lehnert’s experience of similar conditions in the winter forest of Silesia which allows them to find their way back — but only just, as he momentarily collapses from exhaustion before returning them to the spot where Ruth and Uncas are waiting. This chapter prepares us for the climax of the novel (Chapters 34 and 35). When Toby does not return from a eagle-hunting expedition, Lehnert sets out with Uncas to see if he can find him. He takes a track to the range which runs parallel to the valley leading to Fort O’Brien, and heads towards a vantage point from which he will be able to see the peak known as Eagle’s Point, where he suspects Toby will be. He climbs up a craggy and slippery slope but stumbles, breaks his hip, and loses consciousness. By the time the rescue party from Nogat-Ehre arrives, Uncas having returned without him, Lehnert has died of exposure. Strum’s 1885 map of the Indian Territory shows a road from Darlington to Fort Cantonment following a valley as described in the novel with mountains behind. Fontane tends to refer to the Ozark Mountains as all mountains to the north, and to the Shawnee Hills as all hills in the south, so that when he writes that all Mennonites from between the Ozark Mountains and Shawnee Hills come to Nogat-Ehre (pp. 198f.), he really means that they have come from the whole of the Indian Territory as it then existed. However, the mountains, clearly shown on Strum’s map, are the Glass Mountains, adjacent to the Cimarron River and Eagle Chief Creek, which possibly inspired Fontane’s ‘Eagle Point’. The Glass Mountains, named after their selenite crystals that glint in the sunlight, now form part of a national park, nine kilometres east of the junction of Eagle Chief Creek and the Cimarron River. The Glass Mountain peaks have commanding views of the surrounding countryside, as far as the horizon in some directions, their steep slopes characterized by loose rocks, the dangerous nature of which seems to be underscored by the eagles circling above. What is missing, as far as the reader of Quitt is concerned, is the forest cover, which plays a major role in the second half of the novel and ensures that the landscape of the second half of the novel ref lects that of the first. However, although the area now appears semi-arid, in Fontane’s day these mountains and the surrounding plains were covered in dense forest, which was felled, hauled out, and sold in the late nineteenth century by ‘timber raiders’.47 Far from being a figment of Fontane’s imagination, therefore, the American landscapes in Quitt may be seen as ‘remarkably accurate’.48 The same applies to Fontane’s depiction of his Mennonite community. Writing from the American Mennonite perspective, Ernst Correll describes Fontane’s Nogat-Ehre as a ‘true,

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35

Fig. 6 (above). Cantonment, looking north across Cantonment Creek, c. 1890 (Shuck Collection 17, Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma Libraries). Fig. 7 (below). Cantonment Mission Building, c. 1890 (H. P. Krehbiel, History of the General Conference of the Mennonites of North America, 1898, Heritage Room, Berne Public Library, Berne, IN).

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Fig. 8. Detail of Map of Indian Territory, 1885, Department of the Interior, General Land Office, G. P. Strum, Principal Draughtsman, showing Darlington and Cantonment linked by the road to Fort Supply, with Glass Mountains to the north of Cantonment and to the west of Eagle Chief Creek (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin — Preußischer Kulturbesitz, R 7281).

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37

Fig. 9. The Glass Mountains, west of Eagle Chief Creek, correspond to the position of the mountains described in Quitt which provide the setting for Eagle’s Point in Chapters 23–26 of the novel ( J. Bade).

unadulterated’ depiction of the ‘Mennonites of Darlington’ and comments: ‘the total picture of this group of Mennonites is quite accurate.’49 Similarly, Elisabeth Bender refers to the novel’s ‘authentic and sympathetic portrayal of Mennonite family life’ and its ‘painstakingly accurate and sympathetic portrayal of Obadja’.50 If the second half of Quitt is in fact a faithful reproduction of a Mennonite community in that part of the United States in the 1880s, then the question arises: what were Fontane’s sources? We know about Fontane’s love of maps and his ‘besonderes Interesse an Geschi­ chte und Geographie’ from Paul Meyer’s reminiscences.51 Christina Brieger believes that Fontane would have used a map for his geographical orientation in this novel, quoting his 1888 letter to Friedrich Stephany: ‘Indian Territory — das ich zufällig fast so gut kenne wie die Mark Brandenburg’.52 We should assume therefore, that Fontane had access to contemporary maps of the Indian Territory of the United States similar to, if not identical with the 1879 and 1885 maps held at the Berlin State Library. The historical novels of James Fenimore Cooper and the Californian stories by Bret Harte, both of whom are mentioned in the novel (pp. 135–36), undoubtedly contributed to Fontane’s image of the United States. As mentioned above, Paul Lindau’s letters may well have been the original inspiration for Fontane’s NogatEhre Mennonite setting. When one considers that Lindau also mentions in his letters the ‘Mennonitenhochschule’ (p. 359) in Halstead, which in the novel Ruth attends (p. 219), as well as the North Pacific Railroad (‘Nördliche Pacificbahn’, pp. v–vi), referred to in the novel as ‘die Nord-Pacific-Bahn’ (p. 142), one can see that Lindau’s writings were the framework around which Fontane built the second half of his novel.

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For his information on the Mennonite settlements in the United States, Fontane was in touch with Jakob Mannhardt, the Mennonite elder in Danzig who founded the Mennonitische Blätter zur Belehrung und christlichen Erbauung zunächst für Mennoniten, which Fontane refers to in Quitt as the ‘Blätter der mennonitischen Genossenschaft’ (p. 205).53 Both Zieglschmid and Jantzen mention the Mennonitische Blätter as possible sources, and Jantzen refers to three reports from Darlington which appeared in the October 1881, May 1882, and June 1882 issues.54 There are in fact five reports from Darlington altogether, two more appearing in April 1882 and July 1882.55 All reports are from S. S. Haury, whose address — ‘Darlington, Indian-Territory’ — is identical to that given on Toby’s bag in Quitt (p. 141). The Mennonitische Blätter may be regarded as one of Fontane’s principal sources; as we have seen, many of the proper names and place-names which Fontane uses in his novel may be traced back to these reports. The relaxed acceptance of all backgrounds, religions, and beliefs which comes out so clearly in the novel is illustrated in Haury’s moving account of the funeral for four children, including his own son, who had perished in the mission school fire — the funeral service was conducted by a Quaker and the interment by an Episcopalian, while Haury gave the funeral address; almost everyone from the Darlington agency was there, together with 120 Arapahoe adults and children.56 This account has many similarities with Fontane’s description of the Mennonite assembly in Chapter 24 (pp. 196–205). One of Fontane’s key sources was the German explorer and novelist Balduin Möllhausen, whose account of his experiences as a topographer and artist on Lt. Amiel Whipple’s expedition to determine a route for a transcontinental southern railway appeared in Germany in 1858 as Tagebuch einer Reise vom Mississippi nach den Küsten der Südsee, featuring a foreword by Alexander von Humboldt. Brieger mentions that Fontane knew Möllhausen’s novels, that the two met on 7 December 1881, and that Fontane wrote an essay on Möllhausen.57 But Möllhausen’s inf luence on Fontane went much deeper than that of a mere acquaintance. Andreas Graf suggests that there may be some reluctance by ‘Germanisten’ to engage with Fontane’s association with Möllhausen because of the latter’s proliferation of novels set in the ‘wild west’.58 Graf has established that Fontane met Möllhausen regularly at the round table (‘Tafelrunde’) meetings set up by Prinz Friedrich Karl at Dreilinden between 1881 and 1885; Möllhausen, he has found, was invited on average twice a month, and between 25 November 1881 and 14 May 1882, Fontane attended the Tafelrunde eight times.59 In his essay on Möllhausen, Fontane emphasizes that Möllhausen spent ten years on scientific expeditions in America.60 Roland Berbig has documented significant correspondence between Fontane and Möllhausen and a number of occasions on which they met between 1881 and 1884, the most significant being an overnight visit at Lohme, on 10–11 September 1884, at which Möllhausen spent the evening and the next morning telling Fontane about his ‘Amerika-Reisen’.61 Möllhausen relates in great detail in Tagebuch einer Reise how his expedition traversed the whole of the ‘Indianer-Gebiet’, including that part which Fontane uses to establish the geographical setting at the beginning of Chapter 17. Möllhausen writes that the expedition follows the south bank of the Canadian River through the thick forest ’[v]on Shawnee Village bis Shawnee

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Fig. 10. The remains of the Arnsdorf Protestant church with cemetery, Miłków ( J. Bade).

Town’ alongside the hills that were later to become known as the Shawnee Hills, and Möll­hausen specifically mentions ‘eine alte Befestigung’ at the junction of the Cana­d ian and Little Rivers — Fontane’s Fort Holmes, though Möllhausen refers to it as Fort Edwards, as it was known at the time.62 Möllhausen’s descriptions of circling ‘Adler’, ‘tafelförmige Berge’ with views to the far horizon, dense forest, Indian hunting parties, and disused dilapidated forts, are very reminiscent of Quitt.63 These impressions would have been supplemented by Möllhausen’s in­formal remi­ ni­scences of his time in the Indianer-Gebiet in his conversations with Fontane. How can the present-day reader connect with the landscapes in Fontane’s Quitt? Although Silesia is now part of Poland, and much development has taken place in the Riesengebirge/Karkonosze area, particularly as far as the tourist industry is concerned, Arnsdorf/Miłków and Krummhübel/Karpacz are still recognizable as Fontane’s settings for the first half of his novel. The Evangelische Kirche in Miłków is in ruins, but its churchyard is intact. The ‘Gerichtskretscham’ in Karpacz, still a restaurant, has a plaque by its entrance emphasizing its historical significance. The Kirche Wang is a well-known landmark in the district; it affords a fine view over the township and the surrounding forest, still a popular hunting ground. Of the landscapes in the American half of the novel, however, little remains. Fort Holmes went out of existence in 1889, but the site on the conf luence of Little River and Canadian River can still be visited and is indicated by a historical marker on the main highway. The nearest town is Calvin, which has a pleasant view of the Shawnee Hills; once a stop on the Rock Island Line, its economy is now based on its peanut farming.64 The Darlington site has had a chequered history. In 1909 it became a Masonic home, of which the 1913 chapel remains; in 1923 it was taken over by the Oklahoma Narcotics Institution; and the Oklahoma Wildlife Department operated it from 1932 to 1996. It is now the Agriculture Education and Applied

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Fig. 11 (above). The former Krummhübel ‘Gerichtskretscham’, Karpacz ( J. Bade). Fig. 12 (below). Kirche Wang, Karpacz ( J. Bade).

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41

Fig. 13. View over former Wolfshau and Krummhübel from Kirche Wang, Karpacz ( J. Bade).

Research Center of Redlands Community College. The arrival of the Rock Island Line in Darlington in 1889 together with the opening up of land for settlement proved a distraction to both the Indians and the mission workers, many of the latter becoming more interested in ‘thoughts of occupying farms than of winning souls’.65 Jacob S. Krehbiel, superintendent of the Indian Mission School at Darlington, joined four other young Mennonites in claiming land east of Darlington when it became available for settlement in 1892. Their settlement led to the establishment of the first church in the nearby township of Geary, forty kilometres north-west of Darlington. In 1897 Jacob Krehbiel resigned his Darlington post altogether, and was ordained by his father, Christian Krehbiel, from Halstead, as elder of the Geary Mennonite Church.66 Other mission workers from Darlington joined another group of Mennonites in 1889 in staking claims about twelve kilometres north of El Reno, which turned into the township of Mennoville, with the earliest Mennonite church in Oklahoma, built in 1893. The Mennoville Church was used till 1952, and has now been moved to the historic precinct of El Reno; the cemetery is all that remains of Mennoville.67 The Geary First Mennonite Church still stands proudly in Broadway Avenue, but is now used by the Baptist community. The centre of activity for Mennonites in that area is now Hydro, twenty-two kilometres to the west of Geary, with its Bethel Mennonite Church and Great Plains Mennonite Convention Camp, together with its large Pleasant View Mennonite Church and community centre, which dates back to 1897.68 Fort Cantonment lives on in the name of the

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Fig. 14 (above). The Fort Holmes site, on the left bank of the Little River as it approaches the Canadian River ( J. Bade). Fig. 15 (below). Shawnee Hills from Calvin ( J. Bade).

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Fig. 16 (above). Calvin, the present-day town closest to the site of Fort Holmes ( J. Bade). Fig. 17 (below). The former Darlington Agency became a Masonic home in 1909, of which the 1913 chapel remains (pictured); it now forms part of the Agriculture Education and Applied Research Center of Redlands Community College ( J. Bade).

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Fig. 18. The Fort Cantonment Officers’ Quarters, built in 1880 and reconstructed in 1976, four kilometres from the present-day township of Canton, which took its name from the nearby Fort ( J. Bade).

nearby township of Canton; the only surviving building, the Fort Cantonment Officers’ Quarters, built in 1880 and reconstructed in 1976, is to be found four kilometres north-west of Canton. After the closure of the Mennonite mission at Fort Cantonment in 1901, the Arapahoe from Darlington and Cantonment moved gradually to Canton, where a Mennonite Arapahoe mission station operated well into the 1980s.69 The nearest Mennonite church is in Fairfield, 29 kilometres northeast of Canton, near the Glass Mountains State Park. From the point of view of Quitt, it is interesting to note that, although NogatEhre did not exist, within a few years of the appearance of the novel, two Mennonite communities had sprouted up in the very area where Fontane had put his fictional ‘Mennonitenkolonie’, and that this region is still a focus of Mennonite activity. In this connection, one also wonders how the Mennonite communities in the United States have fared over the last 125 years, particularly as far as the doctrines highlighted in the novel are concerned. The lack of social distinctions, the attitude of positive goodwill towards others, and the acceptance of all for the sake of the good of all, are still key tenets in Mennonite belief and practice.70 The doctrine of pacifism, based on the biblical principles outlined in the Sermon on the Mount, is still central to Mennonite life, although it received a buffeting from those who regarded the Mennonite stance as unpatriotic, particularly during the two World Wars, which led to some difficult concessions on the part of the Mennonites.71 Arguably this is foreseen in the novel, as Toby’s skills as a marksman and his preparedness to use these skills to ensure the survival of an endangered species (p. 270) indicates that a compromise in this doctrine may be necessary when it comes to the preservation of life.72 In recent years, negative views on the Mennonites’

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non-combatant roles have given way to a more positive focus on the Mennonite contribution towards civil defence and disaster relief.73 Quitt is unquestionably Fontane’s strongest critique of Prussian and German militarism. In Obadja’s Mennonite community Fontane sketches out a working alternative: a thriving tolerant and supportive community that is not based on authoritarianism or blind obedience, but on common sense: ‘Wo Verstand befiehlt, ist der Gehorsam leicht’, as Lehnert comments (p. 145); and, as he observes later: ‘Er sah kein Regieren und einfach ein Geist der Ordnung und Liebe sorgte dafür, daß alles nach Art eines Uhrwerks ging’ (p. 166). Is this indeed, as Arthur Davis suggests, Fontane’s idea of a community that could ‘serve as a model for Europe’?74 If so, this novel is, sadly, just as relevant today as it was in 1890. Fontane’s urgent message has for far too long been drowned out by a chorus of misinformed criticism of Fontane’s ‘gemalte Landschaft’, his supposedly imaginary locales. It is time to restore Quitt to the Fontane canon where it belongs. Notes to Chapter 2 1. Quoted by Christina Brieger, in ‘Wirkung’, in Theodor Fontane, Große Brandenburger Ausgabe: Das Erzählerische Werk, 12: Quitt, ed. by Christina Brieger (Berlin: Auf bau, 1999), pp. 322–41 (p. 327). All subsequent page references to Quitt are to this edition. 2. Anna Stroka, ‘Schlesien im Leben und Werk Theodor Fontanes’, in Annäherungen: Polnische, deutsche und internationale Germanistik. Hommage für Norbert Honsza zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. by Bernd Balzer (Wroclaw: Oficyna Wydawnicza ATUT, 2003), pp. 75–76. 3. Kenneth Hayens, Theodor Fontane: A Critical Study (London: Collins, 1920). 4. Fritz K. Richter, ‘Theodor Fontanes schlesischer Roman “Quitt’’’, Jahrbuch der schlesischen Friedrich Wilhelms-Universität zu Breslau, 19 (1978), 188–97 (p. 192). 5. Peter Demetz, Formen des Realismus: Theodor Fontane: Kritische Untersuchungen (Munich: Hanser, 1964), p. 107. 6. Stefanie Stockhorst, ‘Zwischen Mimesis und magischem Realismus: Dimensionen der Wirklichkeitsdarstellungen in Kriminalnovellen von Droste-Hülshoff, Fontane und Raabe’, Jahrbuch der Raabe-Gesellschaft (2002), 50–81 (p. 67). 7. Lieselotte Voss, Literarische Präfiguration dargestellter Wirklichkeit bei Fontane: Zur Zitatstruktur seines Romanwerks (Munich: Fink, 1985), p. 225. 8. Helmuth Nürnberger, Fontanes Welt (Berlin: Siedler, 1999), p. 653. 9. Udo Wörffel, Theodor Fontane im Riesengebirge (Husum: Verlag der Nation, 2000), p. 77. 10. Sylvain Guarda, Theodor Fontanes ‘Neben’-Werke: Grete Minde, Ellernklipp, Untern Birnbaum, Quitt: ritualisierter Raubmord im Spiegelkreuz (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2004), p. 83. 11. Annalies Luppa, Die Verbrechergestalt im Zeitalter des Realismus von Fontane bis Mann (New York: Peter Lang, 1995), pp. 67–84. 12. Hans-Heinrich Reuter, ‘Kriminalgeschichte, Humanistische Utopie und Lehrstück’, Sinn und Form, 23 (1971), 1371–76 (p. 1373). 13. Christian Grawe, ‘Quitt’, in Fontanes Novellen und Romane, ed. by Christian Grawe (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1991), pp. 157–84 (p. 158). 14. Theodor Fontane, Große Brandenburger Ausgabe: Das Erzählerische Werk, 9: Cécile, ed. by Hans Joachim Funke and Christine Hehle (Berlin: Auf bau, 2000), pp. 57, 82, 121, 310. In Quitt, Lehnert carves an effigy of Rübezahl which incurs the disapproval of some of the Mennonites, and leads to a sermon by Obadja on the difference between effigies and toys (pp. 211–12). 15. Brieger, ‘Entstehung’, in Fontane, Quitt, pp. 311–21 (pp. 311–12). 16. A. J .F. Zieglschmid, ‘Truth and Fiction and Mennonites in the Second Part of Theodor Fontane’s Novel “Quitt”: The Indian Territory’, The Mennonite Quarterly Review, 16 (1942), 223–46.

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17. Mark Jantzen, ‘The Darlington Mission in Theodor Fontane’s Novel Quitt’, Mennonite Life, 61 (2006), 1–7, and Mennonite German Soldiers: Nation, Religion, and Family in the Prussian East, 1772–1880 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010). Eckart Pastor, in ‘ “Quitt” oder nicht? Theodor Fontanes umstrittener Mennonitenroman’, Mennonitische Geschichtsblätter, 69 (2012), 73–92, finds no justification for the criticism levelled against the novel that it gives an unrealistic portrayal of the Mennonites (p. 73) and calls for a new assessment of the novel (p. 90), particularly in view of its championing of a pacifist society at a time of pronounced militarism in Germany: ‘In Zeiten enthusiastischer Begeisterung für alles auftrumpfendaggressiv Militärische in Deutschland wird hier ex negativo für eine friedliebende Gesellschaft die Gegenutopie entworfen, die wohl ihresgleichen in der deutschen Literatur der 1880er Jahre nicht hat’ (p. 85). 18. ‘Map of the Territory of the United States, West of the Mississippi River’, prepared by authority of the Hon. The Secretary of War in the Office of the Chief Engineers, under the direction of Brig. Gen. A. A. Humphreys, Chief of Engrs Bvt. Major General U.S.A. by Edward Freyhold, 1879. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin ref. no. R 5230 Bl. 6. 19. ‘Indian Territory 1885’, Department of the Interior, General Land Office, N. C. McFarland, Commissioner, compiled from the official Records of the General Land Office and other sources, G. P. Strum, Principal Draughtsman G. L. O. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin ref. no. R 7281. 20. Jon D. May, ‘Camp Holmes’, Oklahoma Historical Society, [accessed 28 August 2014], p. 1. 21. See Jantzen, Mennonite German Soldiers, p. 235. 22. See Zieglschmid, pp. 236–37, and Jantzen, Mennonite German Soldiers, p. 237. Jantzen (p. 237) believes that the surname Hornbostel (spelt ‘Bornhostel’ in his study) may be a reference to the Mennonite mission leader John Oberholzer. 23. The Fort Holmes Commandant tells Lehnert that Darlington is less than twenty-five miles away (p. 139), though in reality it is four times that distance. 24. Oklahoma History Centre ref. ITMap.0123 — Indian Archives Maps — Darlington Agency Reserve. I would like to thank the Oklahoma Historical Society and the staff of the Oklahoma History Center, Oklahoma City, particularly Beverley Mosman and Mallory Covington, for their assistance with this research. 25. Although Gunpowder Face seems an unlikely name to the average reader, it is based on the name of the Arapahoe Chief Powder Face, and must be put into the context of actual Indian Chiefs’ names at the time. The J. A. Shuck Collection at the University of Oklahoma Libraries Western History Collections, for example, records the following Chiefs’ names: Circle Left Hand, Bacon Rind, Little Owl, Roman Nose, Young Bear, Three Fingers, Red Turtle, Black Kettle, and Dull Knife. 26. Herbert M. Dalke, ‘Seventy-five Years of Missions in Oklahoma’, Mennonite Life, 10 (1955), 100–07 (pp. 100–02). See also C. Henry Smith, Smith’s Story of the Mennonites, 5th edn, rev. by Cornelius Krahn (Newton, KS: Faith & Life Press, 1981), p. 467. 27. Zieglschmid, p. 232. 28. H. P. Krehbiel, The History of the General Conference of the Mennonites of North America (Canton, OH, 1898), p. 298, and Dalke, p. 102. I would like at this point to thank Shona Neuenschwander and Kathy Rausch of the Berne Public Library Heritage Room for their help with my research, and my colleague Dr Kathryn Lehman for organizing my trip to Berne, Indiana. 29. Krehbiel, p. 290, and Lawrence H. Hart, ‘Arapaho and Cheyenne meet the Mennonites’, in Growing Faith: General Conference Mennonites in Oklahoma, ed. by Wilma McKee (Newton, KS: Faith & Life Press, 1988), pp. 14–37 (p. 22). 30. Wilma McKee, ‘Geary: Rooted in its Community’, in Growing Faith, pp. 50–55 (p. 51). 31. Krehbiel, p. 299. 32. Mennonitische Blätter zur Belehrung und christlichen Erbauung zunächst für Mennoniten, begründet von J. Mannhardt, Prediger der Mennoniten-Gemeinde in Danzig 28 (October 1881), pp. 75–77 (p. 76). 33. Zieglschmid, p. 236. 34. William I. Schreiber, The Fate of the Prussian Mennonites (Göttingen: Göttingen Research Committee, 1955), p. 18. 35. Krehbiel, p. 315.

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36. O. P. Ruth, First Mennonite Church, Geary, Oklahoma: Historical Sketch (Geary, OK: 1947), p. 6. 37. ‘Darlington Congregational Mission’, WPA Historic Sites and Federal Writers’ Projects Collection, 2002, Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma Libraries. I would like to thank University of Oklahoma Libraries bibliographers Elizabeth G. Brown (Bizzell Library) and Laurie Scrivener and Jacquelyn Slater Reese (Western History Collections) for their assistance with this research. 38. See James N. Bade, Fontane’s Landscapes (Würzburg: Könighausen & Neumann, 2009), and ‘ “Märkische Frühlingslandschaft”: Landscapes of Transition in Fontane’s “Der Stechlin’’’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 49 (2012), 313–31. 39. See Wörffel, p. 74. 40. See Zieglschmid, pp. 243–46. 41. Paul Lindau, Aus der neuen Welt: Briefe aus dem Osten und Westen der Vereinigten Staaten (Berlin: Salomon, 1885), pp. 359–60. 42. Peter J. Klassen, Mennonites in Early Modern Poland & Prussia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), pp. 35–36. 43. Cornelius Krahn, ‘Die Mennonitengemeinden in Nordamerika’, in Die Mennoniten, ed. by Hans-Jürgen Goertz (Stuttgart: Evangelisches Verlagswerk, 1971), pp. 184–95 (p. 194). Krahn gives the other countries of origin as Poland, Russia, and Switzerland. 44. Jantzen, pp. 227–28. I would like to thank Research Librarian Laura Whitney of the AndoverHarvard Theological Library for her assistance, and Professor Judith Ryan, Robert K. and Dale J. Weary Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Harvard University, for supporting this research project. 45. Edmund G. Kaufman, ‘Mennonite Missions among the Oklahoma Indians’, Chronicles of Oklahoma, 40 (1962), 41–54 (p. 44); Eddie Chet Horn, ‘The Acculturation of Low German Mennonites in Oklahoma: Continuity and Change’ (unpublished MA thesis, University of Oklahoma, 2011), p. 12; Krehbiel, pp. 292–93. 46. Krehbiel, p. 312; Dalke, pp. 101–02. 47. Bill Burchardt, Our Treasure in Trust: The Glass Mountains (Fairview, OK: Major County Economic Development Corporation [2014]), p. 2. 48. Interview with Professor Chet Horn, Head of the History Department at the Southwestern Christian University, Bethany, Oklahoma, 22 July 2014. I would like at this point to thank Professor Horn for his invaluable assistance in identifying the Oklahoma landscapes in Quitt and with for his support of this research project. 49. Ernst Correll, ‘Theodor Fontane’s Quitt’, Mennonite Quarterly Review, 15 (1942), 221–22 (p. 222). 50. Elisabeth Horsch Bender, ‘The Mennonites in German Literature’ (unpublished MA thesis, University of Minnesota, 1944), pp. 126 and 119. Bender agrees with Correll’s assessment as far as the ‘painstakingly accurate and sympathetic portrayal of Obadja’ is concerned (p. 119), but feels that Fontane is mistaken in his thematic emphasis on predestination, which is ‘Calvinistic and not at all Mennonite’ (p. 124). For the opposing views on predestination held by Calvin and Menno Simons, see Gerd Bockwoldt, ‘Das Menschenbild Calvins’, in Johannes Calvin: Neue Wege der Forschung, ed. Herman J. Selderhuis (Darmstadt: WPG, 2010), pp. 84–104 (pp. 91–93, 95–101), and The Complete Writings of Menno Simons, c. 1496–1561, trans. from the Dutch by Leonard Verduin and ed. by J. C. Wenger (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1984), p. 760. 51. ‘Erschrecken Sie nicht, ich bin es selbst’: Erinnerungen an Theodor Fontane, ed. by Wolfgang Rausch and Christine Hehle (Berlin: Auf bau, 2003), p. 239. 52. Brieger, ‘Anmerkungen’, in Fontane, Quitt, pp. 358–412 (pp. 380–81). 53. Brieger, ‘Stoff ’, in Fontane, Quitt, pp. 297–305 (p. 304); Jantzen, Mennonite German Soldiers, p. 324. 54. Ziegelschmid, pp. 243–46, Jantzen, Mennonite German Soldiers, pp. 230 and 324. 55. Mennonitische Blätter zur Belehrung und christlichen Erbauung zunächst für Mennoniten, vol. 28, no. 10, October 1881, pp. 75–76; vol. 29, no. 4, April 1882, p. 32; vol. 29, no. 5, May 1882, pp. 38–40; vol. 29, no. 6, June 1882, pp. 42–43; and vol. 29, no. 7, July 1882, pp. 50–52. 56. S. S. Haury, ‘Der neunzehnte Februar 1882 auf der Mennoniten-Missions-Station in Darlington, Indian-Territory. (Schluß)’, in Mennonitische Blätter vol. 29, no. 7, July 1882, pp. 50–52. 57. Brieger, ‘Stoff ’, p. 302.

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58. Andreas Graf, ‘Fontane, Möllhausen und Friedrich Karl in Dreilinden. Zu Entstehungshintergrund und Struktur des Romans “Quitt” ’, Fontane-Blätter, 51 (1991), 156–75. 59. Graf, pp. 159–60. 60. Fontane, ‘Balduin Möllhausen’, in Sämtliche Werke, ed. by Edgar Gross and others, 21 vols (Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, 1953–75), xxi/1: Literarische Essays und Studien, ed. by Rainer Bachmann, Peter Bamböck, and Hans-Heinrich Reuter (1963), pp. 309–13 (p. 313). 61. Roland Berbig, Theodor Fontane Chronik, Band 3: 1871–1883 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), pp. 2415, 2417, 2462, 2464, 2476, 2488, 2513, 2514, 2516–18, 2527–28, and Band 4: 1884–1885, pp. 2528 and 2646. 62. Balduin Möllhausen, Tagebuch einer Reise vom Mississippi nach den Küsten der Südsee, introd. by Alexander von Humboldt (Leipzig: Hermann Mendelssohn, 1858), pp. 47–48; May, p. 1. 63. See Möllhausen, pp. 29, 48, 56, 57, 105. 64. Interview with Larry O. Wilson, Calvin Peanut Company, 21 July 2014. Zieglschmid mentions Calvin, p. 226. 65. Krehbiel, p. 316. 66. Ruth, pp. 3–7; Marvin Elroy Kroeker, ‘The Mennonites of Oklahoma to 1907’ (unpublished MA thesis, University of Oklahoma, 1954), pp. 37–39. 67. Marvin E. Kröker, ‘ “Die Stillen im Lande”: Mennonites in the Oklahoma Land Rushes’, The Chronicles of Oklahoma, 67 (1989), 76–97 (p. 82). 68. Kroeker, ‘The Mennonites of Oklahoma to 1907’, p. 52. 69. Kaufman, ‘Mennonite Missions’, p. 46, Hart, pp. 31–32. 70. A. S. Rosenberger, A Guide to Christian Teaching as Held by Mennonites (Newton, KS: Mennonite Publication Office, 1936), pp. 40–42. 71. Horn, p. 51; Rosenberger, pp. 40–41. 72. The possession of rif les for hunting, as portrayed in the novel, is not uncommon in rural Mennonite communities. (Personal communication from Professor Chet Horn, Southwestern Christian University, 24 September 2014.) See Merle and Phyllis Good, 20 Most Asked Questions about the Amish and Mennonites (Intercourse, PA: Good Books 1995), pp. 30–32. 73. Brenda D. Phillips, Mennonite Disaster Service: Building a Therapeutic Community after the Gulf Coast Storms (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014). 74. Arthur L. Davis, ‘Theodor Fontane’s Interest in America as Revealed by his Novel Quitt’, The American-German Review, 19 (1952–53), 28–29 (p. 29).

C h ap t e r 3

v

Die Krautentochter: Plädoyer für eine Rangerhöhung Gotthard Erler, Berlin Prolog: Märkische Messalina oder Schwester von Effi Briest? Bei der Vorbereitung des Bandes Fünf Schlösser. Altes und Neues aus Mark Brandenburg in der Gesamtausgabe der Wanderungen für die Auf bau-Edition besuchte ich (es muß 1984 gewesen sein) Schloß Hoppenrade bei Gransee. Es war unbewohnt, und nur die große Halle im Erdgeschoß mit der repräsentativen Treppe beherbergte den Dorf-Konsum mit seinem spartanischen Angebot. Ich schaute mich in diesem merkwürdigen Ambiente ein wenig um und wartete, bis die wenigen Kunden gegangen waren. Dann fragte ich die zunehmend von meiner Anwesenheit irritierte Verkäuferin, ob ich das Schloß besichtigen könne und wo ich den Schlüssel bekommen könne. Ich habe selten einen Menschen im Handumdrehen so erleichtert gesehen wie diese junge Frau: sie hatte mich offensichtlich für einen Kontrolleur aus ihrer Verwaltung gehalten, der ihren nicht sonderlich gepf legten Laden inspizieren wollte. Und dabei ging´s mir wirklich nur um das Schloß, für das sich wohl sonst niemand interessierte. Ich bekam sofort einen reichlich unansehnlichen Schlüssel, durfte ganz allein durch die Räume im oberen Geschoß streifen und kam mir wie Fontane 1861 vor, denn ich lief, wie er hundertvierzig Jahre früher, durch lange Zeit unbenutzte Gemächer: Spinnweb und Staub, knarrende Dielen und schmutzige Fenster, Tapetenreste an den Wänden und — ich wollte es nicht glauben — auch eine tote Rauchschwalbe, wie Fontane erzählt, lag auf dem Boden. ‘Kraut- und Rübentum’ pur (wie er es 1880 in einem Brief an Philipp zu Eulenburg formuliert hatte). Ich gab nach einer guten Stunde der inzwischen wieder ins Gleichgewicht gekommenen Verkäuferin den Schlüssel zurück und fuhr, merkwürdig beeindruckt, nach Berlin zurück. Hier also hatte die ‘Krautentochter’, die Frau von Arnstedt, wenigstens zeitweise gelebt, deren Schicksale Fontane in jahrelangen Recherchen aufgeklärt hatte, und es schien wie ein Symbol für ihr unstetes Leben, für das Pech mit ihren drei Ehemännern, für ihre Unbehaustheit in der Welt der Liebe, daß ihr Herrenhaus schon wieder oder noch immer leerstand. Fontane hatte bei seinem ersten Aufenthalt gerade in dieser ‘Unbewohntheit’ den ‘Hauptzauber’ des Hauses empfunden. Ich versuchte zu verstehen, warum er seine Nachforschungen abbrechen wollte, falls inzwischen ‘ein beliebiger weiß oder schwarz gestempelter Erdenbürger dort eingezogen’ sei; der ‘Charme’ von Hoppenrade wäre ‘dahin’. Sein Interesse

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würde sich allenfalls wiederbeleben, wenn über die Arnstedts ‘wirklich historischromantisches Lüderlichkeitsmaterial auszugraben wäre’, wie er am 29. Januar 1873 an seine Schwester Elise schrieb. Genau solche Dokumente hat er schließlich aufgespürt und den großen biographischen Essay über die ‘Krautentochter’ geschrieben und veröffentlicht. Und der nachgeborene Schloßbesucher mit dem unvergeßlichen Erlebnis in der Konsum-Verkaufsstelle hat seither mehrfach nachgedacht, ob Frau von Arnstedt tatsächlich, wie Fontane 1880 (noch immer im Dunklen tappend) vermutete, ‘eine ins Kurbrandenburgische transponierte Messalinenexistenz’ geführt hat oder nicht doch eine, vom Schicksal gebeutelte, aber respektgebietende großartige Frau im Sinne des alten Dubslav von Stechlin war, der die Schwester seiner künftigen Schwiegertochter mit der Formel charakterisiert: ‘eine Dame und ein Frauenzimmer — so müssen Weiber sein’. Neues für die Galerie Forscher und Fans behandeln, so scheint mir, Fontanes Buch Fünf Schlösser von jeher ein wenig stiefmütterlich, da es trotz einer gewissen stoff lichen Verwandt­schaft weder eine Fortsetzung noch ein Teil der Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg ist — eher, wie der Autor meinte, eine Sammlung ‘historischer Spezialarbeiten’. Als der Band Anfang November 1889 erschien, traf er vor allem wegen des vielseitig argumentierenden ‘Quitzöwel’-Kapitels auf erhebliche publi­zistische Resonanz, zumal genau zum gleichen Zeitpunkt die Aufführung von Ernst von Wildenbruchs Schauspiel Die Quitzows im Königlichen Schauspielhaus in Berlin die alte, emotional hochgeputschte staatsrechtliche Debatte um das Verhältnis von hohenzollernscher Zentralgewalt und aufsässigem Territorialfürstentum die öffentliche Meinung bewegte. Die Geschichte hat dieses Thema längst erledigt, und auch die Kapitel über Plaue, Liebenberg und Dreilinden regen allenfalls noch Regionalhistoriker ernsthaft auf. Wohl aber dürfte das teilnehmende Interesse der Leser dem überzeitlich berührenden Schicksal der Charlotte von Kraut gelten, deren vielfach schillerndes Porträt Fontane im Hoppenrade-Abschnitt präsentiert, und ich möchte lebhaft dafür plädieren, diese ‘Krautentochter’ in die Galerie der immer neu beeindruckenden Frauen­gestalten Fontanes zu integrieren — wobei die märkisch-ruppige Bezeichnung durchaus durch einen ihrer klangvollen Vornamen (Charlotte oder später Luise) ersetzt werden könnte. Denn wo immer man sie auf ihrem aventurenreichen Leben beo­bachtet, kann man sie als eine Verwandte von Effi und Cécile, Corinna und Lene, Melanie oder Melusine begreifen und verstehen — nur mit dem Unterschied, daß sie eine tatsächlich historische Figur ist. Karriere auf mütterliche Anordnung Luise Charlotte Henriette von Kraut wird 1762, also gegen Ende jenes Krieges, der sich sieben Jahre hinschleppt, in Berlin geboren. Der Vater ist Marschall am Hofe von Prinz Heinrich in Rheinsberg; ihre Mutter, eine geborene von Platen, bereits zweimal verwitwet, erscheint in den höchst widersprüchlichen Äußerungen der Zeitgenossen als eine machtbesessene Intrigantin, die sich perfekt an die Erfordernisse des höfischen Lebens anzupassen weiß, das mit Kunst und Theater,

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Musik und Philosophie drapiert, daß es in Wahrheit ein speichelleckerischer Kult um Prinz Heinrich in Rheinsberg ist. ‘In Gunst stehen, reich sein und Einf luß haben war das einzige, das zu leben lohnte. Und wenn es überhaupt Pf lichten gab, so war doch erste Pf licht jedenfalls die, von der Sorge kleiner Leute nichts zu wissen und einem Prinzen zu gefallen.’ Und so wird diese Mutter ‘une femme vaine, bornée et détestable’ (eine eitle, dumme und abscheuliche Frau), ja sogar ‘un monstre’ genannt. Frau Kraut verkörpert das Lebensgefühl der Hofgesellschaft, das sich in kostspieligen Lustbarkeiten ergeht, während König Friedrich in Brandenburg, Schlesien und Sachsen in mörderischen Schlachten seine Landeskinder verheizt oder als Krüppel nach Haus schickt. Die Hofmarschallin tobt (wie die Gräfin von Voß am 11. Oktober 1760 in ihrem Tagebuch vermerkt), als ihr Mann aus Sparsamkeit Talglichter anstatt Wachskerzen anzünden lassen will. Da Kraut früh stirbt, übernimmt es diese Frau, die Tochter zu erziehen und möglichst rasch und gut unter die Haube zu bringen und dabei selbst gehörig zu profitieren. Ihr schwebt von Anfang an ein höherer Diplomat vor, der mit ihrem Kind irgendwo weitweg stationiert wird, so daß sie inzwischen als Herrin aller Güter nach Belieben und zum eigenen Vorteil wirtschaften kann. Ein britischer Ambassadeur ist ihr Ideal, da der vielleicht als ost- oder westindischer Gouverneur oder gar Vizekönig enden könne. So etwa stellt sich die ehrgeizige märkische Provinzpolitiker-Gattin die Welt vor, und sie richtet sich tatsächlich ein bißchen darin ein: Tochter Charlotte ist mit sechzehn Jahren verheiratet mit dem britischen Gesandten Hugh Elliot. Dem jungen Mann fehlt alles Distinguierte, das man von einem Diplomaten auf diesem Posten erwartet, eher gilt er als unsteter Springinsfeld, aber er ist geistreich und liebenswürdig und in seinen Kreisen beliebt. In der Frage der um ihre Unabhängigkeit kämpfenden amerikanischen Kolonien — das ist der weltpolitische Hintergrund seiner brandenburgischen Ehe — scheint er eine zwielichtige Rolle zu spielen, die später auch zu seiner Abberufung vom preußischen Hof führt. Daß er in seiner exzentrischen, launenhaften Art für seine Kind-Frau (die an die etwa gleichaltrige Effi auf Hohen-Cremmen erinnert, als Innstetten um sie anhält) wirklich ein Partner war, ist kaum anzunehmen. ‘. . . er liebte sie wirklich’, vermutet Fontane, ‘soweit er einer wirklichen Liebe fähig war, und hatte seine Wahl aus Sinn und Herz und nicht aus allerhand Rücksichten getroffen, am wenigsten aber aus Rücksichten auf ein Erbe, das nach englischen Vorstellungen überhaupt nicht bedeutend und jedenfalls erst in Zukunft zu gewärtigen war.’ Klingt das nicht ein wenig wie die Charakteristik des Geert von Innstetten, der Effi nach seinen begrenzten Möglichkeiten liebt, aber keinesfalls ein Liebhaber ist? ‘Denn er hatte viel Gutes in seiner Natur und war so edel, wie jemand sein kann, der ohne rechte Liebe ist.’ Baron Knyphausen taucht auf Die Geschichte entwickelt sich nun nach dem gängigen Muster: Die Geburt einer Tochter übertüncht vorübergehend das zunehmend brüchig werdende Verhältnis des Paares. Der phantasievolle Elliot quält seine Frau mit absurden Eifersüchteleien und dichtet ihr zum Beispiel eine Liebschaft mit dem bereits betagten holländischen Gesandten an.

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In dieser vertrackten, für Charlotte bedrückenden Situation taucht der Baron Knyp­hausen in Rheinsberg auf, wo er — die Personnage bei Hofe ist kaum überschaubar — eine Kammerherren-Stelle bekleidet. Knyphausen kommt aus begütertem, angesehenem ostfriesischen Adel, ist seriös, gebildet, vielleicht auch etwas hausbacken und schulmeisterlich. Er und Charlotte freunden sich an, er unterstützt und berät sie, und die bald ins Erotische hinübergleitende Beziehung findet ein günstiges Umfeld, da Elliot zu dieser Zeit nach Kopenhagen versetzt wird (1783), aber auch von dort aus die Affaire seiner Frau sorgfältig verfolgt, wobei vor allem die Schwiegermutter als zuverlässig intrigierende Informantin über den Stand der Dinge in Rheinsberg, Hoppenrade und Berlin im Spiel ist. Knyphausen nennt sie gelegentlich ‘eine vom unerträglichsten Herrschsuchtsteufel geplagte Närrin’. Ihrer perfiden Planung entsprechend holt Elliot bei Nacht und Nebel aus der Berliner Wohnung seiner Frau alle kompromittierenden Unterlagen (vor allem die Korrespondenzen mit Knyphausen), entführt die vierjährige Tochter und fordert Knyphausen in unglaublicher Dreistigkeit auf, nach Kopenhagen zu reisen und sich dort mit ihm zu schlagen. Duell oder Rencontre Was nun folgt, ist ein drastisches Kapitel über Kompetenz-Gerangel um das von Elliot geforderte Duell, das eigentlich ohnehin nicht statthaft ist, aber von den Justizbehörden in Mecklenburg, Sachsen und Berlin geduldet und höchst unter­ schiedlich gehandhabt wird. Die Vorgänge sind dank Fontanes Recherche vorzü­ glich in den Briefen des Barons an seinen Vater dokumentiert, die Fontane im Familien­archiv in Lützburg aufgestöbert und aus dem Französischen in ein gut lesbares Deutsch übersetzt hat. Der publizitätssüchtige Elliot ändert inzwischen, in Absprache mit Frau von Kraut, seine Strategie und verlegt das Duell nach Berlin, wo die Angelegenheit begreif licherweise ‘Sensation macht’ und ein breites Publikum sich wochenlang die Mäuler aufreißt, so daß sich sogar der ‘Generalfiskal’ (so etwas wie die Staatsanwaltschaft) einschaltet und die Auseinandersetzung in der Residenz untersagt. Knyphausen reist darauf hin unverzüglich ab und macht in dem ‘Grenzstädtchen’ Fürstenberg ‘in Mecklenburg-Strelitz’ halt — ‘behufs ungehinderter Ausfechtung unserer Sache’. Dort erscheint eines schönen Tages, wie im spannendsten Krimi, Mister Elliot, ‘etwa im Zustand eines türkischen Opiumrauchers’, begleitet von drei bewaffneten Komplizen, und er zwingt den Baron draußen vor der Stadt zu den Vorbereitungen eines Duells. Da aber die Regeln nicht abgesprochen sind und alles völlig dilettantisch abläuft, überdies die Dämmerung hereinbricht, wird die ohnehin lächerliche Veranstaltung aufgegeben. Der Berliner Generalfiskal erwägt inzwischen, Knyphausen in Fürstenberg zu verhaften, so daß Knyphausen und Elliot sich schließlich als Austragungsort das Städtchen Baruth an der sächsischen Grenze aussuchen. Dort geht man tatsächlich mit Pistolen aufeinander los, Elliot wird an der Hüfte leicht verwundet und dringt sogleich auf ein Schriftstück, in dem Knyphausen den Überfall in Fürstenberg

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dementieren soll, da dieser Vorfall seine diplomatische Karriere beenden würde. Knyphausen stellt eine solche Erklärung großzügig aus, Elliot willigt als Gegenleistung in die Scheidung von Charlotte ein und übernimmt bald danach — die Schmierenkomödie geht zu Ende — den britischen Gesandtschaftsposten in Dresden. Baron Knyphausen kommt nicht so bequem davon. Er wird zunächst in Baruth in ‘Gewahrsam genommen’ und militärisch bewacht. Seine Versuche, mit Hilfe der preußischen Vertretung in Dresden seine Freiheit zurückzubekommen, bringen bei der Gemächlichkeit der Behörden und den Streitigkeiten zwischen Justiz und Kurfürsten gar nichts (es ergeht ihm wie einst dem guten Kohlhaas in der Novelle von Heinrich von Kleist). Ein anderer Ehemann Auf abenteuerliche Weise gelingt Knyphausen die Flucht aus Sachsen nach Berlin. Dort sperrt man ihn, wenigstens für ein paar Tage, in die Hausvogtei, ‘zwei Land­ reiter vor meiner Tür’. Die Gerüchteküche braut aus den verworrenen Fakten alle möglichen neuen Stories zusammen, die Gerichte möchten ihn als Friedensbrecher und Rauf bold gern vor ihre Schranken holen, und er bemüht sich indessen, aus der Fürstenberger Affaire ein ‘Rencontre’ zu machen und es nicht als Duell-Versuch einstufen zu lassen, worauf wesentlich härtere Strafen verhängt werden würden. Darüber kann die unglückliche Frau Elliot jeden Tag in der Zeitung lesen, und die lieben Nachbarn helfen mit delikaten Details gern nach. Charlotte ist gerade einundzwanzig, als sie pausenlos von den Diatriben ihres Mannes und ihrer Mutter erfährt und in atemloser Spannung der Flucht des Geliebten und dem Ausgang der Baruther Schießerei folgt. Im Sommer 1783 scheint sich das Dilemma aufzulösen. Am 30. Juni wird die Scheidung ausgesprochen, aber das Urteil enthält eine groteske Klausel: die gesetzlich Geschiedene darf sich ‘ohne vorgängigen Dispens’ des Königs nicht wieder verheiraten. Deshalb findet die Trauung mit Knyphausen am 1. Oktober 1783 in aller Heimlichkeit in Sachsen statt, und das Paar muß noch bis zum 25. April 1784 auf die öffentliche Zeremonie warten; erst dann liegt die ‘königliche Dispensation’ vor. Hintergrund dieser Machenschaften ist die (zu dieser Zeit noch umstrittene) Erbschaft Charlottes, die die Mutter ihr und dem neuen Partner auf alle Fälle vorenthalten möchte. Dabei versichert Knyphausen glaubhaft, daß es ihm nicht um diese Erbschaft, sondern um den ‘Besitz einer schönen und liebenswürdigen Frau’ gehe. Das ‘Krautenerbe’ Streitobjekt ist das sogenannte ‘Land Löwenberg’, ein ausgedehnter Güter-Komplex, bestehend aus Löwenberg, Liebenberg und Hoppenrade; es gehörte seit 1460 den Bredows. Nach verschiedenen Veränderungen im 17. Jahrhundert, durch die der Familie nur noch Hoppenrade verblieben war, brachte die Heirat von Joachim

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Heinrich von Bredow, Dompropst zu Havelberg, mit der begüterten Constanze Amalie Sophie von Kraut im Jahre 1715 nahezu alle Ländereien des einstigen ‘Landes Löwenberg’ wieder in Bredowsche Hand. Da die beiden Söhne des ‘dompröpstlich Bredowschen Paares’ an einer unheilbaren Geisteskrankheit litten, verfügte die Dompröpstin, daß das Gesamterbe nach dem Ableben dieser Kinder nicht an die Bredow-, sondern an die Krauten-Familie fallen solle, da es von ‘Krautengeld’ erworben worden sei. Dieses testamentarisch bestimmte Erbe war das Krautenerbe, das der Krautentochter zufiel; sie war die Erbnichte der Dompröpstin. Diese Entwicklung der Besitzverhältnisse entsprach zwar dem Testament der Dompröpstin von 1745, war aber juristisch anfechtbar, da sie (irrtümlicherweise?) auch das Lehngut Hoppenrade ‘mit wegtestierte’, das stets Bredowsches Eigentum geblieben und nicht mit ‘Krautengeld’ zurückerworben worden war. Daher versuchten die Bredows später, das ihnen ‘wegtestierte Erbe’ wieder an sich zu bringen. Die komplizierte Angelegenheit, die die junge, in dergleichen Dingen gänzlich unerfahrene Frau insgeheim beständig bedrückt haben wird, beschäftigt die Gerichte jahrzehntelang, und erst 1809, nach dem Tod der geisteskranken Bredow-Söhne, geht der Prozeß zugunsten Charlottes zu Ende: Schloß Hoppenrade ist ihr Eigentum. Doch inzwischen haben sich längst tiefgreifende Veränderungen in ihrem Leben vollzogen. Früher Tod und neue Verheißung Charlotte ist seit dem Frühjahr 1784, öffentlich anerkannt, Baronin Knyphausen, und Knyphausen muß seine Gattin endlich dem ‘hochgeehrtesten Herrn Vater’ und der übrigen Verwandtschaft vorstellen, die nach dem bisher Vorgefallenen die ‘Neue’ mit skeptischer Zurückhaltung empfängt. Doch zu Empfindlichkeiten ist keine Zeit, da der alte Freiherr bald nach der Ankunft stirbt und Charlotte in ihrer Eigenschaft als Gattin des ältesten Sohns und nunmehrigen Chefs des Hauses zur respektgebietenden First Lady aufrückt — worauf sie nicht vorbereitet ist und wozu sie keine Neigung spürt. Wieder ist ein Versuch für Selbstverwirklichung gescheitert und eine Chance vertan, anerzogene Freundlichkeit in angeborene Herzlichkeit zu verwandeln. Auch die Ehe mit Knyphausen ist für Charlotte nicht unbedingt ein Idyll — zu groß sind die charakterlichen Unterschiede: Er war reserviert, mit einem Anf luge von Nüchternheit, sie sanguinisch, mit einem Anf luge von Gefallsucht. Das Leben bei Hofe, das ihn degoutierte, hatte für sie nicht bloß Reiz und Zauber, sondern war auch, aller trüben persönlichen Erfahrungen unerachtet, eigentlich das, wonach sie sich sehnte.

Und eine weitere bittere Erfahrung bleibt ihr nicht erspart: ihr Mann erkrankt unheilbar (‘Knochenfraß und Drüsenverhärtung’ in der diagnostischen Terminologie vom Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts) und stirbt zu Weihnachten 1789. Im Krautschen Erbbegräbnis in der Berliner Nikolaikirche wird er beigesetzt. Charlotte von Kraut, die geschiedene Elliot und verwitwete Knyphausen, ist ganze sieben­undzwanzig Jahre alt, als sie Fontane — wie in einer poetischen

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Roman­szene — in ihrem Herrenhaus Hoppenrade über ihr Schicksal sinnieren läßt: [. . .] eine Woche lang läuteten allabendlich auch die Löwenberger Glocken und verkündeten dem umher liegenden Lande, daß der Gutsherr gestorben sei. Dann saß auch seine Witwe, die Krautentochter, am Fenster und sah in die Schneelandschaft hinaus, die lange Linie der Pappelweiden hinunter, aus deren Gipfeln einzelne Krähen in den dunkel geröteten Abendhimmel auff logen. Sie sah das alles und sah es auch nicht und ging die Rechnung ihres Lebens durch, dabei des Toten gedenkend, dem zu Ehren es draußen läutete. Trauerte sie? Vielleicht. Aber wenn sie trauerte, so geschah es, weil alles so traurig war; nicht aus Schmerz um ein hingeschiedenes Glück. Nein, sie war nicht geschaffen, einem Schmerz zu leben oder gar unglücklich zu sein. Und nun gar dieser Tod! War er denn überhaupt ein Unglück? Was er ihr mit Sicherheit bedeutete, hieß: Befreiung. Sie sagte sich´s nicht, aber es war so, trotzdem sie jeder guten Stunde gedachte. Gewiß, es war aus Liebe gewesen, daß sie sich gefunden hatten, und sie hatte Gott aufrichtig und von ganzem Herzen gedankt, einer doppelten Tyrannei, der eines exzentrischen Gatten und einer imperiösen Mutter, entrissen zu sein, wohl, er war ihr Retter gewesen, und dazu schön und gesittet und klug. Ja, sehr klug sogar, und sie hatte sich seiner Überlegenheit gefreut. Aber dieser Klugheit und Überlegenheit war sie doch manchmal auch überdrüssig geworden, und als sich zu der unbequem werdenden geistigen Überlegenheit auch noch körperliche Krankheit und zu der körperlichen Krankheit ein bittres und menschenscheues Wesen zu gesellen begann, da hatte sie geseufzt, und die Liebe war geschwunden. Und was geblieben war, war Leid und Last. All das überschlug sie jetzt und sah hinauf in den Abendstern, der eben durch die Dämmerung blitzte, blaß und zitternd, und sie frug ihn nach ihrem Glück. Und siehe, da war es, als ob er plötzlich heller auf leuchtete. War es der Stern? Oder war es nur ihre Hoffnung, die sein Licht verdoppelte?

Dritter Versuch: Frau Rittmeister von Arnstedt Doch, es scheint der Glücksstern gewesen zu sein, denn im Sommer 1790 hat die attraktive Witwe das einsame Hoppenrade bereits mit dem geliebten Rheinsberg vertauscht und genießt die Gunst des Prinzen, der sogar, kein Wunder bei seiner Passion für Festlichkeiten, kurz vor Weihnachten 1790, ein großes Hochzeitsfest ausrichtet: denn Charlotte ist seit dem Herbst mit dem Rittmeister Friedrich Karl Rudolf von Arnstedt verlobt. Frau Baronin von Knyphausen heißt nun Frau Rittmeister von Arnstedt und beginnt ein Leben, das erstmals ihrem Wesen und ihren Ansprüchen genügt. Bisher hatte sie unter Kuratel einer tyrannischen Mutter gestanden, war hilf los dem brutalen und eifersüchtigen Schotten Hugh Elliot ausgeliefert und hatte sich anschließend unter die Superiorität des todkranken Ostfriesen Knyphausen (nomen et omen) geduckt, aber dabei kaum wohlgefühlt (herzlicher Dank, aber wenig Liebe). Und nun dieser Arnstedt! Vier Jahre jünger als Charlotte, ein verwöhntes Mitglieder der Hofgesellschaft, zu jedem Unfug aufgelegt, ein sorgloser, heiterer Typ, der sie zum Lachen brachte. Und sie lachte so gern. Daß er bei alledem ‘ein allermärkischster Märker’ war, ‘der an Preußen und Rheinsberg glaubte, beides für etwas Besonderes hielt, ein Pferd über ein Buch, eine besetzte Tafel über

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ein Bild oder ein sonstiges Kunstwerk und einen Spieltisch über alles stellte’ — das alles wird sie, bei ihrem Bildungsniveau und der mentalen Zugehörigkeit zur dominierenden Adelsschicht der Prinz-Heinrich-Zeit kaum irritiert haben. Überdies kann die Herrin von Hoppenrade mit den Erträgen der zugehörigen Güter höchst zufrieden sein. Und nicht zu vergessen: sie scheint eine Art geselliggesellschaftlicher Mittelpunkt der Adelssitze in der näheren Umgebung gewesen zu sein und organisiert einen unausgesetzten Besucherverkehr: wenn heute die mit vier Schimmeln bespannte Chaise von Hoppenrade nach Köpernitz im Sande mahlte, so ging es morgen auf Meseberg und den dritten Tag auf Wulkow oder Wustrau zu. Heute war es die schöne Kaphengst, morgen die schöne La Roche-Aymon, der man huldigte, bis sich der Besuchszirkel in dem reichen und gastlichen und deshalb neben Rheinsberg tonangebenden Hoppenrade wieder schloß.

Im kleinen Köpernitz residierte die gebildete und gastfreundliche Gräfin La RocheAymon, wegen ihrer Haarfülle ‘Prinzessin Goldhaar’ genannt. Im prächtigen Meseberg führte Therese von Kaphengst, einst Schauspielerin am Rheins­berger Hoftheater, das Haus (das heute nach der Wiederherstellung durch die Messer­ schmidt-Stiftung Angela Merkel als diplomatische Datsche dient), und in Rheinsberg zelebriert noch immer der königliche Bruder Heinrich seine seltsamen, teils bizarren und obskuren Veranstaltungen. Die Damen um Frau von Arnstedt hatten dort ja alle ihre Weihen erhalten, und alle waren einfallsreiche Elevinnen des Prinzen. Frau von Arnstedt ist in künstlerischen Anwandlungen besonders produktiv, wenn es gilt, mit aufwendigen Festarrangements einen Besuch des Prinzen Heinrich zu feiern und ‘Monseigneur’ zu ‘surprenieren’. Man wußte es beispielsweise eines Abends einzurichten, daß sich der Prinz im nahen ‘Harenzacken-Wald’ verirrte, doch als er mit seiner Begleitung auf eine Wiese hinaustrat, wurde es plötzlich am Waldrand hell, denn an jedem Baum war ein Dorf bewohner mit einer farbigen Lampe postiert worden. ‘Da küßte der Prinz der schönen Frau die Hand und erklärte sich für besiegt, und eine Woche lang zehrte man von diesem gnädigen Wort und fühlte sich gehoben in der Idee, nicht umsonst gelebt zu haben.’ Berühmt und viel besprochen waren auch die sportlichen Ambitionen der Hoppenrader Herrin. Sie hatte sich am Ufer eines kleinen Sees einen Badetempel, ‘Mon caprice’ genannt, bauen lassen und führte dort das Stück ‘Diana und ihre Nymphen’ auf: die zahlreichen jüngeren Gefährtinnen (Besucher aus Berlin zum Beispiel) hielten sich im Schilfgürtel auf, bevor die ‘brillante Schwimmerin’ Frau von Arnstedt über den See schoß und die Damen aufforderte, sie zu haschen. Doch im letzten Augenblick entkam sie in ihren Pavillon, und der ‘Wettbewerb’ gab ringsumher reichlich medisanten Gesprächsstoff. Mit dergleichen Lustbarkeiten vergnügte sich der märkische Adel; ‘alles war Lust und das Leben ein Feiertag’, während in Frankreich die Guillotine die adlige Gesellschaft dezimierte und der kleine Korse Napoleon sich anschickte, Preußen aus dem Sattel zu stoßen und Europa neu zu ordnen: Jena und Auerstedt und die ‘Franzosenzeit’ sind nur wenige Jahre entfernt. Als bedrohliches Zeichen wird immerhin der Tod von Prinz Heinrich im August 1802 empfunden; das Ende einer Ära ist eingeläutet. Und selbst im persönlichen

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Leben wird, fast plötzlich, alles anders. Charlotte muß begreifen, daß auch die oberf lächlich glücklichen Jahre mit ihrem dritten Mann vorbei sind. Nach Heinrichs Tod kontrolliert niemand mehr den einstigen Rittmeister, und aus dem lustigen Kumpel und dem liebenswürdigen Gesellschafter wird ein Trinker und Spieler. Und Charlotte, die ja nicht zuletzt im ständigen Umgang mit der Kaphengst und der La Roche-Aymon ihren durchaus vorhandenen feinen ästhetischen Sinn entwickelt und geschärft hatte, leidet unter seiner Seichtheit und Oberf lächlichkeit. Und so, wie sie einst mit einer gewissen Verdrossenheit zu ihrem zweiten Mann hinaufgeblickt hatte, blickt sie jetzt auf ihren dritten herab. Arnstedt verkommt immer mehr, und um 1808 läßt sie sich von ihm scheiden. In ein Irrenhaus möchte sie ihn nicht stecken, und so bringt sie ihn im Pfarrhaus von Hakenberg unter, wo er bis 1847 dahinvegetiert, ‘zu Tode gefüttert’ wird. Trauriges Ende und freundliches Urteil Charlotte ist bereits 1819 im Alter von siebenundfünfzig Jahren gestorben, und sie hinterläßt einen gehörigen Berg persönlicher Schulden, die nicht gegen ihren Besitz an Ländereien aufzurechnen sind. Nach der Vertreibung der Napoleonischen Truppen, die ein ausgeplündertes, weithin verarmtes Preußen zurücklassen, ist man auch in Hoppenrade wirtschaftlich am Ende, und der Chefin bleibt nur, ihre reichen Waldbestände abzuholzen und zu Geld zu machen. Sie überträgt dieses gewinnbringende Geschäft ihrem Forstinspektor Görwitz, der etwas davon versteht, rasch sehr wohlhabend wird und den souveränen Lebemann gibt. Ob Charlotte, mit einem Anf lug von Zuneigung (oder mehr), ihn wegen seiner Großspurigkeit gewähren läßt, weiß man nicht. Er ermöglicht ihr jedenfalls ein Leben nach ihrer Art, denn die noch immer ‘lebenslustige Dame’ hatte ‘nicht sparen und marchandieren und, aller wachsenden Lebensnot unerachtet, auch nicht entbehren oder gar entsagen gelernt’. Im September 1819 wird die Krautentochter im Krauten-Erbbegräbnis zu Sankt Nikolai in Berlin beigesetzt. Fontane versucht ein Resumee ihres Daseins: Es hatte sich ein reiches und bewegtes Leben geschlossen. Ob auch ein glückliches? Alles in allem, ja. Sie verstand die Kunst, den Augenblick zu genießen und sich das, was die Stunde bot, durch Zukunftsbetrachtungen oder gar durch Zukunftsbefürchtungen nicht allzusehr trüben zu lassen. Sie war sanguinisch und erfreute sich der Vorzüge dieses Temperaments.

In einer ‘Zuschrift’ will er gelesen haben, sie sei ‘der Typus einer Grande Dame des vorigen [achtzehnten] Jahrhunderts’ gewesen und hätte viel Verwandtes mit der entzückenden Gräfin La Roche-Aymon gehabt. Fontane plädiert dafür, daß wir ‘Nachlebenden’ milder und gerechter über sie befinden und sie vor allem aus ihrem Gesellschaftskreise heraus beurteilen sollten, ‘darin der Charakter nicht viel und die Tugend noch weniger bedeutete und in dem, bei Beurteilung schöner Frauen, über vieles hinweg gesehen werden durfte, wenn sie nur über drei Dinge Verfügung hatten, über Schönheit, Esprit und Charme’. Das ist das Sympathische an Fontanes Frauenverständnis: er sucht sie — ohne zu moralisieren — aus ihrer Zeit und aus ihren Lebensumständen heraus zu schildern

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und zu verstehen. Daher ist etwa ‘Leichtlebigkeit’ (bis hin zur ‘Messalinenexistenz’) kein Vorwurf an das Individuum, sondern ein ‘Zeichen der Zeit’. Charlotte von Kraut wird von ihrer Mutter zu einem willfährig unbekümmerten Mädchen ohne erkennbare moralische Werte erzogen, und daher läßt sie sich auch ohne Skrupel als Spielball der adligen Gesellschaft mißbrauchen und fühlt sich, zeitweise, sogar wohl dabei. Aber auch mit dieser Einstellung ist sie im Ethik-Codex Fontanes gut aufgehoben. Als Effi Briest erschienen war, bekannte er am 10. Oktober 1895 in einem Brief an Colmar Grünhagen: Ich war nie ein Lebemann, aber ich freue mich, wenn andere leben, Männlein wie Fräulein. Der natürliche Mensch will leben, will weder fromm noch keusch noch sittlich sein, lauter Kunstprodukte von einem gewissen, aber immer zweifelhaft bleibenden Wert, weil es an Echtheit und Natürlichkeit fehlt. Dies Natürliche hat es mir seit lange angetan, ich lege nur darauf Gewicht, fühle mich nur dadurch angezogen, und dies ist wohl der Grund, warum meine Frauengestalten alle einen Knacks weghaben. Gerade dadurch sind sie mir lieb, ich verliebe mich in sie, nicht um ihrer Tugenden, sondern um ihrer Menschlichkeiten, d. h. um ihrer Schwächen und Sünden willen. Sehr viel gilt mir auch die Ehrlichkeit, der man bei den Magdalenen mehr begegnet als bei den Genoveven. Dies alles, um Cécile und Effi ein wenig zu erklären.

Diese Absolution schließt die Krautentochter gut und gern mit ein. ‘Kleine Lichtpunkte für den Schatzgräber’: Fontanes Obsession für Hoppenrade Fontane hat zwanzig Jahre gebraucht, um zu seinem behutsamen, ausgewogenen Urteil zu finden; er hat an keinem anderen Kapitel seiner Wanderungen länger gearbeitet. Und es ist für seine Arbeitsweise und das anhaltende Interesse an dieser Frau höchst aufschlußreich, sein sich mehrfach wandelndes Bild entstehen zu sehen, wobei alle pejorativen Elemente (‘Messalinenexistenz’, ‘tolles Kraut’) allmählich verschwinden und seine ‘Frauenschwärmerei’ auch die Krautentochter einbezieht. Seit er 1861, in Begleitung des Neuruppiner Kaufmanns Alexander Gentz, zum ersten Mal durch das ‘verwunschene Schloß’ gelaufen ist und sich die verworrenen Geschichten von ‘de Oll-Stägemannschen’ im Dorf hat erzählen lassen, ist ihm die mysteriöse ‘Krautentochter’, von der er praktisch nichts wußte, nur zeitweise aus dem Sinn gekommen. 1864, als er die zweite Auf lage des ersten Wanderungen-Bandes vorbereitete, wollte er wenigstens eine kurze Beschreibung der bemerkenswerten Kapelle des Schlosses einfügen; aber aus Termingründen kam selbst ein solcher Exkurs nicht zustande. Immerhin kündigte er in einem Brief an Mathilde von Rohr (21. August 1864) an, daß er sich eine Hoppenrade-Darstellung ‘bis auf spätre Zeit’ vorbehalte. 1873 steht eine ‘totale Neugestaltung’ des ersten Bandes an, und Hoppenrade soll einbezogen werden. Diesmal wird Schwester Elise in Neuruppin zur Mitarbeit aufgefordert. Er habe es bei seinem ersten Besuch interessant und vielversprechend gefunden, ‘doch fehlt mir noch der Schlüssel, der zu den Geheimnissen schließt’ (20. Januar 1873). Am 29. Januar 1873 präzisiert er der Schwester sein Anliegen:

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‘Hoppenrade. Dieser Stoff hat mir, seit ich vor sechs, sieben Jahren [das deutet auf einen weiteren Besuch um 1867 hin] dies Schloß sah, nicht Ruhe gelassen. [. . .] Sein Hauptzauber lag in seiner Unbewohntheit.’ Und er hofft, uninformiert wie er offenbar noch immer ist, auf ‘wirklich historisch-romantisches Lüderlichkeitsmaterial’, um etwas interessant Aufschreibenswertes über das Leben der Arnstedts zu erfahren. Am 15. Februar wiederholt er sein Interesse, das Schloß ‘in Schnee-Einsamkeit’ zu sehen, ‘vorausgesetzt, daß es noch wüst und unbewohnt ist’. Im Frühjahr 1874 ist Fontane wieder in Hoppenrade. Am 23. April schreibt er an Frau Emilie: ‘Die Ausbeute, die sich ausschließlich auf Frau v. Arnstedt und die Prinz-Heinrich-Zeit bezieht, ist glänzend.’ Gleichwohl scheinen die Informationen für den Autor eher verwirrend zu sein, denn er wendet sich am 20. April 1875 erneut an Mathilde von Rohr, weil die Auskünfte ‘wie Kraut und Rüben’ durcheinanderliefen. Und er fügt hinzu, daß diese Frau von Arnstedt, geb. v. Kraut, ‘ein tolles Kraut’ gewesen sei und ‘unglaubliche Geschichten’ ausgeführt habe, ‘wie sie nur in der wüsten Zeit des Rheinsberger Hofes möglich waren’. In dieser Zeit schreibt Fontane für die Wochenschrift Die Gegenwart eine referierende Rezension über den Band Briefe der Brüder Friedrichs des Großen an meine Großeltern. Herausgegeben von Leo Amadeus Graf Henckel von Donnersmarck. Sie erscheint am 25. August 1877, und in dem Abschnitt ‘Fünf Briefe des Prinzen Heinrich’ ist ausführlich, teils in Worten des Prinzen, teils als Fontanesche Mitteilung von der Eliot–Knyphausen-Affaire die Rede (Eliot in dieser Schreibung!). Der Prinz wird mit dem Satz zitiert: ‘Die ganze Teufelsgeschichte ist so kompliziert, daß man einen Band damit füllen könnte.’ Fontane referiert vor allem, was ihm die alte ‘Dorfgroßmutter’ Stägemann erzählt hat: ein hohler Eichenstamm sei der Brief kasten für die Liebeskorrespondenz gewesen, das Duell habe auf einer Parkwiese stattgefunden, und Elliot habe das im Park von Hoppenrade spielende Kind dort entführt und ‘samt dem Kindermädchen in eine (goldene) Kutsche gepackt und sie wie im Märchen davongefahren’. Fontane weiß, daß vieles Zutat der vierundachtzigjährigen Dorfahne und ihrer phantasievollen Erinnerung sein könne, teilt gleichwohl diese Details mit, weil sie einem unserer deutschen Geschichtsprofessoren, der die damaligen Beziehungen des preußischen zum englischen Hofe eingehend behandelt hat, vielleicht bei Auf klärung wichtigerer Dinge von einigem Nutzen sein mögen. Es ist ja bekannt, daß es kleine Lichtpunkte sind, die den Schatzgräbern dienen.

(Vermutlich dachte Fontane an Johann Gustav Droysen, der seit 1855 seine Geschichte der preußischen Politik veröffentlichte, abgeschlossen 1885.) Erst im Jahre 1880 bringen ausgedehnte Recherchen nach und nach Licht ins ‘Kraut- und Rübentum’. Vermittelt durch Philipp zu Eulenburg knüpft Fontane Beziehungen zur Familie Knyphausen auf Schloß Lütetsburg in Lützburg an. Fontanes Brief an Eulenburg vom 15. Juli 1880 zeigt, wie wenig gesicherte Fakten ihm bis dahin zu Gebote stehen. (In der gerade erwähnten Rezension von 1877 heißt es zum Beispiel: ‘ein Fräulein von Kraut, sehr wahrscheinlich Enkelin des gleichnamigen Finanzministers unter Friedrich Wilhelm I.’). Oder: Gegenstand des Elliot-Knyphausen-Duells war eine Frau von Arnstedt auf

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Gotthard Erler Hoppenrade, die etwa anno 80 eine schöne junge Frau war, um die Wende des Jahrhunderts eine ins Kurbrandenburgische transponierte Messalinenexistenz führte und vielleicht erst in den 20er oder 30er Jahren dieses Jahrhunderts gestorben ist.

Mitte Juli 1880 ist Fontane in Lützburg und darf die Knyphausensche Familienchronik durchsehen und exzerpieren. ‘Wahre Schätze’ erschließen sich ihm, und Charlotte Kraut gerät erstmals in leidlich korrekte Beleuchtung. Seiner Frau Emilie schreibt er am 24. oder 25. Juli, daß das ‘Hoppenrade’-Kapitel dank des ‘wunderschönen Stoffs’ eins ‘der brillantesten’ werden müsse. Doch noch war er wegen des Krautenerbes und des erbrechtlichen Streits mit den Bredows weitgehend im unklaren. Aber auch diese Fragen klären sich, als er mit Amtsgerichtsrat Hermann Klingner aus Gransee und einem Grafen Bredow-Liepe ausführlich korrespondieren kann. Und erst jetzt kommt Fontane ‘aus dem im Dunklen-Tappen heraus’, wie er am 8. November 1880 an Klingner schreibt. ‘Allerdings schwindet mir die ursprüngliche Anlage des Aufsatzes unter den Händen hin, und aus einer bloßen Duell- und Liebesgeschichte wird ein Zeitbild, in dem zahlreiche Personen und Interessen mitspielen.’ Er hatte zunächst nur eine Beschreibung Hoppenrades vor und wollte, in der bewährten Art der ‘Wanderungen’, ‘die höchst wunderbaren Phasen des ElliotKnyphausen-Zweikampfes’ schildern. Wer die Krautentochter, genealogisch gesehen, eigentlich war, hatte sich ihm noch immer nicht erschlossen. Das erfuhr er erst zum Schluß aus dem ‘Prozessualischen’, und dadurch erhielt seine Arbeit eine ganz neue Gestalt. [. . .] die Akten gaben ungeahnte Schätze heraus. Neben der Duellgeschichte, und dieselbe weit überdauernd, läuft jetzt eine Familienfehde her, in deren Mittelpunkt abermals die Krautentochter steht und von der sie fühlbarer getroffen wurde als von den paar Pistolenschüssen, die Gemahl und Liebhaber aufeinander abfeuerten.

(So heißt es in dem Brief an Klingner.) Fontane hatte schon bald nach der Rückkehr aus Lützburg mit der Niederschrift begonnen und aus Wernigerode an seine Frau geschrieben: ‘Ich bin sehr f leißig gewesen und habe den Triumph, den Hoppenrade- bez. den “Krautentochter”Stoff schließlich doch untergekriegt zu haben.’ Aber er hatte zu früh triumphiert, weil inzwischen nach dem stark veränderten Stand seiner Kenntnisse und der veränderten Anlage des Essays noch einmal begonnen werden mußte. Am 9. Januar 1881 notiert er im Tagebuch: ‘Das “Hoppenrade”-Kapitel dem Stoff nach arrangiert’. Und am 26. April 1882 hält das Tagebuch fest: ‘Hoppenrade I korrigiert und an die “Voss. Ztng” geschickt’. Vom 14. Mai bis 25. Juni 1882 erscheint der Beitrag in der Vossischen Zeitung, und er wird 1889 in den Sammelband Fünf Schlösser. Altes und Neues aus Mark Brandenburg aufgenommen. Nach dieser langen und vielfach irritierenden Entstehungsgeschichte ist es erstaunlich, daß der ‘Hoppenrade’-Essay darstellerisch zu den besonders brillanten historisch-biographischen Arbeiten Fontanes zu zählen ist. Es überrascht die Vielzahl der virtuos gehandhabten Gestaltungsmittel: die informierenden Kapitel­ überschriften ebenso wie die eingefügte Briefdokumentation, die sachlich berichtenden Passagen, aber auch die ins Novellistische hinüberwechselnden

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Abschnitte, die in Charlottes berührendem Monolog nach Knyphausens Tod ihren Höhepunkt finden. Wegen solcher Meriten gibt die Krautentochter-Darstellung ein subtiles Beispiel für Fontanes These — entwickelt in einem Brief an Paul Schlenther vom 28. April 1894 — , daß die ‘besten Gardebataillone der Menschheit’ die Toten seien, ‘die, bio­g raph­ isch wiederbelebt, unter uns wandeln. Es sind nicht Schemen. Umgekehrt, sie haben den wahren Lebensodem’ und verleihen der Erinnerung an sie nachhaltig Dauer. Daß Fontane auch nach der Veröffentlichung des Krautentochter-Essays in der Vossischen Zeitung Schloß und Bewohnerin nicht aus den Augen verlor, zeigen die mehrfachen Erwähnungen in den zwei (nicht ausgeführten) Projekten ‘Geschichten aus Mark Brandenburg’ (1882/83) und ‘Das Ländchen Friesack und die Bredows’ (ab 1889). Im Vorwort zu Fünf Schlösser bemerkt Fontane, daß man in Brandenburg recht großzügig mit der Bezeichnung ‘Schloß’ verfahre und bei Herrensitzen und Gutshäusern ‘immer den Mut der ausgleichenden höheren Titulatur’ gehabt habe. Das gilt auch für Hoppenrade. Ein Bredow hat das Haus 1724 als eingeschossige Dreif lügelanlage errichten lassen. Sie wurde um 1800 aufgestockt und mit einem Walmdach versehen; die Fassaden wurden verändert. Die Besitzer wechselten im 19. Jahrhundert mehrfach, und dazwischen gab es immer wieder Leerstand. Fontane war, wie erwähnt, auf das unbewohnte Hoppenrade fixiert, und es scheint, daß diese Vorstellung nachhaltig wirksam bleiben soll. Denn der Zustand der Unbewohntheit dauert an, und man denkt auch heute bei einem Besuch an Fontanes Bemerkung von 1861: Hoppenrade liege da ‘wie herrenloses Eigentum’. 1945, als Tausende von Flüchtlingen unterzubringen waren, wurde das Haus — wie meist bei vergleichbaren Objekten im Osten Deutschlands — für Wohnungen genutzt, aber — siehe den Anfang — in den achtziger Jahren des 20. Jahrhunderts schon wieder ‘freigezogen’. Nach dem Fall der Mauer erwarb es ein Westberliner Unternehmer aus der Werbebranche. Ich erinnere mich an ein Telefonat mit ihm, in dem er fragte, ob Fontane noch mehr über das Inventar aufgezeichnet habe (nein, hat er nicht). Der neue Eigentümer vermietete das Haus für Familienfeste und Hochzeiten, hat es aber 2012 auch wieder abgestoßen. (Laut Internet heiratete der Theatermann Christoph Schlingensief im Schloß Hoppenrade.) Dazwischen kam es — sinnvollerweise — wieder einmal mit Fontane zusammen. Hermine Huntgeburth drehte dort Teile ihrer anregend-interessanten Neuverfilmung von Effi Briest (2007/2009). Ich widme die vorliegende Paraphrase über ein besonders vielschichtiges Kapitel Fontanescher Prosa Helen Chambers, die ich stets für ihre Joseph-Roth-Studien, aber vor allem für ihr gediegenes literarisches und sozialgeschichtliches Interesse an Frauen und Frauenliteratur bewundert habe, die so gescheit über Ironie und Humor bei schreibenden Frauen des 19. Jahrhunderts nachdenken und schreiben kann und deren penible Art, mit Texten umzugehen und sie gar ins Englische zu übertragen, ich immer geschätzt habe — von ihrem liebenswürdig-kommunikativen Wesen ganz abgesehen, das eine jahrzehntelange freundschaftliche Verbindung ermöglichte und die auch zu Zeiten der deutschen Spaltung funktionierte. Und ich verknüpfe meinen Beitrag mit der herzlichen Einladung, bei nächster

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Gelegenheit die Erinnerungsorte der ‘Krautentochter’ in Augenschein zu nehmen: Hoppenrade und Köpernitz, Rheinsberg und — Meseberg (sofern es die politischdiplomatischen Verpf lichtungen der Bundeskanzlerin erlauben). Als Quelle für den Text und die Kommentierung diente die Große Brandenburger Ausgabe, Abteilung Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg, Band v und Band vii.

PA RT I I

v

Translation Studies

C h ap t e r 4

v

‘All the fruits of fancy’: The British Reception of Hermann von Pückler-Muskau’s Tutti Frutti (1834) Peter James Bowman, Ely A recurrent frustration for historians of the British reception of German literature in the nineteenth century is that works considered important today are passed over in silence while others now more or less obscure are noticed at length. The second phenomenon is not without interest, however, even when there is little forgotten merit to be rediscovered, for it yields evidence of the habits and tastes of British publishers, translators, and reviewers, and by extension readers, of German books during this period. *

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‘Ich wüßte seit langen Jahren keine litterarische Sache, die bei uns Deutschen gleich von Anfang in so vortreff lichem Zuge gewesen wäre, unter so guten Sternen ihre Bahn fortgesetzt hätte.’ Thus Karl August Varnhagen von Ense congratulated his friend and literary protégé Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau on the reception of the first two volumes of Briefe eines Verstorbenen, his travel book about England, Wales, and Ireland.1 Varnhagen was not exaggerating: a string of laudatory reviews, including one by Goethe, heralded a triumphant entry into the world of letters. Pückler was thrilled, though the huge cost of the park he was creating on his Muskau estate meant that personal gratification took second place to the satisfaction of receiving his publisher’s cheques. Late in 1832, a year after the final two volumes of Briefe eines Verstorbenen had appeared, Pückler informed Varnhagen that he was at work on its successor: ‘[Ich] schreibe allerlei, bald dieses, bald jenes, aber nichts Zusammenhängendes, denn das erste Erforderniß ist, daß es mich selbst amüsirt.’2 This mode of composition suggested the title Tutti Frutti — the name of an Italian ice containing small pieces of frozen fruit — that the book soon acquired. By April 1833 he had enough matter to fill two volumes, but feared there was more quantity than quality. In a letter to Varnhagen he called his new production a ‘Machwerk’,3 and in another to Bettine von Arnim a ‘thörigtes Geschwätz’,4 while to his ex-wife Lucie he declared that he was now a purely commercial author.5 This was partly a pose, a defence

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mechanism he used throughout his writing career, and he was no doubt delighted that Varnhagen liked the draft he had sent him. ‘Der Ernst und der Scherz sind sehr glücklich gemischt,’ his mentor told him, ‘und ein heitrer, doch immer mit Tieferem in Beziehung gehaltener, von Verstand beherrschter Geist muß jeden ächten Sinn lebhaft ansprechen.’6 Pückler’s personality is indeed one of the two unifying elements in a work that is otherwise as miscellaneous as its title suggests. The other is Germany, especially Prussia — its landscapes, people, culture, and government. The satirical strain of Briefe eines Verstorbenen is retained, and readers who had laughed at Albion’s foibles now found their own country similarly treated. Moreover, the sterner criticism of British society in the first book is more than matched by the dissection of Prussia’s shortcomings in the second: ‘Ein bischen Raisoniren muß einem guten Preußen erlaubt sein; er hat ja sonst nichts’, Pückler joked to Varnhagen.7 Formally the two works are dissimilar: most of Briefe eines Verstorbenen is a fairly conventional epistolary travelogue, but in Tutti Frutti passages of travel writing jostle with reminiscences, anecdotes, long and short stories, verses, aphorisms, and disquisitions. In the first volume a dedication and preface with ironic encomiums for the chief minister of the king’s household and Prussia’s government newspaper are followed by a ‘Sendschreiben’ with kind words for Varnhagen and unkind ones for certain reviewers of Briefe eines Verstorbenen. The main text begins with ‘Ein Besuch im Herrnhutischen’, a fictional narrative leavened with topical comment and chief ly motivated by a dislike of the eponymous pietistic sect. ‘Aus den Zetteltöpfen eines Unruhigen’ offers ref lections of varying length on slavery and colonization, Protestant doctrine, hostility to the Jews, freedom of the press, officialdom, legal aspects of landownership, and many other topics. Finally, in ‘Scenen und Erinnerungen aus meinen Tagebüchern’ the author recalls a hot-air balloon ascent from Berlin with the aeronaut Karl Gottfried Reichard and the diplomatic luminaries he met at the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818. ‘Brief an den geneigten Leser’, a defence of Pückler’s unorthodox religious faith, opens the second volume, which is mainly devoted to ‘Die Flucht ins Gebürge’, a picaresque tale of a hapless hero’s journey through the mountainous parts of Silesia, interwoven with asides, short stories, and stray thoughts. Here Pückler exhibits his talent for landscape description and sketches of everyday life, tries his hand at Gothic horror, indulges a taste for the salacious, and gives further vent to his views on landowners’ rights and the importunities of Prussian bureaucrats. ‘Der neuste Alcibiades’ contains a vivid account of a bear hunt in Transylvania as related by a French adventurer, and ‘Brief eines Preussen an die Gräfin R. . .u in Copenhagen’ takes a light-hearted look at life in Berlin and pokes fun at the Prussian court. After making some changes proposed by Varnhagen Pückler applied the final touches in the summer of 1833. Slowly public expectation grew: in the autumn there were rumours that a piquant book by the prince was to appear, and selections in the press further sharpened curiosity. The publisher, as with the second part of Briefe eines Verstorbenen, was Louis Hallberger of Stuttgart, and once again Pückler teased his readers with a thin veil of anonymity, the full title being Tutti Frutti. Aus den Papieren des Verstorbenen. The first printing sold out in advance of publication

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in February 1834; a second very soon followed. There were good reviews, among them two by Varnhagen’s friend Wilhelm Neumann,8 and many mentions and extracts in the press. The book was read aloud to King Frederick William III, one of the royal princes told Pückler it had caused a furore, various circles in Berlin discussed it avidly, and individual testimonies of approval poured in. Others were more critical, especially of the lack of formal unity. ‘Nur ein Potpourri, ein Zettelkasten’ was the not untypical verdict of the political writer Heinrich Laube.9 Courtiers, bureaucrats, and churchmen whom the book offended denounced it or gave out that it was a poor effort, and others sincerely felt that Pückler had fallen below the standard of his first title. He would have been hurt if he had known Heine’s view, for in its mixture of genres, use of travel sketches to convey social criticism, sardonic and irreverent tone, deployment of telling anecdotes, and tendency towards the sensational Tutti Frutti is inspired by Reisebilder (1826–31). Pückler acknowledged his debt to the younger man in a letter he asked Hallberger to send him with a copy of the book.10 ‘Er hat mir sein Tutti frutti geschickt mit einem langen liebkosenden Briefe,’ Heine told his brother Maximilian, ‘hat aber mein Urtheil nicht damit bestechen können.’11 All in all Pückler was pleased with the work’s reception. Its praises had been loudly sung, much of the dispraise only increased its renown, and it was eagerly consumed by the reading public. Nonetheless he did not wish it to share with Briefe eines Verstorbenen the further accolade of being published abroad. It was, he told the French novelist Sophie Gay, of purely local interest and intended only for the German market.12 But he could not prevent Jean Cohen, who had translated its predecessor, or Henri Fournier, who had published it, from again joining forces to offer the French public De tout un peu. Tiré des papiers du défunt, which appeared in four volumes in 1834 and 1835. When Pückler learnt of this he asked Gay to mitigate as best she could the inevitable damage to his reputation. To stand before the French nation in such a garb was, he said, ‘un grand sujet de tristesse’.13 The book’s publication in English was inevitable given the huge British and American success of Tour of a German Prince, Sarah Austin’s rendering of Briefe eines Verstorbenen. The translator this time was Captain Edmund Spencer, a young man whose first venture into print this was, but who in the middle decades of the century penned numerous travelogues about Europe and the Black Sea region.14 It is clear from remarks by Pückler in a letter to Varnhagen and in his Südöstlicher Bildersaal that Hallberger instigated the English translation of Tutti Frutti.15 He did so by coming to terms with Spencer, who was expected to find a British publisher himself. Spencer hoped an important house would take the title on, as he explained in a letter to Pückler, but he only received his copy from Hallberger two weeks before the German publication in February, and six weeks before this a small but well-informed London publisher had anticipated him by announcing a translation: ‘I had therefore no alternative but to make the best arrangement I could with them.’16 This enterprising minnow was Bach & Co. of Soho Square, most of whose business was in previously published foreign works in their original languages. Even with this arrangement in place Spencer found himself harried, for another firm,

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perhaps playing the same bluffing game, then announced its own translation. He worked at a lightning pace, with almost no time for revision and correction, and his text was ‘printed as fast as it was translated’, as he ruefully told Pückler. The book went on sale in June 1834 with the title Tutti Frutti, By the Author of ‘The Tour of a German Prince’. It retained the two-volume format of the German edition and cost 16 shillings.17 Of the advertisements placed by Bach, those in the Age and the Standard highlighted its portraits of scenery and manners and its anecdotes of statesmen, and another in the Hull Packet gave quotes from reviews already printed.18 Before looking at the reviews, let us examine Spencer’s version. It opens with a short, signed translator’s introduction explaining the title in terms of the book’s stylistic variety. Then comes an essay on the author, whose anonymity is thus unceremoniously dropped. It is a glowing account, not surprisingly given that it draws, as Spencer admits in his letter, on an article in the Brockhaus ConversationsLexicon, and that this article was written by the ever-helpful Varnhagen using notes supplied by Pückler himself.19 The introduction and biographical essay replace the dedication, preface, and ‘Sendschreiben’, which would have made little sense to British readers. Otherwise Spencer does not in general shy away from items of specifically Prussian reference, and aside from small rearrangements within sections he also keeps to the existing order of contents.20 ‘In the slight deviations I have made from the amusing and spirited originals,’ he told Pückler, ‘my object has been to render the work more agreeable to the English reader.’ Aside from the addition of paragraph breaks, the substitution of direct by indirect speech, and the removal of emphasis — all designed to make the prose smoother — these deviations either expand or contract the text. The commonest reason for expansion is to clarify what might be obscure to British readers. Thus we find a long notice on ‘The Evangelical Brethren, commonly called Herrnhuters’,21 as well as footnotes — some useful, others merely quirky — on knight earls (E.i:30), goblins (E.i:31), the German habit of scratching behind the ear (E.i:51), the Frankfurt uprising of 1833 (E.i:98–99), German turnpikes (E.i:136), and the croaking of German frogs (E.ii:119).22 Spencer also inserts epigraphs plucked from the works of Byron, Coleridge, Dryden, Pope, Schiller, Shakespeare, and Voltaire. More eccentrically, in ‘The Wanderer’s Return’ he fills a page with an animal orchestra of his own contrivance, remarking in a footnote that ‘as the noble author omitted to furnish his dancers with a band of music, the translator has taken the liberty to supply the deficiency’ (G.i:72/E.i:50). And when two balloonists snagged in a lofty pine call for help he adds details on the manner of their shouting and their fear that, having f lown like birds, they would continue the imitation by roosting all night in a tree (G.i:310/E.i:258). Nonetheless, and despite his readiness to tackle passages on Prussian subjects, Spencer contracts far more than he expands. He removes most of the author’s footnotes and many of the asides and anecdotes woven into longer texts. As well as summarizing translations there are simple cuts of a few lines, a paragraph, a page, or even a few pages. The verse satire ‘Die große 10, oder die zwei heiligen Zahlen 1 und 0’ (G.ii:271–79) will scarcely be missed, but among the regrettable excisions are a paragraph of ref lection on the hero’s unlucky encounter with Herr von Lork

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in ‘Die Flucht ins Gebürge’ and the following note on whether descriptions of food and its consumption have a place in literature (G.ii:204–05/E.ii:135). As well as sacrificing colour, such curtailments can cause abrupt transitions or leave loose ends. Some were doubtless made to shorten the book and expedite its publication, and it is noticeable that as Spencer advances through the second volume he leaves out more and more. Another reason for pruning is that, like Sarah Austin before him, Spencer tries to adhere to the chastity of tone demanded by British readers. A double-entendre uttered by a headmistress (G.i:92/E.i:82), a female foot being stroked under a table (G.i:273/E.i:223), a French general living with his paramour (G.ii:75–76/E.ii:51), the prevalence of pretty girls in a particular district (G.ii:124–25/E.ii:86), and a landlady’s suggestive name (G.ii:260/E.ii:169) are all suppressed, and a long stretch of saucy dialogue and innuendo is sanitized (G.ii:125–39/E.ii:86–98). Spencer also eliminates other types of indelicacy. Comments on female ugliness become less brutal (G.ii:119/E.ii:84; G.ii:178/E.ii:118); of a green, foul-smelling corpse we merely learn that ‘decomposition had already commenced’ (G.i:125/E.i:115); and a Moldavian peasant who looks to see if a pig has been castrated instead only inspects its ear (G.ii:303/E.ii:193).23 Although squeamish in such matters, Spencer has no qualms about Pückler’s sometimes trenchant opinions. Criticisms of attitudes, customs, and institutions, including religious institutions, are retained, as are statements of his broadly pantheistic creed.24 We might expect editing on the few British subjects, but neither praise for the nation’s system of landownership and its emancipation of the Jews nor an ungenerous portrait of Lady Castlereagh, wife of the foreign secretary, are tampered with. On the other hand, Spencer cannot resist a gallophobic twist here and there. ‘Thoughtless’ is added to a comment on the French national character (G.i:55/E.i:35), and ‘veränderlich wie eine junge Schöne’ becomes ‘capricious as Parisian belles’ (G.ii:260/E.ii:169). Likewise Napoleon is roughly handled: while in German his fortunes are reversed ‘durch den kalten Schlag eines Wintergewitters’ in English it is ‘by the avenging thunderbolt of heaven!’ (G.ii:58/E.ii:35); and rather than an ‘ehrner Coloss’ he is simply a ‘usurper’ (G.ii:334/E.ii:223). Whether they suspect his interventions or not, readers of Spencer’s text soon realize they are in the hands of a translator with a f lair for language. Cadences are usually pleasing and elegant turns of phrase abound, as in a sentence about a pampered dog biting its owner’s hand: Geschieht mir aber dergleichen, so thue ich so, als sey es nur Spaß gewesen, und versichre, die blutigen Finger versteckend, und freundlich lächelnd: Fancy habe mich nur geleckt. (G.i:78) If it was my lot to be honoured with marks, not of his attachment but his teeth, I should laugh heartily, conceal the bleeding finger and say, that pretty Fancy had been licking my hand. (E.i:71)

Importantly, Spencer rises to the challenge of Pückler’s evocative sketches of scenery, for example in describing the situation of a hunting lodge: In reizendem Contrast mit diesem trüben Bilde war die romantische Umgebung. Hundertjährige Fichten faßten hier mit ihrem schwarzen, faltigen

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Peter James Bowman Mantel blumige Wiesen ein, junge Birken mit den zarten sprossenden Blättern bedeckten das tiefe Thal, und durch das Erlengebüsch raschelte, wie unzählige Eidechsen, in hundert phantastischen Krümmungen, das kleine Bächlein, welches unter den noch übrig gebliebenen Mauern des alten Schlosses sich verlor. (G.i.49) The romantic environs were beautifully contrasted with its dreary history: majestic pines, which had f lourished for centuries, overspread with their black folding mantles the blooming lawns and meadows; young groves of birch, with their tender shooting leaves and rich foliage covered the deep vale, and the small stream rushed through the alder bushes and underwood, like innumerable lizards, in a thousand fantastic windings, until it lost itself behind the crumbling walls of the old tower. (E.i:31–32)25

Elsewhere Spencer’s word-spinning gets the better of him. ‘Zu ihm’ (the devil) becomes ‘with his satanic majesty’ (G.i:120/E.i:109); ‘in der Dämmerung’ becomes ‘As the evening was beginning to cast her sable mantle over created nature’ (G.i:120/ E.i:109); ‘Sie’ (a soprano) becomes ‘the delightful warbler’ (G.i:284/E.i:234); and ‘durch Wald und Flur’ becomes ‘through dark, dreary forests, and gay smiling plains’ (G.ii:16/E.ii:4). As well as altering the tone, such embroidery can mislead: for example the first sentence of the ‘Visit to the Establishment of the Herrnhuters’ adds a reference to ‘their retreat of tranquillity and peace’ (E.i:67; cf. G.i:13) that sits oddly with the critical view of the brotherhood that follows. Worse than such outer limbs and f lourishes are the many mistakes. A few of these may be the result of working at speed, as when Chinese curiosities become Indian (G.i:200/E.i:169) or The Hague becomes Le Havre (G.i:239/E.i:195). More reveal a shaky grasp of German. Spencer gives ‘brav’ as ‘brave’ (G.i:53/E.i:34), ‘Freundin’ as ‘tiny friend’ (G.i:85/E.i:76), ‘Schaffnerin’ as ‘shepherdess’ (G.ii:112/E. ii:78), ‘Wohnzimmer’ as ‘principal sleeping room’ (G.ii:116/E.ii:81), ‘Backe’ as ‘back’ (G.ii:213/E.ii:140), and ‘Nase’ as ‘neck’ (G.ii:247/E.ii:163). ‘Die vielen aufpasserischen Sinne eines Bedienten’ becomes ‘the tiresome observations of a prattling servant’ (G.i:56/E.i:37); ‘ein viel versprechender Neffe’ becomes a ‘nephew [. . .] especially distinguished for loquacity’ (G.i:274/E.i:223); ‘sagte [. . .] etwas ziemlich Unbedeutendes’ becomes ‘her words were unintelligible’ (G.i:275/E.i:224); ‘f luchte gewaltig’ becomes ‘galloped off with the rapidity of lightning’ (G.i:310/ E.i:258); and the fictitious periodical ‘Der Sandomirische Wahrheitsliebende’ becomes the ‘Sandomarien True Lovers’ (G.ii:215/E.ii:142). Likewise a German woman in her forties who in England would be considered at the peak of her attractiveness turns into an Englishwoman of that alluring age (G.i:75/E.i:68). Scenes in plays that are unrealistic if set in a street are instead unrealistic wherever they are set (G.i:96/E.i:86). The scandal that people are inadvertently buried alive is magnified into the much greater one that more are buried alive than dead (G.ii:120–21/E.ii:85). And a headmistress who discourages male visitors to the girls in her charge is replaced by one who welcomes them (G.ii:130/E.ii:90). Occasionally a single error ripples through a paragraph, as when an attack on the Prussian bureaucracy is weakened by ‘unsre Behörden’ being given as ‘our employés’ (G.i:144/E.i:134). More often Spencer misses the satirical thrust of observations or the nub of witticisms, making his English seem f lat or even

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wilful. In the survey of Berlin life at the close of the second volume, for instance, he conveys the eulogies to the Prussian court but not the faux-naïf tone that negates them. None of this was picked up by British reviewers.26 Leaving aside the Athenaeum, the Dublin University Magazine, and the Foreign Quarterly Review, which discuss the German text, praise for Spencer’s translation is warm. It is ‘admirably done from beginning to end’, states the Literary Gazette (p. 425). He has ‘executed his task most ably’, agrees the Court Journal. His style is ‘easy and vigorous’ according to the Leeds Times, ‘easy and idiomatic’ according to the Spectator (p. 662). The Monthly Review (p. 413), the Metropolitan Magazine, the Morning Post, the Town, and the Weekly True Sun take the same view, and there is no dissent elsewhere. Standards of translation at this time were low, and Spencer’s f luent English was enough to win plaudits from critics who, we may assume, did not compare his version with the original. Nor did they know that his biographical essay was largely derivative, and this they extol almost as much.27 As for the author, he is of course remembered for Tour of a German Prince. Some critics rehearse the arguments generated by his treatment of British society in that work, but despite lingering bitterness on this score they seem willing to judge Tutti Frutti on its own merits. Taking their cue from Spencer’s introduction, many elucidate the gastronomic title and remark that it well captures the book’s diversity of style and content. It is ‘as varied and light as the Italian fruit-ices, from which it derives its name’, says the Atlas. The Satirist enjoys its ‘agreeable mélange of the romantic, the descriptive, the serious, and the playful’, a form of words echoed by the Morning Post, for which it is ‘f lavoured with all the fruits of fancy; the rarest and the sweetest among which we have discovered the romantic, the descriptive, the playful, and imaginative’. The Town thinks ‘the miscellaneous contents’ give the book ‘great charm’, and the Leeds Times, in another echo of the Satirist, considers it ‘a very agreeable melange’. As with his first title, Pückler earns credit for his portrayal of landscapes. The Athenaeum refers to his ‘power of painting natural scenery’ (p. 321), the Foreign Quarterly Review to his ‘talent for picturesque, we might say dramatic, description’ (p. 380), the Town to his ‘talent for picturesque delineation’, and the Dublin University Magazine to his ‘glowing enthusiasm for the beauties of nature’ (p. 99). His humorous vein is also acknowledged. A scene in a Herrnhut churchyard raises a smile from the Foreign Quarterly Review (p. 395), the Monthly Review is amused by what he says he would do with a large fortune (p. 417), and the Literary Gazette finds a number of diverting anecdotes (p. 427). Finally, there are admirers, though fewer, of his political ideas. The Dublin University Magazine endorses his opposition to constitutional reform based on utilitarian principles and to the growth of state authority at the expense of traditional power structures (pp. 102–03); the Monthly Review cheers his call for more humane penal laws (pp. 415–16); and the Foreign Quarterly Review appreciates his plea for Jewish emancipation (p. 389). Of the longer articles the one in the Monthly Review is the most favourable. It finds the book full of original and interesting observations from an author with a strong, active mind, a sound knowledge of social and political conditions in various

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countries, and a fine prose style. The Town strikes a similar note, detecting great powers of judgement, a benevolent cast of mind, an engaging sense of humour, and a ‘perpetual play of imagination which sparkles over his pages’. Just as positive is the shorter piece in the Manchester Courier: The Prince is a lively, animated, and frequently very pleasant writer. Original he always is, and he expresses his opinions with candour and fearlessness. The forte of the author is evidently picturesque description, and many admirable specimens of this kind of writing might be selected from these volumes. Taken as a whole, Tutti Frutti is an amusing work, and we strongly recommend it to the attention of our readers.

There is, however, a great divergence of opinion about Pückler’s personality. Some reviewers find it lively and entertaining, others shallow and boastful. The Metropolitan Magazine, the Observer, and the True Sun judge him to be highly conceited, while the Atlas reproves ‘his frivolity, his insincerity, and his summer vain-gloriousness’ and joins the Foreign Quarterly Review (p. 381) in deploring his illnatured satire. Despite Spencer’s editing his philandering and licentious humour are discernible enough to offend the fastidious: the Dublin University Magazine accuses him of ‘coarseness of allusion’ (p. 100) and the True Sun of ‘very lax principles’ and ‘an intolerable f lippancy of manner’. The Bristol Mercury says he has produced a work both trite and disconnected, ‘the common-place book of a common-place mind’, and, like the Foreign Quarterly Review (pp. 381–82), dislikes the alternation between fact and fiction. For the Metropolitan Magazine it is a ‘very desultory’ effort, and the Observer calls it a collection of sweepings that ought to have been ‘swept into the fire instead of into the compositors’ room’. Many find Pückler unequal to complex questions. ‘He has discussed economical subjects without a knowledge of the elements of that science; and his speculations on politics display little acquaintance with facts or principles’, complains the Spectator (p. 662). The Bristol Mercury detects inconsistencies in his thinking: ‘We cannot tell what the prince would be at: he does not like the ancien regime, but it is nevertheless evident that the world is going too fast for him.’ The Weekly True Sun asks why he disapproves of individuals accumulating great wealth but supports the system of primogeniture that is most likely to promote it. The Literary Gazette declares its intention to pass over his political and economic ideas (p. 426), and the Athenaeum thinks them unlikely to interest its readers (p. 321). His anticlericalism and theological musings are ignored or censured: the Dublin University Magazine objects to his unf lattering portrayal of the Herrnhuters (pp. 101–02) and the Monthly Review to the accusation of greed he levels at the English clergy (pp. 420–21). The author’s religion, sniffs the Literary Gazette, ‘hangs very loosely about him’ (p. 427). Taken as a whole, the reviews are slightly more positive than negative, with mixed verdicts predominating. These proportions are replicated in briefer notices. Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal says the book ‘contains some amusing sketches of continental scenery and manners’.28 The Sunday Times calls it a ‘highly entertaining work’ in which ‘the romantic is judiciously blended with the humorous’.29 The Literary Gazette, three months before reviewing the translation, judges that the original is ‘written in a lively and agreeable style’ and makes useful observations

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on political topics.30 The Naval and Military Gazette describes the prince as a ‘keen satirist’ whose imaginative, playful manner is bound to be popular despite not being free from absurdity.31 Leigh Hunt’s London Journal holds him to be a talented man with a gallant spirit but also a vain attention-seeker.32 The Gentleman’s Magazine regrets that his book affords little ‘either for the amusement or instruction of the reader’.33 And the Morning Post, four months before its positive review, finds the German text greatly inferior to what it calls Letters of a Defunct.34 All but the last of these comments introduce extracts from the book, and other extracts are printed elsewhere.35 The selection of these, and of the long passages given in the reviews, is itself revealing. Treatments of political, economic, and religious subjects are all but absent, while pages of satire are infrequent, as even are the much-lauded scenic sketches. Instead, again and again, preference is accorded to Pückler’s short, chatty narratives, the most popular being the Transylvanian bear hunt, the reminiscences of Aix-la-Chapelle, the ballooning escapade, and vignettes of the Napoleonic Wars. It is in such anecdotal material that his curiosity about his fellow human beings and instinct for what is striking and characteristic most clearly emerge. Paul Fechter, in a sensitive analysis of Pückler’s style, claims this mode of perception anticipates Fontane’s: ‘Er hat nicht nur den Sinn für die Anekdote, den Theodor Fontane von ihm erbte: er geht geradezu auf die Suche nach der Anekdote im Wirklichen.’ In Fechter’s view the term Causerie, often associated with Fontane, suits Pückler even better.36 Are there any British authors who exhibit qualities similar to Pückler’s? The Dublin University Magazine suggests three: [Tutti Frutti] belongs to a very interesting class of books, which, like the reminiscences of [Horace] Walpole, Charles Butler, or [Isaac] D’Israeli, present to the reader the cream of the author’s observations — the richest of his anecdotes — and the most lively of his descriptions — unfettered by the restrictions which the choice of any one leading subject must, in a certain degree, impose. (p. 99)

Meanwhile the Literary Gazette proposes William Beckford: The interval of half a century marks a much greater difference in time than any that exists in their tone, spirit, and feeling. A love of the picturesque and romantic, a devotedness to the fine arts, an acute perception of the ridiculous in life, the organ of amativeness rather more than developed — displayed, a philosophical aspiration after human perfection, and rather an antipathy to religion as practised in the world by the worldly — such are features which they exhibit very nearly in common. (p. 425)

While Tutti Frutti was being discussed in the British press Pückler began a voyage that would keep him from home for six years. Nonetheless he was able to read the ‘englische Artikel’ that Varnhagen received from Sarah Austin and forwarded to him. ‘He will see the opinion of an honest friend, who takes a real interest in him’, Varnhagen quoted her as saying.37 The articles in question must be those that Austin wrote for the Foreign Quarterly Review and the Athenaeum, a supposition confirmed by Pückler’s reply that ‘Die englischen Kritiken der Austin sind sonderbar genug.’38 It is an odd comment, for both reviews are broadly positive

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and both are earnest, careful appraisals. Perhaps his epistolary romance with Austin following her translation of Briefe eines Verstorbenen made him expect more.39 As for the other British reviews, their authorship is unknown and Pückler seems not to have read them. He did, however, read Spencer’s translation. He describes it to Lucie as wretched,40 and to Varnhagen he laments that both Jean Cohen and Spencer have made ‘miserable Uebersetzungen [. . .], deren Albernheit mir in Frankreich und England den Hals brechen wird’.41 In Südöstlicher Bildersaal he records receiving a copy of the English version while in Malta towards the end of 1835. Der Uebersetzer hat mir allerdings eine Ehre durch seine Arbeit angethan, das, was er verstanden, auch gut übertragen, weshalb ich, früher nur in dem Buche blätternd, mich zu einem höf lichen Danksagungsschreiben, als Antwort auf einen von ihm erhaltenen Brief, verpf lichtet hielt. Seitdem ich es aber ganz gelesen, muß ich mich eben so sehr über häufige Weglassungen, als Zusätze beklagen [. . .] Ueberdieß könnten hundert Stellen angeführt werden, wo ich gar nicht verstanden wurde, und Anekdoten und Anspielungen dadurch gerade ihre Pointe verloren, so daß sie jetzt wie ein Rumpf ohne Kopf dastehen.42

He gives examples of Spencer’s errors, including the claim of mass live interments mentioned above, and notes that a previous reader of his copy has written ‘The author is an impudent liar’ in the margin next to this: ‘So wird man unschuldigerweise beurtheilt!’43 In December 1834 the final three volumes of Tutti Frutti were published in German. The dish was as varied as before. A further helping ‘Aus den Zetteltöpfen eines Unruhigen’ includes thoughts on gambling, mysticism, technical progress, duelling, and contemporary literature. ‘Acht Frühlings- und Sommertage aus dem Leben Mischling’s’ is a loose assemblage of fictional adventures and conversations, its narrative impetus provided by the autobiographical hero’s abandonment of a simple, generous girl for a heartless coquette and its dire consequences. And ‘Politische Ansichten eines Dilettanten’ makes the case for a socially useful aristocracy, neither perpetuated by birth alone nor purely meritocratic, acting as a bulwark against the twin evils of royal absolutism and full democracy, and preventing the bureaucratic centralization that occurs where nothing stands between the apex of power and the populace. Again the book had prominent supporters, again the king had it read to him; but the critical reception was cooler this time, and booksellers found that many who had bought the first part did not take the second.44 These volumes were not put into English, but they did receive a two-part review in the Athenaeum.45 Its verdict is that although the author is clever and amusing his book is ‘gossiping and desultory’ (i, 41). The critic treats the essay on aristocracy at length, agreeing with some points but not others, and gives extracts from the lighter matter, including, without resentment, remarks on the arrogance of the British abroad. As for the Mischling novella, the heroine Giannina is compared with Goethe’s Mignon but the hero dismissed as ‘fantastic, infirm, sensual, and selfish’ (ii, 84), while the story, though full of improbabilities, is praised for its picturesque descriptions and humorous dialogue. The review ends by regretting that Pückler does not ‘condescend to bestow more labour on what he writes’ and

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declaring him ‘capable of much more than he has yet done’ (ii, 86). This resembles a sentiment expressed in the Foreign Quarterly Review (pp. 380–81), which, taken with the internal evidence of style, suggests that this article, like that and the earlier one in the Athenaeum, was by Sarah Austin.46 Pückler records reading it on his travels in Tunisia in 1835 but not the impression it made on him.47 Meanwhile Spencer’s translation of the first two volumes had not disappeared from view. Pückler reported a second printing to Lucie at the end of 1834,48 and there were detailed advertisements for the book in the Morning Post and the Satirist in the spring of 1835.49 A further advertisement in the Standard in 1836 offered a single-volume edition at nine shillings rather than the original sixteen; this time the publisher was Simpkin, Marshall and Co., another small London house.50 In 1838 the same publisher reissued the book in two volumes as The German Sketch-Book, with author and translator named on the title page. This was its last outing, but three more translations of Pückler’s works were still to be published in London as well as many reviews. His fear that Edmund Spencer would destroy his reputation as a writer in Great Britain was not borne out. *

*

*

*

*

In Germany and beyond the reputation of Tutti Frutti shone brightly but brief ly, dying away even before its more transient subject matter grew dated. Today it is generally thought to be one of Pückler’s weakest books, if not the weakest. Nonetheless it has its little place in the narrative of Anglo-German literary relations in the golden age of the British periodical press, and of course in the reception history of an author who wrote better books before and after. Notes to Chapter 4 1. Briefwechsel und Tagebücher des Fürsten Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, ed. by Ludmilla Assing, 9 vols (Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe, 1873 [i–ii]; Berlin: Wedekind & Schwieger, 1874–76 [iii–ix]; repr. Berne: Lang, 1971), iii, 34 (letter of 5 November 1830). 2. Pückler-Muskau, Briefwechsel und Tagebücher, iii, 123 (letter of 5 November 1832). 3. Ibid., iii, 156 (letter of 12 July 1833). 4. Bettine von Arnim and Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, ‘Die Leidenschaft ist der Schlüssel zur Welt’: Briefwechsel 1832–1844, ed. by Enid Gajek and Bernhard Gajek (Stuttgart: Cotta, 2001), p. 276 (letter of 9 January 1834). 5. Pückler-Muskau, Briefwechsel und Tagebücher, viii, 195 (letter of 15 July 1833). 6. Ibid., iii, 148 (letter of 3 May 1833). 7. Ibid., iii, 150 (letter of 17 June 1833). 8. In the Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik and the Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung. Both articles were reprinted in Wilhelm Neumann, Schriften, 2 vols (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1835), ii, 21–47. 9. Heinrich Laube, Gesammelte Werke, ed. by Heinrich Hubert Houben and Albert Hänel, 50 vols (Leipzig: Hesse, 1908–09), xlix, 360. 10. Pückler-Muskau, Briefwechsel und Tagebücher, v, 49–50 (letter of 10 February 1834). 11. Heinrich Heine, Säkularausgabe: Werke, Briefwechsel, Lebenszeugnisse, ed. by Nationale Forschungsund Gedenkstätten der klassischen deutschen Literatur and Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 57 vols (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1970–), xxi, 83 (letter of 21 April 1834). 12. Pückler-Muskau, Briefwechsel und Tagebücher, i, 34 and 68 (undated letter and letter of 1 April 1834). 13. Ibid., i, 69 (letter of 1 April 1834).

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14. COPAC, the combined online academic library catalogue for the UK and Ireland, lists eleven titles by Spencer from 1836 to 1867, all but three of them travel books. Beyond what these tell us of his journeys, almost nothing is known of Spencer’s life. 15. Pückler-Muskau, Briefwechsel und Tagebücher, iii, 312 (letter of 10 December 1835); Südöstlicher Bildersaal, 3 vols (Stuttgart: Hallberger, 1840–41), i, 419. The former source suggests that Hallberger had a hand in the French translation too. 16. Spencer’s unpublished letter, dated 23 June 1834, is in Box 237 of the Varnhagen-Sammlung in the Biblioteka Jagiellońska, Cracow. There is a copy in the Stiftung Fürst-Pückler-Museum Park und Schloss Branitz: Microfilm 141/CD-Rom 29, scans 512–14. 17. Less than the bulkier tomes of Tour of a German Prince, which cost 18s. (vols i–ii) and 21s. (vols iii–iv). 18. Age, 22 June 1834; Standard, 23 June 1834; Hull Packet, 25 July 1834. 19. On the genesis of this article see Pückler’s letters to Varnhagen in Briefwechsel und Tagebücher, iii, 130–31, 141 and 184 (18 December 1832, 28 January 1833, and 5 February 1834). 20. The single major exception is a self-contained portion of ‘Ein Besuch im Herrnhutischen’ that Spencer lifts out and places before it with the title ‘The Wanderer’s Return’. 21. The German and English editions are henceforward referred to respectively with the letters ‘G’ and ‘E’ followed by volume and page numbers; here E.i:57–66. 22. Much is left unexplained, however, including a reference to the ‘prophetess of Prevorst’ (E.i:92) that would have stumped many readers. Justinus Kerner’s novel Die Seherin von Prevorst (1829), based on the life of the clairvoyant Friederike Hauffe, was not published in English until 1845. 23. We may suspect Spencer of poking fun at his own bowdlerizing when he translates ‘Hosentaschen’ as ‘pockets of that article of dress the name of which is unpronounceable by ladies’ (G.i:16/E.i:5). 24. However, the ‘Brief an den geneigten Leser’, which contains ref lections on Christ, is omitted. 25. Compare also E.ii:146–48 with G.ii:222–25. 26. The first two volumes of Tutti Frutti garnered the following reviews in the United Kingdom (newspapers indicated by date only): Athenaeum, 340 (3 May 1834), 321–23; Atlas, 21 June 1834; Bristol Mercury, 6 September 1834; Court Journal, 272 (12 July 1834), 489; Dublin University Magazine, 4.19 ( July 1834), 99–108; Foreign Quarterly Review, 13.26 (May 1834), 380–97; Leeds Times, 19 July 1834; Literary Gazette, 909 (21 June 1834), 425–27; Manchester Courier, 26 July 1834; Metropolitan Magazine, 10 (May–August 1834), lit. supp. ( July 1834), 76; Monthly Review, n.s. 2.4 (August 1834), 413–24; Morning Post, 4 August 1834; Observer, 20 July 1834; Satirist, 13 July 1834 [p. 218 in 1834 volume]; Spectator, 315 (12 July 1834), 661–62; Town, 3.130 (22 June 1834), 197; True Sun, 7 July 1834; Weekly True Sun, 29 June 1834. 27. Except for the Spectator, which thinks it lacks ‘portraiture’ (p. 662). A periodical that does not review the book makes the facetious claim that the essay’s purpose is to promote the mineral baths at Muskau: Fraser’s Magazine, 10.55 ( July 1834), 105. 28. Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, 133 (16 August 1834), 230–31. 29. Sunday Times, 29 June 1834 (see also 11 May 1834). 30. Literary Gazette, 896 (22 March 1834), 206–07. 31. Naval and Military Gazette, 74 (28 June 1834), 412. 32. Leigh Hunt’s London Journal, 19 (6 August 1834), 149–50. 33. Gentleman’s Magazine, n.s. 2 (October 1834), 398–99. 34. Morning Post, 27 March 1834. 35. Bradford Observer, 14 August 1834; Court Journal, 259 (12 April 1834), 239–40; Kentish Gazette, 26 August 1834; Literary Gazette, 897 (29 March 1834), 223–24; Mirror of Literature, 664 (31 May 1834), 365–68; New Sporting Magazine, 7.40 (August 1834), 273–78; Parterre of Fiction, Poetry, History, Literature, and the Fine Arts, 1 (1834), 359. 36. Paul Fechter, ‘Pückler als Schriftsteller’, in Fürst Hermann Pückler-Muskau, ed. by Paul Ortwin Rave (Breslau: Korn, 1935), pp. 25–34 (pp. 31 and 32). 37. Pückler-Muskau, Briefwechsel und Tagebücher, iii, 234 (letter of 19 June 1834). 38. Ibid., iii, 238 (letter of 5 July 1834). The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals credits Austin as the author of the Foreign Quarterly Review article and the online ‘Athenaeum Index of Reviews and Reviewers: 1830–1870’ as the author of the Athenaeum article. The latter attribution is made

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using the bound copies of the periodical, now held in the library of City University London, on which the editor has marked the names of the anonymous contributors. 39. On this romance see Lotte Hamburger and Joseph Hamburger, Contemplating Adultery: The Secret Life of a Victorian Woman (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1991). 40. Pückler-Muskau, Briefwechsel und Tagebücher, viii, 315 (letter of 29 December 1834). 41. Ibid., iii, 312 (letter of 10 December 1835). 42. Pückler-Muskau, Südöstlicher Bildersaal, i, 416–17. 43. Ibid., i, 418. Pückler is mocked for this apparent blunder in the Monthly Review (p. 423). 44. According to the Literarische Zeitung, 25 February 1835 [no. 9 for 1835], col. 176. 45. Athenaeum, 377 (17 January 1835), 41–43 and 379 (31 January 1835), 84–86. 46. This cannot be confirmed as the 1835 volume of the marked file of the Athenaeum lacks the annotations present for other years and is therefore not covered by the ‘Athenaeum Index of Reviews and Reviewers: 1830–1870’ (see n. 38). I thank Derek MacKenzie of the library of City University London for his help in checking the file. 47. Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, Semilasso in Afrika: Eine Reise durch Nordafrika im Jahr 1835, ed. by Michael Uszinski (Berlin: Verlag der Pioniere, 2013), p. 544. 48. Pückler-Muskau, Briefwechsel und Tagebücher, viii, 315 (letter of 29 December 1834). Also in 1834, Harper & Brothers published a one-volume edition in the United States; this was not reissued. 49. Morning Post, 19 March 1835; Satirist, 24 May 1835 [p. 161 in 1835 volume]. 50. Standard, 19 May 1836.

C h ap t e r 5

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Schiller’s ‘Glocke’ — Mangan’s Bell: Mediating German Culture in Ireland, 1835–1846 Andrew Cusack, University of St Andrews The following essay is intended as a study of a particular case of cultural mediation between Germany and the British Isles in the nineteenth century. It focuses on the part played by James Clarence Mangan (1803–49), a remarkably prolific translator and interpreter, in bringing German literature to the attention of Irish readers during his time as a contributor to the Dublin University Magazine (henceforth: DUM). Together with the Edinburgh-based Blackwood’s Magazine and its counterpart in London, Fraser’s Magazine, the DUM was the foremost conduit for German literature into the British Isles in the Victorian era, and it was also exported to the United States of America. The concern of this chapter is not, however, with the international reception of the magazine, but with the resonances of Mangan’s work within his immediate environment, the city of Dublin in the two decades prior to the Great Famine of 1845–49. This concern informs our task: that of evoking Mangan as a translator and Dublin as a ‘city in translation’, a site where translators were engaged in appropriating exogenous ideas and materials and in disclosing the Gaelic cultural substratum.1 In order to show how Mangan participated in these processes of appropriation, some restriction of the view will be essential. The study will therefore concentrate on Mangan’s translations of Schiller in his Anthologia Germanica, serialized in the DUM in twenty-two instalments from 1835 to 1846. More specifically, I shall discuss Mangan’s translation of Schiller’s ‘Das Lied von der Glocke’ (1799), attending to the use of the anthologist’s tools of selection, annotation, commentary, and juxtaposition to inf luence reader reception of the translated material. My decision to concentrate on Schiller to the exclusion of the many other authors translated by Mangan is justified by Schiller’s status as the representative poet of Germany in the United Kingdom in the mid-nineteenth century.2 In order to understand the part played by the DUM in mediating German literature to readers in the British Isles, we need to know what place that publication held in the cultural and political life of the Irish nineteenth century. Such clarification requires knowledge of the origins of the magazine, and the goals of its editors.3

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The DUM was established by a group of six Trinity College men, including four undergraduates, the first monthly issue appearing in January 1833. One of the undergraduates, Isaac Butt, subsequently a barrister, and much later ‘the Father of Home Rule’, would edit the magazine in the period of its most intense commerce with German letters. The immediate impetus for founding the magazine came from the establishment of the Reform Parliament in Westminster in that year, a development that the conservative Anglicans then governing Ireland regarded with alarm. The extension of the franchise, together with the Catholic Emancipation achieved in 1829, were perceived as significant threats by this elite, the intellectual vanguard of Anglo-Irish society. Out of the galvanizing effect of such anxieties on a coterie of literary men was born the DUM. Until 1877, when it ceased publication, the magazine remained true to its anti-reform, Tory credentials, pouring scorn on opponents of the 1800 Act of Union that abolished Ireland’s parliament; the populist leader Daniel O’Connell and the poet Thomas Moore were singled out for particular opprobrium. But despite the anti-Catholic invective of its editorials, the DUM was a great stimulator of interest in Irish history and literature, gathering a considerable body of Irish poetry in translation. So great were its merits in this area that it may justly be considered to have paved the way for the Celtic literary revival in the late nineteenth century. The magazine’s original cover motifs of a round tower, a harp, and a tomb signalled the editors’ interests in Irish history, poetry, and biography. This cover was soon replaced, however, by a portrait of Elizabeth I, a less ambiguous icon for an organ of conservative and unionist opinion. It is to some extent useful to view the Dublin literary scene of the mid-nineteenth century as divided ideologically into two camps, unionist and nationalist. These two camps contended for control over a large body of material being made available by translations from the Irish and from German. It would be wrong, however, to claim that membership in one of two political camps was the defining feature of relations among the Dublin litterati. Nor were relations between identifiably unionist and nationalist writers exclusively characterized by animosity. Members of both camps were on familiar, even cordial, terms — and there was some exchange of personnel. One temporary defector from the unionist to the nationalist camp was Samuel Ferguson. The Belfast-born scholar of Irish history, legend, and poetry used the pages of the DUM in 1834 to criticize James Hardiman’s Irish Minstrelsy for its Catholic and Jacobite appropriation of Irish poetic heritage.4 In the third year of the Great Famine, 1847, however, Ferguson declared unexpectedly for the nationalist side. He did so by publishing a lament in the pages of the DUM for the ‘lost leader’ of the Young Ireland movement, Thomas Davis, who had died in September 1845. Ferguson soon afterwards renounced nationalist politics at the insistence of his fiancée, Mary Catherine Guinness, whom he married in 1848. The prevalence of an ‘Ireland-first’ attitude at a magazine editorially committed to the Union of Great Britain and Ireland and to the established minority Church of Ireland may seem surprising. It stemmed from the conviction that the best way of securing the Union was by putting Ireland on an equal footing with Britain. This could only be achieved by a combination of cultural and economic rehabilitation that would restore a country demoralized by its relegation to subaltern status by the

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Act of Union. The Protestant Ascendancy then populating Trinity believed that if they could lead such change, their position as an elite could be preserved, even in the face of growing Catholic populism. While the progressive moment in this conservatism was ref lected in calls for economic development, the emphasis on the cultural distinctiveness of Ireland as a partner in the British Empire necessitated the rediscovery and propagation of a distinctly Irish literature and culture, which in turn required antiquarian studies. Thus, contributions on educational reform and the railways appeared alongside the didactic series ‘By-Ways of Irish History’ by the Anglican cleric (and former Catholic) Samuel O’Sullivan, which opened with the programmatic statement that ‘to render the present intelligible, the past must be consulted’.5 From its foundation, the DUM was modelled on Blackwood’s in Edinburgh and Fraser’s in London, literary magazines whose Tory politics did not prevent them from leading a revival of British interest in German literature from 1820 onward.6 That revival affected Ireland, but in ways that differed from the reception of German literature in Britain. The bookish founders of the DUM were attracted by the special prominence that literature appeared to enjoy in the national life of Germany. The idea, expressed in a lecture on the German educational system, that Germany was ‘incontestably the most literary nation in existence’7 chimed with hopes that literature could play a significant role in the intellectual regeneration of Ireland. The nationalists of the Young Ireland movement were slower to realize the ideological potential of German literature than the unionists of Trinity College. By 1840, however, they had begun to do so. In that year Thomas Davis gave an address to the Historical Society at Trinity that was peppered with references to Herder. Davis’s most resonant phrase, ‘think wrongly if you will, but think for yourselves’, was borrowed from Lessing.8 Two years later Davis helped establish The Nation, the weekly newspaper of the Young Ireland movement, whose name indicated filiations with La Giovine Italia and Junges Deutschland. In its second issue, The Nation set about overcoming Irish ignorance of modern European literature, remarking that ‘some of the greatest works that have ever seen the light have, within the last few years, been published in Germany and France.’9 Contributors to The Nation were no less self-consciously engaged in the appropriation of German materials and the emulation of German models than were the unionists of the DUM. In particular, nationalists of the calibre of Thomas Davis and John Mitchel were keenly aware of the part that the consolidation of German letters had played in promoting a shared sense of Germany as Kulturnation with aspirations to national statehood. John Mitchel wrote in a review of Mangan’s Anthologia Germanica in The Nation: ‘History, metaphysics, aesthetics, criticism, prose fiction, dramatic, didactic and lyric poetry, in all Germany has in one century succeeded. What cheering to all humanity — but especially to an infant nation — shines from this fact!’.10 Mitchel’s fairly extensive knowledge of German literature is attested by the frequent references to German authors in his Jail Journal (1854). Mitchel also provides detailed comments on the merits of Mangan’s translations from the German in his 1859 edition of Mangan’s poems. For Denis Florence MacCarthy, who, together with ‘Speranza’ — Jane Francesca Elgee, later Lady Wilde — was the

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principal translator from the German for the Nation, the appropriation of exogenous materials was part of the task of building an Irish national literature. MacCarthy is quoted here by Duffy: In Ireland literary men must be content with a limited celebrity and moderate reward, that they might endeavour to do for their country what Scott had done for Scotland, and what Schiller and Goethe had done for Germany. Why should not the Barrow and the Bann be as famous as the Clyde? Why should not the majestic Shannon, or the wild Blackwater, which rivals the Rhine in beauty, rival it also in fame? The work had begun and must be continued, till the beautiful face of Ireland, like the face of Undine, was illuminated with the soul of poetry.11

In Ireland, as in Belgium, another small, young European nation, translators and other cultural mediators took the lead in striving to establish a canon of national literature. Nele Bemong uses Itamar Even-Zohar’s polysystems theory to illustrate the techniques employed by the Belgians to construct a national literature after 1830.12 Polysystems theory provides a useful vocabulary for discussing cultural transfer, one that is adequate to the heterogeneity of literatures, the dynamic relations among their components, and their interactions with adjacent systems. For our purposes it is sufficient to note that Even-Zohar defines the socio-semiotic system of literature as a polysystem, that is, a system made up of systems. Thus, the polysystem of literature is made up of canonized and non-canonized systems of prose, poetry, and other genres representing different yet interdependent strata of the polysystem. Canonized systems occupy a central position while non-canonized systems are peripheral. Movement is possible within the system of a genre: peripheral properties can penetrate the centre of a genre when the centre has lost its capacity to perform certain functions. Equally, inter-systemic movement is possible within the polysystem, as when a genre moves in from the periphery to complement or displace others at the centre. As we shall see, it is this latter kind of movement that accompanied the work of cultural mediators in the construction of the national literature of Ireland. In nineteenth-century Europe, in contrast to other parts of the world, possessing a literature was felt to be an indispensable part of power, usually in combination with a codified national language. When Belgium attained independence in 1830, the creation of a national literature was a priority for the young nation’s authors, yet there were gaps in the repertoire of the Belgian literary polysystem. In its first decades Belgian literature was a weak polysystem: one that could not function adequately by drawing on its own inventory.13 Such a system will readily borrow items that it lacks from neighbouring polysystems in order to increase the size and diversity of its own stock of genres, or ‘systems’. Bemong shows that this is precisely what happened in the case of Belgium, and that the historical novel, in various forms, was the first generic system to be borrowed from the neighbouring polysystems of France, Germany, Britain, and the Netherlands. In the first half of the nineteenth century the weak polysystem of Irish literature also had the option of borrowing from neighbouring source polysystems to build its canonized systems. Borrowing from the adjacent polysystem of Britain was largely

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tacit, or unref lected, probably because of the relative ease with which many Irish authors moved between Dublin and London. Unlike Britain, however, Germany was sharply profiled as an exogenous polysystem from which materials might usefully be appropriated. The relatively sharp profile of Germany as opposed to France is remarkable. We cannot account here for why Germany should have been so overtly favoured over France as a source of borrowing, except to suggest that cultural mediators in both the nationalist and unionist camps appear to have regarded Germany as the more attractive model, if evidently for subtly different ideological reasons. John Mitchel’s remarks, quoted above, suggest that the attraction had to do with the model of a national literature that had succeeded in distinguishing itself from the more prestigious letters of a powerful neighbour, France, by unearthing and reworking indigenous materials. This latter option — plugging gaps in the literary polysystem by using the home inventory to produce what is lacking — is the second of the two means of strengthening a weak polysystem outlined by Even-Zohar. The Irish literary polysystem was bilingual, embracing a canonized English-language centre, and a non-canonized Irish-language periphery. Translations from the German and other languages also formed a non-canonized peripheral system. The work of constructing a national literature involved transporting selected material from the periphery and codifying it in anthologies like Hardiman’s Irish Minstrelsy (1831), Thomas Davis’s Ballad Poetry of Ireland (1845), and Denis Florence MacCarthy’s Book of Irish Ballads (1846). English was both the dominant language of codification and the language of the canonized system of Irish literature, or of ‘polite letters’ as it was then called. Irish-language material was peripheral also in the sense that it was largely uncodified, with the result that it formed a substratum of the literary polysystem then under construction. Obstacles to the publication of Irish-language material and the rise of literacy in English — reinforced by the establishment of an exclusively English-language national school system in 1831 — meant that poems, biographies, histories, and other materials in Irish continued to circulate largely in the form of manuscript copies.14 Dublin was the privileged site for these activities of translation, codification, and interpretation. The situation in pre-1850s Dublin is very nearly captured by Sherry Simon’s term ‘dual city’, a city whose special character ‘lies in the existence of two historically rooted language communities who feel a sense of entitlement to the same territory’, with the difference that in Dublin’s case each language was not ‘supported by institutions of equal authority — universities, writers’ associations, publishing houses, governmental recognition’.15 Moreover, in Dublin the presence of Gaelic was spectral, shadowing the Hiberno-English of the city’s inhabitants. Beyond the historic territory of the English Pale, however, Irish Gaelic was still the vernacular of about half of the island’s population, and here the cultural goods of Gaelic Ireland, ballads, proverbs, idioms, and other oral elements, continued to circulate, though almost completely deprived of the technologies of codification. Although many Irish-speakers resided in Dublin, the linguistic reality of the city was not bilingual; but it was certainly ‘translational’ in the sense that translation was being employed in the recuperation and appropriation of cultural goods to

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the ends of national identity formation. Indeed, the Irish national identity being thereby constructed was of its essence translational, since it posited Irishness not in terms of dwelling but of movement back and forth between two cultural spheres, the English and the Gaelic. Moreover, for the majority of readers, access to the Gaelic part of the identity equation would increasingly be mediated by English as the century progressed. This was true even for cultural go-betweens like Mangan and Ferguson: neither had sufficient knowledge of Irish to access the Gaelic cultural substratum directly, and both relied on the work of translators like John O’Donovan and James Hardiman who had the requisite competence in the source language. Mediation in English put translations from indigenous and exogenous sources on the same footing, with the result that the non-canonized system of translations became a zone of cultural syncretization. Such a peripheral zone within which the combination of lexical items, motifs, and tropes from English, Gaelic, and Germanlanguage sources could take place is a hypothesis that may be introduced here, but not further developed or verified. As we shall see, the stimulus given to the creation of an Irish national literature in English by the critical reception of James Hardiman’s Irish Minstrelsy provides ample evidence that ‘the canonized system got its popularity, f lexibility and appeal by a constant and positive struggle with the non-canonized one’.16 Hardiman’s anthology became part of the canonized system, but not before it was subjected to astringent criticism in four review articles written by Samuel Ferguson and published in the DUM from April to November 1834. Ferguson deprecated the quality of the English translations collected by Hardiman and regretted what he regarded as a false classicizing tendency that tended to smooth over the characteristic and idiomatic. As a corrective to these perceived deficiencies Ferguson included his own poetic versions of twenty of the Minstrelsy poems in an appendix to the fourth review article. These poetic versions, together with Ferguson’s ‘The Fairy Thorn’, subtitled ‘An Ulster Ballad’, which had appeared in the DUM in March 1834, were to suggest a style of Irish poetry in English that was polyglot in its mixing of Ulster Scots, Hiberno-English, and Anglo-Saxon elements. The theme, the abduction of a farm girl by fairies, though well-established in Irish poetry, had equivalents in Goethe’s ‘Erlkönig’, and in Robert Browning’s ‘Pied Piper’. Ferguson opposed the movement of Hardiman’s Minstrelsy from the peripheral zone of translation into the canonized centre in vain, but the unforeseen consequence of his opposition was to inaugurate what Thomas Kinsella has called the ‘gapped, discontinuous, polyglot tradition’ of modern Irish poetry.17 Poets from Mangan to Hyde working within that newly established tradition would rapidly expand the canonized system of Irish poetry in English. W. B. Yeats would later emphatically align his own work with the first generation of translator-poets, the developers of this distinctive translational poetic idiom, when he asked that he ‘be counted one | With Davis, Mangan, Ferguson’.18 Mangan was the most prolific of the Germanizing contributors to the DUM, though the Victorian practice of appending abbreviated or pseudonymous signatures to periodical contributions meant that his identity was known only to a few. Mangan is principally remembered in this context for his Anthologia Germanica, a

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series of critical translations which appeared in the DUM in twenty-two instalments from 1835 to 1846, and was published as a single volume in 1845. Schiller is the bestrepresented poet, but many others are present: from Bürger, Hölty, and Matthisson to Goethe, Kerner, Heine, and Uhland, Mangan translated over 500 poems from the German. Writing in the 1980s, Patrick O’Neill could say of the Anthologia Germanica that ‘Mangan’s anthology is still, after nearly a century and a half, the most representative selection of German verse ever published in Ireland.’19 Neither of the two book editions of the Anthologia Germanica (1845, 1885) has preserved the critical commentary that framed the translations in the DUM. Indeed, Mangan’s anthology calls out for a critical edition that would restore it in its original form to interested readers. Such an edition would serve readers unable to access the original volumes of the periodical and unwilling to avail of the haphazard digitization available on the internet. If we are properly to understand the impact of Mangan’s translation of ‘Das Lied von der Glocke’ in its Irish environment we need to leave aside the German-language reception history of Schiller’s ‘berühmt-berüchtigt’ poem.20 The conservative and patriarchal attitudes in Schiller’s poem, its sententiousness, and its retrograde gender politics confine its effective reception to the long nineteenth century. The criticisms made of the poem’s stylistic defects by Hans-Magnus Enzensberger and Emil Staiger need not detain us here.21 Instead our interest is in Mangan’s manner of appropriating Schiller’s poem, and in the functions fulfilled by his translation. It is true, the ‘philistinism’ of Schiller’s ‘Glocke’ was already derided by August Wilhelm Schlegel and other Romantics, but their scorn in no way ref lected the views of the mass of ordinary burghers who made the work their own. This popularity, born of its effective embodiment of values that are undeniably artisanal and kleinbürgerlich, was a key factor in motivating Mangan’s turn to the poem. He was not the only Irish poet to take inspiration from this source. Samuel Ferguson had already made his literary debut with ‘The Forging of the Anchor’, published in Blackwood’s in 1832, and Denis Florence MacCarthy’s ‘The Bell-Founder’ would appear in 1857, wearing epigraphs both from Schiller’s original, ‘Arbeit ist des Bürgers Zierde’, and from Mangan’s translation, ‘Toil is polished man’s vocation’.22 Let us now turn to consider Mangan’s translation, and the translator’s use of the techniques of selection, juxtaposition, commentary, and annotation to create a particular receptional constellation. The second instalment of Mangan’s Anthologia Germanica, published in the DUM in February 1835, consists of the following: a preface; the poem, ‘The Lay of the Bell’; explanatory footnotes (including one comparing Schiller’s versification to the translator’s); an editor’s note; a second preface on Schiller’s ballads; a concluding translation of the ballad ‘Der Gang nach dem Eisenhammer’. Taken together these elements form the proximal context for ‘The Lay of the Bell’. But there is a distal context as well: this is made up of the other contributions in each monthly issue of the magazine, and of contributions in earlier and subsequent issues. The first instalment of Mangan’s anthology, published in January 1835, opens with an essay on the belated triumph of German letters in the face of French incredulity and superciliousness. In the concluding commentary Schiller’s ‘Lied

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von der Glocke’ is characterized as a ‘poem without a parallel in the anthology of any country’ (DUM, 5, 57). The instalment closes with a translation from Goethe’s ‘Epilog zu Schillers Glocke’, with verses selected to emphasize Schiller’s transcendence of personal suffering, his ‘ardent faith’ and idealism. The preface to the second instalment takes up the point about the unparalleled nature of Schiller’s ‘Glocke’, developing it into a Herderian assertion of the particularity of genius and its bondedness to national context: ‘It is an isolated production, because it is a purely local production. That is, it could only have been produced by a German. This conclusion will at once be acceded to when the nature of the poem is understood’ (DUM, 5, 140). Mangan goes on to provide further context to guide the reader’s reception of the poem: In the German towns the founding of a bell is, be it recollected, an event that excites considerable interest. The founder publicly notifies his intention several days beforehand; he advertises it in the newspapers, specifies time and place, and invites the people to come and witness the process. A little festival is, as I have mentioned, also solemnized on the occasion, and a name is formally bestowed on the bell, by which name it is ever afterwards recognised. (DUM, 5, 141)

The message to the poets among Mangan’s readers is clear enough: a viable national literature must serve to embody the customs, institutions, and manners of the nation in all their distinctiveness. How does Mangan inf luence the reader’s perception of German letters by selection? Selection manifests itself in his decision to open his anthology with translations of Schiller, beginning with the lyrical poems and moving on to narrative poems. The choice of author carries its own significance: Schiller lacks the ‘sovereign control’ and ‘grace’ of Goethe; he lacks the latter’s ‘playful vein, the versatility, the Protean, Voltairean faculty of metamorphosis and selfmultiplication’, and yet ‘his great individuality is, by reason of this very deficiency, only the more conspicuously developed’ — as a poet Schiller ‘is fairly the compeer of the other’ (DUM, 5, 42). Schiller’s strenuousness, and what today we might call his conf lictedness, make him in Mangan’s eyes a fitter role model for Irish poets than Goethe in his Olympian calm. Mangan is equally judicious in his evaluation of Schiller the balladeer. While acknowledging the view among German critics that Schiller ‘did not eminently excel in the Ballad’ he affirms that ‘taken as narrative-pieces Schiller’s Ballads are invested with a grace, a pathos, and occasionally a majesty rarely equalled in the most finished efforts of other writers’ (DUM, 5, 151). Mangan’s interest in the ballad form anticipates and accompanies the movement of this generic system into the centre of the Irish literary polysystem. His critical translations of German ballads would probably have provided translators and anthologists of narrative poems in Irish with valuable criteria of comparison and with a point of reference that was external to English literature. Schiller’s ‘Lied von der Glocke’ is perhaps unique among the works of Weimar Classicism in its evocation of the milieu of artisanal production. Its eight technically detailed verses depicting the founding of a bell are interspersed with

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verses containing the master craftsman’s observations on the stages of human life. The whole is an allegory of culture in its broad and etymological sense. Mangan observes that ‘the cardinal beauty of the poem consists in its episodes’, noting that ‘the junction of the metals suggests one episode, the possibility of fusion another, the danger of explosion a third’ (DUM, 5, 141). In ‘The Lay of the Bell’ Mangan preserves the forward-driving trochaic metre of the eight verses dealing with the founding of the bell. — Firmly walled within the soil    Stands the firebaked mould of clay, Courage comrades! now for toil,    For we cast The Bell to-day.    Sweat must trickle now,   Down the burning brow, If the work may boast of beauty, Still ‘tis Heaven must bless our duty. (vv. 1–8)

The exhortations of the master are a call to the work of culture, and by implication to the labour of founding a national literature. Mangan echoes the voice of the master in a footnote devoted to the problem of rendering the frequent double rhymes of the German original. Mangan often uses annotations in parody of scholarly conventions, but in this case the footnote is meant to underline the translator’s diligence and bear witness to the values of good workmanship. The dynamism and vigour of the eight bell-founding verses alternate with the calmer iambic rhythm of the ref lective verses: Fire works for good with noble force So long as Man controls its course; And all he rears of strong or slight. Is debtor to this heavenly might. But dreadful is this heavenly might When bursting forth in dead of night, Unloosed and raging, wide and wild It ranges, Nature’s chainless child. (vv. 158–65)

Where these ref lective passages are concerned the reception has been kinder to Mangan than to Schiller. Unlike the ‘gute Reden’ of the original, the ‘cheerful conversation’ (v. 11) of Mangan’s master never congealed into cliché. Mangan’s phrases retained a freshness that made them readable long after ‘wohltätig ist des Feuers Kraft’ had become a tired staple of autograph albums. By juxtaposing individual works and framing them with commentary Mangan engineers receptional constellations. The juxtaposition of ‘The Lay of the Bell’ in the second instalment of the Anthologia with the ballad ‘The Message to the Iron Foundry’ (‘Der Gang nach dem Eisenhammer’, 1797) blocks or at least inhibits a particular kind of appropriative reading, one that would enlist Schiller as an icon of the Anglican Enlightenment in Ireland. The ‘Iron Foundry’ is connected to ‘The Lay of the Bell’ by the motifs of the forge and of fire, and by the theme of labour, but the elevated diction and Enlightenment sublimity of the latter poem are replaced by a self-consciously medieval language and by a darker, pathos-laden

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mood. Inclusion of the poem is justified by its claimed status as ‘one of the most extensively popular of the author’s minor poems’ (DUM, 5, 151), and by Mangan’s encounter with the ballad in his youth in a translation by ‘the learned Spanish Jesuit, Rodriguez’. The ‘Iron Foundry’ tells the tale of the ‘God-revering youth’ (v. 1), ‘gentle Fridolin’ (v. 2), the protégé and devoted servant of the Countess von Savern. Fridolin’s position as the favourite of the countess’s menials arouses the envy of the huntsman, Robert, who skilfully plants the seeds of doubt in his master’s mind. Convinced of his wife’s infidelity, the enraged count engages two ruffians at the iron foundry to set a murderous trap for Fridolin. The dark behest the monsters twain Enjoyed with bloody zest, For anvil-dead had longtime lain The heart in either’s breast, And fiercelier now they blow the fire, Till palier shoots its f lame higher and higher, And glare thereon with gloating eyes, Impatient for the sacrifice. (vv. 105–12)

Instead of proceeding immediately on the false and deadly errand given him by Robert in his master’s name, the ‘duteous boy’ (v. 7) calls on his lady, who asks him to attend ‘the holy Mass’ (v. 133) in her stead. Fridolin complies and, taking the place of the absent sexton, assists the priest at the ceremony. In the meantime, of course, Robert has been consigned to the furnace f lames, and the unsuspecting Fridolin returns to his master with the news that his will has been done. ‘And, Robert?’ asked the Count — and strange Sensations iced his blood — ‘Didst thou not meet him on thy range? I sent him to the wood.’ ‘My Lord, in wood or mead around No trace of Robert have I found.’ ‘Then,’ cried the Count with reverent fear, ‘God has Himself passed judgement here!’ (vv. 225–32)

In this case the poem is intended to resonate with the distal context of the DUM, and especially with its anti-Catholic editorializing. It chimes also with another frequently occurring element of the distal context: a translational genre regularly served up to the magazine’s eager readers — the ostensibly ‘German’ Gothic tale. The first instalment of the Anthologia Germanica is preceded by ‘Walter Marten; or, the Three Cups of Weimar’ — a production that Mangan would have classed as an example of ‘the style Germanesque’, as opposed to ‘the style German’ of his own poetical translations.23 Tales of this kind comprised an informal, subcultural system sui generis, existing in tension with the canonized system of Irish prose and periodically reinvigorating it with its wayward energies. James Clarence Mangan is a key figure to understanding mid-nineteenthcentury Dublin as a city in translation, to recall Sherry Simon’s term, and the role of translation in developing and contesting national identity in the same period. As an employee of the Ordnance Survey from 1838 to 1841 Mangan was officially

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a servant of the government’s endeavours to catalogue and standardize the placenames of Ireland. That great project of toponomastic domestication brought Mangan into contact with John O’Donovan, John O’Daly, and other translators from the Irish, stimulating his own versions of their work. At the same time Mangan’s work as a translator from the German led him to treat translation not as a technique of assimilation, but as a means of complicating the politics of identity, personal and political. It was in this respect that Mangan was to prove such a liberating inf luence for Yeats and Joyce. Notes to Chapter 5 1. The term ‘city in translation’ is taken from Sherry Simon, Cities in Translation: Intersections of Language and Memory (London: Routledge, 2012). 2. ‘As to which German poet was most popular in the pages of the Dublin University Magazine, the answer is clearly Schiller, whose popularity in Britain was also climbing toward a peak in the mid-forties.’ Patrick O’Neill, ‘The Reception of German Literature in Ireland 1750–1850: Part 2’, Studia Hibernica, 17/18 (1977/78), 91–106 (pp. 93–94). 3. The periodical introduction in The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals provides a useful overview of the history of the Dublin University Magazine: [accessed 30 August 2014]. See also: Wayne E. Hall, Dialogues in the Margin: A Study of the Dublin University Magazine (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 2000). 4. Irish Minstrelsy, or Bardic Remains of Ireland: with English Poetical Translations, ed. by James Hardiman, 2 vols (London: Robins, 1831). 5. Dublin University Magazine, 10 (1837), 205–16 (p. 207). Subsequent references to the Dublin University Magazine, by volume and page number, appear in parenthesis in the main body of the text, marked as DUM. 6. John Anster’s 1820 translation of Goethe’s Faust (1808) in Blackwood’s was a significant spur to the upturn in interest in German literature in Britain. Anster, a Dublin lawyer, was one of the founders of the DUM in 1833. 7. [ John Francis Waller], ‘Herr Zander’s Lectures on German Literature’, Dublin University Magazine, 1 (1833), 335–37 (p. 335). This is an account of seven public lectures on German literature recently given in Dublin by ‘Herr Zander of Berlin’. 8. Mary M. Colum, From These Roots: The Ideas that have made Modern Literature (London: Cape, 1938), p. 241. 9. The Nation, 22 October 1842. Quoted from Patrick O’Neill, Ireland and Germany: A Study in Literary Relations (New York, Berne, and Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 1985), p. 100. 10. The Nation, 9 August 1845. Quoted from O’Neill, ‘The Reception of German Literature’, pp. 96–97. 11. Charles Gavan Duffy, Four Years of Irish History, 1845–1849 (London and New York: Cassell, Petter, Galpin [1883]), p. 73. 12. Nele Bemong, ‘Internal Chronotopic Genre Structures: The Nineteenth-Century Historical Novel in the Context of the Belgian Literary Polysystem’, in Bakhtin’s Theory of the Literary Chronotope: Reflections — Applications — Perspectives, ed. by Nele Bemong and others (Ghent: Academia, 2010), pp. 159–78. 13. Itamar Even-Zohar, Papers in Historical Poetics, Papers on Poetics and Semiotics, 8 (Tel Aviv: The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics, 1978), p. 55. 14. Neil Buttimer, ‘Literature in Irish, 1690–1800: From the Williamite Wars to the Act of Union’, in The Cambridge History of Irish Literature, ed. by Margaret Kelleher and Philip O’Leary, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), i, 320–71 (p. 320). 15. Simon, Cities in Translation, p. 3. 16. Even-Zohar, p. 14. 17. Thomas Kinsella, ‘The Irish Writer’, in W. B. Yeats and Thomas Kinsella, The Spirit of the

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Nation (Dublin: Duffy, 1845; repr. Poole: Woodstock, 1998), pp. 58, 66 [quoted in Matthew Campbell, ‘Poetry in English, 1830–1890: From Catholic Emancipation to the Fall of Parnell’, in The Cambridge History of Irish Literature, ed. by Margaret Kelleher and Philip O’Leary, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), i: 500–43 (p. 500)]. 18. W. B. Yeats, ‘To Ireland in the Coming Times’, in Yeats’s Poems, ed. by A. Norman Jeffares, 3rd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1996), p. 85. 19. O’Neill, Ireland and Germany, p. 97. O’Neill has calculated that the DUM contained 137 references to German literature in the period 1833 to 1850, an average of eight references per twelve monthly issues, or an average of sixty-five pages per year. Of these an average thirtyone pages a year was contributed by Mangan, whose total contribution amounted to at least 558 of the 1,179 pages devoted to German literature in this period. (Patrick O’Neill, ‘German Literature and the Dublin University Magazine, 1833–50: A Checklist and Commentary’, Long Room, 14–15 (Autumn 1976–Spring /Summer 1977), 20–31 (pp. 20–21)). 20. Peter-André Alt, Schiller: Leben — Werk — Zeit, 2 vols (Munich: Beck, 2005), i, 11. 21. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, ‘Festgemauert aber entbehrlich: Warum ich Schillers berühmte Balladen wegließ’, Die Zeit, 28 October 1966, p. 26; Emil Staiger, Friedrich Schiller (Zurich: Atlantis, 1967), pp. 206–09. 22. Denis Florence MacCarthy, The Bell-Founder, and Other Poems (London: Bogue, 1857), p. 1. John Anster, the translator of Faust mentioned above, noted the ‘peculiar interest’ that ‘Das Lied von der Glocke’ held for Irish readers, citing two poems inspired by it: ‘Mr Ferguson’s “Forging of the Anchor” and Mr Starkey’s “Death of the Oak” ’ ( John Anster, ‘German Literature at the Close of the Last Century and the Commencement of the Present’, in The Afternoon Lectures on Literature and Art, ed. by anon. (London: Bell & Daldy, 1864), pp. 151–95 (p. 185)). 23. The Collected Works of James Clarence Mangan, ed. by Jacques Chuto, ed. by Augustine Martin and others, 5 vols (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1996–2002). This edition contains Mangan’s collected prose in two volumes: Prose 1, 1832–39; Prose 2, 1840–82. The quotation is taken from Prose 1, p. 105.

C h ap t e r 6

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Searching for the Ultimate German Austen: Recent Translations of Pride and Prejudice Norbert Bachleitner, University of Vienna The publishing trade regularly comes up with retranslations of literary classics, and sometimes this happens in such quick succession that the editions compete with each other. German publishing houses and imprints like Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, Diogenes, S. Fischer, Hanser, Insel, Manesse, Piper, Reclam, Winkler, and some others are constantly providing new versions of canonical literary prose. In spite of Cassandra calls proclaiming the end of the Gutenberg galaxy and the competition of free downloads, classics still seem to sell, presumably mainly in didactic contexts and as a side effect of screen adaptations. According to Wolfgang Pöckl, the reasons for the publication of new translations of classics include the view of translators and/or their publishers that the existing versions are outdated; the conventional conviction of the educated classes (‘Bildungsbürgertum’) that works of world literature should always be available for the (young) reading public; the belief that literary jubilees need to be celebrated with new translations; moreover, in rare cases, quarrels about copyright and the right of translation; finally, by pure coincidence after somebody successfully proposes a certain translation to a publisher.1 In the case of Jane Austen’s works the translation curve shows an exponential increase in the last two decades. As concerns Pride and Prejudice, after Louise Marezoll’s first translation, which appeared in 1830, German readers had to wait for more than a century for a new version. In 1939 Karin von Schab’s translation entitled Elisabeth und Darcy came out (Berlin: Frundsberg). There is a certain mystery about this translator’s name. Under the name Schab she authored and translated a significant number of popular books, among them the long-time bestseller Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier in 1940. In 2001, the Auf bau-Verlag of Berlin published a new edition of Schab’s translation of Pride and Prejudice, but the name of the translator was now ‘von Schwab’. Either the translator had changed her name in the meantime or the publishers were simply careless. Under the name ‘Schwab’ other publishers brought out further reprints of this translation, among them the Anaconda-Verlag in Cologne. In 2011 Anaconda published a new edition of the translation, revised by Isabella Fuchs. Other translations in the period after

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the Second World War include versions by Ilse Krämer (Zurich: Manesse, 1948), Margarete Rauchenberger (Cologne: Schaffrath, 1948, republished by Insel-Verlag in 1985), and Helmut Holscher (Wilhelmshaven: Hera, 1951). Werner Beyer’s version came out in 1965 in the GDR (Leipzig: List) and was republished in West Germany by the S. Fischer Verlag in 1980. A translation hailed by critics for its outstanding quality and also for helpful commentaries and notes was the text delivered by Ursula and Christian Grawe for the Reclam edition (Stuttgart, 1977). Without any doubt, the Grawes — who translated all of Austen’s novels — paved the way for a broad reception of her work in the German-speaking countries, indeed to the extent that the translations may rightly be called the ‘inauguration point of Austen’s West German popularity’.2 Their versions were soon regarded as the standard German Austen translations, although a close inspection of their texts might reveal quite a lot of questionable passages. The most recent translations of Pride and Prejudice were done by Helga Schulz (Munich: dtv, 1997) and Andrea Ott (Zurich: Manesse, 2003). To these we may add the new edition of Karin von Sch(w)abs translation, revised by Isabella Fuchs (Cologne: Anaconda, 2011) and a forthcoming translation by Gabriele Kempf-Allié and Manfred Allié set to appear in October 2014 in S. Fischer Verlag.3 The basis for Austen’s German reception was laid both during and after the war; the four last-mentioned translations which appeared in the space of seventeen years indicate Austen’s final breakthrough to the status of a classic. It is undoubtedly more than coincidence that this breakthrough happened simultaneously with the series of TV and big screen film adaptations that started in the middle of the 1990s.4 The aim of this article is a comparative analysis of the three most recent translations of Pride and Prejudice mentioned above (by Helga Schulz, Andrea Ott, and Karin von Sch(w)ab and Isabella Fuchs5). We cannot pretend to offer an exhaustive analysis of the three translations and we will restrict ourselves to some standard problems of literary translation (such as the culturally specific elements contained in the text) and to samples of dramatic dialogue, which together with the use of free indirect discourse is generally considered as the most important stylistic feature of Austen’s novels. By comparing the rendering of the language of selected characters in the translations we will try to find out if they appear in the same light as in the source text, and if this is not the case how the changes and shifts in the German versions may affect the impact on the reader.6 We start with a paragraph on obvious translation faults. They occur mainly in cases of idiomatic phrases which are sometimes not easy to recognize or to interpret for non-native speakers. For instance, when the news that Wickham will after all marry Lydia spreads in Meryton and surroundings, the Bennets’ neighbourhood is disappointed that the affair seems to have been settled in such an unspectacular way: ‘To be sure it would have been more for the advantage of conversation, had Miss Lydia Bennet come upon the town.’7 Andrea Ott translates the phrase in a quite adequate manner (‘wenn Miss Lydia Bennet in London auf der Straße gelandet [. . .] wäre’).8 Schab and Fuchs are obviously not at ease with this passage and take refuge in a phrase that conveys a completely different idea (‘wenn Miss Lydia Bennet in London verschollen geblieben wäre’).9 The worst procedure in such a case is to

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choose a literal translation as Helga Schulz does (‘wenn Miss Lydia Bennet der Stadt zur Last gefallen [. . .] wäre’).10 The Grawe translation offers the best solution: ‘wenn Miss Lydia Bennet in der Gosse geendet hätte’.11 Another example: during the dinner at Rosings, Miss de Bourgh’s governess Mrs Jenkinson, according to Austen’s narrator, ‘was entirely engaged in listening to what she [i.e. Miss de Bourgh] said, and placing a screen in the proper direction before her eyes’ (162). Most of our translators think that this screen is a rather large structure used to afford privacy to a person or even to separate a part of a room (Schab/Fuchs 363: ‘Paravent’, probably following the Grawes 186; Schulz 193: ‘Wandschirm’)12 which is moved by Mrs Jenkinson to protect sensitive Miss de Bourgh. This interpretation obviously does not make sense, if we consider that the screen is placed before Miss de Bourgh’s eyes and that Mrs Jenkinson would be obliged to leave her seat completely in order to adjust the screen (from behind). Only Andrea Ott seems to have the right idea of the scene when she translates ‘Schutzschirm für ihre Augen’ (258). By the way, the OED explains how we should imagine such a screen: ‘A small hand-held disc or plate of cloth, wood, paper, etc. for shading one’s face from fire’13 to which we only need to add ‘or light’ to have an idea of the object in question. And a last example: Austen’s narrator reports in the middle of Chapter 4 that Mr Bingley was interested in purchasing an estate since he ‘was now provided with a good house and the liberty of a manor’ (15). Schab/Fuchs (35) and Ott (25) translate the word ‘liberty’ correctly as ‘Jagdrecht’; Schulz again renders the phrase word by word, which makes it turn out wrong: ‘da er nun [. . .] die Freiheiten eines Land­ gutes genoß’ (20). Another standard translation problem are words and concepts referring to culturally specific objects, customs, manners, games, telling place-names, etc. Obviously, they are important when it comes to maintaining the ‘Englishness’ of the novel in translation. Schulz inserts a number of footnotes in order to explain culturally specific terms. In Chapter 8 the party of the Bingleys, Mrs Hurst, and Darcy makes fun of Jane’s poverty. Miss Bingley remarks that Jane’s uncle is a lawyer at Meryton; Mrs Hurst adds that the family has another lawyer at Cheapside. Schulz does not translate the place-name but adds a footnote: ‘Cheapside: sehr belebte Straße in London; wahrscheinlich Wortspiel mit cheap/billig’ (45). As a matter of course the passage plays with names as the continuation of the discourse makes more than clear. Further notes are dedicated to card-games (‘loo’, 37 — ‘Lu’ with the explanation ‘ein Kartenspiel’ in the note, 45; ‘quadrille’, ‘cassino’, 166 — ‘Quadrille’, ‘Kasino’ with the note: ‘um 1800 beliebte Kartenspiele’, 197) and to the ‘special license’ (378) for a marriage without banns: Schulz translates this term with ‘Sondergenehmigung’ and adds in a note, ‘in England Genehmigung zur Eheschließung ohne Aufgebot an einen [!] beliebigen Ort und zu einer beliebigen Zeit’ (440). It is interesting that Andrea Ott adds notes at almost the same places (for instance at the mention of ‘Cheapside’, note on 607, and ‘Heiratserlaubnis’, 590, with an explanatory note on 608). Moreover, she adds an important note on the particularities of an ‘entail’ or entailed estate, which as ‘ungeteiltes Erbgut an einen fernen Verwandten fallen würde’ (44, the corresponding note on 607).14 It is

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striking that the annotations are not at all systematic, for other card games remain unexplained (e.g. ‘Vingt-un’ and ‘Commerce’, 23). To know what these games were like may not change a lot, but sometimes the nature of the preferred games may add a feature to the character portraits.15 The cultural particularities include the use of personal pronouns in direct address. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the correct rendering of Mrs Bennet’s ‘You’ when she addresses her ‘Dear Mr Bennet’ or Elizabeth her dear Mr Darcy would have been ‘Sie’. Like many others before her, and in particular the Grawes, Ott maintains this style in her translation, but the two other translations analysed here choose to render ‘You’ with ‘Du’. Obviously, the latter form sounds natural to modern readers whereas ‘Sie’, even if it may be the philologically correct translation, makes the dialogues sound as though they were taken from a historical novel or drama. Schab/Fuchs introduce an interesting switch in Chapter 18 of the third volume (or Chapter 60 in one-volume editions). Probably following the example of the Grawe translation, without any further explanation Elizabeth and Darcy, now engaged, suddenly use ‘Du’ when addressing each other (841). This change is a ref lex of the fact that in the source text Darcy addresses Elizabeth now by her first name. Numerous passages in the novel are open to interpretation. When Mr Bennet and Elizabeth discuss her forthcoming marriage with Darcy the former warns her that she would be ‘neither happy nor respectable’ in an unequal marriage: I know that you could be neither happy nor respectable, unless you truly esteemed your husband; unless you looked up to him as a superior. Your lively talents would place you in the greatest danger in an unequal marriage. You could scarcely escape discredit and misery. (376)

These are strong words indeed! Of course Mr Bennet knows what he is talking about when it comes to an unhappy marriage. But some critics think that the ‘lively talents’ refer to Elizabeth’s sexual appetite that may look for a vent in adultery.16 Actually, ‘greatest danger’, not being ‘respectable’ anymore, ‘discredit’, and ‘misery’ seem to imply much more than just an everyday quarrel in a relationship lacking love and sympathy and its usual judgement in the neighbourhood. It is significant that all translators have difficulties with this passage. Ursula and Christian Grawe think that her ‘lebhafte Intelligenz’ would bring Elizabeth into utmost danger (428). Schab/Fuchs copy the Grawes’ translation: ‘Deine lebhafte Intelligenz könnte dich in einer unausgewogenen Ehe in die größte Gefahr bringen.’ They continue by interpreting ‘discredit’ as a sort of ‘self-hatred’: ‘Du würdest dich beinahe unausweichlich selbst verachten und unglücklich sein’ (835). These phrases sound artificial and their meaning is vague. The same applies to Helga Schulz’s meandering around some undefined troubles of mind and feeling: ‘Dein lebhafter Geist würde dich in einer ungleichen Ehe in größte Gefahr bringen. Du könntest dich kaum vor Mißkredit und Leiden bewahren’ (438). Andrea Ott strikes a similar note: ‘Deine Lebhaftigkeit brächte dich in einer ungleichen Ehe in größte Gefahr. Du könntest der Peinlichkeit und dem Unglück kaum entkommen’ (586). Only Werner Beyer, to look for once back to an older translation, indicates some serious problem leading to immediate social exclusion and ostracism: ‘Dein

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heller Verstand, deine Begabung würde dich in einer ungleichen Ehe in die größte Gefahr bringen. Schande und Elend wären dann unausbleiblich.’17 Austen excels in all sorts of ‘coloured narrative’18 which, opposed to objective narrative, includes not only the contamination of a phrase either by the subjectivity of the narrator or that of the characters but also passages alluding to or imitating other authors. One of Austen’s main intertextual references is Samuel Johnson, especially his use of epigrams and aphorisms. The famous first sentence of Pride and Prejudice, in general interpreted as a specimen of ‘Johnsonian mockery’,19 may serve as an example of this sententious way of expression: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife’ (3). Ott translates: ‘Es ist eine allgemein anerkannte Wahrheit, dass ein Junggeselle im Besitz eines schönen Vermögens nichts dringender braucht als eine Frau’ (5). Schulz sounds very similar: ‘Es ist eine allgemein anerkannte Wahrheit, daß ein alleinstehender Mann, der ein beträchtliches Vermögen besitzt, einer Frau bedarf ’ (5). ‘Junggeselle’ is a somewhat better choice than ‘alleinstehender Mann’ because it has an archaic touch and implies that the man in question is overdue for marriage. Moreover, ‘bedürfen’ is too sober and formal compared to ‘etwas dringend brauchen’ which adds the shot of irony necessary here. On the other hand, ‘bedürfen’ reminds one of books of conduct and therefore of a Johnsonian style. Schab/Fuchs distinguish themselves mainly by the addition of an adverb: ‘Es ist eine allgemein anerkannte Wahrheit, dass ein Junggeselle von ansehnlichem Vermögen zwingend auf der Suche nach einer Ehefrau ist’ (7). ‘Zwingend’ seems to be destined to convey irony, but it sounds much too strained to pass as the rendering of a saying or the communis opinio of the mothers of marriageable daughters. Ott’s sentence is identical with the Grawe translation. This fact reminds us of the common phenomenon of the dependence of new versions on previous translations, something which also plays a role in our text sample. The Grawes’ translation, especially, has left traces in subsequent versions. Not only Ott’s but also Schulz’s text shows remarkable similarities. Compared to the Grawe translation, twenty-nine of the fifty-one sentences in Ott’s first chapter are identical or show only minor lexical or syntactical changes; in Schulz’s translation twenty-eight sentences are closely related to the older translation. Only the Schab/Fuchs text is clearly independent: only thirteen sentences in the first chapter come close to the previous text. By this ‘measuring’ of similarity we do not want to insinuate plagiarism. We rather want to demonstrate that translations are in most cases intertextually connected. Modernization apart, retranslations are often considered as steps towards a ‘perfect’ version in the target language. Even if the goal of an ultimate translation is an illusion, there is no need to change, for innovation’s sake, a phrase from an older version that seems perfectly to convey the meaning and style of the source text. There is a general consensus that the main purpose of Pride and Prejudice is the description of the life, habits, and attitudes of the English gentry around 1800. The members of this class are characterized by their favourite occupation, by the topics they love to talk about, by their dress and lifestyle, by their behaviour in various situations, by the carriages they use and many other things. The most important factor of distinction, though, is their way of speaking. Austen is undoubtedly a

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master of dramatic dialogue and the characterization of protagonists through their speech. Thus, Pride and Prejudice may also be called a novel about language. As the novel amply demonstrates, the gentry is not homogeneous but consists of various ranks segregated from one another and struggling for the highest positions in their stratum by exhibiting differences of taste and behaviour.20 On the lower margin, the middle classes, represented by members of trades and professions, tried to establish themselves in rural society, e.g. by buying estates (Mr Bingley) or by marriage (Mrs Bennet). On the upper margin we find the well-established superiors like Mr Darcy whose income of ten thousand a year ‘puts him among the 400 wealthiest families in the country’.21 We will in the following discussion analyse the translations of the direct speech of the most important characters. Mrs Bennet’s language is characterized by stereotypes and cant. She is unable to hide her thoughts and emotions, which are most often ridiculous. The following enthusiastic outburst is full of words and phrases considered vulgar from the point of view of superior society (‘Good gracious!’, ‘Lord bless me!’, ‘Oh Lord!’, ‘dear me!’, ‘sweet’, ‘charming’).22 The comical effect results from the fact that earlier she had still considered Darcy to be an abominable character. ‘Good gracious! Lord bless me! only think! dear me! Mr Darcy! Who would have thought it! And is it really true? Oh! my sweetest Lizzy! how rich and how great you will be! What pin-money, what jewels, what carriages you will have! Jane’s is nothing to it — nothing at all. I am so pleased — so happy. Such a charming man! — so handsome! so tall! — Oh, my dear Lizzy! pray apologise for my having disliked him so much before. I hope he will overlook it. Dear, dear Lizzy. A house in town! Every thing that is charming! Three daughters married! Ten thousand a year! Oh Lord! What will become of me. I shall go distracted.’ (378)

The Schab/Fuchs translation reads as follows: ‘Gute Güte! Du lieber Himmel! Wer hätte das gedacht! Mein Gott! Mr Darcy! Und du machst keine Witze? Oh, meine liebste Lizzy! Wie reich und vornehm du sein wirst! Welches Taschengeld, welchen Schmuck und welche Kutschen du haben wirst! Jane ist ja nichts dagegen — gar nichts! Ich bin so froh — so glücklich! Und so ein reizender Mann! Und wie gut er aussieht, so hochgewachsen! Oh, meine liebe Lizzy, verzeih mir bitte, dass ich ihn so unsympathisch fand. Hoffentlich wird er darüber hinwegsehen. Liebe, liebe Lizzy! Ein Haus in London! Lauter reizende Dinge! Drei verheiratete Töchter! 10 000 Pfund im Jahr! Gütiger Gott, ich weiß wirklich nicht, wo mir der Kopf steht! Ich werde noch verrückt!’ (837–39)

Schab/Fuchs maintain the breathless rhythm of speech and try to copy the platitudes. ‘Gute Güte’ seems to be a neologism; moreover, no mother in real life would call her daughter ‘liebste Lizzy’, or ‘liebe, liebe Lizzy’ with a double adjective even in such an extraordinary situation. ‘Jane ist ja nichts dagegen’ is very imprecise because Mrs Bennet actually compares wealth and possessions and not persons (which would be a break with her approach to such matters). As to ‘hochgewachsen’, it is much too bookish; in everyday speech there is hardly any alternative to ‘groß’. To a lesser degree the same applies to ‘gutaussehend’, here a word like ‘fesch’ might be suitable. Schulz proposes the following version:

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Norbert Bachleitner ‘Du lieber Himmel! Gerechter Gott! Denk doch nur! Du liebe Zeit! Mr Darcy! Wer hätte das gedacht! Ist es denn wirklich wahr? Oh, meine liebste Lizzy! Wie reich und wie bedeutend du sein wirst. Wieviel Nadelgeld du haben wirst, was für Geschmeide, was für Kutschen! Was Jane hat, ist nichts dagegen — überhaupt nichts. Ich freue mich so — ich bin so glücklich. So ein charmanter Mann! So gutaussehend, so groß! Oh, meine liebe Lizzy, bitte verzeih mir, daß ich vorher eine solche Abneigung gegen ihn hatte. Ich hoffe, er wird darüber hinwegsehen. Liebe, liebe Lizzy. Ein Haus in der Stadt! Alles, was Freude macht! Drei Töchter verheiratet! Zehntausend Pfund im Jahr! Du lieber Gott! Wie wird es nur mit mir enden. Ich werde noch wahnsinnig!’ (440)

This translation is a bit more adequate, but it still contains some phrases very unlikely to be used by anyone in live speech, for instance ‘Wie wird es nur mit mir enden!’ Moreover, ‘Geschmeide’ is archaic or even fairy-tale style. Ott’s version is without doubt the most modern and the closest to natural speech. ‘Meine Güte! Herr im Himmel! Man stelle sich vor! Ach je! Mr Darcy! Wer hätte das gedacht? Ist das wirklich wahr? Oh, meine süße Lizzy, wie reich und vornehm du sein wirst! Wieviel Nadelgeld und Schmuck und Kutschen du haben wirst! Bei Jane ist es nichts dagegen, gar nichts! Ich freu’ mich so, ich bin so glücklich! Solch ein reizender Mann! So gutaussehend, so groß! Oh, liebe Lizzy, entschuldige bitte, daß ich ihn früher so unausstehlich fand. Ich hoffe, er sieht darüber hinweg. Liebe, liebe Lizzy! Ein Haus in der Stadt! Lauter schöne Sachen! Drei Töchter verheiratet! Zehntausend im Jahr! O Gott! Wie wird mir! Ich werde wahnsinnig!’ (589)

It is remarkable that all three translators misunderstand the phrase ‘pray apologise [. . .]’, which means that Elizabeth should apologize to Darcy for Mrs Bennet’s conduct; therefore, in the German versions the following sentence does not make much sense. Lydia cannot deny being a daughter of Mrs Bennet, interested only in men and girls’ talk, balls, dress, and the like, the product of the average (non-)education of girls of her class. Lydia excels in nonsense talk and use of cant expressions. Most important for her is the ‘fun’ which she derives from almost everything. After having reprimanded Elizabeth ‘La! You are so strange!’ she talks about her wedding. She was ‘in such a fuss’, went ‘quite distracted’, her uncle and aunt were ‘horrid unpleasant’, later her uncle was called upon business ‘to that horrid man Mr Stone’ (318–19). Of course jargon of this sort changes very quickly, so it is not easy for translators to decide if they should choose a rather neutral colloquial register or use elements of modern ‘cool’ language. Schab/Fuchs sound strained from the beginning of this passage when they translate ‘La! You are so strange!’ by ‘Pah, du bist so komisch!’, then Lydia was ‘völlig durcheinander’ which is a rather respectable way of expressing oneself, but then she also admits to having almost gone mad (‘wahnsinnig geworden’); uncle and aunt behaved ‘schrecklich lieblos’, which sounds a bit like bad parents in fairy-tales, and finally her uncle has to see that ‘grässlichen Mr Stone’ (702–03). Schulz’s version sounds similarly tame and bookish when she writes: ‘Ach, du bist so komisch!’, then Lydia is ‘schrecklich aufgeregt’, she would have been ‘ganz außer mir’; uncle and aunt were ‘furchtbar unfreundlich’, and finally her uncle meets the same ‘gräßlichen Mr Stone’ (370–71). Ott, too, does

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not dare to use contemporary cant but nevertheless finds an acceptable colloquial phrase when she writes ‘Ach, du bist so komisch!’. Lydia is ‘so aufgeregt’, she would have ‘wahnsinnig geworden’; her uncle and aunt were ‘furchtbar unfreundlich’, and Mr Stone in her version is ‘schrecklich’ (493–94). Mr Bennet has found refuge in sarcasms about his surroundings and in particular about his own family. When in Chapter 2 he teases the female members of his family with the news of having visited Mr Bingley, the object of desire of the whole neighbourhood, without informing them in advance, he suggests that they should introduce themselves to the newcomer in order to avoid anybody else being faster than them. They do not understand how this should be possible, and Mrs Bennet comments on his suggestion with the exclamation ‘Nonsense, nonsense!’: ‘What can be the meaning of that emphatic exclamation?’ cried he. ‘Do you consider the forms of introduction, and the stress that is laid on them, as nonsense? I cannot quite agree with you there. What say you, Mary? For you are a young lady of deep ref lection I know, and read great books, and make extracts.’ Mary wished to say something very sensible, but knew not how. ‘While Mary is adjusting her ideas,’ he continued, ‘let us return to Mr Bingley.’ ‘I am sick of Mr Bingley,’ cried his wife. (7)

He makes fun of his wife by calling her rather common reaction an ‘emphatic exclamation’; at the same time he expresses his scorn of social conventions in the phrase underlining the ‘stress’ which is laid on the forms of introduction so dear to her. His response to Mary, who is obviously not capable of deep ref lections and does not read great books but probably only excerpts phrases from conduct books and other recommended reading for women, is pure mockery. Even the narrator’s voice is infected by this avalanche of sarcasm when it tells us that Mary tried to say something ‘very sensible’. The ‘emphatic exclamation’ is rendered by ‘entschieden vorgebrachter Ausruf ’ by Schab/Fuchs; the phrase preserves some of the irony of the original but is much too stilted. The same applies to the ironic ‘Gewicht, das man dieser Förmlichkeit beimisst’. In the Schab/Fuchs version, Mary ‘denk[t] [. . .] tief über alles nach’, and the narrator makes her want to say ‘etwas sehr Kluges’. Mary then ‘ordnet ihre Gedanken’, at which point her mother ‘ruft’ that she has had enough of Mr Bingley. This literal rendering of the common verb ‘cry’ is of course misleading since it suggests a high volume of voice or the act of calling somebody (17). Nevertheless, Schulz and Ott also let Mrs Bennet ‘rufen’; Schulz uses this verb even at the beginning of the passage, when Mr Bennet sharply (but hardly with a high volume of voice) remarks on his wife’s ‘energischen Protest’. The use of the word ‘Protest’ in this context introduces a slight modernism, whereas ‘die Sitte des Vorstellens und das Gewicht, das darauf gelegt wird’ are equivalent to Austen’s style (especially the archaic ‘Sitte’). In this version Mary is a ‘junge Dame’ who is known for her ‘tiefe Betrachtungen’; she wants to say ‘etwas sehr Verständiges’, and in the following pause she also ‘ordnet ihre Gedanken’ (10). In spite of this identical phrase the level of irony is much lower here: the girl simply does not seem to find the right words, rather than appearing narrow-minded.

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Andrea Ott calls the conventions of introduction ‘Vorstellungszeremonien’, which perfectly preserves Mr Bennet’s ironic tone; but in her translation Mary is not a ‘deep thinker’ but only a ‘nachdenkliche junge Dame’, which lowers the irony factor. Similar to the phrase in Schab/Fuchs, she wants to say ‘etwas besonders Kluges’ (12). Mr Collins, as a consequence of his education, but surely also of his pedantic character, expresses himself in an overly complicated style. The syntax of the following passage is hard to disentangle, and in live speech it would be even hard to understand what he wants to say — an effect that is probably intended in order to hide his greediness. It is for instance significant that he reduces Mr Bennet’s possible lifespan from ‘many’ to ‘several’ years at the end of the sentence. But the fact is, that being, as I am, to inherit this estate after the death of your honoured father, (who, however, may live many years longer,) I could not satisfy myself without resolving to choose a wife from among his daughters, that the loss to them might be as little as possible, when the melancholy event takes place — which, however, as I have already said, may not be for several years. (106)

Schab/Fuchs do their best to reproduce the labyrinthine sentence: Nun ist es ja eine Tatsache, dass ich nach dem Tod Ihres verehrten Vaters — der, wie ich hoffe, noch viele Jahre zu leben haben wird — diesen Besitz erben werde und deshalb wollte ich zur Beruhigung meines Gewissens eine seiner Töchter zur Frau nehmen, damit Sie der Verlust so wenig wie möglich trifft, wenn das traurige Ereignis eines Tages stattfindet, was, wie ich bereits erwähnte, hoffentlich erst in einigen Jahren der Fall sein wird. (243)

‘Beruhigung meines Gewissens’ is of course an interpretation which is slightly in favour of Mr Collins’s character (although it conveys the hypocrisy inherent in this clause); ‘satisfy myself ’ reveals his egotism. ‘Sie’, addressing Elizabeth only, is clearly wrong, since Collins pretends to act for the benefit of all the Misses Bennet (‘them’). Compared to this translation, Schulz enhances the f low of the sentence and makes it sound almost elegant. Doch angesichts der Tatsache, daß ich nun einmal das Besitztum nach dem Tode ihres verehrten Vaters erben werde (der jedoch noch viele Jahre leben möge), konnte ich mich nicht zufriedengeben, ohne den Beschluß zu fassen, eine seiner Töchter zu meiner Gattin zu erwählen, damit der Verlust für sie alle so gering wie möglich sei, wenn das traurige Ereignis eintritt — worüber jedoch, wie ich schon sagte, noch mehrere Jahre hingehen mögen. (129)

‘Konnte ich mich nicht zufriedengeben’ is a very good choice and close to the wording of the original. Moreover, Schulz opts for the translation of ‘may’ with ‘möge’, which expresses a wish (may he live long). One of Austen’s typical ambiguities is the use of ‘may’ which, besides a wish, also conveys the speaker’s anxiety that Mr Bennet might live too long (he may live long). Ott reveals Collins’s hypocrisy when she uses the phrase ‘der noch viele Jahre leben kann’, implying that he is afraid of this possibility. ‘Vielleicht’ in the last phrase again refers to an undesired eventuality. Aber da ich nun einmal dieses Haus nach dem Tod Ihres verehrten Vaters erben werde (der freilich noch viele Jahre leben kann), fände ich keine Ruhe,

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wenn ich mich nicht entschlossen hätte, meine Frau unter seinen Töchtern zu wählen, auf daß, wenn das betrübliche Ereignis einmal eintritt, was allerdings wie gesagt vielleicht noch Jahre dauert, der Verlust für selbige so gering wie möglich gehalten wird. (171)

‘Fände’ represents another mode than the statement in the source text but it keeps the same idea and is pedantic enough to fit into this speech and maybe even compensates for a certain lack of clumsiness in Ott’s version. The same applies to the archaic ref lexive ‘selbige’. Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s diction is haughty, impertinent, and extremely impolite. She uses phrases that may be right for an authoritarian teacher speaking to his pupils but not for the intercourse between civil human beings. In her conver­ sation with Elizabeth destined to shun this unsuitable fiancée she snarls at her inter­ locutor: I will not be interrupted. Hear me in silence. My daughter and my nephew are formed for each other. [. . .] and what is to divide them? The upstart pre­ tensions of a young woman without family, connections, or fortune. Is this to be endured! (356)

Schab/Fuchs rather attenuate the impoliteness of the phrases by inserting ‘gefälligst’ and ‘Ich verlange’: ‘Unterbrechen Sie mich gefälligst nicht! Ich verlange, dass Sie mich anhören! [. . .] Die Anmaßung eines Emporkömmlings, einer jungen Frau ohne Familie, ohne Vermögen und ohne Beziehungen. Muss man das dulden?’ (787). The same applies to Schulz: ‘Unterbrechen Sie mich nicht. Hören Sie mich in Ruhe an. [. . .] Die hochf liegenden Ambitionen einer jungen Frau ohne Familie, Verbindungen und Vermögen! Ist das zu ertragen!’ (413–14). To listen to someone ‘in Ruhe’ is not the same as ‘shut’ him or her ‘up’, which is what Lady de Bourgh wants to do with Elizabeth, and ‘hochf liegende Ambitionen’ sounds almost positive, at least it is far away from ‘upstart pretensions’. The best solution comes again from Ott because in her phrases the speaker reveals no emotions: ‘Unterbrechen Sie mich nicht. Hören Sie zu und schweigen Sie. [. . .] Der anmaßende gesellschaftliche Ehrgeiz einer jungen Frau ohne Familie, Beziehungen oder Vermögen? Das ist doch unerträglich!’ (553). Darcy’s way of speaking is overly correct and therefore very formal and sometimes dry. Surely he is never as absurd as Collins or as impolite as Lady de Bourgh, but if we were to divide the characters in the novel into two groups Darcy would belong to the same group as them. With his complicated way of expressing himself he manages to confuse our translators, for instance when he tries to explain to himself and to Elizabeth why his proposal has been turned down. He thinks he has been too frank when he admitted the reasons that made him hesitate to offer her his hand: These [i.e. Elizabeth’s] bitter accusations might have been suppressed, had I with greater policy concealed my struggles, and f lattered you into the belief of my being impelled by unqualified, unalloyed inclination; by reason, by ref lection, by every thing. (192)

In the Schab/Fuchs version this speech sounds as strained as in the source text. It is located on the border of the comprehensible:

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Schulz slightly changes the logical connection between the elements ‘inclination’, ‘reason’, and ‘ref lection’ by declaring ‘inclination’ to be not only of the same importance but even a consequence of reason and ref lection. Diese bitteren Anschuldigungen wären vielleicht unterdrückt worden, hätte ich meine Kämpfe mit mehr Klugheit verschwiegen und Sie in dem Glauben gelassen, daß mich eine uneingeschränkte, ungetrübte Neigung dazu getrieben hat — auf Grund von Einsicht, Überlegung und allem anderen. (228)

In this case Ott again finds the best solution by simply enumerating the elements in question: Vielleicht hätten Sie Ihre bitteren Vorwürfe hinuntergeschluckt, wenn ich meine Kämpfe höf lich verschwiegen und Ihnen so lange geschmeichelt hätte, bis sie überzeugt gewesen wären, daß mich bedingungslose, ungetrübte Neigung getrieben habe, Vernunft, Überlegung, einfach alles. (303)

A modernism, in my opinion even cant, is introduced here with the word ‘hin­ unter­geschluckt’ which does not fit into Darcy’s solemn diction. His way of speaking does not differ much from his letter-writing. A representative specimen of his pedantic style is the passage in which he repeats his necessary refusal of the behaviour of the Bennet family, excepting only Elizabeth and Jane. It pains me to offend you. But amidst your concern for the defects of your nearest relations, and your displeasure at this representation of them, let it give you consolation to consider that, to have conducted yourselves so as to avoid any share of the like censure, is praise no less generally bestowed on you and your eldest sister, than it is honourable to the sense and disposition of both. (198)

Schab/Fuchs preserve the complicated f low of the verbalization of a simple idea; they only slightly disentangle it by dividing it into two sentences. Es schmerzt mich, Sie zu beleidigen. Aber lassen Sie sich bei all Ihrer Betroffenheit aufgrund der Unzulänglichkeiten Ihrer engsten Verwandten und Ihrem Unbehagen, sie so dargestellt zu sehen, mit dem Hinweis trösten, dass Ihr Verhalten keinerlei Anlass gab, Sie in diesen Tadel miteinzubeziehen. Dieses Lob, das ebenso sehr Ihnen wie Ihrer ältesten Schwester gebührt, zeichnet Ihrer beiden Verstand und Charakter aus. (438–39)

Schulz comes close to the syntactic complexity of the source text and maintains the old-fashioned vocabulary common in conduct books (‘Besorgnis’, ‘Gesinnung’, ‘Verstimmung’). Es schmerzt mich, Sie zu kränken. Doch lassen Sie sich in Ihrer Besorgnis über die Fehler Ihrer nächsten Angehörigen und Ihrer Verstimmung darüber, daß ich sie hier geschildert habe, mit dem Gedanken trösten, daß Ihnen und Ihrer Schwester dafür, daß Sie in Ihrem Verhalten keinen Anlaß zu einer solchen Kritik geboten haben, ebensoviel Lob gebührt, wie es Ihrer beider Vernunft und Gesinnung ehrt. (234–35)

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Ott once again produces the most modern version. It sounds almost too smooth; only the phrase ‘Wesensart ehren’ makes one think of early nineteenth-century mentality. Es schmerzt mich, Sie zu kränken. Aber bei allem Kummer um die Schwächen Ihrer nächsten Verwandten, bei allem Unwillen angesichts dieser Schilderung soll Sie der Gedanke trösten, daß Ihr eigenes Verhalten über jegliche Kritik erhaben ist, ein Lob, das Ihnen und Ihrer älteren Schwester nicht nur im allgemeinen gilt, sondern ausdrücklich Ihrer beider Verstand und Wesensart ehren will. (311–12)

Elizabeth defies convention both in her attitudes and in her language, a quality which makes her finally conquer Darcy. The characters of the two lovers are rather complementary; according to Mrs Gardiner ‘he wants nothing but a little more liveliness, and that, if he marry prudently, his wife may teach him’ (325). Elizabeth does not shy away from fine old sayings like ‘Keep your breath to cool your porridge’ (24), considered ‘vulgar’ by the majority of her neighbourhood. Doody calls this linguistic behaviour a ‘breach of rhetorical manners’.23 At the same time the ‘vulgar’ implies physicality, which is obviously repressed in Meryton society and in the Darcy–de Bourgh clan. Helga Schulz hesitates to translate this phrase and inserts the original English version in her text; in a footnote she remarks: ‘etwa: “Spar dir deinen Atem, um den Haferbrei zu kühlen” — “Behalte deine Meinung für dich.” ’ (30). Ott is less scrupulous and decides on (or creates?!) a saying in North German style, which, it is true, sounds equally colloquial: ‘Spar dir die Puste zum Suppeblasen’ (39). On the contrary, the Schab/Fuchs version’s ‘Spar deinen Atem, um deine Suppe zu kühlen’ (55), with its combination of trivial contents with an elaborated style (‘Atem’, ‘kühlen’), sounds simply ridiculous in this context. A specimen of her original way of verbalizing her thoughts is Elizabeth’s musing about the forthcoming journey to Derbyshire including a visit to Pemberley. Elizabeth is disappointed because, contrary to the original plan, they are not going to see the Lakes, but she comforts herself with the prospect of secretly sneaking into Darcy’s county: ‘ “But surely,” said she, “I may enter his county with impunity, and rob it of a few petrified spars without his perceiving me.” ’ (239). She plans to ‘steal’ some of the famous Derbyshire minerals (‘Derbyshire spar’). The OED gives the following definition of ‘spar’: ‘Any of various crystalline transparent or translucent minerals, usu. more or less lustrous and readily cleavable’.24 Combined with the adjective ‘petrified’ Austen may actually be thinking of fossils; at least, that is the way all of the recent translations interpret the phrase: ‘ein paar Versteinerungen sammeln’ (Schab/Fuchs 529), ‘seine Grafschaft [. . .] einiger fossiler Reste berauben’ (Schulz 282), ‘ein paar Versteinerungen stibitzen’ (Ott 374). ‘Sammeln’ neglects the burlesque tone of Elizabeth’s thoughts; the pathetic ‘berauben’ chooses to render her grim humour by a smack of the mock-heroic; ‘stibitzen’ seems most adequate here, even if it makes the act appear as a childish prank. To sum up with an overall characterization of the three most recent German translations of Pride and Prejudice, we may observe that Schab’s version, in spite of its refurbishment by Isabella Fuchs, still abounds in clumsy, artificial, and sometimes

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even baroque phrases. This stilted language may be suitable for Mr Collins, Lady de Bourgh, and to a certain degree for Darcy, but it is beside the mark in the mouth of Mrs Bennet, Lydia, or Elizabeth. Moreover, the Schab/Fuchs version is a fairly free rendering, many passages being rather reformulated than translated. Compared to the version of Schab and Fuchs, Helga Schulz’s translation is clearly preferable, but it suffers from passages whose meaning is imprecise due to literal word-forword rendering. Especially in the translation of dramatic dialogue literalism often leads to unsatisfactory results. Andrea Ott modernizes the dialogues, even if she maintains the archaic ‘Sie’ for the address among couples. Her colloquial and often pointed style is rather suitable for the group Mrs Bennet & Co. than for the de Bourgh/Darcy party. Nevertheless, her version manages to achieve a degree of differentiation between the various characters’ speech that comes close to Austen’s virtuosity in this respect. The comical and also critical effects inherent in the different use of language, one of the most important features of the novel, is best maintained in her text. All in all, our study of the most recent German translations of Pride and Prejudice leads us to the conclusion that due to the changes described the novel loses a lot of its stylistic brilliance and variety. This seems to be partly a consequence of the fact that her style is actually ‘beyond emulation’ as Austen scholars have maintained.25 We have referred to the evolutionary idea of progress in the history of the translation of a text, but have found the goal of an ultimate translation to be illusory. Even if it is possible to mark objective faults and distinguish more or less adequate versions, different translations reveal the potential meaning of a source text: rather than asymptotically approaching perfection, they accumulate meaning. Thus, the forthcoming next translation of Pride and Prejudice may draw our attention to new interesting aspects of the source text. The putative progress in translation history reminds one of a quotation from the play Der Schützling (1847) by the great mid-nineteenth-century Austrian comic playwright Johann Nestroy — without translation: ‘Ueberhaupt hat der Fortschritt das an sich, daß er viel größer ausschaut, als er wirklich ist.’26 Notes to Chapter 6 1. See Wolfgang Pöckl, ‘Neuübersetzungen: Zwischen Zufall und Notwendigkeit’, in Streifzüge im translatorischen Feld: Zur Soziologie der literarischen Übersetzung im deutschsprachigen Raum, ed. by Norbert Bachleitner and Michaela Wolf (Münster: LIT, 2010), pp. 317–30. References to this edition and the translations under discussion will be cited parenthetically in the text. 2. Cf. Annika Bautz, ‘The Reception of Jane Austen in Germany’, in The Reception of Jane Austen in Europe, ed. by Anthony Mandal and Brian Southam (London and New York: Continuum, 2007), p. 93–116 and 359–63 (p. 100); this article is the best source on the history of German Austen translations. For the history of early German Austen-reception and translation see the seminal article by Helen Chambers, ‘Nineteenth-Century German Translations of Jane Austen’, in Die Rezeption der britischen und irischen Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts im deutschsprachigen Raum, ed. by Norbert Bachleitner (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000), pp. 231–54. 3. See (accessed 1 September 2014). 4. See Bautz, pp. 109–10, and Anthony Mandal, ‘Austen’s European Reception’, in A Companion to Jane Austen, ed. by Claudia L. Johnson and Clara Tuite (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009),

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pp. 422–33 (pp. 423–25), who corroborates the role of film adaptation from the mid-1990s for Austen’s popularization by translation statistics on the European level. 5. Fuchs restored some omissions, but also deleted von Schwab’s arbitrary additions, corrected some errors, partly changed the vocabulary, and smoothed the syntax. All in all, her revision did not really change the character of von Schwab’s translation; therefore it will not be discussed in this article. 6. As to the methodology of the criticism of literary prose translation the elaborated system of analysis proposed recently by Lance Hewson in his study of novels by Flaubert and Austen (An Approach to Translation Criticism. ‘Emma’ and ‘Madame Bovary’ in Translation (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2011)) may be strongly recommended. At the same time, it is clear that this type of comprehensive analysis can only be achieved in studies of book length. 7. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, in The Novels of Jane Austen, ed. by R. W. Chapman, vol. ii, 3rd edn (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 309. 8. Jane Austen, Stolz und Vorurteil, trans. by Andrea Ott, ‘Nachwort’ by Elfi Bettinger (Munich: btb-Verlag, 2011; 1st edn, Zurich: Manesse, 2003), p. 478. 9. Jane Austen, Stolz und Vorurteil, bilingual edition, trans. by Karin von Schwab, rev. by Isabella Fuchs (Cologne: Anaconda, 2011), p. 681. 10. Jane Austen, Stolz und Vorurteil, trans. by Helga Schulz (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1997), p. 360. 11. Jane Austen, Stolz und Vorurteil, trans. by Ursula und Christian Grawe, ‘Nachwort’ notes by Christian Grawe (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2008; 1st edn, 1977), p. 349. 12. In his otherwise excellent notes Pat Rogers also thinks that this screen is standing ‘on carved legs’, a ‘fire-screen placed precisely so as to shield Miss de Bourgh from the heat’; see Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, ed. by Pat Rogers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 499. 13. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles, ed. by Lesley Brown, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), ii, 2731. 14. This note as well as some other notes can be traced back to the Grawe edition, p. 444. 15. Cf. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, ed. with an introduction by Vivien Jones, with the original Penguin Classics introduction by Tony Tanner (London: Penguin, 1996), note on pp. 419–20, and Alistair M. Duckworth, ‘ “Spillikins, Paper Ships, Riddles, Conundrums, and Cards”: Games in Jane Austen’s Life and Fiction’, in Jane Austen: Bicentenary Essays, ed. by John Halperin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 279–97. 16. Cf. Margaret Anne Doody, ‘Turns of Speech and Figures of Mind’, in A Companion to Jane Austen, ed. by Claudia L. Johnson and Clara Tuite (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), pp. 165–84 (p. 175). 17. Jane Austen, Stolz und Vorurteil, trans. by Werner Beyer, ‘Nachwort’ by Helmut Findeisen (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 2008; 1st edn 1965), p. 334. 18. John F. Burrows, ‘Style’, in The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, ed. by Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 170–88 (p. 180). 19. Cf. Isobel Grundy, ‘Jane Austen and Literary Traditions’, in The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, pp. 189–210 (p. 199). Martin Brunkhorst, ‘Perspektiven des Übersetzens: Jane Austens Pride and Prejudice in Sprach- und Medienwechsel’, in Funktion und Funktionswandel der Literatur im Geistes- und Gesellschaftsleben, ed. by Manfred Schmeling (Berne: Peter Lang 1989), pp. 113–27, has commented on different versions of the first sentence in some of the older German translations (by Rauchenberger, Beyer, Krämer, Schwab, and Holscher). 20. We might apply here the model of the social ‘fields’ proposed by Pierre Bourdieu, in particular in his La distinction: critique sociale du jugement (Paris: Les éditions de minuit, 1979). 21. Pride and Prejudice, ed. by Jones, p. 417. 22. For a discussion of the ‘vulgar’ register in Austen see Myra Stokes, The Language of Jane Austen: A Study of Some Aspects of her Vocabulary (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), pp. 21–27. 23. Doody, p. 174. 24. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, ii, 2965. 25. Cf. Gillian Dow, ‘Translations’, in The Cambridge Companion to ‘Pride and Prejudice’, ed. by Janet Todd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 122–36 (p. 134). After a perusal of the

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global translation history of the novel, Dow comes to a similarly pessimistic evaluation of the quality of Austen translations in general. 26. Johann Nestroy, Der Schützling, in Sämtliche Werke, historisch-kritische Ausgabe, xxiv/2, ed. by Jürgen Hein and John R. P. MacKenzie (Vienna: Deuticke, 2000), p. 91.

C h ap t e r 7

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Herder and Fontane as Translators of Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry: The Ballad ‘Edward, Edward’ Michael White, University of St Andrews Introduction [1848] kamen mir Bischof Percys ‘Reliques of ancient English poetry’ und bald danach auch Walter Scotts ‘Minstrelsy of the Scottish border’ in die Hände, zwei Bücher, die auf Jahre hin meine Richtung und meinen Geschmack bestimmten. Aber mehr als der mir aus ihnen gewordene literarische und fast möchte ich sagen Lebensgewinn gilt mir der unmittelbare Genuß, den ich von ihnen gehabt habe. Sachen sind darunter, wie zum Beispiel ‘Der Aufstand in Northumberland’ — zwei längere Balladen aus der Zeit der Königin Elizabeth — , die mich noch heute mit Entzücken erfüllen, worin sich freilich immer eine leise Mißstimmung darüber mischt, daß ich über diese, meiner Gedichtsammlung angefügten herrlichen Sachen niemals auch nur ein bloß kurz erwähnendes Wort gehört habe, was sie am Ende doch verdienen. Über das, was man bloß übersetzt hat, kann man allenfalls so sprechen.1

If we consider the history of Fontane scholarship, then we note that our author’s complaint about his translations receiving no attention was quickly remedied. Indeed, not only did Erich Schmidt publish an essay in the year of Fontane’s death placing him second only to Herder in the translation of the famous ballad ‘Edward, Edward’ that will be the focus of our attention in the following essay,2 but also the two studies which still form the foundation of research into Fontane’s translations of the English and Scottish ballads appeared in 1910 and 1914 by Carl Wegmann and Hans Rhyn respectively, preceding thus the first monographs on Fontane’s prose fiction.3 The later dependence of scholarship on these early analyses of the translations is attested by the reprinting of Rhyn’s work in 1970.4 In Britain too, Fontane’s translations of Percy were the subject of a detailed article by E. I. M. Boyd on the inf luence of Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry in Germany, published in 1904.5 Later scholarship, more interested in Fontane’s novels and his political development, has tended to accord less weight to Fontane’s early ballads and the poetry in general, and, as a consequence, to his translations and Nachdichtungen. Even in a work such as Helmuth Nürnberger’s Der frühe Fontane, the investigation of Fontane’s translations and the inf luence of Percy is dealt with in relatively summary

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fashion.6 Clearly, the shift in emphasis towards the novels is justified, and as we shall see, Fontane’s own assessments of his translations may go some way to explaining the reduced interest in them. Nevertheless, while many of the observations made by Wegmann and Rhyn are still valid, their analyses are often brief and descriptive. Furthermore, as Helen Chambers’s reading of Fontane’s translation of Tennyson’s ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ demonstrates, detailed study of the translations can be rewarding, shedding light not only on Fontane’s strategies as a translator, but also on his poetics in general.7 In the following essay, we shall consider one of Fontane’s translations from Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, a collection which, together with Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Fontane later noted had had the greatest inf luence on him.8 In particular, we shall focus on Fontane’s version of ‘Edward, Edward’. It will be argued that comments Fontane makes in his correspondence and elsewhere indicate that this poem should be interpreted as a version to be read in the context of a specific German reception tradition, rather than simply alongside the English original. In the analysis of the poem, we will consider principally Fontane’s strategies of literarization, his tendency to increase the coherence, poetic register, and symbolic density of Percy’s text, even at the cost of its effective simplicity. Comparison with Herder’s earlier translation will reveal however, that many of Fontane’s translation choices are best understood as an interaction with that text, suggesting that there are two ‘sources’ for his poem. The Context Writing about Freiligrath in an unpublished fragment from the mid-1880s, Fontane summed up the state of literary translation in the Germany of his own time: Es wird nirgends so viel übersetzt wie in Deutschland, und wenn wir Lust und Mut haben, uns mit der Quantität zu brüsten, so mögen wir’s tun; dem eigentlichen Wert nach stehen unsre Übersetzungen moderner Dichter, d.h. also der europäischen Literatur seit Dante und Petrarca, durchaus nicht auf der unbedingten Höhe, wie wir’s im Hinblick auf ein paar große Übersetzernamen wie Voß, Wolf, Tieck und Schlegel ein für allemal anzunehmen uns gewohnt haben.9

What is significant about this quotation is that it gives an indication of Fontane’s sense, not only of the quantity of translation going on in Germany and its relative quality, but also of a tradition of translation. Fontane suggests that while the German translator of modern European literature must of course be able to transmit the meaning and literary quality of the original to his reading public, he must also take account of previous translators, their skills, and their texts. Moreover, Fontane’s ref lections are of particular interest because it is at around this time that Fontane was reassessing some of his own, earlier translations, not strictly in terms of their success as literary texts, nor in terms of their ability to speak directly to his contemporary audience, Fontane’s usual criterion of aesthetic judgement, but by measuring them against earlier translations of the same sources. In 1889, Fontane writes to Detlev von Liliencron: Zahlloses in meinen Sachen habe ich um einer gewissen Forscheté des Ausdrucks willen schließlich fallen gelassen und beklage es nicht. [. . .] Was

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ist der Zauber der altenglischen Balladen? Ihre Simplizität. Ich entsinne mich noch, daß ich vor beinahe fünfzig Jahren die Chevy-Chase besser als Herder übersetzen wollte und mir auch einbildete, es sei mir gelungen. Jetzt bin ich sehr für Herder und erschrecke vor meinen famosen Vollreimen.10

In the case of the Chevy-Chase ballad mentioned in this letter, Fontane’s re-eval­ uation of his earlier poem did not preclude its reinclusion in the third edition of his poems, published same year by Wilhelm Hertz.11 The poem had previously appeared in the first edition of Fontane’s collected poems (1851) and the separately published collection Balladen (1861), only to be subsequently dropped for the second edition of Gedichte (1875), into which the Balladen were incorporated. However, if Fontane continued to present his ‘Chevy-Chase’ to the reading public despite doubts about its relative value in comparison with other German versions, his poem ‘Edward, Edward’, another translation of a ballad from Bishop Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, suffered a different fate. Composed for the Tunnel über der Spree in 1852, thus too late for the first edition of poems published a year earlier, it appeared in 1854 in the journal Argo, which Fontane edited with Franz Kugler, and in the Balladen in 1861. After that, however, it was not again included in the subsequent editions of Fontane’s poems (1875, 1889, 1892, 1898).12 As with ‘Chevy-Chase’, Fontane expressed reservations later about the success of his translation ‘Edward, Edward’, this time in an exchange with Erich Schmidt. In 1896, Fontane writes: Ich habe es [‘Edward, Edward’], als ich ganz jung war, übersetzt, und wollte damals dem alten Herder zeigen, was ’ne Harke sei. Vor vier Jahren aber, als die jüngste Auf lage meiner Gedichte erschien, war mir doch, wenn auch etwas spät, die Erkenntnis gekommen, daß meine Tamtamübersetzung neben der großartigen Schlichtheit des alten Generalsuperintendenten (oder was er sonst war) nicht bestehn könne, und da habe ich die Verfehlung durch Ausmerzung gesühnt. Mitunter ist es aber von Interesse, auch ‘Verfehlungen’ nachzugehn, und sollte das der Fall sein, so bitte ich um ein Wort, daß ich es abschreiben lassen und Ihnen schicken kann.13

Schmidt, who went on to publish an essay on the ‘Edward’ ballad in 1898, must have replied positively to Fontane’s offer, because about two months later, Fontane again wrote to Schmidt, this time enclosing a copy of his version, and the following contextualization: Hinzufügen möchte ich nur noch das, daß ich in zurückliegenden Jahrzehnten mehrfach Zusendungen (immer kleine dumme Heftchen) von Balladen- und Übersetzungsdilettanten erhalten habe, in denen ‘Edward, Edward’ mir fehlte. Das hat sich erst seit 10, 20 Jahren geändert, denn seitdem ist ein allgemeiner großer Balladenniedergang zu verzeichnen. Ich mußte das schaudernd selbst erfahren. Auf Veranlassung meines Demi-ami Dominik hatte ich an das Journal ‘zur guten Stunde’ fünf, sechs Balladen eingeschickt, die auch gedruckt und sogar bezahlt wurden. Vertraulich ließ mir Bong, der Herausgeber, aber doch sagen: ‘ja, das sei alles ganz gut, — aber Balladen gingen nicht mehr.’ Ich, damals noch im ganzen Stolz albionhafter Balladengröße, schlug eine krampf hafte Lache auf, aber schon nach drei Tagen hatte ich mich beruhigt und sagte mir: ‘ja, dieser Esel hat Recht; es ist so, Balladen gehen nicht mehr.’ [. . .] Wie

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The correspondence with Schmidt is revealing, because this time Fontane again demonstrates a ready awareness of the field of translation in Germany during his lifetime, its development, and the relationship between the production of translations and broader trends in the tastes of readers. In our case, Fontane makes two slightly contradictory observations: first, that in editions of ballads, he often noted an absence of versions of ‘Edward, Edward’, and that subsequently the number of ‘Edward’ translations has diminished because of a general falling of interest in the ballad form. Nevertheless, these observations demonstrate that Fontane sees his translations not simply as responses to a foreign original, but rather as texts which respond to national literary circumstances. We must be cautious, of course, not to overinterpret comments Fontane made in later life to other writers and scholars about his early writings, which serve, in part at least as a form of apology on the part of an author who always saw himself on the margins; nor should we seek to see these letters as theoretical writings. These documents are personal letters containing observations refracted and filtered through ongoing conversations. At the same time, however, there is evidence that Fontane’s doubts about his translations were long-standing. Shortly after the appearance of the first edition of his poems in 1851, Fontane began thinking about the possibility of a second edition. Clearly the quality of the translations and his ‘Karl Stuart’ fragment were at the forefront of his mind: ‘ich würde alle Über­ setz­ungen sowie das dramatische Fragment fortlassen und über die lyrischen und Gelegenheitsgedichte furchtbar — wie Karl Moor — Musterung halten.’15 He goes on, in the sketched outline of the contents of this new edition, to list ‘Bilder und Balladen (statt der englischen Sachen alles das, was ich seitdem geschrieben habe)’.16 Despite these doubts, Fontane was still producing translations: his version of ‘Edward, Edward’, which he saw clearly as an attempt to better Herder’s, dates from the same year as this letter. What is more, Fontane felt able to justify both his writing and the publication of new workings of well-known texts. His 1854 Argo publication of ‘Edward, Edward’ and ‘Sir Patrick Spens’ carries the following introduction: Nach einigem Schwanken habe ich mich auch für Aufnahme dieser beiden Balladen entschieden, die seit Herder von einem jeden übersetzt worden ist, der dem Studium der altenglischen Balladen-Literatur auch nur vorübergehend seine Aufmerksamkeit zugewendet hat. Ich will also der Sache nichts Neues bieten, aber die Sache selbst hat noch immer nicht ihren vollendetsten, endgültigen Ausdruck gefunden, und jeder Berufene mag es versuchen, die Aufgabe vieler nach seiner Kraft um einen Schritt weiter zu fördern.17

Fontane appears thus to have had a rather ambivalent view of his translations: on the one hand, there is evidence that Fontane placed his translations rather low in his list of priorities for publication, and was ready to acknowledge their failings; on the other, his writing of translations not only served as a mode of engagement with literary impulses from abroad, it was also a means of entering into a history, tradition, and ongoing practice of writing at home. There is a translation environ­

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ment Fontane clearly sees as strong, which both offers a challenge to him as a writer, but also means that he is often subsequently ready to review his own work and find it wanting. In both cases, Fontane’s view of his translations seems to be in some senses a more extended or sharply attuned form of his view of poetry in general: it has a special place in his oeuvre because the publication of poetry is proof of his status as a creative writer. It is for this reason, he explains to his publisher Hertz, that he is keen to publish even when the remuneration is small or uncertain: ‘Denn ich bekenne ganz offen, daß mir dabei nur an meiner Dichterbeweisführung vor anderen gelegen ist’.18 There is thus a complex relationship between the source text and the tradition of its reception, the translator, and the public in determining the choice, form, and perceived value of a literary translation, a relationship in which the source text is not necessarily the dominant factor. Fontane’s translations are written as versions, which fit into and are to be read within a specific literary landscape, and whose forms are specific responses to that textual environment as much as they are to the original. The Translations Let us now turn to the poem ‘Edward, Edward’ and its translations by Fontane and Herder. The medieval poem, of which there are a number of versions in English and Scandinavian languages, presents a dialogue between Edward and his mother immediately after he has killed his father, and is characterized in English by a bleak, dark tone and its question-and-answer structure.19 Edward appears with a sword dripping in blood, a situation which he is asked to explain by his mother. After claiming at first to have killed his hawk, then his horse, he confesses to his crime. As the dialogue continues the mother asks Edward what his penance shall be and what he will leave to his family. In a twist at the end, he promises his mother the curse of hell for her ‘counseil’. The analysis here will focus on the first three verses and the final verse. We begin with a comparison of Fontane’s version with Percy’s text, looking initially at the first verse: Quhy dois zour brand sae drop wi’ bluid, Edward, Edward? Quhy dois zour brand sae drop wi’ bluid? And quhy sae sad gang zee, O? O, I hae killed my hauke sae guid, Mither, mither: O I hae killed my hauke sae guid: And I had nae mair bot hee, O.20

‘Was blinket dein Schwert so rot von Blut, Edward, Edward? Was blinket dein Schwert so rot von Blut, Und macht so trübe dich schreiten?’ ‘Ich hab erwürgt meinen Falken gut, Mutter, Mutter Ich hab erwürgt meinen Falken gut, Und hatte doch keinen zweiten.’21

Apart from Fontane’s choice to render the Scots dialect in modern, standard German, perhaps the first quality of Fontane’s text that strikes the reader is its ten­dency to literarization. Semantically, ‘trübe’ is more nuanced and belongs to a differ­ent register than ‘sad’, and similarly Fontane’s choice ‘erwürgen’ is more pre­ cise than the English ‘killed’. Syntactically the German text stresses causal relation­ ships, establishing a greater sense of integration, than does the original. Fontane

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underlines the common source behind the blood on Edward’s sword and his sad gait: in English the two questions ‘quhy dois zour brand sae drop’ and ‘quhy sae sad gang zee’ remain separate because of the repeated interrogative, whereas in Fontane they become two aspects of the same question, ‘Was blinket [. . .] | Und macht’. This is the first indication of Fontane’s striving throughout his text to establish coherence, and the decision to render the first line ‘drop wi’ bluid’ with ‘blinket [. . .] so rot’ may also be considered from this perspective. In the English text this colour is evoked as a quality of blood only in the second stanza; the English strophes constitute parallel symbolic worlds, their imagery does not link them. At this stage, thus, Fontane may be seen to replace an evocative but isolated quality of blood, its dripping, with one which will emerge later as symbolically significant, its colour. Already, however, in this first stanza some of Fontane’s choices appear either problematical or less than satisfactory, perhaps above all the first line. While the German does mirror the alliteration of the original, the expression strikes us as clumsy or ill-conceived: ‘blinken’ is not a visually appropriate representation of this very red blood, creating as it does a sense of light, rather than dark foreboding. And it is here that a comparison with Herder can not only shed light on the specificities of Fontane’s text, but may also be seen as the source of some of Fontane’s translation choices: Herder Dein Schwert, wie ist’s von Blut so rot? Edward, Edward! Dein Schwert, wie ist’s von Blut so rot? Und gehst so traurig her? — O! O Ich hab geschlagen meinen Geier tot, Mutter, Mutter! O Ich hab geschlagen meinen Geier tot, Und keinen hab ich wie Er — O!22

Fontane Was blinket dein Schwert so rot von Blut, Edward, Edward? Was blinket dein Schwert so rot von Blut, Und macht so trübe dich schreiten? Ich hab erwürgt meinen Falken gut, Mutter, Mutter Ich hab erwürgt meinen Falken gut, Und hatte doch keinen zweiten.’

If we compare these texts, Fontane’s first line appears at first more like an attempt to take Herder’s text closer to the syntax of the English: Herder’s text reproduces the simple iambs but in so doing loses the structuring, initial position of the interrogatives, which Fontane re-establishes. Here we have, then, what appears to be an example of Fontane’s attempt to improve Herder’s text as a translation, by moving the German text closer to the English source. And yet, this does not account for the gain of the colour red in Fontane’s text, and the loss of ‘drop’. Here, conversely, the comparison with Herder’s text indicates that Fontane’s evocation of red in the first line is the product of a German tradition established by Herder. Fontane could have brought Herder’s translation closer to the imagery of the English by translating ‘wie tropfet dein Schwert so schwer von Blut’ or something similar. Instead, Fontane does the opposite; he takes the difference, the specificity of the German version, and, in the same way as he proceeds with the imagery in the English original, he expands, deepens, and integrates it. Whereas Edward’s sword is red in Herder’s version, it glistens with redness in Fontane’s. Elsewhere in this stanza it appears that the relationship between Fontane’s text and Herder’s is not one of poetic improvement or development; rather Fontane

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seems at times compelled simply to offer something different. This can lead to a better translation: Fontane’s ‘Falke’ is clearly closer to the sense of Percy’s ‘hauke’ than Herder’s ‘Geier’. Often, however, this need to create a different version, rather than a more satisfactory rendering, explains some of Fontane’s less successful lines. This may be the case in the final line of the first verse, for example, where Fontane’s text conveys the sense, but not the force of the original; his version misses the evaluation inherent in ‘nae mair bot hee’. Ultimately, however, Fontane’s motiv­ations must remain supposition, as the extant manuscript provides no variants or gen­etic evidence allowing us to reconstruct Fontane’s previous or alternative solutions.23 To draw some provisional conclusions based on this reading of the first stanza then, it can be suggested that Fontane’s justification for his translation of ‘Edward, Edward’, that he wanted ‘die Sache um einen Schritt weiter bringen’, at times means creating a German text which is closer to the English than Herder’s, that German version he sets out to improve. Yet in many senses the development Fontane evokes can best be interpreted as the desire to see his own version of the text as part of an ongoing process of writing within a specifically German tradition, which has the effect of bringing his text further from, not closer to, its apparent source. If we now proceed to consider the second strophe, we note that it is characterized in the English text by an evolution in terms of argumentation but also by repetition, and, as previously suggested, by a degree of independence in symbolic imagery. The mother recognizes her son’s lie and indicates her proof: the blood on the sword is too red to have been caused by the hawk, implying that the victim was more important, more sacred, and that the crime is more serious. The son replies that he has killed his horse, which means not only an increase in the size and significance of the animal, but also a symbolic intensification, as the horse’s colour (‘reid-roan’) represents an outward sign of its inward quality, its redness. These new developments are offset by the structural repetition of names and the interjection ‘O’, which replicate those of the first stanza and undermine the notion of progression, emphasizing above all the circular nature of the dialogue: Zour haukis bluid was nevir sae reid, Edward, Edward: Zour haukis bluid was never sae reid, My deir son I tell thee, O. O, I hae killed my reid-roan steid, Mither, mither: O, I hae killed my reid-roan steid, That erst was sae fair and free, O.

In both of our German authors this is slightly different. In Herder’s text, we note above all a continuation of an already established pattern more than a development. This is largely the result of the translation of ‘killed’ with ‘totschlagen’, which leads to an emphatic, repeated and structuring rhyme pattern (‘rot’/‘tot’), carried over from the first stanza:

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With Fontane, a clear tendency towards development is marked. His translation of ‘killed’ in the first stanza (‘erwürgt’) is here replaced by ‘erstochen’. Looking further in the poem we note that this is later transformed into ‘erschlagen’ in the third verse. Fontane thus creates an elegant variation on the text’s many repetitions, but also a clear raising of tension; this is very different from the simple repetition of ‘killed’ in the original, but frees Fontane from the restrictive structure which risks becoming dominant in Herder’s version: ‘Deines Falken Blut war nimmer so rot, Edward, Edward, Deines Falken Blut war nimmer so rot, Dein Schwert ist dunkler gerötet; — ’ ‘Ich hab erstochen mein rotbraun Roß, Mutter, Mutter, Ich hab erstochen mein rotbraun Roß, Im Zorne hab ich’s getötet.’

The translations of ‘my deir son I tell thee’ are revealing in both German texts. In Herder, the affirmation becomes an imperative ‘bekenn mir frei’, which permits the rhyming of ‘treu’ and ‘frei’ but which also allows for a neat transition later in the fourth verse. There, the English adds a temporal development ‘my deir son now tell mee’; Herder’s text expands the significance of this invocation, by including an invitation to confess the scope of the crime: ‘bekenn mir mehr’, thereby mirroring the poem’s general sense of progression in the dialogue. Fontane’s method of dealing with these lines is highly significant. In the original, as in Herder, these lines are phatic; while they do serve to make the dialogue explicitly an object of literary representation, they are themselves not carriers of meaning, they give no new information, and their primary function is to create tension through their emptiness. Instead of reproducing this, Fontane uses this empty space in the text to develop his poem’s symbolism: ‘dein Schwert ist dunkler gerötet’. The consequence of this, and the same can be said of similar passages later in the poem, is that Fontane’s text places more value on the proof, on the concrete evidence and its interpretation within the poem’s narrative. The discussion of the meaning of signs and objects thus occupies a greater part of Fontane’s poem, which might be seen, perhaps, as an early indication of the theme of aesthetic interpretation of reality, which becomes such an important theme of Fontane’s later prose fiction. If Fontane’s ‘dein Schwert ist dunkler gerötet’ places the mother’s analysis in sharper relief than in Percy’s text, then this tendency is more pronounced again in the third verse. Here, in the English poem, the mother counters that Edward could not have been so affected by the death of his horse. This is not explicitly said, rather

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it is implied: ‘Zour steid was auld, and ze hae gat mair’. It is this knowledge that leads the mother to suggest that Edward is troubled by something else, ‘sum other dule ze drie’: Zour steid was auld, and ze hae gat mair, Edward, Edward: Zour steid was auld, and ze hae gat mair, Sum other dule ze drie, O. O, I hae killed my fadir deir, Mither, mither: O, I hae killed my fadir deir, Alas! and wae is mee, O!

Herder goes some way to clarifying what is only implied in the original, by inverting ‘ze hae gat mair’ to give ‘[du] hast’s nicht not’: Dein Roß war alt und hast’s nicht not, Edward, Edward! Dein Roß war alt und hast’s nicht not, Dich drückt ein andrer Schmerz — O! O ich hab geschlagen meinen Vater tot! Mutter, Mutter! O ich hab geschlagen meinen Vater tot, Und weh, weh ist mein Herz — O!

Fontane goes further. He disregards the content of ‘ze hae gat mair’, and instead makes explicit the mother’s reasoning: ‘das kann es nicht sein, | Was tät deine Wang entfärben’. Dein Roß war alt, das kann es nicht sein, Edward, Edward. Dein Roß war alt, das kann es nicht sein, Was tät deine Wang entfärben; — Ich hab erschlagen den Vater mein, Mutter, Mutter, Und mir ist weh zum Sterben!

In so doing, Fontane does break the transition to the son’s confession provided by ‘sum other dule ye drie’. In his poem, the mother merely gives yet another negative response, rather than suggesting a way forward, as she does in the original. Nevertheless, not only does Fontane’s text once again raise the prominence of analysis and reading of signs in the poem, his translation also gives a further dimension to the colour symbolism noted above: Edward’s face appears pale, which serves as a visual contrast to the red of the blood, while also creating a symbolic opposition between Edward on the one hand and chivalry (the hawk) and vitality (the horse) on the other. Edward receives the pale colour of death, which prefigures both the end of this verse, and the poem as a whole. Here the comparison with Herder’s solution, ‘Dich drückt ein andrer Schmerz’, which is more or less a literal rendering, poses the question whether the existence of this close translation gave Fontane the opportunity, as well as the need, to develop a poetic potential in his poem which lies in the common source.

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For the remaining part of the discussion, I would like to turn our attention brief ly to the final verse, before then drawing our conclusions. In Fontane’s reassessment of his translation, he referred to it as a ‘Tamtamübersetzung’ compared to Herder’s, which, while not to be taken too seriously, does indicate a dissatisfaction with the rhythmical quality of the poem as a whole. An analysis of the final stanza can shed some light on what Fontane meant by this, and on his way of dealing with the poem’s rhythm more generally. Overall Fontane’s text is, unsurprisingly, less rhythmically varied than the original: this both corresponds to the other aspects of his poem which create a greater sense of coherence, and is part of Fontane’s strategy of literarization, but it is also the result of a process of translation which, like that of Herder, sought to transmit an overall impression of the original.24 Above all, the rhythm of Fontane’s text is more metrical; there are fewer meaningful tensions between the rhythm of the lines and their metre. This is above all evident in the translation of the fifth and penultimate line: And quhat wul ze leive to zour ain mither deir, Edward, Edward? And quhat wul ze leive to zour ain mither deir? My deir son, now tell me, O. The curse of hell frae me sall ze beir, Mither, mither: The curse of hell frae me sall ze beir, Sic counseils ze gave to me, O.

In Percy’s text these are more or less regular, and not of special note other than the stress on ‘hell’. However, the line may be said to stand out because of its regularity, the second half of the poem having been marked by a greater rhythmical freedom, so that here the straightforward iambs give a sense of urgency and desperate anger to the son’s final complaint. In his translation, Herder places the two parts of the line which should be stressed in appropriately marked positions, at the beginning and end of the line: Und was willt du lassen deiner Mutter teur, Edward, Edward? Und was willt du lassen deiner Mutter teur, Mein Sohn, das sage mir — O! Fluch will ich Euch lassen und höllisch Feuer, Mutter, Mutter! Fluch will ich Euch lassen, und höllisch Feuer, Denn ihr, ihr rietet’s mir — O!

His replacement in the line of the position occupied by ‘O’ in previous verses lends the word ‘Fluch’ a special force and pregnancy in this excellent and power­ ful rendering. Similarly, ‘höllisch’ achieves rhythmical significance, while its undeclined form creates a sense of concentration and energy. Fontane’s text is rather different: ‘Und deiner Mutter, was lässest du ihr, Edward, Edward, Und deiner Mutter, was lässest du ihr, Die dich unterm Herzen getragen?’

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‘Den Fluch der Hölle, den laß ich dir, Mutter, Mutter, Die Tat war mein, doch du rietest sie mir, Wir haben ihn beide erschlagen!’

Here there is no significant rhythmical distinction between the fifth and the first lines. In both, Fontane repeats a structure often to be found in his poems, in which he divides the line through apposition. Through its position just before the chiasmus, ‘Hölle’ is indeed stressed in Fontane’s text, but to a much lesser degree than is the case in Herder’s, and it is in fact the relative pronoun which receives the greatest accentuation. Once again, compared with the relatively understated English original, Fontane’s solution here is not unsatisfactory; what is the deciding factor, in terms of many of Fontane’s translation choices and his final assessment of his translation as a whole, is the relationship between his version and that of Herder, and it is here, perhaps above all, that Fontane’s text compares weakly with the earlier translation. If Fontane’s structural division of the lines impedes in his translation that same sense of energy that Herder manages to create, then it offers other possibilities in the penultimate and final lines. In the English text, it is perhaps not at first clear what is meant by ‘sic counseils ze gave to me’. The brevity with which the information is given leaves the reader with a sense of surprise and uncertainty. Both of our German translators render the previous action, and therefore the final consequences, clearer: the mother becomes a more active partner in both versions. With Herder, this occurs through a repetition of the pronoun ‘ihr’, so that at the end of the poem the mother is the dominant figure; in addition ‘counseil’ is verbalized, clarifying the mother’s role as agent. In Fontane’s text we note again the tendency to develop the form found in Herder: repetition and phatic phrases here give way to new information, and, as earlier, the argumentation is clarified. In Fontane’s version, only ‘du rietest mir’ is translation. His text makes explicit that the crime consisted in two parts, advice and action, a dualism that the structure of this final verse, with its divided lines, the added conjunction ‘doch’, and above all the emphatic clarity of the final line, all serve to convey. Conclusions Fontane’s translation ‘Edward, Edward’ is characterized by literarization, by a tendency to develop symbolic imagery, to create a deeper sense of coherence and integration, by a more precise and varied vocabulary, and a desire to make all parts of the poem meaningful. Only a few of these various strategies can be accounted for through a comparison with the English original. Rather, many of Fontane’s ‘translations’ are the products of an engagement with a translation tradition, as much as with the English text. Fontane’s text is a translation, but the improvement he seeks is the improvement of a German text; he does not aim for a ‘better’ translation in the sense of a more accurate rendering of the English text, rather he seeks to write an alternative version which is a better German poem than that of Herder. This insight into Fontane’s writing afforded to us as readers through an analysis of

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the ‘Edward’ poem is significant in part because it indicates that the intertextuality which defines his later prose has its roots in the processes of assimilation, imitation, and inf luence which dominate Fontane’s early years as a writer. Perhaps more importantly, it reminds us that Fontane’s englische Schule, his love of and lifelong engagement with English literature and culture, is not to be understood as a stepping out of, but a means of finding a place in, a German tradition as a German writer. In more general terms, a study of Fontane’s translations which emphasizes their qualities as variations may inform our view of this author, who is often seen as a lone figure of European stature in nineteenth-century Germany, and whose life can be seen as a unity proceeding towards his ‘Eigentliches’.25 Fontane’s works may well be exceptional, and expressive of his true self, but, like the Stechlin lake, they are also evidence of the interconnectedness of things. Notes to Chapter 7 1. Theodor Fontane, Von Zwanzig bis Dreißig: Autobiographisches, in Werke, Schriften und Briefe, ed. by Walter Keitel and Helmuth Nürnberger, 20 vols in 4 sections (Munich: Hanser, 1962–97) [first published as Sämtliche Werke], iii/4, 327–8. Hereafter cited as HA. 2. Erich Schmidt, ‘Edward’, in Forschungen zur neueren Litteraturgeschichte: Festgabe für Richard Heinzel (Weimar: Felber, 1898), pp. 29–50. 3. Carl Wegmann, Theodor Fontane als Übersetzer englischer und schottischer Balladen (Münster: Westfälische Vereinsdruckerei, 1910); Hans Rhyn, Die Balladendichtung Theodor Fontanes mit besonderer Berücksichtigung seiner Bearbeitungen altenglischer und altschottischer Balladen aus den Sammlungen von Percy und Scott (Berne: Francke, 1914). 4. Hans Rhyn, Die Balladendichtung Theodor Fontanes mit besonderer Berücksichtigung seiner Bearbeitungen altenglischer und altschottischer Balladen aus den Sammlungen von Percy und Scott (Nendeln/ Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint, 1970). 5. E. I. M. Boyd, ‘The Inf luence of Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry on German Literature’, Modern Language Quarterly, 7 (1904), 80–99. 6. Helmuth Nürnberger, Der frühe Fontane: Politik, Poesie, Geschichte 1840 bis 1860 (Munich: Hanser, 1971), pp. 206–07. 7. Helen E. Chambers, ‘Fontane’s Translation of “The Charge of the Light Brigade” ’, in AngloGerman Studies, ed. by R. F. M. Byrn and K. G. Knight (Leeds: The Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, 1992), pp. 83–104. 8. See ‘[Was soll ich lesen?]’, HA iii/1, 570–71 (p. 571). 9. ‘Übersetzungskunst’, in Theodor Fontane, Aufzeichnungen zur Literatur: Ungedrucktes und Unbe­ kanntes, ed. by Hans-Heinrich Reuter (Berlin and Weimar: Auf bau, 1969), pp. 173–74 (p. 173). 10. Letter dated 11 May 1889, HA iv/3, 689. 11. For a detailed discussion of the genesis of Fontane’s Gedichte, see the notes in Theodor Fontane, Gedichte, ed. by Joachim Krueger und Anita Golz, 3 vols (Berlin and Weimar: Auf bau, 1989), i, 413–40. 12. It did appear, however, in Fontane’s essay, ‘Die alten englischen und schottischen Balladen’, printed in Europa, in 1860 and the Morgenblatt für Gebildete Leser in 1861 (anonymously). See HA, iii/1, 645. 13. Letter of 7 October 1896, HA iv/4, 598. Fontane implies here that he revisited the poem for the 1892 edition; it had not, however, appeared in the 1889 edition, though that collection did take up several poems which had been previously removed, among them the ‘Chevy-Chase’ ballad. 14. Letter of 23 November 1896, HA iv/4, 614. 15. Letter to Friedrich Witte, 4 December 1852, HA iv/1, 327. 16. Ibid. 17. Reprinted in Krueger/Golz, Gedichte, i, 626. 18. Letter to Wilhelm Hertz, 15 April 1887. HA iv/3, 535.

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19. For variants and a list of the Scandinavian texts, see Francis J. Child, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 3 vols (New York: Folklore Press, 1957), i, 167–69. The text in Percy’s Reliques is ballad number 13 B. For a study of the relationship between the different versions, see Archer Taylor, ‘Edward’ and ‘Sven i Rosengård’: A Study in the Dissemination of a Ballad (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931). 20. The English text follows the following edition: Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, Every­ man’s Library 149, (London: Dent, [1906]), pp. 101–02. The spelling is deliberately archaic. 21. See: Krueger/Golz, Gedichte, i, 402–03. 22. The text follows: ‘Edward’ in Johann Gottfried Herder, Werke, ed. Günter Arnold and others, 10 vols (Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–2000), iii: Volkslieder, Übertragungen, Dichtungen, ed. by Ulrich Gaier (1990), pp. 365–67. 23. See Krueger/Golz, Gedichte, i, 671. 24. Chambers, ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’, p. 91. 25. The phrase is Reuter’s. See Hans-Heinrich Reuter, Fontane, 2 vols (Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, 1968), i, 34.

PA RT I I I

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Nietzsche and the Scottish Enlightenment Ritchie Robertson, University of Oxford 1 In connecting Nietzsche and the Scottish Enlightenment, I am not talking about the inf luence of the Enlightenment on Nietzsche, nor tracing the precise derivation of Nietzsche’s ideas from those of the Enlightenment. This is not an exercise in source study. Rather, I want to point out some specific ways in which Nietzsche takes up, develops, and radicalizes ideas already put forward in the Scottish Enlightenment, although most of the eighteenth-century texts I shall refer to were almost certainly unknown to him.2 The comparison should not only bring out some unexpected similarities across a century, but also suggest ways in which some standard pictures of both the Enlightenment and Nietzsche need to be modified. If we think of the Enlightenment as the Age of Reason, and associate it with an optimistic conception of human progress, we shall instantly think of ways in which Nietzsche opposes such ideas. Nietzsche questions both the value and the possibility of the search for truth. Throughout his work he attacks the notion of linear progress in human society (‘Der “Fortschritt” ist bloß eine moderne Idee, das heißt eine falsche Idee’, A 4).3 He argues that the purpose of humanity consists in producing its highest exemplars, figures such as Alexander the Great or Cesare Borgia. But the Enlightenment itself was often cautious about making claims for human progress. The dogmatic belief in progress that f lourished in the Paris salons, and was expressed especially by Turgot in his Discours sur le progrès de l’esprit humain (1750), met with an ironic response from David Hume.4 Herder said that progress, like walking, consisted in falling now to the right, now to the left, and thus unsteadily pursuing a middle course: ‘Wie unser Gang ein beständiges Fallen ist zur Rechten und zur Linken und dennoch kommen wir mit jedem Schritt weiter: so ist der Fortschritt der Kultur in Menschengeschlechtern und in ganzen Völkern.’5 Moreover, the conception of the Enlightenment as the Age of Reason is outdated and inadequate, especially as regards the High Enlightenment, the period from roughly 1740 to 1790. Recently, in a work which (whether or not one agrees with its thesis) is a major scholarly landmark, Jonathan Israel has maintained that the core of the Enlightenment was the rationalism of the late seventeenth century, inspired by Descartes and especially by Spinoza, so that, as Israel maintains, the business of the Enlightenment was essentially over by the end of the 1740s.6 More recently,

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and more persuasively, John Robertson has argued that the period 1740–90 has a coherence of its own with different emphases from the earlier period.7 One might therefore seek to distinguish between the early Enlightenment, which emphasized reason and often took mathematics as its paradigm of knowledge, and the High Enlightenment, which emphasized not so much reason but rather the passions. ‘Reason’, said Hume, ‘is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.’8 Such a periodization would be misleading, however, for even in what Israel considers the key phase of the Enlightenment we find two profoundly inf luential figures whose commitment to reason was accompanied by an emphasis on emotions and by an often elusive irony. One is the third Earl of Shaftesbury, whose Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, published in 1711, foregrounds the emotions and gives reason a subordinate function: to ‘secure a right application of the affections’.9 The other is Pierre Bayle, best known for his Dictionnaire historique et critique (first published in 1697), a guide to figures of religious and philosophical importance. Bayle’s irony has made his intentions controversial ever since. Some of his expositors claim that Bayle believed in Christianity but thought that belief had to be based on faith alone and therefore took delight in exposing all the philosophical arguments for Christianity as fallacious.10 Others would agree with H. B. Nisbet: ‘Pierre Bayle was as complete a sceptic as any thinker in modern times’.11 Bayle introduces into the Enlightenment an ironically elusive style and a sceptical outlook which seeks to replace dogmatism not with an alternative dogma but with a propensity to question all apparent certainties. In different ways he is the intellectual and stylistic ancestor of Voltaire, Hume, and Lessing. Although the concept of an ‘Enlightenment project’, coined by Alasdair MacIntyre, is too reductive, one can nevertheless find, as John Robertson has recently done, a degree of unity within the Enlightenment. Robertson locates the ‘intellectual coherence of the Enlightenment’ in ‘the commitment to understanding, and hence to advancing, the causes and conditions of human betterment in this world’.12 For this purpose, the Enlighteners studied human nature: ‘the connected study of the understanding, the passions, and the process of moral judgement which David Hume christened “the science of man” ’.13 The science of man was supposed to combine mental and moral philosophy, psychology, and ethics, and to investigate human behaviour within a framework provided by human society, not divine authority. Further, in order to understand the conditions of material betterment, the Enlighteners studied political economy as a distinct field of investigation, and, more generally, they studied the development of societies through various stages as a passage from barbarism to refinement or civilization. Instead of annals, chronicles, dynastic or merely national histories, they practised ‘philosophical history’. The Enlightenment programme thus sketched is in some obvious ways antithetical to Nietzsche’s. But in important respects Nietzsche is continuing the Enlightenment programme. He is seeking ways in which human life can be improved in this world. In Zur Genealogie der Moral (GM II 24), he argues eloquently that to liberate humanity, the harmful moral ideal must be destroyed; for every new ideal requires the destruction of an old one. Modern man regards his natural inclinations as evil. We need a revaluation that would encourage us instead to regard as evil our

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unnatural, other-worldly inclinations. But that would require a new type of person, strong, creative and adventurous, who could redeem mankind from its false ideals and from the nihilism to which they must lead, and point towards a better future in the real world. Moreover, the revaluation will not consist only in the exercise of the will to power. The most strong-willed person will not simply impose his values on those around him. Rather, he will rely on the advances in knowledge, particularly in philological scholarship and natural science, with which the nineteenth century had built on the work of the Enlightenment. These are the branches of learning which Nietzsche describes in Der Antichrist as ‘die beiden großen Gegnerinnen alles Aberglaubens, Philologie und Medizin’ (A 47). This Nietzschean aspiration has various consequences which can be related to the Enlightenment programme. First, Nietzsche too requires a ‘science of man’, an understanding of humanity as it is. As a psychologist, Nietzsche works out a complex account of human nature, based not on reason but on what he calls ‘Affekte’ and what the Enlightenment called ‘the passions’. Shaftesbury’s concept of the ‘moral sense’ was especially devel­oped in the Scottish Enlightenment by Francis Hutcheson and Adam Smith, who based morality on sentiment rather than reason. The High Enlightenment agrees with Nietzsche in considering mankind as motivated primarily by powerful desires. Second, Nietzsche’s ambition requires the critique of religion which he carries out most vehemently in his late works, and which again continues a central pre­ occupation of the Enlightenment. Much of the Enlightenment’s criticism of religion was made from within Christianity. The radical critique of Christianity from a deist standpoint had been virtually suppressed by the mid-eighteenth century, and some of the most challenging subsequent criticisms were published only after the authors’ deaths: Hume’s Dialogues concerning Natural Religion and the Fragmente by Hermann Samuel Reimarus. By attacking ‘enthusiasm’, however, the Enlightenment, both Christian and deist, separated itself firmly from the sectarian spirit that had wrought havoc in the seventeenth century, and a series of its thinkers proposed medical explanations for the spiritual excitement that claimed divine inspiration. Third, although Nietzsche is not interested in political economy, he does have a theory of history, set forth especially in Zur Genealogie der Moral, which bears comparison with the ‘philosophical history’ practised in the Enlightenment. Like Enlightenment historians, he contrasts barbarism with civilization, but his evaluation of the two denies the Enlightenment’s favourite narrative of progress and aligns him more closely with Rousseau, whom he so often attacked. Finally, Nietzsche shares with the sceptical Enlighteners a strong sense of the limits of knowledge. This sense exists in tension with the reliance on nineteenthcentury scholarship and science noted above. At times Nietzsche draws these limits very narrowly, at times he allows more scope for knowledge, but especially in his later writings he professes a scepticism of which prefigurations can be found in the Enlightenment.

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Natural Histories Nietzsche’s complex relationship to the Enlightenment can be illustrated by the concept of nature. I shall juxtapose two texts which inquire into the foundation in nature of important human institutions, Hume’s Natural History of Religion and Nietzsche’s ‘Zur Naturgeschichte der Moral’, which forms the fifth section of Jenseits von Gut und Böse.14 Hume’s essay, published in 1757, is not about natural religion — that is, the body of knowledge about God which can be obtained by reason alone without divine revelation. It is about the origins of religion in the early stages of history. As a concession to his readership, Hume professes belief in what would now be called intelligent design. He maintains that philosophy suggests the existence of an intelligent and wise creator. However, since early humans were not yet capable of forming such elevated philosophical conceptions, they must naturally have been drawn to ideas of polytheism and idolatry. Living in material insecurity, primitive people personified the various natural forces, such as sun, wind, and rain, which were capable of doing them good or harm, and sought to propitiate them. Thus early religion was not based on ‘the pure love of truth’ but on ‘passions’, namely ‘the ordinary affections of human life; the anxious concern for happiness, the dread of future misery, the terror of death, the thirst of revenge, the appetite for food and other necessaries’.15 Not reason, therefore, but passions and appetites lie at the origin of religion. If Hume’s natural history of religion explains the origin of religion without revelation, Nietzsche’s natural history of morals goes further. It explains morality, not only without reference to any such revelation as Moses received in the form of the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai, but also without reference to any internal moral sense or categorical imperative. Nietzsche assumes that there is no universal morality. Actual moral systems are diverse and incompatible. Thus the Greeks regarded envy as a virtue and hope as a vice (M 38). There is not one ‘Moral’ but many ‘Moralen’. Like Hume, Nietzsche explains these moralities by reference to psychology. In a morality, Nietzsche finds three elements. The first is what he calls ‘Affekte’. ‘Affekte’ are emotions and desires, in contrast both to mere physical sensation and to intellectual cognition; they are what the eighteenth century called the passions. Moralities are a ‘Zeichensprache der Affekte’ ( JGB 187), an expression of the passions. This would suggest that it is desirable to be sharply aware of one’s passions, to be a person of powerful feelings, a naive or natural person in Schiller’s sense, who is liable also to seem somewhat childish among self-controlled adults who may have lost touch with their instincts.16 But that is only half the story, for morality also involves compulsion; it is a tyranny exercised upon nature ( JGB 188), which eventually becomes almost a second nature, as when a skilful musician plays a difficult instrument without apparent effort. Most people submit to someone else’s tyranny; some strong characters nowadays present themselves as obeying higher commands, such as their ancestors, the law, or even God ( JGB 199); only a few submit to their own tyranny, like artists. There are, however, occasional natural commanders, such as Napoleon, who is a portent of the great and terrible leaders to

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come. The third distinguishing feature of a morality is the character of the people who practise it. Here Nietzsche resorts to racial, geographical, and — especially — physiological imagery. Hard-working races need to control their drives by periodical fasting, illustrated by the English Sabbath ( JGB 189). Just as there are beasts and birds of prey, so some people are predatory (‘Raubmenschen’, JGB 197) by nature, such as Cesare Borgia: they have a tropical, luxuriant character, and to constrain them by morality is a futile attempt to make them into creatures different from what they are. In the section entitled ‘Völker und Vaterländer’ Nietzsche suggests that races can be distinguished by their faster or slower metabolism ( JGB 241), and talks about the German stomach slowly digesting the Jews in the population ( JGB 251). Earlier in the book Nietzsche suggests that our passions are similar in kind to the physiological processes which are essential to organic life ( JGB 36). There is room for debate about whether Nietzsche is here using physiology as a metaphor or whether he is presenting the body and its processes as the basic human reality. The latter would be consistent with the ‘große Vernunft’ ascribed to the body in Zarathustra. So a morality is ultimately dictated by one’s bodily nature, one’s physiological constitution. Religion Medicalized Physiology also underlies Nietzsche’s critique of religion. We remember how in Book iii of Zur Genealogie der Moral he evokes the priest, who, himself sick, pretends to minister to the illness of his f lock, but in fact keeps them in a state of bearable ill-health, sustained by dieting (fasting), trance-like states (prayer), and inactivity (compared to the Weir Mitchell rest cure), and alleviated by occasional licensed outbursts of religious enthusiasm (GM iii, 17). In general terms, Nietzsche is here continuing and radicalizing the Enlightenment critique of priestcraft, or the arts by which priests, from the earliest times on, had deceived the people in order to keep them in subjection. Thus Hume explains ‘the origin of Priests’ as ‘an invention of a timorous and abject superstition, which, ever diffident of itself, dares not offer up its own devotions, but ignorantly thinks to recommend itself to the Divinity, by the mediation of his supposed friends and servants’.17 More specifically, he is continuing the Enlightenment tradition of explaining religious enthusiasm in medical terms. Voltaire in Le Siècle de Louis XIV tells how the Huguenot extremists who fought a war in the Cévennes, and the Jansenists of Saint-Médard, both showed their devotion by convulsive gestures. One of the Huguenot prophets, du Serre, professed to impart inspiration to his followers by blowing into their mouths.18 As he had previously been a glass-blower, he might be thought to be putting his professional skills to a new use.19 Preachers foamed at the mouth and fell down speechless with swollen throat and stomach before delivering their discourses to an excited crowd. Shaftesbury saw these prophets when they came to London. They prompted his ‘Letter concerning Enthusiasm’ which ascribes religious enthusiasm to ‘vapours’ which may be induced by ‘public calamities’, ‘unwholesomeness of air or diet’, or natural disasters such as earthquakes; it then spreads as ‘popular fury’; people’s ‘very looks are infectious’, and ‘the disease is no sooner seen than caught’.20

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The convulsionaries of Saint-Médard were even more spectacular. A famous Jansenist who died in 1728 had a tomb erected in the cemetery of Saint-Médard in Paris, where miraculous cures took place and presently both the sick and the healthy assembled to take part in convulsive dancing, leaping, and hopping, while groaning, shrieking, and barking like dogs. Voltaire deals brief ly and contemptuously with these ‘enthousiastes’, regarding them as the last gasp of Jansenism: ‘Ces extravagances ont été en France les derniers soupirs d’une secte qui, n’étant plus soutenue par des Arnauld, des Pascal et des Nicole, et n’ayant plus que des convulsionnaires, est tombée dans l’avilissement.’21 Hume discusses seventeenth-century sects and religious conf licts in his History of England. He denounces the ‘faction, fanaticism, rebellion, and almost frenzy’ of the Civil War.22 But he is baff led by ‘fanaticism’ and ‘fury’, unable to explain them further. A tentative explanation can, however, be reconstructed from the History. Sects which abolish ceremonies, like the Presbyterians, invite believers to focus their minds ‘entirely on the contemplation of that divine Essence, which discovers itself to the understanding only’. Such concentration on the abstract is too much for human frailty. The mind, straining for these extraordinary raptures, reaching them by short glances, sinking again under its own weakness, rejecting all exterior aid of pomp and ceremony, was so occupied in this inward life, that it f led from every intercourse of society, and from every chearful amusement, which could soften or humanize the character.23

Concentration of interior vacuity provides no restraint for extravagant fancies which are strengthened by the belief that one belongs to the elect. These fancies are communicated by ‘social contagion’. Collective excitement, artificially sustained and heightened by preachers who believed themselves inspired, leads to medical symptoms, most obviously among the Quakers: ‘The violent enthusiasm of this sect, like all high passions, being too strong for the weak nerves to sustain, threw the preachers into convulsions, and shakings, and distortions in their limbs; and they thence received the appellation of quakers.’24 Nietzsche’s account of the sick priest and his f lock draws (by whatever inter­ mediaries) on this tradition of explaining religious enthusiasm in medical terms. He frames it in an evolutionary account of human development. The priest has the function of keeping the mediocre slave types under control and preventing them from interfering with the few high specimens of humanity, the ‘Glücksfälle’, who are the only hope for humanity’s future. Barbarism and Civilization The emergence of the sick priest forms part of a longer history, or prehistory, which Nietzsche reconstructs in Zur Genealogie der Moral. We can see this as a philosophical history such as the Enlightenment put forward. The theorists of the Scottish Enlightenment, in particular, developed an account of the history of humanity to which one of their number, Dugald Stewart, gave the somewhat misleading term ‘Theoretical or Conjectural History’, meaning, he explained, much the

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same as Hume’s term ‘natural history’.25 It was not speculative, but rather required, as Fania Oz-Salzberger puts it, ‘a careful balancing of “empirical” evidence and philosophical conjecture’.26 Their empirical evidence came from travellers’ reports about ‘primitive’ societies surviving in the present, especially about the natives of North America. Abundant information about them was available from Jesuit missionaries, among whom Joseph-François Lafitau deserves special mention for his early work in comparative ethnography, Mœurs des sauvages américains comparées aux mœurs des premiers temps (1724), in which he compared the customs of the native Americans to the early stages of Greek and Roman civilization. With the help of these ethnographic materials, the Scottish Enlighteners composed a narrative of social development which dispensed with such fictions as the social contract. In this narrative, commonly known as the ‘four stages theory’, society advanced through successive stages, each defined by the dominant mode of subsistence. The most primitive stage, that of hunting, was followed by herding, then by agriculture, and finally by commerce. The most systematic version of this narrative occurs in the lectures on jurisprudence which Adam Smith delivered in 1762–63 at Glasgow, and which we know from the transcript made by a zealous student.27 It appears also in The Wealth of Nations (1776), particularly in the sections of Book V where Smith discusses the costs of defence and justice at various stages of social development, and in the major works on the history of society by other thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment: Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), John Millar’s Observations concerning the Distinction of Ranks in Society (1771), and Lord Kames’s Sketches of the History of Man (1774).28 The four stages theory, also known as ‘stadial history’, has disturbing implications for human autonomy. It is based on the material needs of humanity. The transition from one stage to another happens when the available means of subsistence no longer satisfy people’s physical appetites. So stadial history presupposes, in Karen O’Brien’s words, that ‘historical development is the outcome of man’s irrational, individual appetites and activities.’29 Some thinkers drew back before the full deterministic implications of this theory. They wanted to allow some room for moral decisions and conscious choices, above all for the striving for liberty. In its radical versions, however, stadial history, though emphasizing subsistence, anticipates Marx’s historical scheme based on changes in the dominant mode of production. The most radical arguments based on stadial history are to be found in Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society, whose moral and political ideas, according to an anonymous review probably by Edward Gibbon, ‘were liable to provoke a “shudder” among the more “tranquil philosophers” of Enlightenment Europe’.30 Ferguson is concerned mainly with two stages, that of herding, which he calls ‘barbarism’ as opposed to the earlier ‘savagery’ of the hunter-gatherer stage, and the commercial society of his own day. Both Ferguson and Nietzsche were interested in what could be discovered about primitive society before written records. Ferguson compares the reports about native Americans by Lafitau and other missionaries with the picture of ancient Greek society preserved in the Homeric epics and with the accounts by Tacitus and Caesar of the ancient Germans. Nietzsche followed the example of his friend Paul Rée in drawing on Victorian ethnologists such as Edward

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Tylor, the first Professor of Anthropology at Oxford, who argued that ceremonies and superstitions in modern society were the residual ‘survivals’ of features of primitive society, and of Sir John Lubbock, who combined evolutionary biology and prehistoric archaeology in his inquiries into primitive religion and society. He seems to have carried the German translation of Lubbock’s The Origin of Civilisation and the Primitive Condition of Man (1870) around on his travels and drawn from it the arguments about primitive animism and hallucinations that appear especially in Menschliches, Allzumenschliches and Morgenröte.31 From his reading, Ferguson drew the conclusion that humanity was naturally warlike. Such a reading of human nature appealed to Ferguson, who had been regimental chaplain to the Black Watch, had been present at the Battle of Fontenoy, and, according to a popular but perhaps apocryphal anecdote, was only with difficulty prevented from leading the charge with a broadsword in his hand.32 ‘Mankind not only find in their condition the sources of variance and dissension; they appear to have in their minds the seeds of animosity, and to embrace the occasions of mutual opposition, with alacrity and pleasure.’33 He instances the ancient Greeks and Romans, for whom foreigners were automatically enemies; the Hottentots, who steal each other’s cattle and women, simple to provoke war; and the hostility to other nations felt strongly by present-day Europeans. This has sometimes seemed hard to reconcile with Ferguson’s emphasis on humanity’s natural benevolence.34 The two are related, however, inasmuch as belligerence towards foreigners promotes benevolence towards one’s kith and kin: The frequent practice of war tends to strengthen the bands of society, and the practice of depredation itself engages men in trials of mutual attachment and courage. What threatened to ruin and overset every good disposition in the human breast, what seemed to banish justice from the societies of men, tends to unite the species in clans and fraternities; formidable, indeed, and hostile to one another, but in the domestic society of each, faithful, disinterested, and generous.35

Thus, in the words of a recent study of Ferguson, ‘sociability was the product of a dynamic interaction between love and fear, friendship and animosity, and concord and discord’.36 Reading Ferguson with Nietzsche in mind, one notes that this warlike disposition f lourishes especially in the second of the four stages, that of herding, in which mobile bands of pastoralists prey on their settled neighbours. This way of life resembles that which Nietzsche ascribes to the primitive aristocrats who first developed a master morality. Charting the progress of humanity from barbarous to polished and civil society, Ferguson is alert to how polite society may be corrupted. Like Machiavelli, he admires the Greek and Roman republics in which all male citizens fought in the defence of their country. In his discussion of the division of labour in modern society, he finds it deplorable when the citizen is divided from the soldier and the defence of the realm is entrusted to mercenary troops. Analysing the potential in commercial society for corruption, he sees the worst corruption as occurring when people are seduced by wealth and comfort into neglecting the active defence of their freedoms.

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To avert such corruption, which must lead to despotism, Ferguson calls for the renewal of active civic virtue. Citizens must always be prepared to defend their rights. War can have a salutary effect in stimulating political activity, and prolonged peace can be pernicious: ‘Long intermissions of war, suffer, equally in every period of civil society, the military spirit to languish.’38 Nietzsche similarly welcomes war, pro­claim­ing that thanks to Napoleon we have entered a classic age of warfare (FW 362). Ferguson is not a determinist, and does not think corruption inevitable. He sees worrying precedents, however, in China, which he considers a bureaucratic despotism with a feeble and unwarlike population, and of course in the history of Rome. After the Essay he wrote a three-volume History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic (1783), recounting how civic virtue was eclipsed by corruption. Nietzsche, on the other hand, takes grim satisfaction in foreseeing a future renewal of aristocracy, which is implicit in his conception of history. While stadial history proceeds smoothly, and Marx’s historical scheme proceeds by class conf lict, Nietzsche’s scheme proceeds by a series of ironic reversals. The original tyranny of the noble masters leads to a slave revolt in morals and a redefinition of values. The values of the slaves appear much more unattractive than the displaced master morality, yet thanks to the inwardness fostered by slave morality, the slaves become much more profound and interesting than their original masters. In this scheme, too, the priest is an unstable element, initially a master but one who takes charge of the slave revolt and (unwittingly) prevents it from wholly destroying master morality. Nietzsche expects another ironic reversal to happen in the near future. The spread of democracy in Europe is reducing the population to an obedient herd, and it will be an easy matter for the new masters to take power and establish a new oligarchy of Übermenschen. In these future leaders, the psychological subtlety generated by the slave revolt in morals may be combined with the generosity of the masters, and this combination is embodied in the figure of Zarathustra. The Limits of Knowledge Nietzsche is sharply aware of the limitations on our knowledge. He often insists that we can know only what our cognitive apparatus permits us to know, and hence not what is true but what is useful for us in conducting our struggle for power. This scepticism has been highlighted in the Franco-American ‘new Nietzsche’ of recent decades. A central place has been given to the essay of 1873, ‘Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinne’, with its claim that all so-called ‘truth’ is merely fossilized metaphor, although Nietzsche’s failure to publish this essay implies that

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he did not wish to stand by its arguments. But in fact, as we have seen, Nietzsche often uses scholarship and science as a means of criticizing traditional values and particularly as a stick with which to beat religion. Priests are hostile to scholarship (‘Wissenschaft’) because they know it endangers their own power. Nietzsche defines ‘Wissenschaft’ (forgetting his scepticism about causality) as ‘der gesunde Begriff von Ursache und Wirkung’ (A 49). Theologians are hostile to truth because their character predisposes them to lie. Another, associated characteristic is their ‘Unvermögen zur Philologie’ (A 52): a priest who interprets a passage from the Bible has no sense of scholarly responsibility, but gives wild interpretations which would scandalize any philologist. Nietzsche was keenly interested in science, not only in biology but also in physics and cosmology.39 He does, however, question the universal claims of physical science. For example, he questions the organic and mechanical metaphors which have been used at various times to claim a knowledge of the world which we do not have (FW 109). The solar system we inhabit is a small enclave of order within a universe of chaos. The world lacks form or purpose; matter is an illusion; there are no laws of nature, merely necessities. Natural laws are only interpretation, not text; what counts is strength (‘Durchsetzung von Machtansprüchen’), and if this is just another interpretation, so much the better ( JGB 12). He proposes that what is immediately given in experience is our passions (‘unsere Welt der Begierden und Leidenschaften’, JGB 36), and suggests that they have the same kind of reality as the material world, which must therefore be in its intelligible character nothing but will to power. This scepticism may seem to sever Nietzsche sharply from the Enlightenment, which owed much to the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century: to Galileo, Kepler, and above all to Newton. It was thanks especially to Newton, according to Voltaire, that human reason had recently been born in England: ‘Elle [la raison humaine] est née dans ce siècle en Angleterre.’40 Newton’s empiricism provided a partial model for the Enlightenment ‘science of man’, which similarly started from facts, not speculations. Just as Newton had explained physical nature by the two opposing principles of attraction and repulsion, so Hume aimed to explain human nature from the opposing forces of self-love and reason.41 Scepticism about scientific knowledge can, however, be found even in the Enlightenment. A notorious example is Hume’s analysis of causality which was to arouse Kant from his ‘dogmatischen Schlummer’.42 As defined in A Treatise of Human Nature, ‘A cause is an object precedent and contiguous to another, and so united with it that the idea of the one determines the mind to form the idea of the other, and the impression of the one to form a more lively idea of the other.’43 Thus the concept of cause, supposedly the cement of the universe, is dissolved into a subjective conviction, and while the regularity of nature still guides our arguments from cause to effect, it is not a metaphysical principle but a rule of thumb derived from experience, reliable only because it has not yet been contradicted. Nietzsche, who knew Hume’s arguments (see e.g. FW 357), is similarly sceptical about causality, listing among the four great errors the ‘Irrtum einer falschen Ursächlichkeit’ (GD, ‘Die vier großen Irrtümer’). It may seem self-contradictory that both Hume and

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Nietzsche nevertheless use the language of causality freely, as when they inquire into the origins of mistaken religious beliefs. However, as Kant pointed out, Hume never denied that the concept of causality is indispensable for our understanding of the world, although his opponents wrongly attributed such a claim to him.44 Hume claimed only that causality lacks any logical foundation. It could be replied that Hume and Nietzsche direct their scepticism towards false understandings of causality, not towards causality itself.45 A less familiar example of scientific scepticism is Adam Smith’s essay on the psychological basis of astronomical systems, written probably in the late 1740s after his return from Oxford to his native Kirkcaldy, and first published in his posthumous Essays on Philosophical Subjects (1795). Smith begins from psychology, with distinctions among the sensations of wonder, surprise, and admiration. When we cannot discern the relation between two strikingly different phenomena, we feel wonder, and the task of philosophy (including natural philosophy, or physics) is to render these phenomena coherent. Smith undertakes to examine the four cosmological systems of Ptolemy, Copernicus, Descartes, and Newton not in their correspondence to truth, but only in their fitness or otherwise ‘to soothe the imagination, and to render the theatre of nature a more coherent, and therefore a more magnificent spectacle, than otherwise it would have appeared to be’.46 This implies that he is judging astronomical systems by aesthetic standards and showing that they are accepted on aesthetic grounds. On Smith’s account, observations and calculations could have been accommodated within more than one system. Thus Ptolemy’s system of eccentric spheres and epicycles could have been adjusted to fit newly observed phenomena. Copernicus’s system triumphed, not because it was the only possible one, but because it was superior to its rivals in simplicity, uniformity, and beauty, even though it defied the evidence of the senses by claiming that the earth was really in rapid motion. Newton’s system explained all the irregularities subsequently observed by Kepler, Cassini, and others, by introducing the force of gravity. Smith finds this almost too persuasive: And even we, while we have been endeavouring to represent all philosophical systems as mere inventions of the imagination, to connect together the otherwise discordant and disjointed phaenomena of nature, have insensibly been drawn in, to make use of language expressing the connecting principles of this one, as if they were the real chains which Nature makes use of to bind together her several operations.47

Newton’s system threatens to undermine Smith’s psychological argument by appear­ing to be such a convincing explanation of natural phenomena that it might actually be true. Yet Smith ends by insisting, a little desperately, that Newton’s system remains ‘an attempt to connect in the imagination the phaenomena of the Heavens’.48 How far is Smith’s essay intended as a serious philosophical argument, how far is it a jeu d’esprit? Looking back in 1773, Smith described it as a ‘fragment of an intended juvenile work’, and added: ‘I begin to think myself there is more refinement than solidity in some parts of it.’ On the other hand, it is likely that Smith wrote this

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essay after reading Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature and was seriously applying its scepticism to a key subject in what was then called ‘natural philosophy’.49 The examples of Enlightenment thought discussed in this essay not only confirm that ‘the Age of Reason’ is an over-simple and misleading label for the period: they also suggest that the Enlightenment’s commitment to reason cannot be kept neatly separate from its exploration of scepticism. In the major thinkers of the Enlightenment, reason and scepticism coexist in a constant tension. And a similar though sharper tension can be found in the work of Nietzsche. He has full respect for the nineteenth century’s achievements in philological scholarship and physical and physiological science, and regards scientific thinking as essential for his critique of established values. Yet he also opposed the claims of the sciences to authority when they seemed to conf lict with the freedom of the strong individual. In so far as his work expresses this tension, Nietzsche can be seen, however surprisingly, as an heir of the Enlightenment. Notes to Chapter 8 1. This is a revised version of the paper I gave when I was kindly invited by Helen Chambers to speak as the President’s guest at the meeting of the Conference of University Teachers of German in Scotland at Glasgow in October 2006. 2. On Nietzsche’s complex attitude towards the historical Enlightenment and the process of enlightenment, see Nicholas Martin, ‘ “Auf klärung und kein Ende”: The Place of Enlightenment in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thought’, German Life and Letters, 61 (2008), 79–97. 3. Nietzsche’s works are quoted from his Werke, ed. by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 8 divisions (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1968 — ), and abbreviated as follows: A = Der Antichrist; FW = Die fröhliche Wissenschaft; GD = Götzen-Dämmerung; GM = Zur Genealogie der Moral; JGB = Jenseits von Gut und Böse; M = Morgenröte. 4. See Hume’s letter to Turgot, June 1768, in The Letters of David Hume, ed. by J. Y. T. Greig, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), ii, 180. A comparison between Hume and Nietzsche is particularly inviting: see Craig Beam, ‘Hume and Nietzsche: Naturalists, Ethicists, AntiChristians’, Hume Studies, 22 (1996), 299–324; P. J. E. Kail, ‘Nietzsche and Hume: Naturalism and Explanation’, Journal of Nietzsche Studies, 37 (2009), 5–22. One obvious point of comparison, which there is not room to explore in the present essay, is their scepticism about personal identity: see Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. by L. A. Selby-Bigge, revised by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), p. 252, and Nietzsche, GM i, 13 and elsewhere. 5. Johann Gottfried Herder, in his Werke, ed. by Günter Arnold and others, 10 vols (Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–2000), vi: Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, ed. by Martin Bollacher (1989), p. 655. 6. Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 7. 7. John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 41. 8. Hume, Treatise, p. 415. 9. ‘An Inquiry concerning Virtue or Merit’, in Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. by Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 175. 10. The best-known exponent of ths interpretation is Elisabeth Labrousse: see her Pierre Bayle, 2 vols (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963–64). 11. H. B. Nisbet, ‘Lessing and Pierre Bayle’, in Tradition and Creation: Festschrift for Elizabeth Wilkinson, ed. by C. P. Magill, B. A. Rowley, and C. J. Smith (Leeds: Maney, 1978), pp. 13–29 (p. 14). In support of this interpretation, see David Wootton, ‘Pierre Bayle: Libertine?’, in Studies

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in Eighteenth-Century European Philosophy, ed. by M. A. Stewart (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 197–226; Israel, Radical Enlightenment, pp. 332–41, and Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670–1752 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 72–85. 12. Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment, p. 28. 13. Ibid., p. 29, referring to Hume, Treatise, p. xvi. 14. Their ‘methodological similarity’ is noted, but not explored, by David Couzens Hoy, ‘Nietzsche, Hume, and the Genealogical Method’, in Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche’s ‘On the Genealogy of Morals’, ed. by Richard Schacht (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 251–68 (p. 253). 15. David Hume, The Natural History of Religion, ed. by A. Wayne Colver, and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. by John Valdimir Price (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 32. 16. See Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung, in Friedrich Schiller, Sämtliche Werke, ed. by Gerhard Fricke and Herbert G. Göpfert, 5 vols (Munich: Hanser, 1958), v, 701–02. 17. Hume, ‘Of Superstition and Fanaticism’, in Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), pp. 75–80 (p. 77). 18. Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, ed. by Louis Moland, 50 vols (Paris: Garnier, 1877–83), xv (1878), 33. 19. Ronald Knox, Enthusiasm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950), p. 358. 20. Shaftesbury, ‘A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm’, in Characteristics, p. 10. 21. Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, xv, 61, 62. 22. Hume, The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688, 6 vols (London: Cadell, 1778; repr. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1983), vi, 141. 23. Ibid., v, 68. 24. Ibid., vi, 143–44. 25. Dugald Stewart, ‘Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith, Ll.D.’, in The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. by D. D. Raphael and A. S. Skinner, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976–),iii: Essays on Philosophical Subjects, ed. by W. P. D. Wightman, J. C. Bryce, and I. S. Ross (1980), pp. 269–351 (p. 293). 26. Fania Oz-Salzberger, Translating the Enlightenment: Scottish Civic Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 112. 27. Quoted at length in R. L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 116–25. 28. See ibid., pp. 150–73. Millar’s book is better known by the title of the third, heavily revised edition, The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (1779). 29. Karen O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 141. 30. Iain McDaniel, Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), p. 2. 31. See David S. Thatcher, ‘Nietzsche’s Debt to Lubbock’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 44 (1983), 293–309; Robin Small, Nietzsche and Rée (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), p. 72. 32. See James Buchan, Capital of the Mind: How Edinburgh Changed the World (London: John Murray, 2003), p. 218; Fania Oz-Salzberger, ‘Adam Ferguson’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 33. Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society 1767, ed. by Duncan Forbes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966), p. 20. 34. Forbes, ‘Introduction’, Ferguson, Essay, p. xix. 35. Ferguson, Essay, p. 101. 36. McDaniel, p. 75. 37. Ferguson, Essay, p. 243. 38. Ibid., p. 213. 39. See Gregory Moore, Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Robin Small, Nietzsche in Context (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001). 40. Dictionnaire philosophique, art. ‘Newton et Descartes’, in Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, xx (1879), 122. See Voltaire’s brief account of Newton’s system in Lettres philosophiques (1734) and his fuller exposition in Eléments de la philosophe de Newton (1738).

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41. See John Henry, ‘Science and the Coming of Enlightenment’, in The Enlightenment World, ed. by Martin Fitzpatrick and others (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 10–26 (p. 24). 42. Immanuel Kant, ‘Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik, die als Wissenschaft wird auftreten können’, in Werke, ed. by Wilhelm Weischedel, 6 vols (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1958), iii, 109–264 (p. 118). 43. Hume, Treatise, p. 170. 44. Kant, ‘Prolegomena’, pp. 116–17. 45. See Kail, ‘Nietzsche and Hume’, p. 8. Nietzsche and Hume on causality are brief ly compared by Peter Poellner, Nietzsche and Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 36–37. 46. Smith, ‘The Principles which Lead and Direct Philosophical Enquiries: Illustrated by the History of Astronomy’, in The Glasgow Edition, iii, 31–105 (p. 46). 47. Smith, ‘Principles’, p. 105. 48. Ibid. 49. See Ian Simpson Ross, The Life of Adam Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 99.

C h ap t e r 9

v

Between Yesterday and Tomorrow: London in the Eyes of Richard Friedenthal (1896–1979) Rüdiger Görner, Queen Mary University of London ‘London is the haven for every lost cause’, concluded a mid nineteenth-century report on political refugees, later quoted by Richard Friedenthal in his cultural history of London. But he was quick to add that this metropolis had also given shelter and inspiration to projects which succeeded. Friedenthal’s monograph on London came out in 1960 with a surprisingly minor Munich publisher, given the author’s standing at the time.1 A German-Jewish émigré from Berlin-Nikolassee, Friedenthal reached London in late autumn 1938 and soon found the British capital an ideal object for his literary and cultural studies. But more immediate concerns preoccupied him after his emigration: matters of survival in a foreign country, adjusting to the community of German-speaking exiles, coping with the (traumatic) difficulties of internment as an ‘enemy alien’, and, after 1941, working as secretary to the re-established exile PEN of German-speaking authors — together with Alfred Kerr, Friedrich Burschell, and others — alongside some more permanent work as journalist and translator, mainly for the BBC.2 It is particularly noteworthy to find, though, that in London Friedenthal referred to the situation of German exiles in the mid nineteenth century and at the outbreak of the First World War, but without mentioning them at all in his short section on London during the Second World War. Friedenthal came to London as a protégé of Stefan Zweig, whom he had known since the 1920s3 and who had brought him into contact with the publishers Axel Juncker and, most importantly, Anton Kippenberg with his prestigious Insel Ver­lag. They soon collaborated on specific projects, including assembling more material on Balzac and their translation of Irwin Edman’s essay Candle in the Dark: A Postscript to Despair (1939), hitherto a much-underrated inspiration for Zweig during the last phase of his life.4 Edman (1896–1954), a professor of philosophy at Columbia, appealed to both writers because of his decidedly humanist stance in political matters. With Zweig, Friedenthal shared his interest in the great explorers, Columbus and Cortes, his passion for poetry, a particular interest in the novella as a concise form of narration, as well as biography and its specific demands on historical

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research and narrative skills. Even on their arrival in Rio de Janeiro in October 1941, Stefan Zweig remembered the impression reading Friedenthal’s novella Marie Rebscheider made on him back in 1927 and eagerly awaited the next major book by his friend, whose company in Bath during the last phase of Zweig’s exile in England had been a source of comfort and joy.5 In terms of style and narrative approach Zweig must have recognized this particular novella as closest to his own literary practices. As with so many of Zweig’s stories, Friedenthal’s Marie Rebscheider offers a psychological study of a woman in extreme circumstances, in this case a victim of violation who not only pardons the rapist after he is released from prison, but falls in love with him. Friedenthal’s prose at the time was as sensually charged as was Zweig’s, as exemplified by descriptions like this one: Alle ihre Sinne waren reizbar und offen, wie sie es nie gekannt hatte: der Wind fuhr ihr direkt ans Herz und fachte es in Stößen auf, klare Lohe füllte ihr erstickend den Hals, ihre Fußsohlen spürten jeden Stein der Straße und der Mund bis in den Gaumen hinein die Schärfe der Luft.6

I quote this passage because it also illustrates the difference between Friedenthal’s early prose and his later achievements as a stylist as evidenced both by his monograph on London and the masterly biographies of his later years. The development of striking clarity in Friedenthal’s style of writing was equally apparent in his poetry. In fact, some of his last poems are more reminiscent of Fontane than Zweig, especially in terms of their laconic wisdom, dialogical structure, and sheer serenity.7 Somewhat surprisingly, despite sharing Theodor Fontane’s observational skills and his sense of the unusual, irregular, and uncanny, as evidenced by his views on London, Friedenthal featured Fontane’s thoughts and writings about the city only marginally in London. Admittedly, the very title of his book, ‘London between Yesterday and Tomorrow’, suggests a homage to Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday (1942) and his late study on Brazil as the ‘country of the future’ (1941). Again without mentioning him, Friedenthal positioned London precisely where Zweig had located himself: between then and tomorrow. But his perspective was that of the late 1950s, with London still marred by the scars of the Second World War. Friedenthal mainly describes the buzz of the metropolis in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and alludes to the hub London would once again become. What Friedenthal seemed to have had in mind was to design a ‘biography’ of a world city, decades before Peter Ackroyd put this ambition into an infinitely more detailed practice. As it happened, Friedenthal’s ‘London’ project was framed by the completion of two biographies (on Georg Friedrich Händel and Leonardo da Vinci, both in 1959) and work on a third, which became his most successful book, Goethe: Sein Leben und seine Zeit (1963). In his later project, a voluminous biographical study on Karl Marx, which occupied him until the end of his life, he was to revisit his favourite nineteenth-century London. Notwithstanding Friedenthal’s close proximity to Zweig, with London zwischen Gestern und Morgen he distinguished himself decisively from the legacy of his friend and long-time mentor in that he portrayed one particular city, which Zweig never did — London — with the exception of the latter’s extensive references to the city in Die Welt von Gestern. Understandably, Friedenthal became ever more anxious to

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point out the differences between himself and Zweig. In an interview he argued for instance that Zweig’s approach to biography had been distinctly essayistic and the latter’s studies on Joseph Fouché and on Marie Antoinette were neither of them models for his own conception of biography, but rather Carl Justi’s biography on Winckelmann, which Friedenthal regarded as the best biography ever written in German.8 More than anything else, detail mattered to Friedenthal in biographical writing.9 He quoted Cromwell’s words to his portraitist, ‘warts and all’, as the proper motto for a biography.10 What, then, was the particular detail in Friedenthal’s quasi-biographical exploration of London that made his narrative special? Arguably, it was his point that London had never been subject to comprehensive town planning. ‘London’ was a conglo­merate or, at best, an occasional synthesis of rather disparate entities, strong in indi­v idual character and resilient against architecturally unifying conceptions. In doing justice to this urban tendency to put growth before grace, Friedenthal empha­sized the gradual and at the same time erratic side of London’s development. This is also ref lected in the structure of his book, as it presents itself in sections rather than chapters and does not offer a table of contents. By reading this book, one is supposed to be drawn into the maelstrom of its narrative and ever-moving object. Friedenthal points to various attempts at comprehensive city planning in Lon­ don’s history, most notably by Inigo Jones, Sir Christopher Wren, and, in Regency London, John Nash. He highlights the fact that even Wren, who designed some thirty churches in London, prompting the Conte Algarotti to claim that this city was the ‘country of campaniles’,11 envisaged the Royal Exchange as the centre from which all major roads would radiate. The description of London’s building history is one of the most compelling aspects of Friedenthal’s book, with references to James Burton, who worked together with Nash on the construction of many a square, and Thomas Cubitt, who famously designed Belgrave Square. Friedenthal makes a great deal of the architectural dichotomy between the tightly built City and the infinitely more generous use of space in what was to become the West End right down to Chelsea and Belgravia. These different designs ref lected different mentalities and social attachments: The West End aristocracy needed the City to finance its extravagances, whilst the City liked to decorate itself with its connections to the Court and the nobility. Equally compelling is Friedenthal’s account of the ‘power of the City’, and he offers some interesting cases which ref lect both the bourgeois solidity of that power and its volatility. Interestingly, one such case he singles out was Barings Bank. The Baring family, who came originally from Bremen, were intrinsically linked with the rise of the British Empire and its world trading capacity. Johann Baring of Bremen (1697–1748) founded his business originally in Exeter in 1717, but his sons moved to London in 1762 and established John & Francis Baring & Co. Their portrait, created by Sir Thomas Lawrence, is an icon of bourgeois wealth in Hanoverian England. From 1806 Baring Brothers & Co. financed Britain’s wars against Napoleon.12 But the Baring bank was also connected with spectacular difficulties at the end of the Victorian era, when, in 1890, it had to ask the British Government for support

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after some of its business in South America collapsed. But the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Goschen, a descendent of the famous Göschen publishers in Leipzig and another German who had lost his Umlaut on these shores, denied the Barings any such rescue operation.13 It was the Governor of the Bank of England who intervened by setting up a back-up fund with borrowed money from Russia and France, which enabled the successful transformation of this private bank into a shareholder organization. Friedenthal did not live to see how this bank turned into a symbol of ruinous capitalism after its spectacular collapse in 1995 following poor speculative investments by one of its main traders (Nick Leeson) and insufficient management.14 It foreshadowed what was to come some thirteen years later when the City of London turned into one of the epicentres in the most severe financial crisis since 1929. Just how much Friedenthal’s study on London represented a culmination of his previous work on English themes becomes apparent when we consider his essayistic survey Die englische Kultur, written for the British Information Service for distribution in West Germany in 1953.15 This stunningly comprehensive investigation into the nature of English culture, to a certain extent an equivalent to his German Study Guide of 1949,16 can now be seen as a major contribution to the rebuilding of post-war Anglo-German cultural relations. It even includes English poetry in translation, some by Friedenthal himself (extracts from T. S. Eliot’s ‘East Coker’, together with poems by Walter de la Mare, W. H. Auden, G. M. Hopkins, and D. H. Lawrence appear in his version, as well as translations of Christina Rossetti and Alfred Lord Tennyson by Alfred Kerr and Georg von der Vring). The documentary value of this publication is reinforced by Friedenthal’s attempt to offer an objective account of a culture which he clearly regarded as a measure for the reconstruction of Germany. His explicit references to London in Die englische Kultur are surprisingly sparse but poignant. What comes through in particular is his admiration for Christopher Wren, whom he saw as the ‘George Frederick Handel’ of architects and builders: Sein großartiger Plan zum Neubau der ganzen Stadt nach dem verheerenden Brand von 1666 kam leider nicht zur Ausführung. Er hätte London zur schönsten Stadt Europas gemacht. Man kann nicht mit gutem Gewissen behaupten, daß seine Nachfolger dies Ziel erreicht haben.17

This is one of the rare moments where Friedenthal, the gentleman scholar, allowed himself thinly veiled criticism of town planning in London after Wren. And perhaps we can find in this criticism a pointer towards the way in which German cities were rebuilt after their ‘great fires’ of the war. Already, in Die englische Kultur, Friedenthal had singled out London as a tradi­ tional haven for political refugees (‘Nicht vergessen werden soll, daß England, und besonders London, seit den Tagen Voltaires das vornehmste Refugium für die Verfolgten und Exilierten aller Länder war’18). But, as in the later London zwischen Gestern und Morgen, he will only refer to examples from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and not to the years 1933 and 1938 respectively. It seems that Friedenthal had tried to compartmentalize this, his very own, experience and he needed to write a novel to come to terms with it. His extensive but tightly composed

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narrative on this traumatic subject bears the title Die Welt in der Nußschale.19 This is an autobiographical novel 20 about Friedenthal’s experience as an ‘enemy alien’ in the internment camp on the Isle of Man. In it, ‘London’ serves as a narrative framework. It is a very different London from the metropolis he had grown to admire. In his novel the capital shows its sinister side with policemen deporting ‘enemy aliens’ in the early hours of the morning in their infamous vehicle, the so-called ‘Black Maria’. And yet the tone of this narrative is light and the policemen come across as civilized. Friedenthal clearly wanted to make the point that this was not the Gestapo raiding houses of suspects and worse. But what mattered now to him was not the centre of London but its outskirts: Die Autobusse fuhren zum Rennplatz Kempton Park im Süden von London. Etwa hundert andere Gefährte hielten bereits vor der Anfahrt. Am Eingang standen Posten der Buckingham Guards mit aufgepf lanztem Bajonett. Der ganze Gebäudekomplex war mit Stacheldraht eingezäunt; in gewissen Abständen erhoben sich hölzerne Wachtürme.21

When the group around the protagonist, Konrad Gärtner, returns to London after several months of internment on the Isle of Man it will do so as ‘friendly aliens’.22 Their reunion takes place in the third year of the war in the undamaged main building of the Trade Unions near London Bridge. The novel finishes with a striking image: a leaking gas pipe nourishes a tower-high f lame that generates a thundering noise.23 It is a symbol for a city in which even wasted resources can turn into a sign of undiminished energy. The internment camp and London are two ‘nutshells’ of different shapes and sizes for two worlds that are nonetheless related to each other, mainly through forms of memory. The city retains the knowledge of its development in its buildings whilst the world of the camp recalls things past as a form of nourishment which also provides substance for new hope. Friedenthal’s narrator describes in minute detail aspects of cultural memory. This becomes particularly apparent in conversations amongst some inmates about music, which ref lect as much London’s musical culture as one prime aspect of Europe’s cultural heritage. It is interesting to see how Friedenthal’s narrative integrates information drawn very indirectly from his familiarity with Stefan Zweig and his papers. For instance, one protagonist in Die Welt in der Nußschale refers to the fact that Richard Wagner had made piano arrangements of arias from operas by Donizetti;24 Friedenthal would have seen the relevant Wagner autograph in his friend’s extensive collection. To write means to weave in words; and the fabric that emerges and the pattern that evolves as the textual structure of a language composition dress the body of thoughts, which continues to transform itself underneath these verbal clothes until it has outgrown them, or they no longer fit for other reasons. Writing about cities, in particular if they are of London’s size, can cause this impression. For ‘writing the city’ often means that its products seem dated by the time of its completion. It may be that Friedenthal centred so demonstratively on London in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries because he could demonstrate how features of his ‘contemporary’ London were already firmly established in those centuries. Characteristics of the past, such as London’s entertainment culture from

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the Haymarket Theatre to the Vauxhall Gardens of Handel’s time and the political comedy of John Rich, as well as the interplay between social revolt and popular entertainment through The Beggar’s Opera, provided Friedenthal with marks of orientation but also sudden insights into rather specific causalities: ‘Der ChaplinFilm ist ein Kind der Music Hall.’25 Interestingly, though, Friedenthal described the exemplary journalistic tradition in London from the early days of the Spectator and The Times, but did not comment on the fact that from it not a single antifascist periodical emerged in the 1930s, nor did the eighteenth-century tradition of the literary coffee house survive, a particular grievance for many an émigré in the 1930s.26 But there was more to Friedenthal’s (early) London experience, which partly translated itself into his collection of poetry Brot und Salz,27 even though it is interesting to find that he himself did not include a specific London poem in his collection. He approached the London scene from the outskirts and indirectly through the eyes of John Donne and his elegiac poem ‘Twickenham Garden’.28 His choice of poem is telling. It is a possible idyll outside London, but one profoundly disturbed by pain, sorrow, and unfulfilled love. In its emotional ambivalence Donne’s poem is the perfect ref lection of someone deeply uncertain of his position in life. This said, some of Donne’s verses sound harsher than Friedenthal’s rendering, for instance the phrase ‘But O! self-traitor’ reads merely ‘O Trug!’ in this translation. It appears that for Friedenthal in 1943 it was too self-condemning to refer to his lyrical I in terms of self-betrayal or ‘Verräter an sich selbst’. This tendency to soften the blow of this poem with its barrage of self-accusations is present in the second stanza, too. Donne’s exclamation: ‘Love, let me | Some senseless piece of this place be’ becomes: ‘O so verwandle den, der dich nicht lassen kann, | In ein Stück unbeseelten Gartens dann’.29 But ‘senseless’ is, again, tougher than ‘unbeseelt’. It suggests the transformation into something meaningless. When the poem’s subject turns from self-accusation to accusing the supposed emotional cruelty of the Beloved — in anticipation of Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ — Donne does not mince his words: ‘O perverse sex, where none is true but she, | Who’s therefore true, because her truth kills me.’ Even though Friedenthal’s translation comes to a similarly outspoken conclusion, it shifts the meaning in a significant way by replacing the word ‘perverse’ with ‘nonsensical’ and implying that the female belongs to a specific ‘order’: ‘Unsinniges Geschlecht: getreu nur ihrem Orden | Und ihrer innersten Natur, wenn sie uns morden.’30 The inclusion of the word ‘order’ here suggests a combination of female and quasi-clerical allegiance, a fusion of the secular and the sacred in woman which poses a threat to males. Perhaps unwittingly, Friedenthal’s translation offers a gendered reading of Donne’s poem avant la lettre. But this particular choice of poem may have had an even more allegorical meaning: Donne’s female could represent, in Friedenthal’s reading, the (female) megacity with which he finds it difficult to cope, even when staying in her more idyllic outskirts. The city remains a sinister force full of temptations and alluring in nature. Her poet is deceiving himself in thinking that poems could ‘tame’ her. Ultimately, it is the city that dominates her ‘explorer’, who cannot but be hopelessly lost in her dangerous and fateful charms. Friedenthal himself was to make a renewed attempt to settle in London before

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he could really feel ‘at home’ there. In 1952 he moved to the Federal Republic of Germany and four years later returned to London, back to Burgess Hill in Hampstead. In two of his biographies, the one on Handel and his epic undertaking on Karl Marx, he described the lives of a legendary composer and an intellectual who mastered the ‘female London’, Handel arguably more so than Marx. In fact, in Georg Friedrich Händel, his first major contribution to the biographical genre, Friedenthal emphasized the composer’s two attempts to settle in London (‘Kapellmeister in Hannover und Gast in London’ and ‘Nochmals Hannover und dann auf immer nach London’).31 As mentioned previously, the large sections on London in Friedenthal’s bio­ graphy of Handel come close to an elaborate case study for his monograph on London. Written with the bicentenary of Handel’s death in mind, the London sections in his biography obviously focus on the city’s entertainment sector, with its tension between highbrow Italian operatic culture and the growing demands for popular entertainment. He gives detailed accounts of the Haymarket Theatre’s significance under the directorship of Aaron Hill, the role played by the SwissGerman impresario Johann Jacob Heidegger in London’s musical life and as a networker on Handel’s behalf, and the cultural function of Vauxhall Gardens with its Handel monument erected during the composer’s lifetime. Friedenthal shows the liveliness of journalism in London at the time, with the caricature as one of its most important accompanying media. William Hogarth and Joseph Goupy, who created stage sets for many a Handel opera, are introduced as the social portraitists of London, with the latter’s caricature of Handel, ‘The Charming Brute’ of 1754, as the pinnacle of vindictiveness to which the composer was exposed in later life. It shows a pig-faced glutton sitting on a wine barrel playing the organ and surrounded by expensive foods but confronted with a mirror, which he tries to avoid looking into.32 The caption reads: ‘I am myself alone’33 — the deserted artist in the midst of a buzzing capital, irrevocably exposed to fate. Notes to Chapter 9 1. Richard Friedenthal, London zwischen Gestern und Morgen (Munich and Vienna: Wilhelm Andermann Verlag, 1960), p. 189 (henceforth cited as LGM with page number). 2. See Hans Wagener, Biographie des großen Biographen (Gerlingen: Bleicher Verlag, 2002), pp. 75–134. 3. See Stefan Zweig’s note ‘Ein junger Dichter’, Berliner Tagblatt, 25 January 1925, in Stefan Zweig über Richard Friedenthal/Richard Friedenthal über Stefan Zweig: Zum 100. Geburtstag von Stefan Zweig am 28. November 1981, ed. by Klaus Gräbner (Gundelsheim: Bussard, 1981), pp. 5–6. In this article Zweig emphasized Friedenthal’s early poetic achievements, mainly with reference to the poetry volumes Tanz und Tod (Berlin: Egon Fleischel & Co., 1918) and Dementer (Berlin: Axel Juncker Verlag, 1924). 4. See Rüdiger Görner, ‘Retrospection and Utopia: Stefan Zweig’s Conception of World Literature from the Spirit of Historiography’, paper given at the conference Zweig in the World at the University of California at Berkeley, 25 September 2014, in press. 5. Richard Friedenthal, Marie Rebscheider: Vier Novellen (Leipzig: Insel-Verlag,1927). See Stefan and Lotte Zweig’s South American Letters: New York, Argentina and Brazil 1940–42., ed. by Darién J. Davis and Oliver Marshall (New York and London: Continuum, 2010), p. 143. 6. Friedenthal, Marie Rebscheider, pp. 2–3.

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7. For example ‘Mit einem Glase Wein’, dedicated to Carl Zuckmayer, and ‘Das Alter’ (‘Schön ist es zu denken, daß einmal der Lärm verstummt’) in Wagener, pp. 264 and 268. 8. See Wagener, p. 221. 9. See Richard Friedenthal, ‘Zum Thema Biographie’, Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung: Jahrbuch 1971 (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1972), pp. 99–102 (p. 101). 10. Ibid. 11. Friedenthal, London, p. 56. 12. Philip Ziegler, The Sixth Great Power: A History of One of the Greatest of All Banking Families, the House of Barings, 1762–1929 (New York: Harper Collins, 1988). 13. Ibid., p. 85. 14. Nicholas William Leeson and Edward Whitley, Rogue Trader: How I Brought down Barings Bank and Shook the Financial World (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996). 15. Richard Friedenthal, Die englische Kultur. Eine Übersicht. Beilage zur Englischen Rundschau (Bad Godesberg: Publications Branch, British Information Services, 1953). Some 70,000 copies were printed and distributed by the British authorities: Wagener, p. 158. 16. Richard Friedenthal, German Study Guide; Joshua Rosenberg, German: How to Speak and Write It (London: Odhams Press, 1949). 17. Friedenthal, Die englische Kultur, p. 53. 18. Ibid., p. 78. 19. Richard Friedenthal, Die Welt in der Nußschale: Roman (Munich: R. Piper & Co. Verlag, 1956). 20. It is possible to interpret Friedenthal’s interest in this genre as a response to the English tradition of autobiographical writing, which he singled out in Die englische Kultur, p. 86. 21. Friedenthal, Die Welt in der Nußschale, p. 38. 22. Ibid., p. 421. 23. Ibid., p. 424. 24. Ibid., p. 166. 25. Friedenthal, London, p. 238. 26. Wagener, p. 78. 27. Richard Friedenthal, Brot und Salz (London: Barnard & Westwood Ltd, 1943). 28. Poems of John Donne, ed. by E. K. Chambers, 2 vols (London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1896), i, 29–30. 29. Friedenthal, Brot und Salz, p. 80. 30. Ibid. 31. Richard Friedenthal, Georg Friedrich Händel in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1959), pp. 40–48. 32. Ibid., p. 119. 33. Ibid.

PA RT I V

v

Germany and Europe

C h ap t e r 10

v

The Franco-Prussian War: War Reporting in the Irish Print Media 1870–1873 Eda Sagarra, Trinity College, Dublin The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, the last of the three wars of German unification, played a key role in the life and work of Theodor Fontane, whose oeuvre has inspired such an important part of Helen Chambers’s contribution to German studies. Yet to write about Irish interest in that seminal conf lict of nineteenthcentury European history for Helen’s Festschrift must appear hard to justify, for Ireland scarcely figures in Fontane’s historical or fictional writing. ‘Irland lasse ich absichtlich fallen’, observes Melusine with aristocratic disdain in conversation with Woldemar Stechlin’s admiring friends, Czako and Rex.1 Understandably perhaps, since Ireland, unlike Scotland, possessed no literary profile, neither in Fontane’s oeuvre nor in nineteenth-century German literature more generally. And, indeed, what possible interest could a far-off community of illiterate and troublesome peasants hold for a Countess Melusine Ghiberti, née Barby, who after spending her formative years in the capital of the British Empire is now a citizen of continental Europe’s premier city of Berlin? True, peripatetic German travellers to nineteenthcentury Ireland reported in considerable numbers on their experiences in the German media — Fontane was not one of them — but in general their impressions only served to reinforce stereotypical views of the poverty-stricken and ignorant Irish.2 Similarly, with some few exceptions,3 Germany scarcely figured in the work of contemporary Irish writers. It is surprising therefore to encounter an intense if passing interest displayed by the Irish metropolitan and regional press in the FrancoPrussian War of 1870–71. The Irish reader might be on familiar terms with Boston or New York, Missouri or Chicago, thanks either to his4 own sojourn in the United States or through the remittances sent home from the Irish immigrant community in those cities. But who, apart from a handful of travellers from the counties Galway or Mayo had ever set foot in Paris or Berlin, let alone Strasbourg or Kiel? Yet collectively, these Irish newspapers provided their readers during the FrancoPrussian War and in its immediate aftermath with many hundreds of columns on the topic.5 Some dozen Irish newspapers, based over a thousand kilometres from the theatres of the war, made the progress of the conf lict during 1870 a regular feature of their pages, many affording it front-page coverage or leading article status.

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As most English people and not a few Germans know, it is a long way to Tipperary. Yet what conceivable attraction could the Franco-Prussian conf lict possess for the good citizens of the rich agricultural land of South Tipperary as they opened the pages of their twice-weekly paper, the Nenagh Guardian, founded in that prosperous Munster market town a decade before the uprising of 1848? Or indeed what interest could that war hold for readers in Connaught, the most westerly province of the island of Ireland, where no less than four regional newspapers reported at irregular intervals on the advance of the Prussian troops and the plight of the French? The Ballinrobe Chronicle (1868–) in distant County Mayo6 was particularly assiduous in keeping its readers up to date on the course of the war, its reports occasionally echoed by the Mayo Examiner (1868–76). Nor did it fail to attract the editorial attention of the Tuam Herald (1837–) or that of the Connaught Telegraph (1830–) in neighbouring Galway. The Midlands were represented by the Anglo-Celt (1846–), with subtitle ‘and Meath, Westmeath Leitrim, and Cavan Advertiser’, and Ireland’s eastern province of Leinster by the Dundalk Democrat (1849–), located just south of the present-day border with Northern Ireland. In Ulster the Belfast Newsletter (1738–), organ of Protestant loyalism, showed passing interest in the Prussian court but virtually none in the conduct of the war. The war featured prominently if eclectically in Ireland’s oldest national newspaper and organ of moderate liberal opinion, the Freeman’s Journal (1763–1924),7 published daily in Ireland’s capital Dublin. The most tireless in its reporting, at least in the first months, was the much-censored organ of resurgent Irish nationalism, The Nation (1842–97). It had been founded by the poet Thomas Davis, translator of Freiligrath and Herwegh, and his associates as part of the Young Ireland movement, which in turn had been inspired by its German counterpart.8 Throughout the nineteenth century Irishmen had been well represented in the ranks of foreign armies. They had fought in Napoleon’s Peninsular War — Wellington was by birth a (reluctant) Irishman — and in the Crimean War of 1854–56; Irish émigrés played a prominent role in nineteenth-century America’s wars of independence and conquest. Their presence both in the officer ranks and as infantrymen in Europe’s continental wars had however a much longer tradition dating from the late sixteenth through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These refugees from Elizabeth I’s Tudor wars and later as defeated supporters of the Stuart cause were known as the ‘Wild Geese’, many serving with distinction in the armies of France, Spain, Austria, Italy, and even Russia. Others fought as mercenaries, and in the nineteenth century in considerable numbers as members of the British armed forces. Irish military presence in the Franco-Prussian War was limited to an Irish ambulance corps in France9 and to an Irish Brigade, recruited in large part from the ambulance corps, to support the French cause against the invaders and on whose progress The Nation reported with evident satisfaction.10 Irish people, then as now,11 were avid consumers of print media, and most reasonably sized towns in rural Ireland from the 1860s forward boasted their own, usually weekly, newspaper. Columns had to be filled and ‘Our London Corres­ pondent’ was ever available to supply material. Irish newspapers had traditionally been more heavily taxed than their British counterparts. However, commercial, fiscal, and social developments in post-Famine (1845–47) Ireland, together with the impact of the 1848 Revolution, combined to extend and politicize its newspaper

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press. The rapid development of the Irish railway system from mid-century forward revolutionized the communications system on the island. In 1853 William Ewart Gladstone as Chancellor of the Exchequer abolished tax both on paper and on advertisements. The rise in mass literacy12 and consumer spending in the 1860s and the easing in 1865 of the tax on Irish newspapers led to an explosion of titles both in the capital and in rural Ireland. By 1865 the mechanics of publication and distribution of Irish newspapers both in the capital and the regions were firmly in place,13 not least thanks to Anthony Trollope’s contribution to the design and establishment of the Irish postal system.14 From the late 1860s the provincial press came to play a key role in the spread of Irish nationalism. Local and national politicians frequently owned or ran their newspaper with a view to inf luencing elections to parliament. As Alex Ritchie, editor of the Leeds Mercury, noted in 1870, there were two audiences for every speech at a public meeting (and the Irish were passionate attendees at such events), namely those present at the meeting and those who read about it next morning in their newspapers.15 Not all Irish newspapers reported on the war, but those which did continued to feature it in some manner throughout the conf lict and for one or two years thereafter. In reporting affairs beyond Irish shores, more particularly from Europe, Irish journalists did not have to look far for copy. All non-Irish news was mediated through the London newspapers and agencies, as had been the case over a century earlier, when Frederick II’s campaigns in the Seven Years War occupied the front pages of the Dublin press almost daily and columns were filled with lengthy and detailed descriptions of the battles of Rossbach and Leuthen.16 In the second half of the nineteenth century Dublin as the seat of the British colonial administration was no less loyal, but the sectarian factor which had attracted popular attention to King Frederick of Prussia — ironically, in view of his own religious cynicism — had by this time ceded pride of place to British policy interests. Dublin in 1870 had a large resident population of British civil servants and a constant stream of visiting government officials who needed to keep up to date with events in Ireland that had the capacity to affect British political, military, or commercial interests. But what could Ehrenbreitstein or Gravelotte, Weissenberg or Saarbrücken mean to the average reader in metropolitan and still less in provincial Ireland? ‘The siege of the Rhenish fortress [Ehrenbreitstein]’, noted the Freeman’s Journal portentously, ‘will be assuredly the most important operation of this war. It will be carried on under conditions never before known in the military art.’17 The following day the same paper noted the number of troops under command of General Steinmetz, Crown Prince Frederick (later brief ly Emperor Frederick III), and Fontane’s favourite strategist, Prince Friedrich Karl Hohenzollern. Several of the Irish newspapers published lengthy accounts of troop movements and battles and would continue to do so at least up to the turn of the year 1870/71. Irish interest in the conf lict, at least for those sympathetic to the cause of resurgent Irish nationalism, is not difficult to elicit. Apart from the somewhat detached Belfast Newsletter and the Nenagh Guardian, sympathy lay from the outset firmly with France: ‘We have no quarrel with the Prussians or the Austrians, or with any nation, except that which holds us in thrall’, declared the editor of The Nation on the day that Emperor Napoleon declared war on Prussia. ‘But France we

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regard as the traditionary [sic] friend of the oppressed Irish people, and the leader of European civilisation.’18 The next years saw no less than 300 reports on or references to the conf lict in the columns of The Nation, the vast majority of which appeared in the early months of the war. Some reports ran to several pages and many of these, such as the ten-page account on the ‘terrible battles of Verdun and Metz’, included detailed maps of the cities and fortresses involved. Local demonstrations in favour of ‘noble and gallant France’ were reported at length, as were those in October 1870 detailing Dublin Corporation’s resolutions in her support. Letters to the editor in the same vein were quoted in full. Pro-French sentiment was also inspired by the alleged partiality of the British press in favouring the Prussians and even suppressing news of French victories and Prussian reverses. In a fine rhetorical f lourish the same edition of The Nation carried an appeal — echoed a week later by the Mayo Examiner — to our Fellow Countrymen — let the English press from Times to Punch howl their worst against the Frenchman and his cause in the present Titanic quarrel between himself and the Prussian — at least the young blood of Ireland be no party to that howl. On the contrary every reason of history, tradition, of hope, demands your support on the side of the [. . .] adopted country of Sarsfield and Dillon, of the free sons of MacMahon and Neil.19

The same editorial went on to castigate the British press’s ‘cowardly and systematic’ habit of ‘making French victories defeats and the still more cowardly circulation of such lies to the world by the British press’, declaring that it was ‘causing universal dissatisfaction in France’. An immediate response came from a concerned citizen of Galway claiming to speak for his fellow countrymen, namely that ‘the scandalous attitude of the British press as a body forces this expression of feeling from the Irish heart which otherwise might throb in private with hopes of success to the right and just cause as represented by France’.20 The ultra-liberal Dundalk Democrat, no less forceful, also shared the tendency of the pro-French Irish papers to refuse to believe in the possibility of a French defeat: Bismarck and his master, and that wonderful general Moltke, imagined that when by overwhelming numbers they succeeded in capturing Mac Mahon’s forces and those of Bazaine, they would easily dispose of France and its inhabitants. [. . .] They considered that as France was left without an army she would crouch like a spaniel before them, and humbly do their bidding. [. . .] How woefully they find themselves mistaken.21

Insouciantly disregarding the strictures about the mendacity of the British media frequently expressed in Irish nationalist newspapers, the pro-French editor of the Ballinrobe Chronicle published a French account of ‘German atrocities’ in its issue of 1 October 1870. Reproducing an extract from the Journal de Rouen but without editorial comment apart from the heading: ‘The War [. . .] A series of reports’, readers could learn how the Prussians ‘disembowel women, cut the throats of chil­d­ren, shoot old men, send the vigorous ones to the galleys, pillage houses, burn villages, destroy churches, break the statues of the Holy Virgin and assassinate the priests’. However, towards the end of the year 1870 the defeat and surrender of Emperor Napoleon III and his f light to England effected a change of attitude. Not many

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newspapers were as forthright as the Anglo-Celt, whose editor boasted in a leading article of 19 November 1870: from the commencement of the war between Prussia, or Germany, and France, we have kept our readers au courant with the news as it turned up; but we confess we have not much spirit to write upon the saddening details [. . .] the astounding facts that have been revealed since the fall of Sedan and the abdication of Emperor Napoleon [. . .] the state of unpreparedness for war in which France was left [. . .]

The Prussians, the author presciently declared, ‘had been preparing for war for four years previous to the actual outbreak of hostilities’, but the full force of disappointed hopes was vented on the person of the Emperor: ‘Who could have anticipated that the “Nephew of my Uncle,” the “Man of Destiny” [. . .] would have surrendered his sword with as little evident concern as if he were the veriest poltroon?’22 Despite the extensive coverage of the fighting by Irish newspapers during the first months of the war, the Irish media lacked in-depth understanding of the issues involved. The press in Ireland was almost wholly dependent on the London agencies and their reporters in France and Germany for their information. If on occasion some reference was made to the epochal character of what was happening on the European mainland, it was generally prompted by anti-British or by Roman Catholic sentiment. Thus in selecting as the essay title for its senior scholarship examination in 1872: ‘What has the Franco-Prussian war done for Europe?’,23 Ireland’s premier Catholic boarding school, the Jesuit-run Clongowes Wood College, was actually expressing solidarity with persecuted co-religionists in Germany as a consequence of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf.24 Similarly when, on the first anniversary of the French declaration of war, the Freeman’s Journal described the conf lict as one of the ‘two most memorable events of the age’, the seemingly impressive character of its prophetic judgement is somewhat modified by the newspaper’s according equal historical significance to Pope Pius IX’s declaration of papal infallibility.25 British official and popular interest in the Franco-Prussian conf lict was dictated by its wider political and commercial interests and, in the former case, by awareness of its own poor military record and defective leadership in the Crimean war of 1854–56.26 Events leading up to Emperor Napoleon III’s declaration of war on Prussia and her allies and its subsequent course were vigorously debated in parliament. Benjamin Disraeli as leader of the opposition believed what he termed ‘the German Revolution’ to be of even greater import than the French Revolution of 1789. He strongly favoured British intervention, but British business interests and popular opinion supported Gladstone’s determined policy of non-intervention in this, his first administration as prime minister (1868–74). Irish newspapers generally included parliamentary reports as a regular editorial feature. Thus on 18 February 1871 the Dundalk Democrat noted on page 7 that Disraeli’s criticism of the French as ‘the aggressor’ was firmly dismissed in the House by Gladstone.27 Both Liberals and Conservatives identified the chief danger for Britain as coming from Russia, who was expected to and did indeed take advantage of the conf lict to renounce the closure of the Black Sea straits to warships, a key provision of the 1856 Treaty

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of Paris.28 And while Bismarck’s highhandedness in the conduct of the peace settlement in 1871 aroused concern, on the whole the British authorities came to regard Prussian hegemony in Central Europe as the best restraint on Russian imperialist ambitions. Very little of such political considerations impacted on the contemporary Irish media, except where Irish nationalist concerns were involved. The manner of reporting the war in these Irish newspapers suggests that it was in some senses a parasitical exercise: virtually all reports appear to have been taken over more or less wholesale from other, non-Irish print media. Apart from the opening weeks of the conf lict there is little evidence of systematic editorial comment, informed or otherwise, or indeed in reporting on events in 1871 and thereafter of any selective principle. The Nenagh Guardian presented its readers on 7 December 1870 with what purported to be a factual account of the origin and progress of the campaign, while acknowledging as its source the semi-official organ of the Prussian government, the Berliner Staatsanzeiger, copied via London.29 Similarly, when readers encountered the following impression of post-war Paris, they could be forgiven for thinking it represented the Journal’s opinion: In place of the pleasant recollection of those visits which monarchs and artists and workers paid to Paris during the international exhibitions to admire the assembled treasures which art and industry had accumulated in the capital of the civilised world, there are the melancholy traces of the two sieges of Paris of which the first, like the other events of the Franco-Prussian war, made civilisation retrograde to the epochs of the Wars of Conquest, and the second to barbarism and the Vandals.

In fact the passage was taken over, albeit duly acknowledged, from the Italian journal Epoca. It was juxtaposed, again without comment, by an entry on the same page from Unità Cattolica, taken from the ‘London Correspondent’.30 The most sustained engagement of Irish newspaper readers in the war seems to have been charitable. Thus the Ballinrobe Chronicle brought a lengthy account of the campaign on 30 December 1871 and drew attention on its third page to the generous effort of Great Britain and several other nations in subscriptions [. . .] for the relief of the inhabitants of Paris, of the distressed peasantry of France, and of the many French towns that had been [made] desolate by the war.

As early as 26 July 1870 the Freeman’s Journal reported approvingly how the ‘Society for the Support of the Wounded is organising itself with rare promptitude and success’ and how, thanks to its exalted patrons including the Prince of Wales, ‘subscriptions are f lowing in [. . .] and a number of ladies of various creeds and sisterhoods’ were already preparing supplies to be forwarded to France. The same organ gave front page coverage on St Patrick’s Day 1871 to the performance of the ‘Grand International Band’ for the benefit of the victims of war to be given to both sides ‘in equal parts’, and ending with the rousing exhortation: ‘Irishmen! Give them a bumper!’ Two weeks previously, the same paper had carried a notice (4 March, p. 4) on an evidently nationwide parish collection, organized for war relief, noting that ‘many distinguished and charitable persons have largely contributed’ but that ‘the humbler classes have been [no] less generous’.

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During the period in which the wars of German unification occurred, the Freeman’s Journal, the oldest and most enduring Irish national title,31 gradually evolved from being the organ of liberal Protestant opinion to one representing middle-class views and interests more generally. Anything affecting the Christian churches would be of interest to the church-going Irish, regardless of denomination, such as the report that ‘the Latin Christians in Jerusalem are profoundly disquieted by the tidings of the Franco-Prussian war, inasmuch as the overthrow of France, their protector’, would give rise to ever greater encroachments on them.32 For it was at this point that the Journal had begun to ref lect the most significant social development of the 1860s and 1870s in Ireland, namely the growth in aff luence of a Roman Catholic middle class. It now included issues of interest to this cohort, as for example in its covert reference to Germany’s Catholic minority: ‘During the Franco-Prussia war the Catholic subjects of the Emperor William exhibited a valour and devotion which could not be surpassed’.33 There was an unstated agenda here on the part of a newspaper attempting to appeal to the growing sector of Dublin and Irish readers, namely the effort by European Catholics to counter Bismarck’s claims based on conspiracy theories of the threat of ‘international political Catholicism’ to the young German state, that to be a Roman Catholic subject of his Imperial Majesty was to be less than loyal.34 (The Reich Chancellor, alas, did not read the Freeman’s Journal.) A particular interest of the Franco-Prussian War for historians lies in its character as an early example of modern ideological warfare, in which both sides mobilized mass support through music, literature, and the print media — notably newspapers, pamphlets, and posters. Little of this character of the war appears to have filtered through to the Irish press. True, three weeks after the battle of Sedan and Napoleon’s f light to Britain, the Freeman’s Journal on 5 November 1870 reported a ‘carpenter’, one [O’] Toole, having been fined ‘3 shillings’ for ‘tearing down a placard having reference to the Franco-Prussian war which was exhibited outside the Daily Express offices on Parliament St.’. However this appears to have been an isolated incident. Ideological positions in so far as they emerge refer virtually exclusively to domestic issues, namely resurgent Irish nationalism, as represented at one end of the spectrum in The Nation, as against loyalty to the official British government position in papers such as the Belfast Newsletter or the strongly Church of Ireland Nenagh Guardian.35 As early as the first months of 1871, a fundamental change in these Irish newspapers’ response to the war makes itself manifest. This had evidently more to do with changes in the function and promotion of the media than with political sentiment. Entertainment began to take centre stage: money was to be made out of matters of topical interest. At the start of the conf lict Emperor Napoleon had ordered the Marseillaise to be adopted as the official anthem of the French. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Rhine that erstwhile icon of resurgent liberal German nationalism, ‘Die Wacht am Rhein’, would shortly be ‘prussified’ to celebrate the advance of Prussia and her German allies into French territory. Within a matter of months of the German invasion of France, Dublin, always a musical city, was advertising a grand public concert featuring ‘the celebrated national patriotic songs — Die Wacht am Rhein, the Marseillaise, and a variety of Touching and

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Appropriate Songs [which] will be sung by Mr Fletcher Baker and Mrs Hilbert, assisted by Eminent Vocalists and Instrumentalists’.36 A whole variety of enterprising spirits, notably in Dublin, scented the opportunity offered by the war to promote business. The Freeman’s Journal provided front-page advertising space, where for example the citizens of Dublin were invited to create for themselves the thrill of battle by visiting on successive evenings in June 1871 ‘J.S. Eduard’s Colossal Diorama of the Franco-Prussian War’, ‘For Twelve Nights only’. Here at the ‘Rotundo’, a spacious assembly hall beside the famous Dublin maternity hospital of the same name,37 they could inspect ‘OVER a Hundred views of the war, including the celebrated battles of Weissenberg, Worth, Gravelotte, Panges, Vionville, Sedan &c., [. . .] exhibited in Colossal Dimensions.’ The advertisers had sought to attract the ‘better classes’ to its performances by regularly advising their potential clients that ‘Persons of Questionable repute [were] not admitted, and on being recognised will be immediately expelled’.38 In August 1871 the Dundalk Democrat could announce the opening of the same major entertainment in its Town Hall, ‘for Twelve Nights only’. Announcing the Diorama’s visit to Ireland’s southern capital, Cork, and to Limerick, the Freeman’s Journal earlier in the year had alleged that ‘upwards of One Hundred Thousand Persons’ had witnessed it; a year later the promoters were advertising an extensive tour of south-east Ireland, starting in Wexford and Enniscorthy.39 The primacy of entertainment over genuine engagement in the Franco-Prussian war, generally characteristic of the Irish media response from the later months of the conf lict onwards, is well encapsulated in the same paper’s statement as early as 11 February 1871 that the stern realities of the war, from which it is hoped Europe is about to emerge [. . .] represented by the splendid automaton of the wounded French Zouave [. . .] has been replaced by the ‘Sleeping Beauty’ in the Exhibition.

At the other end of Dublin’s main thoroughfare, Sackville St. (now O’Connell St.), Samuel’s of Westmoreland St. offered his ‘photographic Exhibition’ of scenes from the conf lict. On a number of occasions from 1871 forward the Freeman’s Journal carried an advertisement for MAGIC PHANTASMAGORIA and DISSOLVING MAGIC LANTERN of Mr. E.

Solomon’s improved constructions, with powerful Lenses producing a well-defined and large Disc, unsurpassed for brilliance, used with facility; Superior Slides, consisting of Frolics, Comicalities, Scenery in Ireland and all parts of the world, illustrating Science, Tales, Franco-Prussian and Abyssinian Wars and other subjects of an instructive and highly amusing character.40

Other major events of the war, among them the famous system of communication with the outside world during the siege of Paris, were reduced to ‘attractions’ — the ‘Great Balloon Race’, advertised on 5 July 1871 in the Freeman’s Journal, was, its readers were informed, to be conducted by ‘Professor Wells’ in the Rotundo Gardens. The wide variety of commercial interests exploiting (or promoting) popular interest in the war in Britain as well as Ireland indicated the increasing commercialization of the print media. Thus the promoters of the [London] Bow Bells Annual praised its ‘well written tales’ in the Tuam Herald (‘second to none in Ireland as an advertising medium’),41 singling out ‘Jules and Lischen’ as a ‘story of

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the Franco-Prussian war, which is treated in an off hand[!] and lively manner; no doubt a little severe on the French, on account of the reverses which followed the shocks in Paris of “On to Berlin” ’.42 A leading firm of Dublin hatters, Gilham & Sons of Werburgh Quay at Essex Bridge, drew the attention of its customers on four separate days in Christmas week 1870 to the fact that ‘owing to the FrancoPrussian War Silk Plush has risen in value from 20 per cent to 40 per cent’. They could however offer ‘our Friends’ the ‘pecuniary advantages’ of ‘7 shillings velvet Napoleon’s Hat[s]’, from their 1,000-strong stock.43 Following the end of hostilities, the Irish newspaper press carried numerous advertisements for accounts of the war, with the same catholicity or rather arbitrariness that it had exhibited in the actual reporting of the campaigns. Thus The Nation, which had earlier so vigorously attacked the ‘lying British press’ for its denigration of France and support for Prussia, was now to be found promoting General (later Field-Marshal) Helmut von Moltke’s memoirs, ‘General Froissard’s work on the great Franco-Prussian war’, and ‘A History of the War of 1870 by the well-known correspondent of the Cologne Gazette’.44 It is unlikely that the Irish editor was aware of the provenance of the last-named newspaper, namely as one of the media organs bought up by Bismarck from his slush fund 45 to promote Prussia’s ‘colonization’ of the Rhineland. The whole entry is in fact taken from London’s inf luential British journal the Spectator. The Franco-Prussian War retained its fashionable status for some two years after the final defeat of France. A century earlier, interest in Prussia’s war against France had proved less ephemeral, no doubt in great part because Prussia, following the famous ‘Diplomatic Revolution’ of 1756,46 had abandoned her French ally and was now fighting Britain’s colonial wars on the European continent. Between the years 1756, the date of the outbreak of the Seven Years War, and 1761 the Dublin newspapers devoted often as many as two to three closely printed columns on their front page to Frederick II’s conduct of the campaign, giving it even more space than the colonial war in North America. By contrast with the seemingly arbitrary response of Irish newspapers to the Franco-Prussian War a century later, the assiduous reporting of the mid-eighteenth-century Dublin press displayed a firm and agreed editorial line. In papers such as the Dublin Gazette, Dublin Journal, Public Gazetteer, and Pue’s Occurrences Frederick was stylized as ‘gallant Prince’, ‘invincible King’, ‘Prussia’s God-like[!] Monarch’, and, above all, as ‘Protestant Hero’. While Dublin newspapers drew (copied) their information as they did their opinions from British, and frequently Scottish, media sources, for a few years they took ‘His Protestant Majesty’ to their hearts. His fame rivalled ‘that of the most celebrated Captains of antiquity, being weighted with Pyrrhus, Philip, and perhaps his son, Alexander’.47 Only weeks after the battles of Leuthen and Rossbach, several of these papers had carried on their title page a notice to the effect that Tuesday, January 24, being the Anniversary of the Birth of his Prussian Majesty, who enters into the 47th year of his Age, the same will be observed throughout this City and Liberties.48

The subsequent number reported the celebrations in loving detail:

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Eda Sagarra The morning (of the 24th) was ushered in with Ringing of Bells, and Firing of Guns from the Shipping in the River, at Night a superb Ball and Supper were provided on that Occasion, at the Musick Hall in Fishamble Street, by Subscription, at which there were a great Number of Persons of the First Rank. In different parts of the City and Liberties there were Bonfires, and Illuminations, and particularly in Grafton Street [Dublin’s fashionable street — E.S.], a piece of Painting, representing his Prussian Majesty at the Siege of Prague, which was grandly illuminated.49

There was, it appears, something for everyone — or was it perhaps a case of ‘any excuse for a party’? Thus Pue’s Occurrences reported how ‘At Noon many Gentlemen had elegant Entertainments at different Taverns in the City to celebrate the Day in honour of that magnanimous and invincible King, where farther Success to his Arms and other Loyal Toasts were Drank.’50 Similar celebrations followed Frederick’s victory over the Russians at Küstrin in September 1758 and a Dining Club was formed to meet each year to commemorate the King’s birthday, which outlasted the war by a number of years. Several Dublin taverns were renamed after him, and street names were altered to honour him. Cabragh Lane now became known and survives to this day as Prussia St., while (North) Frederick St. and Nassau St., which also changed their names to commemorate fellow commanders in the field, still retain them today. The leading authority on the conf lict, Michael Howard, memorably described the Franco-Prussian War as a ‘dramatically catastrophic’ event.51 Within a month of Napoleon’s declaration of war in July 1870, Prussia had established both her military supremacy and political hegemony which, thanks to Bismarck’s adroit management, led to the long-awaited unification of Germany. But, as seen in hindsight, its impact was by no means limited to France, for so long the leading military power of continental Europe, and now devastated by the scale and evident ease of her defeat at the hands of the ‘upstart’ Prussia. As the renowned German military historian Gerhard Ritter put it in following the Second World War, the real significance of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 lay in the fact that it marked the impact of the industrial, scientific, and communications revolutions on warfare, and thus facilitated the emergence ‘of that sinister problem of the modern national War, from which the great catastrophes of our epoch have developed’.52 Virtually nothing of this import comes across from Irish newspaper press reporting during the war years or immediately thereafter, despite dire references to the war’s impact on France. Certainly the coverage given the Franco-Prussian War between 1870 and 1873 in terms of volume is quite astonishingly high, given the country’s remoteness from both the conf lict and the issues involved. However it is evident from a reading of these sources that Irish media interest was essentially concerned with domestic political issues, with nationalist editors attempting to exploit popular pro-French sentiment among the Irish as a stick to beat the traditional enemy, Britain. Of particular interest to the Irish historian, apart from the evidence offered by these papers of the growing commercialization of the print media in Ireland at this point in her nineteenth-century history, is what they collectively provide in terms of the recognition by nationalist-minded individuals across the island of the potential of regional press to build up from the grass roots a like-minded community. In

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the following decades the press would indeed become one of the most powerful instruments in the hands of Irish nationalist leaders. Notes to Chapter 10 1. Theodor Fontane, Das erzählerische Werk: Der Stechlin, Große Brandenburger Ausgabe (Berlin: Auf bau Verlag, 2001), p. 131. 2. There is an extensive literature on the subject. See the bibliography in Eoin Bourke, ‘Poor Green Erin’: German Travel Writers’ Narratives on Ireland from before the 1798 Rising to after the Great Famine (Oxford and New York: Peter Lang, 2012). Fontane was personally acquainted with a number of the travellers, among them Jakob Venedey, Moritz Hartmann, and Julius Rodenberg. 3. Notably Charles Lever (1806–72) and Lady Morgan (1776–1859), whose cheerful character and career may have provided some input into the figure of Rosa Bonheur in Cécile: see Sagarra, ‘Fontane’s Arabella as Mediator between Ireland and Germany? National Stereotypes and the Mid-Nineteenth-Century German Book Market’, German Life and Letters, n.s., 47 (1995) (Special Number for W. A. Coupe), 390–400. 4. Nineteenth-century Irish papers were owned, edited, and written almost entirely by men, and coverage was generally directed at them. In 1861 there were only two females among the 236 newspaper proprietors, editors and authors, Marie-Louise Legg, Newspapers and Nationalism: The Irish Provincial Press, 1850–1892 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999), p. 139. 5. Many have been digitalised and are easily available on . The National Library of Ireland holds microfiches of most regional and local Irish newspapers. 6. Compare the chapter: ‘Mayo — God Help Us’, in Heinrich Böll, Irisches Tagebuch (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2009 [1957]), pp. 27–36. 7. The Freeman’s Journal was founded, like The Nation eighty years later, by radical Protestant Irish patriots; in the early years of the following century it took a pro-British line but under the editorship of Sir John Gray (1815–75) became sympathetic to nationalist aspirations. 8. Davis (1814–45) and his fellow Young Irelanders, students at Trinity College, greatly admired Schiller and Heine, whom they translated together with the work of several Young German poets and published in the College organ, the Dublin University Magazine. 9. Freeman’s Journal, 11 October 1870, p. 5. The report describes the reception at Le Havre on the arrival of the Corps from Ireland, accompanied by an Alderman from Dublin Corporation. A num­ ber of Irish papers reported subsequently at irregular intervals on the Corps’s activities in France. 10. The Nation, 26 November 1870 and 10 December 1870. 11. While this continues to be the case for the majority, it no longer obtains for Ireland’s digital generation, the under-thirty-fives, for whom Facebook and Twitter have virtually consigned the daily or local weekly paper to history. 12. In 1851 53 per cent of Irish people alleged they could read, by 1861 the figure had risen to 58 per cent. Twenty years later it was 75 per cent, though differing substantially according to region, gender, class, and confession (Presbyterians the most, Roman Catholics the least literate), The Census of Ireland for the Year 1851, Part IV. Report on Ages and Education. Presented to the Houses of Parliament by Command of Her Majesty (Dublin, 1855), p. xxvi; for 1861: The Census of Ireland for the Year 1861: Reports and Tables on Ages and Education and Occupation (Dublin, 1861), p.xviii. 13. Legg, p. 85. 14. Trollope is modestly reticent in his own account of what was a scrupulously executed mapping, on horseback, of the future Irish postal network; it has remained more or less as he designed it to this day. Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography, ed. by Michael Sadleir and Frederick Page, with an introduction and notes by P. D. Edwards, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 88 and 97. 15. Quoted in Legg, p. 172. 16. Eda Sagarra, ‘The Image of Frederick II in Eighteenth-Century Dublin’, Hermathena, 142 (1987), 50−58. Frederick was stylized throughout as ‘our Protestant hero’ in vanquishing the ‘renegade Catholic Empress Maria Theresia’, for Dublin at the time was as doughty an anti-Papist city as Belfast would later become.

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17. Freeman’s Journal [henceforth FJ], 4 August 1870, p. 5. 18. The Nation, 23 July 1870, p. 12. 19. Echoed by the Mayo Examiner, 1 August 1870, p. 3. Sarsfield was one of the most famous of the legendary Irish exiles, who fought as a general in the French army. 20. The Nation, 27 August 1870, p. 10. The writer, one St George Joyce, was the editor of a local paper, the Galway Vindicator. 21. Dundalk Democrat, 11 November 1870, p. 4. This was still a reasonable supposition in the autumn of 1870. For centuries France had been the major military power on the continent, and underestimation of Prussia’s military capacity would prove a vital weapon in Bismarck’s strategy. See introduction to Michael Howard, The Franco-Prussian War: The German Invasion of France, 1870–1871 (London: Fontana Library (Collins), 1967 [1st edn 1961, 2nd 2001]). 22. Anglo-Celt, 19 November 1870, p. 2. 23. As reported in FJ, 23 July 1872, p. 5. 24. Under the so-called May Laws of 1872, the Jesuit order was expelled from Prussia, some 1,800 clergy and two archbishops were imprisoned, and their property confiscated. The poli­ tical impulse for the discriminatory Kulturkampf (1872–c. 1885) derived from Bismarck and his Liberal associates’ desire to prevent the formation of a political Catholic alliance against the new Reich and to ‘punish’ the Catholic minority for their support of Austria in the period of unification. 25. FJ, 23 July 1871, p. 5. 26. Paul Kennedy, The Realities behind Diplomacy: Background to British External Policy, 1865–1890 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981), p. 76. 27. Dundalk Democrat, 18 February 1871, p. 7. 28. Kennedy, pp. 75f. 29. Few of the papers surveyed here made reference to casualties, though the Nenagh Guardian (27 July 1871), as befitting the organ of local agrarian interest, read by well-to-do local landowners, merchants, and shopkeepers, showed concern at the ‘2,758 horses killed for food in Paris’. 30. FJ, 16 January 1873, p. 5. 31. Its demise in the first year of Irish independence was a consequence of the paper’s support for the once dominant moderate Irish Nationalist Party and its opposition to the more radical Sinn Féin nationalist movement. In the so-called ‘Coupon’ elections at the end of the First World War in December 1918, the INP was decimated, winning a mere six seats against the (young) Sinn Féin’s seventy-three (out of a total of 126). 32. FJ, 9 December 1870, p. 6. 33. FJ, 2 January 1873, p. 5. 34. Bismarck’s speeches in the Reichstag during the years of the Kulturkampf (1872–85) included provocative references to German Roman Catholics as ‘Reichsfeinde’, enemies of the state. 35. The Nenagh Guardian (22 April 1871, p. 4) was one of the few papers to report in passing on ‘the Communistic revolution’. 36. FJ, 14 January 1871, p. 1. 37. Both establishments are still f lourishing, though the assembly hall is now a cinema. 38. FJ, 1 January 1871, p. 1 and 7 July 1871, p. 1. 39. FJ, 16 May 1872, p. 3. 40. FJ, 26 December 1871, p. 6. 41. Legg, p. 193. 42. Tuam Herald, 3 July 1871, p. 3. The Tuam Herald, which in common with other regional papers carried the subtitle and Advertiser’, was regarded as the most effective advertising medium. 43. FJ, 24, 24, 26, and 30 December 1870, p. 2. 44. The Nation, 27 July 1872, p. 4. 45. Following Prussia’s absorption of the Welf kingdom of Hanover in 1867 and the expulsion of its wealthy ruler, King George V, Bismarck had confiscated the massive Welfenfonds or Reptile Fund, the interest on which he adroitly and unscrupulously used in the following years to buy national and regional press support. 46. For over two centuries, the Austrian Empire had provided Britain with her continental ally, containing Russian dreams of empire in Eastern Europe and French plans of aggrandizement

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across the Rhine. The ‘Protestant’ Frederick proved far more popular with English public opinion than the Catholic Empress Maria Theresa, as the elder Pitt was quick to appreciate. 47. The Public Gazetteer, vol. iii, 18 March 1760, p. 405. 48. The Dublin Gazette, no. 773, 21 January–24 January 1758. 49. Ibid., no. 774, 25–28 January 1758. 50. Pue’s Occurrences, vol. lv, 24–28 January 1758. 51. Howard, p. xi. 52. Staatskunst und Kriegshandwerk (1954), quoted in Howard, p. 456.

C h ap t e r 11

v

Bertha von Suttner’s Die Waffen nieder!: The Roots and Reception of a Pacifist Manifesto Barbara Burns, University of Glasgow The Austrian writer and peace activist Bertha von Suttner (1843–1914) has been variously described as a ‘prototypical European’,1 as ‘Europe’s Cassandra’,2 and, in her own era, as ‘wohl [. . .] der umfassendste, universellste Kopf unter den schreibenden Frauen’.3 Suttner became the first female winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1905, but the bestselling novel that propelled its author to a position of international inf luence is today largely forgotten, dismissed as a product of its age without lasting literary merit. From the outset Die Waffen nieder! (1889) was a problematic text. ‘Große Kreise unserer Leser würden sich durch den Inhalt verletzt fühlen’,4 wrote the editor of one periodical to which Suttner submitted the manuscript, and numerous further rejection letters followed, one of which asserted that it was ‘ganz ausgeschlossen, daß der Roman in einem Militärstaat veröffentlicht werde’.5 Such a response is hardly surprising, given the work’s resolutely pacifist stance at a time when Europe’s most powerful states were spending substantial sums on weaponry and notions of military heroism and of the political inevitability of war still abounded. But Suttner’s original intention to write this story ‘um der Friedensbewegung [. . .] einen Dienst zu leisten’6 had by her own admission drawn her irresistibly into an all-embracing commitment to the cause of peace, and she would not be cowed by fear of opposition or censorship. Her tenacity was rewarded when the Dresden publisher Edgar Pierson agreed to take the novel, despite her refusal to act on his strong advice to make certain changes, in particular to the title. The success of Die Waffen nieder!, which during the writer’s lifetime alone saw forty editions, was translated into sixteen languages and adapted into a film, opened doors of opportunity for Suttner far beyond that experienced by any of her contemporary authors. Arguably she became the most renowned Austrian woman of her day:7 she was the first female political journalist in the German language, who used her aristocratic background and exceptional personality to gain access to those in power and lobby for her cause. In 1891 she was elected President of the new Austrian Peace Association, which she herself had worked to establish, and delivered

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her first public speech at the third World Peace Congress in Rome later the same year. In the following two decades Suttner travelled extensively both in America and Europe, and was formally received in Buckingham Palace and the White House. Her rhetorical skills are evidenced in her extensive correspondence, conducted in three languages, with politicians and members of the European intellectual elite, as well as in her lectures. Even in 1912, at the age of 70, she embarked indefatigably on a six-month tour of America in which she addressed large audiences in over fifty cities, repeatedly using her pacifist slogan: ‘As a Religion we preach it; as a Science we teach it; as a Warfare we fight for it.’8 Frédéric Passy’s reference to Suttner as ‘notre général en chef ’ indicates the esteem in which she was held internationally as an inspirational leader in the peace movement, while the many cartoon caricatures in the press satirizing the campaigning work of ‘die Friedens-Bertha’ also bear testament to her prominence. Today Die Waffen nieder! is a challenging read, the tone ‘high f lown and didactic’.9 Indeed recent criticism which points out the work’s relative lack of artistic accomplishment10 differs little from the observation of some commentators at the time. There is general consensus, however, on Suttner’s ability to convey a pow­erful message through the medium of fiction, and on the novel’s status as a ‘significant document of social and ideological history’.11 One of the most striking and oft-quoted evaluations of the work came from Tolstoy: ‘L’abolition de l’esclavage a été précédée par le fameux livre d’une femme, de Mme BeecherStowe; Dieu donne que l’abolition de la guerre le fût par le vôtre.’12 Even if Tolstoy’s optimism proved somewhat overstated, Suttner’s novel, particularly via the English translation Lay Down Your Arms! which reached a substantially wider readership in Britain and the United States than the original did in the German-speaking lands, fulfilled a comparable role to Uncle Tom’s Cabin in terms of raising public awareness of a universal ethical goal.13 For a woman of her era, Suttner was remarkably cosmopolitan in outlook, not simply moving with ease between cultures and languages as might have been expected of an educated Austrian noblewoman, but promoting a vision of internationalism that was well ahead of her time. Most of her inf luences came from abroad, and indeed the genesis of Die Waffen nieder! represents a noteworthy example of Anglo-Austrian interaction, facilitated by the French. While the Suttners were spending the winter of 1886/87 in Paris, mixing with artists and intellectuals in the city’s literary salons, they learned of the English pacifist Hodgson Pratt (1824–1907), co-founder in 1880 of the International Arbitration and Peace Association.14 Pratt had clearly defined political goals and pursued a systematic method of touring European capitals in the 1880s to seek support for his new movement and institute as many societies as possible on the London model, unified in a single confederation. The purpose of the Association was to mobilize support for settling international disputes by means of arbitration rather than armed conf lict, and this chimed with the view Suttner herself had formed, without being fully aware of the pioneering work already being done by others. By the time Suttner learned of Pratt’s initiative, he had helped to establish branches in Stuttgart, Berlin, Milan, and Rome, as well as in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. ‘Die Nachricht elektrisierte mich’,15

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Suttner wrote in her memoirs, and immediately sought a means of championing this enterprise. Having begun corresponding with Pratt and informing herself about his work, Suttner’s initial response was to add a report on the International Arbitration and Peace Association to the final chapter of her work Das Maschinenzeitalter, published anonymously in 1889. But the desire to engage more fully with pacifist ideas necessitated a fresh writing project. As Suttner had already achieved modest success both as a journalist and an author of fiction, she had two options for her new undertaking, and the decision to craft her work as a novel, rather than a treatise, was a strategic one: ‘Dafür würde ich sicherlich ein größeres Publikum finden als für eine Abhandlung.’16 These words make no attempt to conceal her homiletic inclination, and illustrate her belief in the legitimacy of using fiction as a means of shaping public opinion. A year earlier, in her work Schriftsteller-Roman, Suttner had indicated that the concept of the creative writer as an educator or spokesperson was fundamental to her sense of artistic purpose. There she wrote of the role of the author: ‘Er soll nützen, erheben, beglücken — er soll der Wahrheit, der Gerechtigkeit und der Schönheit gedient haben, freudenhemmende Vorurteile wegräumen, Aberglauben und Dunkel zerstören helfen.’17 Throughout her oeuvre the Enlightenment principles which permeate this statement are blended with the literary ideas of the Naturalist movement to which she was also drawn. Die Waffen nieder! is set against the backdrop of four nineteenth-century wars waged between 1859 and 1870. It presents the first-person account of the Viennese countess Martha Althaus, who loses two husbands in these hostilities and begins to question nationalistic concepts of valour and self-sacrifice, becoming a strong advocate for pacifism. By choosing the subtitle ‘Eine Lebensgeschichte’, Suttner assigns the text to the genre of biography, rather than that of the novel, thereby deliberately obscuring the work’s fictional basis and exploiting the guise of authenticity to provoke a more thoughtful reaction. The story’s didactic purpose is served through three different narrative modes: starkly naturalistic descriptions of the horrors of the battlefield, portrayals of the repercussions of war on family life away from the front line, and more discursive sections containing the protagonist’s outpourings, either in interior monologue or in conversation, on the futility of war and the possibility of more rational solutions. Having meticulously researched the conf licts in question by reading accounts of the work of military doctors and Red Cross volunteers and collecting oral histories from her own circle of family and friends, Suttner is able to place a female character in the centre of the action as an eyewitness to the aftermath of the battle of Königgrätz with a high degree of credibility. Martha’s search for her missing husband gives the opportunity for many pages portraying her encounter with dead and wounded soldiers which are designed to shock: ‘Zerschossene Glieder bildeten nur noch faulende Fleischstücke, Gesichter waren nur noch eine mit Schmutz bedeckte, zerronnene Blutmasse, in welcher eine unförmliche schwarze Öffnung den Mund vorstellte, welchem gräßliche Töne entquollen’ (203–04).18 Such distressing imagery for a middle-class readership of this time, combined with the relentless underscoring of the pacifist theme through logical argument, has an impact on the visceral, emotional, and cognitive level,

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and Suttner’s political message is unmistakeable. But, as if this were not enough to achieve the desired effect, she builds into the closing chapter a letter from Hodgson Pratt, dated July 1889. This not only brings the historical story into the present, thus intensifying the sense of its relevance for contemporary readers, but also lends authority to its central argument through the rather obtrusive insertion of the words of a respected international campaigner. There is ample evidence that Suttner was not ignorant of the dubious reputation of ‘Tendenzliteratur’, expressed most cogently in Goethe’s words: ‘Sowie ein Dichter politisch wirken will, muß er sich einer Partei hingeben, und sowie er dieses tut, ist er als Poet verloren.’19 But her awareness of the aesthetic drawbacks is balanced by an intuitive sense of the power of a well-crafted tale to inform and inf luence its readers. Moreover, writing against the backdrop of a century which had seen the burgeoning of politically engaged writing in the Junges Deutschland movement and was in the 1880s in the midst of the Naturalist boom, Suttner benefited from a literary context which was increasingly tolerant of polemical content. Her novella Ein Stück Leben, as well as some journalistic pieces, had been published in Michael Georg Conrad’s Naturalist periodical Die Gesellschaft, and she shared with the Naturalists the conviction that art should address social problems. Despite this shared ground, however, Conrad’s perceptive review in 1890 of Die Waffen nieder! encapsulates the mismatch between Suttner’s brand of hard-edged realism and the tenets of the Naturalist movement. He praises the novel as ‘ein gutes, schönes, edles, bald ergreifendes, bald erschütterndes Buch’, but maintains that it is ‘trotzdem ein unvollständiges Werk, weil es nicht auf der vollen Höhe des modernen Wissens und der modernen realistischen Kunst steht’. Criticizing in particular Suttner’s use of ‘das Wort human unzähligemal, das Wort sozial fast kein einzigesmal’, Conrad recognizes in her work the literary legacy of a previous era.20 While Suttner’s creative output may not have fully satisfied the theoretical criteria of the literary avant-garde of her day, her ideas were prompted by an active engagement with recent developments in science and philosophy. Underlying all of Suttner’s writing and campaigning is her belief in the progress of mankind through the evolution of intelligence, shaped through her reading of Darwin, Spencer, Comte, and Haeckel among others. The fashion of discussing the theories of Darwin is colourfully illustrated in a scene of Die Waffen nieder!,21 but the strongest inf luence on Suttner’s thinking evidenced in the novel is that of the English historian Henry Thomas Buckle (1821–61). His major, unfinished work, History of Civilisation in England (1857–61), highlighted in Suttner’s memoirs as having been a revelation to her,22 was particularly attractive to peace activists because it questioned inherited nationalistic approaches to history which focused on kings and conf licts. In particular he criticized historians who composed ‘long accounts of campaigns, battles and sieges, very interesting to those engaged in them, but to us utterly useless because they neither furnish new truths, nor do they supply the means by which new truths may be discovered’.23 Buckle regarded intellectual development, often in his view frustrated by the dogmas of state and church, as the only means of advancing European civilization.24 In Die Waffen nieder! reference is made to Buckle’s work as offering ‘den Grundstein zu einer neuen Auffassung

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der Geschichte’ (35), and the process of encountering his ideas is represented as a radical widening of the protagonist’s horizons and a conceptual coming-of-age. Embracing Buckle’s optimistic belief that social progress would lead to an avoidance of war is portrayed almost as a spiritual experience for Martha: ‘Er betont, daß im Fortschritt der Gesellschaft, mehr noch als der Krieg selber, die Liebe zum Kriege im Schwinden begriffen sei. Das war mir aus der Seele gesprochen. [. . .] ich fühlte mich dadurch gehoben, geklärt, beruhigt’ (36). The incorporation of such references to scholarly thought was a crucial aspect of Suttner’s creative task, as she sought to employ every means of validating her argument. The prospect of war becoming obsolete is based in the novel not on the romantic notion of a woman, but on a logically argued philosophy of human development, and this cerebral underpinning of the narrative offers an important counterbalance to accusations of sentimentality.25 For some reviewers, however, Suttner’s overuse of intellectual reasoning was seen as a weakness. Conrad in Die Gesellschaft predictably notes that this is not a book for ordinary people, but the product of an exclusive education. Rudolf Lothar, in an article for the Moderne Rundschau, bemoans the novel’s lack of colour, accusing its writer of seeing things ‘mit dem Verstande’ and criticizing the ‘philosophischen Excurse, Monologe, Zwiegespräche’.26 In a similar vein, Otto Hartung in Deutsche Dichtung identifies the primary f law as lying ‘in den endlosen Diskursen über die Verwerf lichkeit des Krieges, in den historischen und staatsrechtlichen Abhandlungen, die zuweilen ohne jeden Versuch, sie harmonisch der Handlung einzufügen, mitten in der Erzählung stehen’.27 Hartung’s use of the term ‘Abhandlung’ brings to mind Suttner’s assertion that this was precisely what she intended to avoid because of its unattractiveness to the reading public. The accusation is not unwarranted, and illustrates a fundamental tension in the work between artistic and didactic priorities. Negative judgements such as these, however, are balanced by generous praise on the part of commentators for Suttner’s use of wit and satire28 and her wealth of political and historical knowledge.29 Otto Hartung, despite his reservations quoted above, recognizes Suttner’s narrative skill in portraying the plight of the individual to convincing effect. Added to these compliments is a broad consensus that the incorporation of the political message is well executed. Hartung’s observation that the story is ‘für ihren Tendenzzweck geschickt und erfindungsreich ausgestaltet’30 indicates that the literary climate at the time was not averse to undisguised didactic content, provided it was skilfully presented. In America too this aspect of the novel was benignly received. One lengthy and inf luential review declared: People are accustomed, not without ground, to fight shy of novels with a purpose. The artist and the missionary do not make a good team. But the book [. . .] forms one of several notable exceptions to the general rule.31

Suttner’s focus on rational argument to communicate her ideas engaged the attention not only of thinking consumers of fiction, but also of politicians and figures who inf luenced civic attitudes. The author reports in her memoirs an anecdote from an Imperial Council debate on 18 April 1891 on the military budget, in which Finance Minister Julian Ritter von Dunajevski refers directly to Die Waffen nieder!, stating ‘ich kann den Herren nur raten, der Lektüre dieses Romans

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einige Stunden zu widmen; wer dann noch Vorliebe für den Krieg hat, den könnte ich nur bedauern.’32 If this account is true, and there is no reason to suppose that it is not, given the many witnesses and Suttner’s precise documentation of the time and place, the novel must belong to a rare category of works of fiction cited with serious intent in a parliamentary context. One of the most remarkable aspects of the reception of Die Waffen nieder! is the manner in which it divided opinion, together with the manner in which Suttner, with all the vigour and artifice of a modern-day spin doctor, strove to facilitate her own rise to good fortune. While history records the novel’s status as a bestseller and recognizes its pivotal role in Suttner’s winning of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1905, less is known about the identity and precise arguments of its detractors. Suttner’s biographer Beatrix Kempf reports that after the writer’s death 157 anonymous letters were found relating to Die Waffen nieder!.33 In later life, with the benefit of her celebrity status, Suttner can afford to look back nonchalantly to the ‘anonyme Spottund Schmähbriefe’ triggered by the novel, and is sufficiently self-possessed to enjoy the irony of quoting some of their vitriol: ‘ “rührselige Albernheit”, “aufdringliche, unkünstlerische Tendenzmacherei”; “gänzlich verfehltes Machwerk”; “die Autorin möge doch zu ihren Novellen zurückkehren, bei denen sie ein ganz nettes Talent entfaltet” u.s.w., u.s.w.’.34 She even includes the epigram by Felix Dahn, whose mockery of Suttner’s political conviction provided ready fodder for the press: Die Waffen hoch! Das Schwert ist Mannes eigen, Wo Männer fechten, hat das Weib zu schweigen, Doch freilich, Männer gibt’s in diesen Tagen, Die sollten lieber Unterröcke tragen.35

In the thick of this criticism, however, Suttner was far from indifferent and worked assiduously to promote her product, sending copies of the novel to prominent individuals in the hope of receiving favourable comments which could be quoted in the marketing effort. She wrote to her friend Bartholomäus von Carneri, a member of parliament and notable man of letters at the time, of her fears about the book’s slow sales, diplomatically reminding him of his promise to review it and adding the somewhat disingenuous assurance that she really did not expect ‘viel des Lobes’.36 Carneri’s report, which eventually appeared on 15 March 1890 in Vienna’s main newspaper, the Neue Freie Presse, was a comprehensive paean of praise far exceeding her expectations. This marked a turning point in the novel’s fortunes, unleashing a f lood of interest which quickly led to the need for a reprint. Alongside numerous new editions in a range of formats and prices came translations into all the European languages, including Russian and Esperanto. It is notable that Alfred Nobel, a multilingual businessman with a global perspective, anticipated the novel’s potential international resonance in his very first statement after reading it. He begins a letter to Suttner: ‘Je viens d’achever la lecture de votre admirable chef-d’œuvre. On dit qu’il y a deux mille langues — ce serait 1999 de trop — mais certes il n’y en a pas une dans laquelle votre délicieux ouvrage ne devrait être traduit, lu et médité.’37 While the phenomenal success of Die Waffen nieder! delighted Suttner in terms of the publicity it brought her pacifist cause, in an age before the advent of copyright law she bitterly lamented the climate of

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‘Freibeuterei’38 in which publishers could reprint and translate her work without authorization or financial obligation. Occasionally her faith was restored, such as in the case of Marquis Carlo Alfieri, owner of the Roman newspaper Fanfulla, who asked for permission to print an Italian translation of the novel in his feuilleton section. In response Suttner requested that an honorarium of 1,500 francs be paid to the account for establishing the International Peace Union in Berne, an organization formed with the aim of linking pacifists throughout the world. But this example of journalistic profit being employed in the pursuit of humanitarian goals is a rare one. Suttner looked forward to a future when ‘das geistige Eigenthum auch international geschützt sein wird’,39 while resigning herself to a present reality of writing begging letters to philanthropic friends and patrons such as Alfred Nobel, Andrew Carnegie, and Prince Albert of Monaco in order to sustain her international advocacy work. Without the support of her rich associates across the world, it is questionable whether Suttner as an impoverished aristocrat would have been able to travel as extensively as she did. Her activity as a peace campaigner is closely bound up with her literary success, for while her public speeches were not intended as promotional efforts for her novel, increased sales of Die Waffen nieder! as her seminal work were inevitably the result. Moreover, the publication in 1909 of Suttner’s memoirs, which were quickly translated into English, sparked renewed attention for her work both in Britain and in the United States. In February 1910 Suttner received a letter from the inf luential British reform journalist William Stead, who alerted her to his piece in the monthly journal Review of Reviews.40 The article described Suttner and the American activist Jane Addams as two of the greatest women in the world. With a touch of wistfulness Suttner wrote in her diary: ‘Die Memoiren fangen an, für mich gut zu wirken, aber nicht zu Hause ist man Prophet.’41 Apart from a close circle of allies, among them most notably her collaborator Alfred Fried, Suttner struggled to rally more than lip-service in Austria and Germany. A number of famous names were sympathetic to her ideas, including Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, Friedrich Spielhagen, Ludwig Fulda, Max Nordau, Michael Georg Conrad, and Ernst Haeckel, but they avoided active engagement with her pacifist cause. Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, for example, declined Suttner’s invitation to sign up for the Austrian Peace Association, preferring to be a quiet well-wisher than stand up and be counted: ‘erlauben Sie mir der Gesellschaft der Friedensfreunde wie bisher auch ferner nur als stille Bekennerin anzugehören.’42 For some artists and intellectuals in the public eye, Suttner’s denunciation in Die Waffen nieder! of the patriarchal nature of Austro-Hungarian society, its aristocratic privilege, its militarism, and its deference to the Catholic church was too loudly stated, and it is unsurprising that the author felt without honour in her own country, despite her considerable achievements. With her antipathy towards intercultural intolerance and her vision for internationalism, Suttner preferred to see herself as a global citizen, rather than be too closely associated with a homeland which she described, by comparison with America, as a ‘schandbare[s] Mittelalterland’.43 Her ambivalent relationship with Austria is illustrated in her response to an invitation to be included in a ‘deutsch-vaterländisch’ anthology: ‘Mein Platz ist nicht in einer Anthologie “deutscher” Schriftstellerinnen zugunsten eines “deutsch-

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vaterländischen” Vereins. Ich bin ja keine Deutsche, sondern Österreicherin.’ But she continues: ‘Übrigens wäre auch kein Beitrag von mir in einem österreichisch“vaterländischen” Unternehmen zu finden, da ich ja mein ganzes Streben und Arbeiten in den Dienst des Weltbürgertums stelle.’44 Die Waffen nieder! was from the outset a work of cosmopolitan scope, infused with references to thinkers from other countries and containing conversations and phrases in English and French, much to the annoyance of some critics. Conceived as a historical novel, it became a work which did not simply depict Austrian history, but which inf luenced the course of European and American history through its reception. The reviewer Rudolf Lothar commented in the year of its publication on its ‘tiefgehende Wirkung auf das Publicum’,45 and within a few years newspapers ascribed the exponential growth of the international peace movement in large part to the effect of Suttner’s novel. The impact of this work and the campaigning activity it generated are encapsulated in Fried’s obituary for the author in June 1914: Als sie den Ruf ‘Die Waffen nieder!’ als Titel eines Romans in die Welt stieß, da war die Friedensbewegung noch eine Utopie. [. . .] An dem Tage, an dem Bertha v. Suttner ihre Augen schloß, war jene Utopie eine Wissenschaft geworden, eine mächtige Weltbewegung.46

Fried published these hopeful thoughts just two days after Suttner’s death, little knowing that another five days would bring the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie. In deteriorating health, Suttner had spent the preceding weeks in a state of increasing despair about the heightened tensions in Europe. Stefan Zweig recalled a striking encounter with her in the street: ‘Die Menschen begreifen nicht, was vorgeht’, schrie sie ganz laut auf der Straße, so still, so gütig gelassen sie sonst sprach. [. . .] ‘Warum tut ihr nichts, ihr jungen Leute? Euch geht es vor allem an! Wehrt euch doch, schließt euch zusammen! Laßt nicht immer alles uns paar alte Frauen tun, auf die niemand hört. [. . .] Es steht schlimmer als je, die Maschine ist doch schon im Gang.’47

But while Suttner was proved right in her grim predictions, she belonged to a lineage of European visionaries whose optimistic concept of a united Europe was not extinguished by successive wars. In Die Waffen nieder! she names numerous figures, from Georg von Podiebrad to Immanuel Kant, who promoted the ideal of an international community capable of settling its differences peacefully, thereby educating her readers to see a broader picture. The world peace congresses in Rome and The Hague in which she had played a part were the preserve of the elite, but by disseminating her convictions in the form of a novel, she reached an audience that would not otherwise have had access to discussions about international arbitration and security. As late as 1932 Ludwig Quidde, winner in 1927 of the Nobel Peace Prize, testified to the sustained and pervasive inf luence of Die Waffen nieder!: ‘Keine Kongresse, keine Versammlungen, keine Reden und keine Flugblätter haben weite Massen so aufgerüttelt wie dieses Buch.’48 The continued popularity of the novel during and after the First World War is movingly illustrated by Klaus Mann, who as an eleven-year-old boy received a used copy of the book for Christmas in 1917. The volume had originally been

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given by his great-grandmother Hedwig Dohm, a contemporary of Suttner, to her grandson Erik Pringsheim, and bore the inscription: ‘Möge neben vielen anderen Weihnachtslichtern Dir auch das Licht dieses Buches leuchten.’49 Dohm, herself a prominent pacifist, captures here the sense of quasi-religious enthusiasm which this book ignited in many readers. Klaus Mann’s personal response was no less passionate: ‘Der primitiv, aber schlagend wirksam gemachte Tendenzroman hinterließ mir gewaltigen Eindruck. Viele Einzelheiten der Handlung sind mir ganz unvergeßlich.’50 But in 1933, only a year after Mann’s autobiography containing these memories was published, it disappeared from circulation, having been added alongside Suttner’s Die Waffen nieder! to Wolf Herrmann’s ‘Liste des schädlichen und unerwünschten Schrifttums’ in the wake of Hitler’s seizure of power. The fact that Suttner’s novel in particular, the work of a deceased woman writer, was included in the blacklist, bears witness to its enduring status and perceived seditiousness at that time. Even before Suttner’s work was banned, however, a new writer was succeeding her as the international voice of pacifism. Remarque’s Im Westen nichts Neues (1929) offered its readers a more contemporary style and context, as well as a move away from overt didacticism. While Remarque’s work joined Suttner’s in the Nazi purge, his most famous novel, unlike hers, regained a substantial readership in the post-war era and beyond. From today’s perspective Die Waffen nieder! belongs to that category of works which are of interest more for their ideological impact on the world at large than for the aesthetic subtleties of their achievement. As a result the question of Suttner’s literary legacy is an ambivalent one. Her bestselling novel was unashamedly tendentious, and its somewhat melodramatic style has not withstood the test of time and changing literary tastes. Yet her ground-breaking approach and moral courage in demythologizing the notion of military heroism in the socio-political context of the Austro-Hungarian Empire deserves to be remembered. Die Waffen nieder! is a well-constructed and moving literary engagement with the idea that war is a primitive phenomenon that negates the laws of evolution by annihilating the strongest and the best. But while the logic and timeliness of Suttner’s message are irrefutable and the international breadth of her perspective is remarkable, some critics have identified a naivety in her idealism. It has been argued that her utopian vision lacked the practical understanding of political processes needed for implementing change, and that her ideology of moral protest ‘was vacuous as a constructive theory of international relations’.51 Whatever truth there may be in this judgement, she belonged to a select group of thinkers whose work paved the way for the establishment of the League of Nations, and in turn of a united Europe and of inter-governmental institutions such as the United Nations which promote international cooperation today. In 1878 Victor Hugo, in his opening address to the international literary congress held at the Paris World Fair, laid down a challenge to the writers of Europe: ‘le genre humain a une maladie, la haine. La haine est mère de la guerre; la mère est infâme, la fille est affreuse. Rendons-leur coup sur coup. Haine à la haine! Guerre à la guerre!’52 While she may not have been aware of Hugo’s plea for action, Suttner was the first author to take up the gauntlet against the jingoistic

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militarism of her day, producing in Die Waffen nieder! a work which at the time was considered ‘epochemachend’.53 Hugo’s words are echoed by those of Alfred Nobel when he congratulates Suttner on the novel and wishes to shake her hand, ‘cette main d’amazone qui fait si vaillamment la guerre à la guerre’.54 Despite Nobel’s recognition of Suttner’s idealism, however, he was a pragmatic individual who remained to be convinced of the value of pacifism, believing that his munitions factories might offer a more effective means of avoiding war than peace congresses, if a significant deterrent were achieved by the stockpiling of arms. The relationship between the Swedish dynamite magnate and the impecunious Austrian countess who touched the world with a bestselling novel has been the subject of some debate.55 Whether the endowment of a Peace Prize can be attributed solely to her inf luence or not, there is no doubt that Suttner’s Die Waffen nieder! and the campaigning activity to which it led played a major role in persuading Nobel to devote part of his fortune to recognizing those who have ‘done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses’.56 For a writer of fiction, this is a notable legacy. Notes to Chapter 11 1. Johann Georg Lughofer, ‘Bertha von Suttner: A Prototypical European Writer’, Journal for Linguistics and Literary Studies, 9 (2001), 186–209 (p. 208). 2. Sybil Oldfield, Women against the Iron Fist: Alternatives to Militarism 1900–1989 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), p. 31. Oldfield seems to have taken the notion from Stefan Zweig, who described Suttner as ‘die großartige und großmütige Kassandra unserer Zeit’ in Stefan Zweig, Die Welt von gestern: Erinnerungen eines Europäers (Stockholm: Bermann-Fischer, 1947), p. 243. 3. Leopold Katscher, introduction to Bertha von Suttners gesammelte Schriften, 12 vols (Dresden: Pierson, 1906–07), i (1906), xviii. 4. Bertha von Suttner, Memoiren (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1909), p. 181. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid., p. 184. 7. A public survey around the turn of the century for Der Weltspiegel, a supplement of the Berliner Tageblatt, declared Bertha von Suttner the most famous woman of her era, ahead of Carmen Sylva, Sarah Bernhardt, Eleonore Duse, and Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach. 8. See, for example, the text of Suttner’s speech delivered in San Francisco in June 1912, reprinted in Beatrix Kempf, Suffragette for Peace: The Life of Bertha von Suttner (London: Wolff, 1972), pp. 179–85 (p. 181). 9. Anna Landau, ‘Friedensbertha’, The Guardian, 13 July 1984, p. 12. 10. See, for example, Karl Holl, Pazifismus in Deutschland (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1985), p. 54. 11. ‘Pacifist Warfare’, The Times Literary Supplement, 24 November 1972. 12. Letter to Suttner of 10/22 October 1891, quoted in Bertha von Suttner, Lebenserinnerungen, ed. by Fritz Böttger (Berlin: Verlag der Nation, 1968), p. 582. 13. See Regina Braker, ‘Bertha von Suttner as Author: The Harriet Beecher Stowe of the Peace Movement’, Peace and Change, 16 (1991), 74–96. 14. This was not the only British organization of its kind, but it adopted a different approach from that of its predecessors such as the Peace Society, set up in 1816, which had a strong Quaker inf luence, or the International Arbitration League, established around 1870 by the Liberal MP Sir William Randal Cremer, which was run by men from working-class backgrounds. See Paul Laity, The British Peace Movement 1870–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2001). 15. Suttner, Memoiren, p. 176. 16. Ibid., p. 180. 17. Suttner, Gesammelte Schriften, viii (1907), 196.

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18. This and subsequent quotations from the novel are taken from Bertha von Suttner, Die Waffen mieder! Eine Lebensgeschichte (Berlin: Holzinger, 2014). 19. Conversation dated March 1832, Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1921), p. 404. 20. M. G. Conrad, ‘Die Waffen nieder! von Bertha von Suttner’, Die Gesellschaft, 6 (1890), 433–36. 21. The impact of Darwinian ideas on Suttner’s novel is discussed in Werner Michler, Darwinismus und Literatur: Naturwissenschaftliche und literarische Intelligenz in Österreich, 1859–1914 (Vienna: Böhlau, 1999), pp. 448–92. 22. Suttner, Memoiren, p. 155. On the inf luence of Buckle on Suttner, see Helen G. Morris-Keitel, ‘(R)Evolution: From Edelleute to Edelmenschen — Bertha von Suttner’s Pathway to Peace’, Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, 50 (2014), 34–50. 23. Henry Thomas Buckle, History of Civilization in England, 3 vols (London: Oxford University Press, 1936), i, 183. 24. See Giles St Aubyn, A Victorian Eminence: The Life and Works of Henry Thomas Buckle (London: Barrie, 1958), pp. 113–57. 25. See, for example, Richard R. Laurence, ‘Bertha von Suttner and the Peace Movement in Austria to World War I’, Austrian History Yearbook, 23 (1992), 181–201 (p. 188). 26. Rudolf Lothar, ‘Bertha von Suttner’, Moderne Rundschau, 3 (1891), 13–17 (p. 17). 27. Otto Hartung, ‘Ein Tendenzroman’, Deutsche Dichtung, 8 (1890), 97–99 (p. 98). 28. ‘Bertha von Suttner: Die Waffen nieder!’, Der Kunstwart, 3 (1889–90), 261–62. 29. ‘Die Waffen nieder!’, Literarische Rundschau, 8 (1890), 141–43. 30. Hartung, ‘Ein Tendenzroman’, p. 97. 31. Fanny Hertz, ‘A Palm of Peace from German Soil’, International Journal of Ethics, 3 (1892), 201–17 (p. 203). 32. Suttner, Memoiren, p. 183. 33. Beatrix Kempf, Bertha von Suttner: Eine Frau kämpft für den Frieden (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1979), p. 36. 34. Suttner, Memoiren, p. 183. 35. Ibid. 36. Letter of 11 March 1890 to Carneri, Fried-Suttner archive, United Nations Office, Geneva. 37. Letter of 1 April 1890, Suttner, Memoiren, p. 183. 38. Letter of 10 July 1890 to Carneri, Fried–Suttner archive, United Nations Office, Geneva. 39. Ibid. 40. Founded by Stead in 1890, this journal had an international perspective and distribution. Stead was one of the most famous British victims of the Titanic disaster. 41. Diary entry of 8 February 1910, Fried–Suttner archive, United Nations Office, Geneva. 42. Letter of 19 December 1894, Fried–Suttner archive, United Nations Office, Geneva. 43. Diary entry of 14 December 1912, Fried–Suttner archive, United Nations Office, Geneva. 44. Letter of 29 August 1908 to Hermann Beuttenmüller, cited in Brigitte Hamann, Bertha von Suttner: Kämpferin für den Frieden (Vienna: Brandstätter, 2013), p. 282. 45. Rudolf Lothar, ‘Bertha von Suttner’, Moderne Rundschau, 3 (1891), 13–17 (p. 13). 46. Alfred H. Fried, ‘Bertha v. Suttner. Ein Blatt des Gedenkens’, Neue Freie Presse, 23 June 1914, p. 10. 47. Zweig, Die Welt von gestern, pp. 243–44. 48. Cited in Walter Bredendiek: Kirchengeschichte von ‘links’ und von ‘unten’. Studien zur Kirchengeschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts unter sozialhistorischer Perspektive, ed. by Hans-Joachim Beeskow and Hans-Otto Bredendiek (Berlin: Thurneysser, 2011), p. 239. 49. Klaus Mann, Kind dieser Zeit (Munich: Nymphenburger, 1965), p. 86. The original was published in 1932. 50. Ibid., pp. 86–87. 51. Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and a World Without War. The Peace Movement and German Society, 1892–1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 93–94. 52. Victor Hugo, ‘Discours d’ouverture du Congrès littéraire international, Paris, 7 June 1878, [accessed 1 August 2014].

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53. Alfred H. Fried, Handbuch der Friedensbewegung. Zweiter Teil: Geschichte, Umfang und Organisation der Friedensbewegung (Berlin: Friedens-Warte, 1913), p. 104. 54. Suttner, Memoiren, p. 183. 55. The best authority on this is Irwin Abrams, ‘Bertha von Suttner and the Nobel Peace Prize’, Journal of Central European Affairs, 22 (1962), 286–307. 56. See [accessed 1 August 2014].

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‘Ich hätte so geschrieben’: Fontane’s Reception of Zola Patricia Howe, Queen Mary, University of London Zola is the only French novelist to whom Fontane repeatedly returns.1 In diaries, letters, reviews, and in his own novels he records his reactions to Zola’s novels and to his literary programme, referring mainly to those volumes of Les RougonMacquart written between 1871 and 1880, and to its theoretical preface. Apart from his draft essays on La Fortune des Rougon and La Conquête de Plassans, these consist mainly of isolated paragraphs and brief comments, so that it is difficult to judge how much of each work he read, whether in French, in translation, or, indeed, in both. From the beginning his comments on Zola’s work show a sense of apprehension, competition, and reluctant admiration that originate in personal and public taste and style. Behind his recognition of Zola’s evident talent lies scorn for Zola’s quasi-scientific programme and the fear that this new way of writing will make his own kind of realism look outdated. In November 1878, Fontane writes to Hermann Kletke with a copy of Vor dem Sturm, which he also sent to Ludwig Pietsch for review, comparing his novel pessimistically with Zola’s Le Ventre de Paris. Vor dem Sturm is ‘unmodern, etwas fromm und etwas kirchlich [. . .] An Zola, der einen unterirdischen Pariser Käseladen mit genialer Bravour zu beschreiben weiß, erinnert nichts. Und das spricht mir mein Urteil. Denn Pietsch ist für Zola.’2 While Pietsch and others were, indeed, impressed by Zola’s modernizing talents (although in this instance Fontane’s pessimism was unwarranted), Fontane believed that Zola’s writing might offend Prussian sensibilities. His reservations are aesthetic, which distinguishes them from the common objection to Zola’s writings as immoral, but he takes a pragmatic view of aesthetics that accommodates a sense of German custom and taste, as implied, for example, by the contrast between Zola’s enthusiastic reviews of contemporary French drama and his own.3 Throughout his reception of Zola this emphasis on aesthetic criteria remains, but the territory on which Fontane conducted his unilateral battle with Zola was not the drama, but the novel. His reading of Zola’s novels was selective and sceptical, sufficient to satisfy his professional interest. He writes to Emilie in 1883: ich werde wohl über einen Band nicht hinauskommen, oder vielleicht les’ ich auch alle Bände aber von jedem nur zwei, drei oder vier Kapitel (die Kapitel sind sehr lang, mitunter 50 Seiten, also sagen wir zwei Kapitel.) Als Mann von

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Fach interessiert mich die Sache sehr, aber von Bewunderung keine Rede. (Ehebriefwechsel, iii, 297)

His judgement gradually moderates from comprehensive rejection of Zola’s theoretical premise into grudging recognition of his talent for observation and description: Die Vorrede zu La fortune des Rougon ist Unsinn und Anmaßung, also schließ­lich der reine Mumpitz. Nun kommt das erste Kapitel. Was hierin er­zähl­er­isches Talent ist, erkenn ich gern an, — manches (aber auch nur manches) ist scharf beobachtet, die Darstellung lebhaft, farbenreich, fesselnd [. . .] (Ehebriefwechsel, iii, 297)

But, less graciously, as his aesthetic objections surface: ‘Es wimmelt von Fehlern, Wuscheleien, Ungehörigkeiten und Unsinnigkeiten, lesbar, auch für unserein, aber ohne Kunst und ohne Bildung’ [Fontane’s italics] and, recording that he has read another chapter, ‘Frisch, lebendig, voll schildernder Kraft, aber ohne Kunst und Sorgfalt’ (Ehebriefwechsel, iii, 298, 300). As he progresses from La Fortune des Rougon to La Conquête de Plassans he acknowledges Zola’s undoubted talent, exonerating him from cynicism or immorality, but describing his writing as ‘niedrig’. By this Fontane understands a rejection of beauty. Although he claims to judge ‘nicht vom Moral-Standpunkt aus’, he treats beauty as a moral imperative for art and, specifically, for Realism: So ist das Leben nicht, und wenn es so wäre, so müßte der verklärende Schönheitsschleier dafür geschaffen werden. Aber dies ‘erst schaffen’ ist gar nicht nöthig, die Schönheit ist da, man muß nur ein Auge dafür haben oder es wenigstens nicht absichtlich verschließen. Der ächte Realismus wird aber immer schönheitsvoll sein, denn das Schöne, Gott sei Dank, gehört dem Leben gerade so gut an wie das Häßliche. Vielleicht ist es noch nicht einmal erwiesen, daß das Häßliche präponderiert. (Ehebriefwechsel, iii, 306)

His more favourable verdict on La Conquête de Plassans, which he went on to read, maintains the distinction between talent and execution, and announces his wish to write about its author: Seit vorgestern Abend bin ich auch mit La Conquête de Plassans fertig und habe gestern Nachmittag viel darüber geschrieben. [. . .] Das Talent ist kolossal, bis zuletzt. Er schmeißt die Figuren heraus, als ob er über Feld ginge und säte. Gewöhnliche Schriftsteller, und gerade die guten und besten, kommen einem arm daneben vor [. . .] Ich hoffe über Zola zu schreiben. Was jetzt über ihn gesagt ist, ist alles dummes Zeug, geradezu kindisch. (Ehebriefwechsel, iii, 311)

Fontane’s rejection of Zola’s ‘intellectual disguise’ provokes an aesthetic profession of faith.4 His draft essay combines qualified approval of Zola’s novels with scorn for his programme, particularly for his ‘verrücktes Vorwort’ (Ehebriefwechsel, iii, 207). In the final section of his essay on La Fortune des Rougon, he argues that Zola’s interpretation of the laws of heredity allows for any possible combination of human characteristics to emerge in a single individual, thus, ‘von allen Menschen, die auf Gottes Welt rumlaufen, läßt sich beweisen, daß sie von der Familie FouquéRougon-Macquart abstammen müssen.’5 This is, in Fontane’s opinion, ‘alles Schwindel’. The quasi-metaphysical counter-argument echoes his belief, expressed

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in the second section of the essay, that Zola’s theory negates individual free will: ‘Das Ganze wirkt als Negierung des freien Willens des Individuums. Der Mensch hat keine Seele, die kraft ihrer selbst, aller Schwächlichkeit und aller Verführung unerachtet, Großes, Schönes, Tugendhaftes, Heldenmäßiges kann’ (La Fortune des Rougon, NFA xxi/2, 342; Fontane’s emphases). As his scorn mounts, he repeats, ‘Im Übrigen ist alles Schwindel’ and concludes ‘und so gewiß es Naturgesetze gibt, so gewiß gibt es Wunder Gottes, die diesen Brast jeden Tag über den Haufen stoßen’ (La Fortune des Rougon, NFA xxi/2, 346). In the first two sections of his essay on La Fortune des Rougon Fontane focuses on events in the Provençal town of Plassans following the declaration of the Second Empire on 2 December 1851, and the rise of Pierre Rougon to power and prosperity. He follows his account with a brief list of the other functions of the novel as he sees them, namely: as a family history, as a love story, and as a picture of life in a provincial town in the South of France ‘in seiner Ödheit, Anmaßung, Borniertheit, Zersplitterung und Parteizerrissenheit’ (La Fortune des Rougon, NFA xxi/1, 341). His disapproval of Zola’s programme may explain why he simplifies the complex, multiple functions of Zola’s opening pages, which are: to inaugurate a series of novels conceived as a single project and so intended to fulfil broader expository functions than the beginning of a single novel; to provide an example of a contemporary theory of human evolution, based on scientific methods of observation; to depict the socially and politically divided community of Plassans, his fictionalized version of Aix-en-Provence, as it reacts to the declaration of the Second Empire; and to introduce a tragic love story. This last element Fontane describes as ‘Poesie mit Albernheit verquickt’, and he believes Zola was himself uncomfortable with it (Ehebriefwechsel, iii, 308–09). This fragment of ‘Idealität’, as Fontane calls it, fades before the political machinations of the more vivid characters, reappearing towards the end of the novel as a contrast to their triumph. Fontane’s brief rewriting treats time and place as the overture to action. In a single paragraph it f lows smoothly through the history of the Aire St. Mittre to the introduction of Silvère, treating the material as historical background and creating a melancholy and ultimately sinister mood. He believes that his version conveys everything essential and ‘viel, viel höher steht’ (NFA xxi/2, 341) than Zola’s. It does not, however, convey everything that Zola saw as essential. Zola’s essay De la description (1880), of which Fontane was presumably unaware, claims that the French novel has moved away from ‘les longues énumerations de commissaire-priseur, dont Balzac obstruait le début de ses romans’6 and, with Flaubert, reduced beginnings to what is strictly necessary. In La Fortune des Rougon this means that the opening is designed to show the passage of time and the effects of change within continuity. It charts the history of the Aire St. Mittre, from its origins as a cemetery, through the failed attempt to sell it for houses and the creation of a woodyard, to its present function as the place of the marginalized and dispossessed — outsiders, urchins, gipsies, old people, and at night the place of sinister shadows and of the young lovers, Silvère and Miette. As change marks the place so its uses shift and human beings survive, f lourish, or perish according to how effectively they adjust. Opportunists, often the survivors, grasp every chance, while the weak, the dispossessed and marginalized, the innocent and the naïve fall by the wayside.

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The ‘interessantes, aber konfuses Hin und Her, in dem es schwerfällt, sich zurechtzufinden’ may refer to the length of Zola’s opening — twelve paragraphs — and to its frequent shifts of tense, which are designed to show ‘l’état du milieu qui determine l’homme’ (La Fortune des Rougon, NFA xxi/1, 343).7 This aim is fundamentally contrary to the prevailing ideology of the period, according to which the material world is the product, not the determinant, of human behaviour, a view that Fontane appears to share.8 In Zola’s opening the Aire St. Mittre is the focus, the constant but changing element to which human beings adapt or perish. The opening paragraph, entirely in the present tense, addresses the reader, as does Fontane when he recasts Zola’s opening pages, and establishes the continuing existence of the Aire St. Mittre. Intermittent recourse to the present tense continues to remind the reader of this. In the following paragraphs the predominant, but not exclusive use of the imperfect conveys continuity, giving way in the middle four paragraphs to events that are complete and consigned to the past, conveyed by the past historic and past anterior, and drawing closer to the present with five paragraphs that mix perfect and present tenses, until, in the last two paragraphs, the present again dominates. Finally the narrative reaches its first discriminated occasion with a precise statement of time, place, and the introduction of Silvère Mouret. Fontane’s sense of competition and of aesthetic difference, combined with his scepticism about Zola’s project, may explain his idiosyncratic reading of La Fortune des Rougon, and of the second subject of his essay, La Conquête de Plassans. While he is more positive, even complimentary, he rejects Zola’s characterization of the central characters, basing his judgement on their credibility and again on aesthetic criteria. He explains the political plot, in which the ambitious Abbé Faujas has been sent to Plassans by the authorities in Paris to win its citizens for the Bonapartist regime, lodges with his mother in the house of François Mouret and his wife Marthe, into which Faujas’s sister and brother-in-law later insinuate themselves. As Faujas establishes his power among the political factions in the town, and over the Mourets, so his relatives gradually take over the house and ‘overnight a safe, predictable enclosure becomes a haunted house’.9 François Mouret, who belongs to the Republicans who must be eliminated, becomes the victim both of the intruders and of the machinations of the Rougons, but ultimately escapes from the asylum in which he has been incarcerated, returns to his ravaged home, burns the house down and with it Faujas and his kin. Fontane interprets this as an act of revenge, the culmination of the ‘Liebesroman, der sich in den politischen Roman einwebt’, namely the development of Marthe Mouret’s frustrated passion for Faujas (NFA xxi/2, 347). Qualified praise for the first half of the novel, in which the details convey ‘wunderbare Lebensfülle’ and the secondary characters are ‘meisterhaft’, gives way to objections to extreme characterization that Fontane sees as aesthetic misjudgements: ‘Eine Übertreibung jagt die andre, und [?] (sic P.H.) der angestrebte Naturalismus wird zur Darlegung krasser und häßlicher Unnatur’ (NFA xxi/2, 349–50). In effect he misreads Zola’s novel, underestimating its political theme and its extreme characterization. The ‘conquest’ of the title refers to a plot to ensure that Plassans becomes Bonapartist. Its instrument is a political priest, more ruthless and devious than suggested by Fontane’s description of ‘die einzige reinliche

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Figur, klug, bestimmt, charaktervoll, und weder Gewinnsucht noch Eitelkeit noch Sinnlichkeit bef lecken ihn. Er ist nur ehrgeizig’ (NFA xxi/2, 350). Faujas is more sinister than Fontane implies. The power of his character and physical presence lures the different factions and individuals in Plassans into his personal and political mission. His ‘speaking name’, Ovide Faujas, offers an echo of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and of the erotic Ars amatoria, ref lecting the priest’s effect on the inhabitants of Plassans, and particularly on Marthe Mouret, while his surname suggests his capacity to deceive.10 The susceptible Marthe is not just an unfulfilled woman, glimpsing unknown happiness in the stranger, but is intended to be a ‘folle lucide’, whose potential insanity is latent until awakened by a dominating personality.11 His machinations combine with the rivalry between the Rougons and the Macquarts to destroy her husband, François Mouret. Their combined conspiracies precipitate Mouret’s insanity, and lead, finally, to the conf lagration that destroys the house and its inhabitants. Fontane’s objections are, again, aesthetic. He is unconvinced by François Mouret’s failure to eject Faujas and his relatives from the house: it is an ‘extremer Ausnahmefall, dem wir mit unserem Gefühl und unsrer Teilnahme nicht folgen können’ (NFA xxi/2, 353). With desperate, problematic logic, he argues that, even if ‘eine Grause-Schönheit [. . .] sogar eine Häßlichkeit’, ‘das absolut Verletzende, Dégoûtant’, are admissible, when the reader says ‘ “Nein, keinen Schritt weiter”, so ist der Fehler da, so ist bewiesen, daß das nicht in die Kunst hineingehört’ (NFA xxi/2, 352). A brief comparison between the opening of La Conquête de Plassans and that of Effi Briest illustrates Fontane’s conditional approval and his reservations. Similar settings, configurations, and structures inaugurate a demonstration of personal and political power. In both the setting is a garden, an ambiguous zone, private and cultivated, but open to the observation and encroachment of others. It is bordered on each side by spaces occupied by opposing forces: in La Conquête de Plassans by properties belonging to the factions of Bonapartists and Legitimatists whom Faujas must unite,12 in Effi Briest by the pond that Effi associates with the drowning of adulterous women, and by the church, ref lecting the opposition between mythology and religion enshrined in female education and ultimately associated with Effi’s moral choices.13 At the beginning of both novels the garden is a neutral space, neither political nor gendered according to the nineteenth century’s view of separate male and female spheres.14 In each a mother concentrates on her needlework, while her daughter soon wanders away, attracted by nature and physical exercise. The implication that neither daughter will follow her mother into quiet domesticity is reinforced when the idyll is broken by the arrival of a stranger, who will change all their worlds. Faujas, the ambitious political priest, and Innstetten, the equally ambitious civil servant, are themselves controlled and controlling, and serve powerful political masters. Both pursue their quests for personal and political power, but success is snatched away. The priest’s violent death and Innstetten’s disillusion exemplify the differences between Zola’s violent, dramatic narrative and Fontane’s elegiac, ambiguous one, differences that are exemplified as both narratives return finally to the garden, the one a scene of devastation, the other with a grave at its centre.

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Despite Fontane’s choleric outbursts, his unfinished essay also ref lects his distaste for destructive criticism. Recalling a conversation about Zola and other writers, which in its savagery resembled a battle ‘wo in jeder Sekunde hundert fiel. Das reine Massacre’, he asks: Bin ich auch so? Hau’ ich auch so erbarmungslos in die Pfanne? Ich kann es nicht glauben. [. . .] Meinen Trost find’ ich darin, daß ich, so viel mir gegenwärtig ist, keinen absolut verwerfe; an jedem erkenn’ ich etwas wenigstens ab. (Ehebriefwechsel, iii, 349–50)

As Zola becomes a touchstone in his assessment of other writers, his tolerance is tested. While his comments on Zola range from wry scepticism through grudging praise to acknowledgement of Zola’s talent, less gifted imitators and followers are judged more severely. Fontane deplores society’s creation of a literary stock exchange — the current rates are ‘Zola 500, Sardou f lau’ (NFA xxi/1, 458). He is sceptical of literary programmes: for example, he asks Rudolf Lindau whether he intends to write a cycle like Zola’s (NFA xxi/1, 286), and is relieved that the proposed cycle of novels by Lindau’s brother, Paul, is not intended ‘ein physiologisch-psychologisches Problem zu lösen, auch nicht ein Geschlecht durch 1400 Jahre zu begleiten’ (NFA xxi/1, 289).15 Assessing the relative merits of contemporary North German writers and the acknowledged talents of Scott, Dickens and Thackeray, Balzac or Zola, Tolstoy or Turgenev, he cannot resist singling out Zola for criticism, ‘denn selbst Zola gefällt sich darin, zeitweilig und “aus Prinzip” unsterblich langweilig zu sein’ (NFA xxi/1, 286). Eduard Engels’s Geschichte der französischen Literatur (1882) mirrors his own views. Everyone will agree, Fontane argues, that Flaubert is a great talent, Balzac’s greatest pupil but a superior stylist; Zola, for one, certainly did agree. Engels’s view of Zola is less favourable, and, ‘Auch hierin wird er kaum Widerspruch finden’ (NFA xxi/1, 447). Like Fontane, Engels dislikes Zola’s photographic reproduction of ugliness, his pessimism, the pleasure in coarseness and squalor that detracts from the composition of his novels and his vision of humanity. It should, perhaps, be added that Zola’s own essays, often written under the pressures of journalism, also attack his opponents in order to affirm his own views; but while his critical intelligence is naturally militant, Fontane’s is defensive.16 Fontane’s unfavourable judgements on Zola are, however, relative, and occur mainly in comparisons with other major talents. Zola’s stature rises as less gifted imitators fail to match up to him. Fontane condemns Max Kretzer’s Drei Weiber, ‘die neuste Leistung dieses furchtbaren Menschen, der angestellt scheint, um Flaubert, Zola und den echten Realismus zu diskreditieren’, for the unrelieved pessimism of his distorted view of human nature: ‘Es ist alles zerrbildlich’ (NFA xxi/2, 269–70). More favourably, Alexander Kielland’s Arbeiter shows that the author has read Spielhagen and Zola, among others, ‘mit Verständnis und Liebe’, resembles them ‘in Tendenz und Behandlungsweise der Schreibweise’, but lacks a sense of the aesthetically pleasing (NFA xxi/1, 472). Kielland ‘hat das Reportertum, aber statt der Komposition hat er die Kompositionsschablone, und von der schönen Seele hat er nichts’ (NFA xxi/1, 473). He disapproves of Paul Lindau’s emphasis on social conditions, because ‘die Darstellung dieser Form großstädtischer Existenz ist mehr Feuilleton- als Romansache’, arguing that ‘Das Hineinziehens des Feuilletons,

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wie beispielsweise bei Zola ist vielleicht nie statthaft’ (NFA xxi/1, 288; Fontane’s italics). In the essay on Kielland, he acknowledges that ‘Feuilletonismus’ in literature, though perceived as decadent, is ubiquitous, but ‘Zola ist noch ein Schritt weitergegangen und hat das Reportertum zum Literaturbeherrscher gemacht. Und eine gute Strecke Weges gehe ich dabei mit ihm’ (NFA xxi/1, 474). His reservations are echoed in comments made by William Dean Howells, who argues that it was not so much the methods of science that Zola imported into fiction as those of journalism: ‘It was the error of the realists whom Zola led’, writes Howells, ‘to suppose that people like truth in fiction better than falsehood; they do not; they like falsehood best.’17 But Howells also emphasizes Zola’s innate gifts: ‘in this he had his will only as far as his nature of artist would allow.’18 Fontane recognizes Zola’s gifts, but despite waverings and concessions, his concern for the aesthetics of the novel informs his criticism of Zola and of his imitators. Fontane argues for the aesthetic perfection of the whole, not for ‘schöne Stellen’: rather, ‘das Ganze soll schön und wirkungsvoll, das Einzelne so schlicht wie möglich sein’ (NFA xxi/1, 288). Art must redeem and transform ugliness, degradation, squalor, poverty, ignorance, but Zola’s vivid, minutely observed recreation of places, things, and events seems to him to be only the first step in this process. Echoing his argument in the essay on Les Rougon-Macquart, he articulates his demand for the elusive quality of beauty in quasi-religious terms: ‘diese Rettung kommt erst, wenn eine schöne Seele das Ganze belebt. Fehlt diese, so fehlt das Beste. Es ist dann ein wüst zusammengeworfenes Reich, das ebenso rasch auseinanderfällt und stirbt’ (NFA xxi/1, 473). Fontane’s aesthetic creed does not prevent him from putting Zola’s novels to use in his own. They prove to be a useful resource when negotiating taboo topics with the discretion required by late nineteenth-century sensibilities in circles where literature might be discussed. Emilie’s verdict on Zola, ‘deutsch könnte ich kein Buch von ihm auslesen’ (Ehebriefwechsel, iii, 302), is echoed in Petöfy’s comment: ‘über das Anfechtbare hilft schließlich die fremde Sprache hinweg’ (Graf Petöfy, NFA ii, 52). Fontane negotiates ‘das Anfechtbare’, which, according to Norbert Mecklenburg, means the taboo topic of sexuality, by allusion, quotation, and other forms of indirection.19 Fontane’s characters, however, break the convention, also identified by Mecklenburg, that in late nineteenth-century society gender and class determined that these were subjects for male conversation, and that men of higher social classes did not discuss them in front of women.20 When Fontane’s characters quote or read Zola, they know that they are teetering on the edge of the socially acceptable. The ambitious Mathilde Möhring consciously risks her petit bourgeois respectability when she agrees to read the ‘Paradou’ episode from La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret to Hugo Grossmann. Graf Petöfy’s attempt to describe Zola’s writing to two actresses is cautious and hesitant. Like Fontane, Petöfy finds it hard to say what Zola wants, ‘weil er sehr viel will und dies viele zu gleicher Zeit’ (Graf Petöfy, NFA ii, 50). Petöfy’s self-conscious fastidiousness contrasts with Effi’s naïve, or perhaps disingenuous, letter to Innstetten reporting her conversation with Geheimrätin Zwicker about Nana, with its hint of ‘Schlimmeres’ (Effi Briest, NFA vii, 364), which amuses and annoys him because of Effi’s capacity ‘sich nach links hin treiben zu lassen’ (Effi Briest, NFA vii, 365).

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‘Schlimmeres’ may refer to the second novel in Zola’s series, La Curée, the publi­ cation of which was suspended by the censorship authorities, while the image of ‘sich treiben lassen’ is an echo of ‘wohin treiben wir?’ in L’Adultera. When Fontane reports to his daughter that he has received an appreciative letter about L’Adultera, he seems to think automatically of Zola as a competitor: Wär’ ich nur zehn Jahre jünger, so wär’ ich auch sicher, daß ich damit durchdringen und insoweit besser als Turgenew und Zola (wenn auch selbstverständlich mit geringerem äußeren Erfolge) reüssieren würde, als meine Schreibweise von zwei Dingen völlig frei ist: von Übertreibungen überhaupt und und vor allem von Übertreibungen nach der Seite des Häßlichen hin.21

Whether intentionally or accidentally, L’Adultera, Fontane’s first contemporary subject, shares aspects of theme and configuration with Zola’s La Curée. Both have striking, predictive titles, a similar configuration of characters, a metropolitan setting, and treat personal stories as indicative of social and political developments. Their titles prefigure events by conferring an identity and linking them with the world beyond the text: in La Curée the image of the hunt, the kill, and the division of the spoils, already present as metaphor in the narrative of La Fortune des Rougon, alludes to the exercise of power by the greedy, manipulative Saccard, the speculator determined to profit from the Haussmannization of Paris,22 to the fate of his unfaithful wife, and beyond these, to the ritual that took place regularly at Louis Napoleon’s séries at Compiègne;23 in L’Adultera the Tintoretto painting, a copy of which Van der Straaten buys for his private gallery, foreshadows his wife’s adultery. Melanie recognizes the warning — and challenging — message of the painting, while in La Curée Renée has a sudden foreboding that she will become the victim of her husband’s greed: ‘Et quelque matin, elle s’éveillerait du rêve de jouissance qu’elle faisait depuis dix ans, folle, salie par une des spéculations de son mari, dans laquelle il se noierait lui-même. Ce fut comme un pressentiment rapide.’24 The boredom of the privileged but neglected wife prompts each of them to court the fates prefigured in the titles; their husbands, who bring younger men into their homes, provide the opportunity. Zola consciously created in La Curée a modern version of Racine’s Phèdre, and while Fontane based his own novel on contemporary events, he too knew Racine’s play.25 The narrative of both novels becomes the inexorable process by which the intratextual predictions and extratextual allusions are completed. The plot of each novel depends, however, both on personal attraction or provocation, and on socio-political conditions. Both young wives are commodities: Melanie is acquired when her father dies in debt, Renée sold by her family to save them from shame. Both are displayed by their husbands to an appreciative public, like their opulent houses, their servants, and Van der Straaten’s pictures. Each is ‘valuable to her husband [. . .] as a means of showing off his financial status’.26 The aspirations of the socially and politically ambitious bourgeoisie, with its desire for social acceptance and public recognition, its taste for art as a display of wealth, contrast with the values of poorer people, such as servants: Melanie’s maid can overlook Melanie’s transgression, if not condone it, while Renée’s maid observes her mistress’s behaviour, saves her wages, and declares her intention to lead a single, independent life in the country. Renée’s fate, the eventual trickery

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by which her husband acquires the remains of her dowry and is, himself, duped by wily speculators, belongs to the corruption of Hausmannization, a central theme of the novel and determinant of events. Saccard’s dubious business deals are an intrinsic part of the social and material development of Paris. The Prussian equivalent is ref lected less in L’Adultera than in the aspirations of the petit bourgeois in Fontane’s fragment, ‘Koegels-Hof Nummer drei’, in which the central character is determined to achieve fame and fortune, but by more honest means than Saccard, both for benevolent purposes and to immortalize his name.27 Speculation and expropriation ruin his worthier aspirations, as they do Saccard’s selfish ones. The failure of Rubehn’s banking venture, and the consequent need for the couple to become employees, conveys the sense of a society in f lux, of social and economic change, of traditional values and modern sensibilities. Similarly, conversations at Van der Straaten’s dinner-table hint at the Franco-German crisis of relations in 1875, the Anglo-German clash of interests in the Near East, the possibility of war and rumours circulating on the Stock Exchange, articulating the wealthy bourgeois’s fear that his personal ambitions or desire for public recognition may be threatened. While L’Adultera and La Curée share basic plots, configurations, and themes, they differ in style and method. Fontane evokes the psychological and material worlds of his characters by indirection and selection, using incidents and objects, references to works of art and to scripture to represent temperament, mood, or social status. Zola’s omniscient narrator, by contrast, amasses detail, appeals to the senses and mythologizes.28 In both novels the husband uses his possessions, including his wife, to express his desire for display and validation. In L’Adultera Melanie’s resistance is exemplified by the décor in her own rooms, and in her preference for music over painting, while Renée’s boredom drives her into excesses and delusions that enable Saccard to entrap her; her apartment is transformed into a grotto, her affair with Maxime a perversion, the opulent display of clothes and jewels a disguise for the degradation and debt into which she falls. The differences are exemplified in the episodes in the ‘Palmenhaus’ in L’Adultera, ‘la serre’ in La Curée. These fashionable structures are a visible display of wealth and success, which, therefore, implicitly define the heroine’s infidelity as insult, treachery, even desecration (Melanie speaks of setting up an altar under the dome), Zola likens the serre to the nave of a church. In both episodes the heavy, perfumed air overwhelms the senses, but, whereas in L’Adultera reminders of human life punctuate descriptions of exotic vegetation and the stif ling atmosphere, in Zola’s vision of the serre the environment dominates, the atmosphere is ‘hyperbolic, hallucinatory’, engulfing Renée and Maxime in a confusion of species and genders.29 Although the episode may be seen as a decadent element in both novels, the relative reticence of L’Adultera contrasts with the descriptive excesses of La Curée.30 And remote as the transgressions in the fashionable, exotic ‘Palmenhaus’ and ‘la serre’ may seem from the domestic scenes in idyllic gardens of La Conquête de Plassans and Effi Briest, all convey a sense of the unending competition between the natural and the cultivated world. ‘There will never be a day’, writes William Dean Howells after Zola’s death, ‘when criticism of him will be of one mind about him, when he will no longer be

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a question and will have become a conclusion.’31 Indeed, while Fontane generally prided himself on the clarity of his opinions, his response to Zola remains complex and shifting. Informed by a sense of Zola’s talent, he adapts tone and style to the intended reader, the type of communication, and the degree of personal accountability each entails. Yet from his earliest serious encounter with Zola’s works, in the summer of 1883, the decisive elements are his sense of his own talent and his concept of realism and of the novel. As Reuter suggests in his Nachwort to Fontane’s essays, ‘die Auseinandersetzung mit dem Werk des anderen hat zuerst der Sorge um und der Arbeit an dem eigenen Werk zu dienen’ (NFA xxi/2, 473). Fontane’s instinctive appreciation of Zola’s talent does not fail him, and he is a severe judge of poor imitations, but behind recognition lurks a resistance to Zola’s methods and, with this, the anxiety of competition that is perhaps an inverted form of ‘the anxiety of inf luence’.32 Zola is not ‘the great precursor’ but the younger competitor. Dismissing Zola’s programme so vehemently, as modern critics do with ease, does not dispel concern for the fate of his own works at a moment when realism, as Fontane understands it, is threatened. Yet, ultimately, as Verena Brandes suggests, the scattered occasions of criticism become a component of the author’s own work.33 The final poem of the cycle Aus der Gesellschaft (1889), ‘Nur nicht loben’, offers a glimpse of such creative criticism. In it Fontane lists a range of genres that are always assumed to be the province of another writer. Two are French, namely, Dumas, creator of beautiful women and Ehebruchsdramen, and Zola, but in the last two verses lingering anxiety about Zola’s talent gives way to a wry note of relief as Fontane wrests at least one genre from the Frenchman: Jeder Einfall, statt ihn zu loben, Wird einem andern zu geschoben. Ein Glück, so hab ich oft gedacht, Daß Zola keine Balladen macht.34

Notes to Chapter 12 1. Hans-Heinrich Reuter, ‘Nachwort’, in Theodor Fontane, Sämtliche Werke, ed. by Edgar Groß and others, 21 vols (Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, 1959–75), xxi/2: Literarische Essays und Studien, ed. by Rainer Bachmann, Peter Bamböck, and Hans-Heinrich Reuter (1963), pp. 471–95 (p. 489): ‘In seinen Arbeiten zur Literatur hat sich Fontane nur anhand Zolas eingehend über den französischen Roman geäußert.’ Further references to Fontane’s works, unless otherwise indicated, are to this edition and given in the text in the form: title, NFA, volume, page number. 2. Theodor Fontane, Briefe in zwei Bänden, ed. by Gotthard Erler (Berlin: Auf bau-Verlag, 1980), i, 451. The reference is to chapter 5 of Le Ventre de Paris, 1873 (trans. as Der Bauch von Paris, 1874). Fontane continued to associate Pietsch with Zola: ‘Es giebt doch wundervolle Figuren. Schade, daß er nicht in Paris lebt. Dort wäre eine Art Zola aus ihm geworden.’ Emilie und Theodor Fontane, Die Zuneigung ist etwas Rätselvolles Der Ehebriefwechsel, iii: 1873–1898, Grosse Brandenburger Ausgabe, ed. by Gotthart Erler unter Mitarbeit von Teresa Erler, (Berlin: Auf bau, 1998) p. 200. Further references to this edition are given in the text as (Ehebriefwechsel, iii, xxx). 3. Yves Chevrel, ‘Theodor Fontane and France: A Problematic Encounter’, in Theodor Fontane and the European Context: Literature, Culture and Society in Prussia and Europe, ed. by Patricia Howe and Helen Chambers, Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft, 53 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), pp. 63–75.

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4. Angus Wilson, Emile Zola: An Introductory Study of his Novels, (London: Secker & Warburg, 1952), describes Zola’s introduction as ‘an intellectual disguise, presenting his genius as “logical theory” ’ (p. 84), adding ‘Flaubert was rightly horrified by its appearance’ (p. 85). 5. Émile Zola, La Fortune des Rougon. La Conquête de Plassans, in NFA xxi/2, 338–55 (p. 346); further references to the essay are given in the text. 6. Zola, ‘Du roman’, in Le roman expérimental, ed. by Francois-Marie Mourad (Paris: Éditions Flammarion, 2006), pp. 222–27 (p. 225): ‘On peut dire que Gustave Flaubert a réduit à la stricte necessité les longues énumérations de commissaire-priseur, dont Balzac obstruait le début de ses romans’ [One may say that Gustave Flaubert reduced the long auctioneer’s catalogues with which Balzac obstructs the openings of his novels, to what is strictly necessary (my translation)]. 7. Zola, Le roman expérimental, p. 22. 8. See Sandy Petrey, ‘Zola and the Representation of Society’, in The Cambridge Companion to Émile Zola, ed. by Brian Nelson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 39–52 (p. 40). 9. Frederick Brown, Zola: A Life (London: Macmillan, 1995), p. 287. 10. ‘Fau(x)’ (false) and ‘jas(er)’ (to prattle). See Émile Zola, La Conquête de Plassans, with a preface by Marc B de Launay, ed. with notes by Henri Mitterand (Paris: Gallimard, 1990). Mitterand (p. 441) refers to the implied ‘Fau(x)’ in ‘Faujar’, but not to ‘jaser’. 11. In his preface (p. 16) de Launay suggests the description of Marthe’s hysteria conforms to mental derangement of an hysterical order, as described by Charcot. Mitterand (pp. 440–41) traces Zola’s research into mental illness to the inf luence, amongst others, of La Folie lucide by Dr Ulysse Trélat. 12. Chantal Pierre-Gnassanou, ‘Zola and the Art of Fiction’, in Cambridge Companion to Zola, pp. 86–104 (p. 94): in La Conquête d Plassans, ‘space is entirely structured in the manner of a sort of provincial war-game exposing the small town rivalries.’ Faujas is sent to reconcile the opposed parties of Bonapartists and Legitimists, and eliminate Republican opposition, and, ‘As if by chance Mouret’s house [. . .] is ideally placed between the two worlds.’ 13. James C. Albisetti, Schooling German Girls and Women: Secondary and Higher Education in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 18–19, explains that religion was considered to be the basis of girls’ education, and that, in the early nineteenth century, there was opposition to the teaching of Greek mythology, ‘because it contained too many references to procreation to be an acceptable subject for girls’ (p. 18). In the 1860s mythology was introduced and the hours spent on needlework reduced. 14. Nicholas White, ‘Family Histories and Family Plots’, in Cambridge Companion to Zola, pp. 19–38 (p. 21), explains: The distinction between a secure private domain and the dangers of la vie publique (not least the city-space of the street) was solidified by the nineteenth-century theory of separate spheres, which saw the home as a feminine space and public life as a male domain of politics, art, journalism and work. Nineteenth-century literature performed before its audiences their fear that such a spatial separation of the genders might not hold good. 15. The first allusion is to Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart, the second to Gustav Freytag’s Die Ahnen, a cycle of nine novels written between 1872 and 1880. 16. Zola, Le roman expérimental, p. 11: ‘il a toujours eu besoin de lutter contre des ennemis, réels ou supposés, pour mieux affirmer ses vues et bâtir ses theories. Son intelligence créatrice s’accompagne du besoin d’action et d’une envie d’expliquer, elle est naturellement militante’ [He always had a need to fight his enemies, real or presumed, in order to confirm and construct his theories. His creative intelligence is accompanied by the need for action and the desire to explain, it is naturally combative (my translation)]. 17. W. D. Howells, ‘Emile Zola’ (1902), in W. D. Howells as Critic, ed. by Edwin H. Cady (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), pp. 386–95 (p. 394). 18. Wilson, Emile Zola, p. 30, also argues that Zola’s theory is not allowed to get in the way of his ‘creative genius’. 19. Norbert Mecklenburg, Theodor Fontane: Romankunst der Vielstimmigeit (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhr­ kamp, 1998), pp. 228–80 (ch. 4, ‘Zweideutigkeiten: Formen und Funktion erotischer Anspiel­ ungen’).

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20. Mecklenburg, Romankunst der Vielstimmigkeit, p. 230, describes Fontane’s technique as ‘ein feines Spiel mit Tabu-Schwellen’, pp. 228–80. 21. Theodor Fontane, Briefe an seine Familie, i (Berlin, 1924), no. 187, pp. 26–27, to Mete, 5 May 1883. 22. For an account of the aims, processes, and effects of Haussmannization, see Rupert Christiansen, Tales of the New Babylon, Paris in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (London, 1995), pp. 93–116 (ch. 5, ‘Social Engineering’). Christiansen discusses the radical reorganization and reconstruction of Paris between 1853 and 1970, carried out according to the plans of George-Eugène Haussmann (1809–91), a civil servant, later Prefect of the Seine, and the political involvement of Louis Napoleon. 23. Christiansen, Tales of the New Babylon, pp. 18–37 (ch. 1, ‘Autumn Pastoral’), describes ‘la série’, one of a series of gatherings held every autumn at the château of Compiègne about fifty miles outside Paris, to which Louis Napoleon summoned favoured or high-ranking guests in groups of about a hundred for about a week; pp. 33–34 describe the hunt that took place during every série, followed in the evening with great ceremony by ‘la curée’, the division of the spoils, from which Zola derives the title of the second volume of Les Rougon-Macquart. 24. Émile Zola, Les Rougon-Macquart. Histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le second Empire, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), p. 334 (‘And one morning she would awaken from the dream of pleasure she had lived in for the last ten years, mad, soiled by one of her husband’s speculations, in which he himself would go under. It came to her as a sudden foreboding’. Émile Zola, The Kill, translated with an introduction by Brian Nelson, Oxford World Classics (Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 19). 25. In Unwiederbringlich, NFA v, 174, ch. 26, Ebba describes Phèdre’s rejection by her stepson as ‘Vielleicht der erste Décadencefall, erstes Vorspuken des schwächlich Modernen.’ 26. Hannah Thompson, ‘Questions of Sexuality and Gender’, in Cambridge Companion to Zola, pp. 53–66 (p. 61): ‘He uses her body like a clothes horse, adorning it with expensive jewels in a dazzling display of his buying power.’ 27. Theodor Fontane, ‘Koegels-Hof Nummer drei’. Fragment einer ungedruckten Erzählung’, in: NFA xxiv: Fragmente und frühe Erzählungen: Nachträge, pp. 218–20. 28. Brian Nelson, ‘Zola and the Nineteenth Century’, and Sandy Petrey, ‘Zola and the Representation of Society’, Cambridge Companion to Émile Zola, pp. 1–18 (p. 6) and pp. 39–52 respectively, emphasize the lengthy descriptions of places and things that effectively make people into objects. 29. Nelson, ‘Zola and the Nineteenth Century’, p. 7. 30. For an analysis of decadence in L’Adultera, see Julia S. Happ, ‘Die Dekadenz ist [wieder] da’, in Theodor Fontane: Dichter des Übergangs, ed. by Patricia Howe (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2013), pp. 123–46. 31. Howells, p. 386. 32. The terms are borrowed from Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). 33. Verena Brandes, ‘Über Kollegen: Fontane und Kempowski als Literaturkritiker’, Fontane-Blätter, 96 (2013), 121–36. 34. Theodor Fontane, ‘Aus der Gesellschaft, 9. Nur nicht loben’, in Theodor Fontane, Gedichte, ed. by Joachim Krueger und Anita Golz, 3 vols (Berlin and Weimar: Auf bau, 1989), i: Gedichte (Sammlung 1898), Aus den Sammlungen ausgeschiedene Gedichte, p. 40.

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Nineteenth-Century Literary Networks and the ‘Unheroic’ Man of Letters: Victor Aimé Huber and Friends Carol Tully, Bangor University The nineteenth century in Europe saw an unprecedented expansion in scholarship, translation, and literary reviewing. This was fuelled by the rapid expansion of the periodical press and a huge increase in the book market, developments which were in turn responding to the intellectual needs of an increasingly literate population. One notable side-effect of this publishing boom was a marked upturn in the transnational exchange of ideas with scholars from across the continent and beyond engaged in the dissemination, study, and recording of cultural artefacts and literary debates, their interests ranging from Spain in the south to the Scandinavian north. Some of these, such as the Brothers Grimm, became inf luential household names across Europe, their work setting the standard for future scholarship in the fields of philology, translation, and literary history; others, although inf luential and well-connected in their day, were destined to remain in the shadows, forgotten by the very disciplines they sought, often without remuneration, to advance. Yet, without these figures, the literary and cultural landscape of Europe would not have developed as it did. It is their work — in terms of motivation, transnationality, and reception — which is the subject of this essay. Fontane’s much-cited observation that ‘es wird nirgends so viel übersetzt als in Deutschland’1 characterizes the nature of the nineteenth century in the Germanspeaking lands in particular, where, inspired by the Goethean notion of Weltliteratur and the findings of travellers and explorers like Alexander von Humboldt, the desire to know and understand cultures and literary texts from across the globe resulted in a plethora of publications including travel writing, translation, literary reviews, and political commentary. The range and extent of the material available was the result of a veritable obsession with knowledge. Writing only a few decades later in his 1921 study of the life and work of one of the most prolific figures of the period, the writer and editor Julius Rodenberg (1831–1914), Heinrich Spiero made the following observation which captures well the spirit of the age: ‘Der deutsche Schriftsteller, der sich in den Jahrzehnten von 1830 bis 1860 bildete, glaubte fast immer, langer und eindringender Studien von Land und Leuten jenseits der deutschen Grenze

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zu bedurfen.’2 The period highlighted by Spiero can be extended to include the majority of the nineteenth century, as post-Napoleonic Europe gradually came to terms with itself and marched forward into the industrial age. The writing which emerges ref lects that process of adjustment. Boundaries between the genres were often blurred with travelogues containing philological or literary historical material and literary reviews merging into socio-political analysis. The network of scholars involved in this process of transnational analysis included both men and women, albeit with a predictable gender imbalance. Many of them operated across, and occasionally in, numerous cultures. Examples could include Johann Nikolas Böhl von Faber (1770–1836), who mediated between German and Spanish culture from around 1805 until his death in 1836, most notably introducing Schlegelian thought to Spain but also providing German readers with access to ancient Spanish ballads. In the same vein, one could cite the work of Georg Depping (1784–1853) and Friedrich Diez (1794–1876), both of whom published anthologies of Spanish poetry in 1817 and 1821 respectively, and Hedwig Dohm (1831–1919), who published an extensive study of Spanish literature in 1867 before making her name as a campaigner for women’s rights. Another example with a different cultural emphasis would be the notable work in relation to Celtic Studies undertaken by Albert Schulz (1802–93), who published the first German translation of selections from the Mabinogion in 1841, and Julius Rodenberg, whose Ein Herbst in Wales (1858) provided a potted cultural history of Wales and the Welsh, as well as a narration of his own adventures there. The roll-call of individuals is seemingly endless and while much was published anonymously, many scholars made their name within extensive and complex national and transnational networks. Böhl von Faber could, for example, count scholars in Germany, Spain, the United States, and France among his correspondents, including names as well-known as Washington Irving. Schulz, working in the area of Celtic Studies in the 1840s and 1850s, was equally well connected and corresponded with the likes of the Brothers Grimm, Lady Charlotte Guest, and Karl Lachmann. The group of scholars in question forms part of an unofficial but incredibly effective network of what John Gross, echoing Carlyle, refers to as ‘unheroic’ men of letters.3 They are deemed to be ‘unheroic’ because they are not the producers of literature but rather the evaluators of the ‘true’ men of letters: the poets, writers, and thinkers whose work and cultures they explore and explain. They act essentially as cultural commentators for the reading public and as such take second place to the canon. Yet they are numerous and essential to the publishing scene. In the introduction to the 1991 edition of his study The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: English Literature since 1800 (1969), Gross seeks to understand the cultural role of these individuals, whom he describes variously as ‘Bookmen’, ‘middlemen’, and ‘private enthusiasts’. He deliberately throws his net wide when discussing these figures, including well-known writers such as Carlyle, whom he describes as ‘an intermediary for the Germans’ (p. 46), as well as lesser-known individuals such as the architect and founder of the high Victorian journal The Nineteenth Century, James Knowles (1831–1908). Knowles is typical in that, at a time when the very possibility of working as a freelance writer was still debatable, his literary activities

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were to some extent a sideline, undertaken to satisfy his own desire for learning and a sense of intellectual duty to his social group. One could draw similar parallels in the German context: Böhl von Faber, for example, was a merchant by trade while Schulz worked as a Prussian civil servant. Nevertheless, like Knowles, both invested extraordinary energy in their academic work, publishing prolifically and ensuring a legacy which would endure, albeit it often unacknowledged, in the cultural fabric of European thought. It is this aspect of these scholars’ lives which is particularly fascinating: the fact that they felt driven to undertake often painstaking and detailed research whilst simultaneously engaged in careers quite separate from their scholarly endeavours. Gross seeks to explore this aspect and places his intentions in context in the opening paragraph of the volume: The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters had two separate but closely related points of departure. When I began sketching it out, in 1966, I was partly prompted by simple curiosity. I had become increasingly interested in the middlemen of nineteenth-century and twentieth-century literature, the commentators and interpreters; I wanted to find out more about them — as individuals, not as mere cultural symptoms or representative types. But I was also thinking of current conditions, and of where they were likely to lead. On the one hand you had the mass media, relentlessly pressing forward; on the other hand, the universities steadily consolidating their grip on scholarship and intellectual life. How much room was there going to be left in between for the critic at large or the unattached litterateur? It seemed time to remind readers of endangered traditions, and to speak up for the virtues of independence. (p. 7)

What Gross cannot have known, of course, was that less than half a century later, world communication would have changed beyond all recognition. His bleak view of a world where independent thought might struggle to find an outlet has been proven overly pessimistic as we now live in an era where anyone can write, comment, and publish online. Indeed, the work of those Gross sought to understand is itself now much more accessible with digitized versions of the many nineteenthcentury periodicals and books now available in a readily searchable format. This is in many ways a natural development, continuing a process of democratization started in the nineteenth century. Periodicals and reviews were the blogosphere of their day, supplemented by a plethora of anthologies, travelogues, and other informative works. Today’s scholars, in the free world at least, do not need private means or social connections to publish their work, only access to a computer or handheld device. The activities undertaken are, however, essentially the same, as is the impact of those individuals on the cultural landscape. In this respect, the ‘unheroic’ man of letters is alive and well, albeit now just as likely to be a woman. Gross’s interest in these scholars ‘as individuals, not as mere cultural symptoms or representative types’ usefully underpins the broader research questions around the networks they populate. These have been the subject of major research in recent years as the importance of book history has been increasingly foregrounded in fields such as Cultural Studies and Social History. In the introduction to the volume Publishing Culture and the ‘Reading Nation’: German Book History in the Long Nineteenth Century (2010), Lynne Tatlock provides a useful overview of the approaches which have emerged in recent decades.4 She cites Robert Darnton’s notion of the

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‘communications circuit’, which ‘conceives of the lifecycle of the printed book in terms of the convergence of complex cultural, social, and economic pressures and networks’ (p. 2), a view echoed in Reinhard Wittmann’s view of ‘literarisches Leben’ as a ‘System mehrerer, einander teilweise schneidender und überlagernder Kreise heterogenen Materials’ (p. 3). Tatlock also notes the ‘impulses from literary sociology’ and other disciplines, including book history, which ‘invite us — indeed, make possible — multiple border crossings between the interpretation of texts and the study of their socialization’ (p. 4). Central to this process, as Gross makes clear, is our understanding of the authors whose work populated the pages of the books and periodicals. Yet the reception of these figures as individuals is variable and generally relates to key interactions, often driven by interest in their more famous correspondents, rather than their oeuvre as a whole. Part of the problem lies in the sheer number of scholars involved and the complexity of the networks within which they operated. Here, the work of theorists like Bourdieu, with his notions of habitus and field, and the concept of the Konstellation promoted by Dieter Henrich can be useful in enabling us to position the writers within their national and transnational networks but, like Gross, I would like to go a level deeper to examine the writer as individual in order to understand why they become part of a literary network in the first place, to explore why they were driven to undertake the work they did, to understand the transnational aspect of their work, and to ask why so many of them have since vanished from view. Taking as a case study the work of Victor Aimé Huber (1800–69), who spent much of his prolific career from the 1830s to the 1850s seeking to explain British, Spanish, and French life and culture to his fellow Germans, I will explore the inf luences, relationships, and ideals which underpin the activity of the ‘unheroic’ man of letters. Apart from one dedicated comprehensive biography written shortly after his death,5 Huber has been the subject of two major studies which engage extensively with his work as a scholar: Renate Haas’s V. A. Huber, S. Imanuel und die Formationsphase der deutschen Anglistik: Zur Philologisierung der Fremdsprache des Liberalismus und der sozialen Demokratie (1990)6 and Eike Baumann’s Der Konvertit Victor Aimé Huber (1800–1869): Geschichte eines Christen und Sozialreformers im Spannungsfeld von Revolution und Reaktion (2009).7 As the titles suggest, both texts focus on specific areas of Huber’s career. Haas emphasizes Huber’s role as an educator and disseminator of ideas while Baumann’s study includes a detailed exploration of the milieu from which Huber emerged and which enabled him to access the network within which he operated. The two studies complement each other in terms of an understanding of Huber’s intellectual environment. There are also key parallels to be drawn between the English network described by Gross and what Haas describes as an active ‘Bildungsaristokratie’ (p. 63), which she clarifies as being the ‘dünne tonangebende oberste Schicht des Bildungsbürgertums’, often linked to or with aspirations to become nobility. The agenda-setting nature of this upper level of the Bildungsbürgertum then feeds off what Baumann calls the ‘Bildungswilligkeit’ (p.180) of the emergent German-speaking middle class. These two interrelated concepts, with individual learning at their core, are integral to the rationale for and impact of Huber’s work as an ‘unheroic’ man of letters and also his impact in a transnational

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context. Bearing them in mind, it is possible to look at how the author positions himself as a transnational mediator, building up through his intellectual and social connections the relationship to his field and, by extension, to his readers. Because he worked primarily in the field of Spanish and English studies, but with an interest in France and other European countries, Huber’s oeuvre covers a wide range of subject matter, with publications including translations, literary history, reviews, and travel writing. Like many of his contemporaries, he was destined for a more practical career as a doctor and spent many years at odds with himself and, indeed, his mother, torn between two very different ambitions. He did his best initially to combine the two and during his time as a medical student was able to travel widely, producing many of his literary studies and travel narratives during these early years. Eventually, however, his interest in literary matters would prevail as he went on to occupy academic positions at Rostock, Marburg, and Berlin. He spent the later years of his life as a social reformer, linked closely with the emerging German Cooperative movement, the role for which he is now generally remembered. Here, however, the focus is on his work as a transnational scholar and cultural commentator. Huber’s intellectual trajectory was both predictable and remarkable; predictable in that he very much followed the path set out by his forebears in pursuing literary interests, but remarkable in relation to the depth of literary tradition and range of contacts which his family provided. He was born in Stuttgart into a family with well-established intellectual credentials. His grandfather, Michael Huber (1727– 1804), was an acquaintance of Goethe and also published transnationally while based in Paris, translating Salomon Gessner’s Idyllen (1762) and a small volume, Choix des poésies allemandes (1786). Huber’s father, Ludwig Ferdinand Huber (1764–1804), was an associate of Schiller in Leipzig in 1785 and, perhaps most notably, his mother was the writer Therese Huber (1764–1829). The family also had close links to the periodical press of the day, to the Stuttgarter Allgemeine Zeitung through Michael Huber, to Cotta and the Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände through Therese Huber, and to the Göttinger Gelehrten Anzeiger though Huber’s great-uncle, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840). The extended family was polymathic in character with links to numerous universities and disciplines, effectively forming an intellectual network in itself, epitomizing in microcosm the Bourdieuian field within which Huber operated, one which reinforced itself continually through marriage and academic inf luence to form part of the ‘Bildungsaristokratie’ referred to by Haas. Huber would continue this tradition well into the nineteenth century. It is during his time as a medical student that Huber truly becomes an ‘unheroic’ man of letters in Gross’s sense. That Huber conceived of himself as such is possible. He certainly sees his drive to scholarship as a calling to develop his own intellect and, indeed, that of others. He makes this explicit writing to his mother in 1827: [die] möglichst freie Entwicklung des Geistes, der Menschheit, u nach außen Beförderung dieses selben Ziels bei anderen, Einzelnen oder Volk, Staat. Das Erste [Geistesleben] ist die Hauptsache — u gerade das treiben die Menschen in der Regel so neben bei oder gar nicht. Klarheit, Heiterkeit durch Wissen u Handeln u wo uns das nicht ausreicht durch Liebe und Glauben — danach

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strebe ich — alle Zufälligkeiten der äußeren Lage werden mir immer mehr blose Nebensachen, die in ihrer Stelle u als Mittel Werth haben, aber nie als Zweck.8

It is this idealized concept of learning which underpins his role as a ‘middleman’ whose aim is to bring knowledge to others, his actions informed by an unshakeable faith in the ‘Bildungswilligkeit’ of his readership. In so doing, Huber’s work ranges across several cultural interfaces, looking out from a German-speaking perspective to engage with other European cultures. In his work, he is effectively ‘receiving’ Europe (Spain, Great Britain, Ireland, France, Belgium, and Portugal) on behalf of his reader, exploring other cultures from a variety of angles including the social, literary, political, and, later, theological. His output encompasses everything from travel writing to educational anthologies with various stages in between, including the translation and adaptation of texts by other authors. His work is then received into other cultures in turn, as the network of transfer broadens, crossing borders but remaining essentially within the same Bourdieuian field. His interaction with audiences in other cultures is realized primarily through translation, promoted by the recommendation and advocacy of other like-minded scholars. There are, then, effectively two axes to his work as a literary and cultural scholar: his writing on other cultures and the subsequent reception of that writing by other cultures. This transnational dialogue is often binary in nature but can also result in an even more elaborate interaction: for example, whereas he mediates British culture to a German-speaking audience and has his views then mediated through translation back to an English-speaking audience, on the other hand, his work as a German writing on Spain is received into numerous other cultures through translation into English and French. By focusing on these two axes, it is possible to divide his work into two textual groups. The first group includes those texts specifically exploring the cultures of other European countries (Skizzen aus Spanien, Spanisches Lesebuch, Englisches Lesebuch, Die neuromantische Poesie in Frankreich, Ueber Friedrich Raumer’s England im Jahr 1835, Die englischen Universitäten, Skizzen aus Irland, Skizzen aus der Vendée und Bretagne, and Genossenschaftliche Briefe aus Belgien, Frankreich und England). The second, effectively a subgroup of the first, includes those texts which are then mediated to non-German readerships through translation (Skizzen aus Spanien, Die englischen Universitäten). Viewed chronologically, there are three decades of continual interchange between cultures with Huber at the centre. His first major work, Skizzen aus Spanien, is published in 1828, with a French translation, Esquisses sur l’Espagne, by Louis Levrault, appearing soon afterwards in 1830, to be followed in 1837 by an English translation by James Robertson Craufurd (1803–88). Huber’s two educational anthologies, the Spanisches Lesebuch and the Englisches Lesebuch, appear in 1832 and 1833 respectively, with Die neuromantische Poesie in Frankreich also appearing in 1833. His critique, Ueber Friedrich von Raumer’s England im Jahr 1835, is published in 1837. The major work on the English university system, Die englischen Universitäten, is published in 1839 with an English version edited by Francis William Newman (1805–97) appearing in 1843. That same year, Samuel (1800–89) and Anna Carter Hall (1800–81) publish their Ireland, its Scenery, Character etc., which Huber then

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translates and publishes in 1850 as Skizzen aus Irland. The year 1852 sees a return to Spanish material with Ueber spanische Nationalität und Kunst im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert and a year later, in 1853, Huber publishes his Skizzen aus der Vendée und Bretagne, based on two works by the Breton novelist, journalist, and teacher Emil Souvestre (1806–54), Les derniers paysans (1851) and Scènes de la Chouannerie (1852). The cycle ends with the publication of the Genossenschaftliche Briefe aus Belgien, Frankreich und England in 1855. This impressive range of outputs does not even take into account the numerous periodical contributions published during his years travelling around Europe and literary editions including his Geschichte des Cid Ruy Diaz Campeador von Bivar (1829) and an edition of Therese Huber’s Erzählungen (1830–33). What soon becomes clear looking at these decades of transnational interaction is the complexity of the networks involved and the way in which Huber, as an individual scholar, is embedded in the cultural landscape. This is enabled primarily by his membership of the ‘Bildungsaristokratie’ and his privileged access to the literary networks of the day. Huber studied in Göttingen, his mother’s home town. This not only drew him further into the family network but also exposed him to a wealth of languages and cultures, perhaps most notably, initially at least, that of Spain. Göttingen was a centre of excellence for Spanish Studies in Germany at the time with well-known writers and scholars such as Ludwig Tieck and the Schlegel brothers taking advantage of the tuition and library there. A comparative approach was particularly encouraged and this set the tone for Huber’s future endeavours. Despite this, his time as a student at Göttingen was not without its negative side. He felt constrained by the fact that he was forced to live and socialize with family members a great deal of the time and it is perhaps this which drew his attention to further-f lung locations. He followed developments in Spain with particular interest, as the absolutist regime struggled to re-establish itself in the post-Napoleonic era, leading to the Liberal revolt of 1820 which saw Fernando VII f lee into exile and the establishment of a short-lived Liberal government before the eventual restoration of monarchical power in 1823. The upheaval in Spain and Huber’s almost visceral reaction to it brought his medical career to a temporary halt. He was young and idealistic and the events in Spain spoke to his more romantic side, siding with the Liberal cause in the battle against absolutist rule. This suggests a drive beyond that of his intellectual milieu, one fostered instead by a romantic urge to become involved in the action of the age. In this respect, he was himself defined by transnational responses and perhaps sought to convey this to others through his self-appointed role as a ‘middleman’. This drive to act effectively in a transnational context would characterize his later interactions with British culture, albeit in a more measured fashion, notably in his mature exploration of the Cooperative movement in his Genossenschaftliche Briefe aus Belgien, Frankreich und England (1855), the findings of which would feed into developments in his native Germany. Huber spent long periods travelling around Europe, something which gives an added dimension to his work, ref lecting on and narrating his experiences in what Mary Louise Pratt calls the ‘contact zone’, the point where, through travel, ‘disparate cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other’.9 This level of direct engagement with the cultures under enquiry was not universal at the time. The

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Schlegels and Tieck, for example, despite their extensive engagement with the culture and language of Spain, never visited the country, while Schulz’s success as a scholar of Welsh culture and history was achieved in spite of the fact that he had never visited Wales. Huber, however, made use of the privileges of the aff luent ‘Bildungsaristokratie’ to broaden his horizons. In 1821 he made for Paris, where he was active in the circle around Alexander von Humboldt, before travelling on through France to his by now beloved Spain, heading almost immediately for the south, the seat of Spanish Liberalism. This trip resulted in a number of articles for the Morgenblatt based on his experiences in France, and a further series entitled ‘Allerley aus Spanien’. The articles on Spain were the foundation for his first major publication, the Skizzen aus Spanien (1828). As well as attracting positive attention in the Germanspeaking context, contemporary interest in the tumultuous recent history of Spain gained Huber an international readership almost immediately. The French edition, translated by Levrault, was published in 1830 and well received by a readership keen to understand the cultural and political issues facing their near neighbours. Interest in the English-speaking context was even more sustained, with a serialization of the Skizzen in the British Athenaeum in 1835 followed by a full edition in 1837, published in two volumes by Craufurd as Stories of Spanish Life from the German of Huber.10 Craufurd, an officer in the Brigade of Guards, was impressed with the accuracy of Huber’s description of Spain in the years around the Liberal Triennial and felt the text to be of value to a British readership, adding only an introduction outlining the political background to Huber’s experiences. The German is presented as an expert on the Spanish way of life, having ‘observed with great accuracy, the interesting localities of the country’, leading Craufurd to surmise that Huber ‘must have associated familiarly with the different classes, to have described their character, feelings, and manners, with so much spirit and fidelity’ (p. 2). Although very much drawn to Spain, Huber was also fascinated by the culture of the British Isles. He travelled on to Great Britain in 1823, visiting Edinburgh and once more narrating his experiences for the Morgenblatt in his ‘Briefe aus Schottland’. He travelled again from 1825 to 1828, visiting Paris and London, where he had links to the Foreign Quarterly Review and narrowly missed the opportunity to become the Times correspondent in Madrid. His first foray into the emerging field of Anglistik was his Englisches Lesebuch für höhere Schulclassen. Erste Abtheilung. Handbuch der englischen Poesie mit einer Einleitung über die historische Entwickelung der englischen Poesie (1833).11 The volume was intended to serve, as the title suggests, as a reader for university language courses and contained a range of works from Chaucer, Milton, and Shakespeare, through to the Lake Poets, Scott, and Burns. In choosing this broad range of material, which also included non-canonical works such as Jacobite folk songs collected during his stay in Scotland, Huber sought to reframe the perception of the British canon in Germany. This revisionary approach continued in his Ueber Friedrich von Raumer’s England im Jahr 1835 (1837),12 which takes a critical view of Raumer’s observations, quite overtly taking him to task while acknowledging his status as a historian and commentator on modern Europe. This shows Huber’s awareness of his position among the ‘unheroic’, but also his

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willingness, with the typical self-assurance of the ‘Bildungsaristokratie’, to use his role as a ‘middleman’ to ensure the facts are preserved for the edification of his readership. As his work develops, this relationship with his readers, grounded in a belief in the ‘Bildungswilligkeit’ identified by Baumann, becomes ever more important and is often the subject of paratextual commentary in prefaces and notes. Huber’s main work on British literary culture, his lengthy study Die Englischen Universitäten. Eine Vorarbeit zur englischen Literaturgeschichte (1839), is typical in this regard.13 In the text, Huber undertakes a detailed study of the universities at Oxford and Cambridge from their foundation to the middle of the nineteenth century. In the preface, he explains his rationale and his opening words give some insight into his understanding of the relationship between author and reader: Daß der Leser eines Buches im Allgemeinen mit dem Verfasser über das Inter­ esse des Gegenstandes einverstanden sei, muß vorausgesagt werden, da es sonst zu einem Verhältniß zwischen beiden überall nicht kommen würde. Die weitere Bestätigung dieser gemeinsamen Ansicht muß sich dann aus dem Buch selbst ergeben. (p. v)

The need for and assumption of a like-minded reader highlights a key purpose of Huber’s work as a whole and as a member of the ‘Bildungsaristokratie’ in particular. His scholarship is undertaken in order to draw others into or consolidate their position as members of the Bildungsbürgertum. His role as a scholar, as he sees it, is to plug gaps in knowledge, to enable the members of his intellectual network to further their own understanding of the world. This would be justification enough for undertaking the study, but he is at pains to explain the other, essentially existential reason for tackling the subject — his personal scholarly drive, underpinned by his experiences as a traveller: Den ersten Anstoß zu derselben gab ein leider nur kurzer Aufenthalt in Oxford im Jahr 1824. Damals fehlte zwar sowohl Muße als Veranlassung und Beruf zu weiteren Forschungen über die Vergangenheit, zu erschöpfenden Untersuchungen der Gegenwart jener Zustände; allein der Eindruck desjenigen, was sich auch schon dem f lüchtigern Blick darbot, blieb — auch neben den noch frischen Bildern der merkwürdigsten Punkte europäischer Civilisation und Natur — so eigenthümlich bedeutend, daß er zum fruchtbaren Keim geistigen Lebens wurde. (p. v)

Here, Huber emphasizes the conf lict experienced by the aspiring scholar, unable to dedicate himself to his studies due to the impositions of daily life. Yet the drive for knowledge cannot be held back. Furthermore, rather than claiming this drive for his own, the idea of intellectual curiosity as an unstoppable force in the life of the individual is one he expects to be common to others: Wer hätte nicht Aehnliches erfahren? Ein solcher Keim mag lange schlafen; er regt sich doch immer wieder — zieht im Stillen an sich, was seiner Entwicklung dient, oft ohne daß der Träger sich dessen bewußt ist. Er wiederholt dann gelegentlich seine Ansprüche auf vollständigere Organisierung und drängt sich immer ungestümer ans Licht und zur selbstständigen Existenz. Kommen dann noch äußere begünstigende Momente hinzu, so sind diese Ansprüche nicht mehr abzuweisen. So auch hier. (pp.v-vi)

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By generalizing his own experience in this way, Huber draws his readers into his confidence as equals, locating his work at the heart of a mutual quest for intellectual betterment. While Huber is working essentially for the interests of his German-based network, the ongoing reception of his work in Great Britain with the publication of Newman’s edition of The English Universities from the German of V. A. Huber (1843) further demonstrates both the impact of Huber’s work on a transnational level and also the resultant expansion of the scholarly network to which Huber belonged.14 By selecting the work for translation, Newman draws Huber into his own network, the extent of which becomes clear from the genesis of the English version. Newman was himself well-connected. The younger brother of Cardinal Newman, he was Professor of the Greek and Latin Classics at Manchester New College, and former Fellow of Balliol College. He acted as the editor of Huber’s text, with the translation itself being completed by the Cambridge scholar J. Palgrave Simpson, at the behest of Newman and another Cambridge academic, James Heywood. This complex set of connections is another example of the literary networking underpinning the contemporary transfer of knowledge, one which, in this case, is further enhanced by the added transnational exchange with German scholarship. The potential impact of Huber’s study in the British context is clear from the outset. Newman acknowledges the text as a much-needed addition to scholarship at a time of great social change, noting too the appeal to a like-minded readership and stating that: ‘it is hoped that the publication of Professor Huber’s history in our own language may prove seasonable’ (p. vi). Yet the reception of Huber’s text is not intended to provide a set of solutions to the issues facing the English universities, but rather a new perspective from which to approach the debate. Indeed, Newman is critical of some of Huber’s views. The two men have been in direct contact and Newman’s preface gives a fascinating insight into the interaction between literary networks, demonstrating clearly some of the inherent difficulties involved in the transnational exchange of ideas, in particular the differences in scholarly approach: When the translation was all printed off, except a few of the last Notes and Appendices, it was sent to the Author; and a correspondence has ensued which leads the Editor considerably to alter his Preface. For while on the one hand there is now less need of explaining in detail the liberties which have been taken with the form of the work, — (for of these the Author does not appear to complain,) — it has become, on the other hand, necessary for the Editor to enter somewhat more at large into his own views; since he finds that the tendency of his remarks, (contained in the bracketed footnotes,) has been all together misconceived. (p. vi)

Following this insight into the rather tense relations which have resulted from the attempt to draw two networks together, Newman goes on to explain the impact this has had on his own approach. His editing process has adapted the text to suit an English readership, including the addition of new sections on University College London and Durham, as well as several essays on university-related topics and various illustrations. Having made clear the extent to which the text has been altered and enhanced in translation, something not always readily acknowledged in

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contemporary foreign-language editions of texts, Newman’s attention also turns to the relationship with his readers. In so doing, he makes it explicit that he is making Huber’s views known in order to provoke a debate in England on the topic of universities, noting that ‘[i]f the publication of this work shall stimulate discussion in such a spirit, I shall feel that I have attained something’ (pp. xxi). Newman is, then, equally mindful of his readers’ responses and uses Huber’s text to elicit what he feels will be a useful discussion, drawing the views of the German into the discourse of his own field. Huber would return to his own relationship with his readers in the foreword to his abridged translation of Samuel and Anna Carter Hall’s Ireland and its Scenery, Character etc. (1843), published as Skizzen aus Irland (1850).15 The text marks a shift in focus, away from the purely intellectual — the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake in response to a deep-seated drive — to a more socially conceived approach. The approach to the reader, however, remains the same as Huber situates his interest in Ireland in the broader socio-historical context, once more assuming the role of trusted source for a like-minded readership, identifying his readers as the educated, ‘nicht ganz Unkundigen’ at an early stage: Erweckt doch schon der Name Irland bei jedem nicht ganz Unkundigen neben so vielen anmuthigen, heitern, ja komischen Momenten, eine Fülle so ernster, schmerzlicher Gedanken und Gefühle — steht er doch auf einem so tragischen Grundton und Hintergrunde, wie kaum ein anderer Volks- und Landesname! [. . .] Vielmehr haben wir ein sehr entschiedenes, sehr wohlthuendes Gefühl, daß es nicht an Gleichgestimmten fehlen wird, denen es in dieser Zeit mit diesen Skizzen aus Irland eben so gehen wird, wie uns — daß gar Mancher sich dran erfrischen, erheitern, sie lieb gewinnen wird, und zwar zum Theil wenigstens eben weil sie einer ganz andern Schule angehören, als jene — oder viel mehr gar keine Schule! (pp. v–vii)

Here, the response to both subject matter and the reader seems more emotive with an expectation that writer and reader, as independent thinkers, will share a similar, visceral response to the material presented. The potential of the text to enable selfbetterment and self-understanding amongst a specific readership is then outlined explicitly: Dies dürfte wohl schon hinreichen, um die Veröffentlichung dieser vielleicht nur zu freien deutschen Nachbildung einer geringen Auswahl aus dem reichen Schatze eines englischen Künstlers zu rechtfertigen. Sollten aber, was in der That wohl nahe genug liegt, unter der Classe von Lesern, die wir, nach dem oben Angedeuteten, besonders im Auge haben, einige sein, die sich mehr oder weniger bei der sogenannten innern Mission betheiligt fühlen, so wollen wir diesen nicht verschweigen, daß auch dieses Büchlein mittelbar im Dienst derselben Sache ausgeht. (pp. vii–viii)

Highlighting the increasing importance of social reform to his own development, Huber draws attention to the text as one which would potentially speak to the interests of the German Protestant Evangelical movement known as ‘Die innere Mission’, led by Johann Hinrich Wichern (1808–81). By drawing attention to this aspect of the Skizzen aus Irland, with their inevitable focus on the poverty and social issues which plagued the country for most of the nineteenth century, Huber draws

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together the two networks within which he operated: the literary network of his early years and the emerging socio-political and theological network of his mature years. By referencing his own developing interests in this way, he is perhaps seeking to change his relationship with the reader, or possibly even the field within which he is operating, by signposting a shift towards a new set of concerns. This essay set out to explore the motivation, transnationality, and reception of what have been termed ‘unheroic’ men of letters in the nineteenth century. Huber was chosen as a case study because of his role both as a scholar and as a figure with a transnational impact. Although the focus here has been on his motivation as an individual, his rationale was one shared by many others of the age: a desire, almost vocational in nature, to further the knowledge of his peers while satisfying an unstoppable drive to further his own intellect. He found himself at the centre of a network of like-minded scholars, members in his case of an inf luential ‘Bildungsaristokratie’ whose self-appointed role it was to set the intellectual agenda in the German-speaking lands. Focusing almost exclusively on the mediation of other European cultures to a German-speaking readership, Huber sought to establish a relationship with his readers which relied on their parallel desire to be informed. This level of activity is not unique to Huber’s case. There are countless others with a similar range of publications and interests, many of them even less well-remembered, yet all contributing to the development of the intellectual networks of the day, without which the exchange of ideas would have been greatly hampered. Current research and the interest in the networks they populate has begun to uncover their legacy in more detail, but the true salvation of the ‘unheroic’ man of letters is likely to come from the field of book history where often the canon is the least important gauge of success. Instead, William St Clair, working on the history of the book in the English context, highlights the importance of looking at what was actually read by what he terms the ‘reading nation’, not what the canon might suggest was read.16 This level of exploration is far more likely to lead to the recognition of writers like Huber who sit at the heart of the transnational exchange of ideas in nineteenth-century Europe, proving in so doing that the relationship with the reader, which Huber was at such pains to promote, might be the most important thing of all. Notes to Chapter 13 1. ‘Übersetzungskunst’, in Theodor Fontane, Aufzeichnungen zur Literatur: Ungedrucktes und Unbekanntes, ed. by Hans-Heinrich Reuter (Berlin and Weimar: Auf bau, 1969), pp. 173–74 (p. 173). 2. Heinrich Spiero, Julius Rodenberg: Sein Leben und seine Werke (Berlin: Paetel, 1921), p. 34. 3. John Gross, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: English Literary Life since 1800 with a New Introduction and Afterword (Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1992 [1991]), p. 39. Further references appear in the text. 4. Lynne Tatlock (ed.), Publishing Culture and the ‘Reading Nation’: German Book History in the Long Nineteenth Century (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010). References appear in the text. 5. Rudolf Elvers, Victor Aimé Huber: Sein Werden und Wirken (Bremen: Müller, 1872). 6. Renate Haas, V. A. Huber, S. Imanuel und die Formationsphase der deutschen Anglistik: Zur Philologisierung der Fremdsprache des Liberalismus und der sozialen Demokratie (Frankfurt a.M.: Lang, 1990). References appear in the text.

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7. Eike Baumann, Der Konvertit Victor Aimé Huber (1800–1869): Geschichte eines Christen und Sozial­ reformers im Spannungsfeld von Revolution und Reaktion (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2009). References appear in the text. 8. Quoted ibid., p. 179. 9. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd edn (New York: Routledge, 2008 [1997]), p. 7. 10. James Robertson Craufurd, Stories of Spanish Life from the German of Huber (London: Henry Colburn, 1837). References appear in the text. 11. Victor Aimé Huber, Englisches Lesebuch für höhere Schulclassen. Erste Abtheilung. Handbuch der englischen Poesie mit einer Einleitung über die historische Entwickelung der englischen Poesie (Bremen: Wilhelm Kaiser, 1833). Huber planned a second volume containing prose, echoing the pattern of his Spanisches Lesebuch which appeared a year earlier, but this was never realized. 12. Victor Aimé Huber, Beiträge zur Kritik der neuesten Literatur: Erstes Heft Ueber Fr. v. Raumer’s England im Jahr 1835 (Rostock: Universitätsbuchhandlung, 1837). 13. Victor Aimé Huber, Die Englischen Universitäten: Eine Vorarbeit zur englischen Literaturgeschichte (Kassel: J. C. Krieger, 1839). References appear in the text. 14. Francis William Newman, The English Universities from the German of V. A. Huber (London: William Pickering, 1843). References appear in the text. 15. Victor Aimé Huber, Skizzen aus Irland (Berlin: Wilhelm Hertz, 1850). References appear in the text. 16. See Tatlock, p. 3.

INDEX ❖ America, Fontane’s knowledge of 26–45 Anglo-Celt, The 146, 149 Arnim, Bettina von 65 Arnstedt, Charlotte von, see Kraut, Charlotte von Arnstedt, Karl Rudolf von 55–56 Athenaeum, The 71, 73, 74 Atlas, The 71, 72 Austen, Jane 90–102 Pride and Prejudice 90–102 Austin, Sarah 67, 69, 73–74, 75 Ballinrobe Chronicle 146, 148, 150 Balzac, Honoré de 175 Barings 136–37 Baumann, Eike 185 Bayle, Pierre 121 Beeren, Hans Heinrich Arnold von 10 Belfast Newsletter 146, 147, 151 Bemong, Nele 81 Bender, Elisabeth 37 Berbig, Roland 38 Berliner Staatsanzeiger 150 Bismarck, Otto von 149, 150, 154 Blackwood’s Magazine 78, 80 Blomqvist, Clarissa 14 Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich 186 Böhl von Faber, Johann Nikolas 183, 184 Bourdieu, Pierre 185 Boyd, E. I. M. 107 Brandes, Verena 179 Brieger, Christina 37, 38 Bristol Mercury 72 Browning, Robert 83 Buckle, Henry Thomas 161–62 Bürger, Gottfried August 84 Burton, James 136 Butt, Isaac 79 Carlyle, Thomas 183 Carnegie, Andrew 164 Carneri, Bartholomäus von 163 Chambers, Helen 61, 108, 145 Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal 72 Connaught Telegraph 146 Conrad, Michael Georg 161, 162, 164 Cooper, James Fenimore 37 Correll, Ernst 34 Court Journal 71

Craufurd, James Robertson 187, 189 Cubitt, Thomas 136 Dahn, Felix 163 Darnton, Robert 184–85 Davis, Arthur L. 45 Davis, Thomas 79, 80, 146 Ballad Poetry of Ireland 82 Demetz, Peter 24 Depping, Georg 183 Dickens, Charles 175 Diez, Friedrich 183 Disraeli, Benjamin 149 Dohm, Hedwig 166, 183 Donne, John 139 Droysen, Johann Gustav 59 Dublin University Magazine 71, 72, 73, 78–80, 83–85 Dumas, Alexandre 179 Dundalk Democrat 146, 148 Ebner-Eschenbach, Marie von 164 Edman, Irwin 134 ‘Edward, Edward’ (ballad) 111–17 Elliot, Hugh 51–53, 55, 59–60 Engels, Eduard 175 Eulenburg, Philipp zu 49, 59 Even-Zohar, Itamar 81, 82 Ferguson, Adam 126–28 Essay on the History of Civil Society 126–28 History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic 128 Ferguson, Samuel 79, 83, 84 Fontane, Elise 50 Fontane, Emilie 59, 170, 176 Fontane, Theodor 7–62, 107–18, 135, 170–79 as journalist 7, 11–13 Aus der Gesellschaft 179 Cécile 25 ‘Chevy-Chase’ 109 ‘Edward, Edward’ 109–17 Ellernklipp 18 Effi Briest 32, 51, 61, 174, 176 Frau Jenny Treibel 23 Fünf Schlösser 49 Graf Petöfy 176 Grete Minde 18 Irrungen, Wirrungen 23

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‘Karl Stuart’ 110 L’Adultera 18, 177–78 Mathilde Möhring 176 Quitt 23–45 Schach von Wuthenow 23, 32 ‘Sir Patrick Spens’ 110 Der Stechlin 23, 32, 145 Vor dem Sturm 18, 170 Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg 9, 50 Foreign Quarterly Review 71, 72, 73, 189 Franco-Prussian War 145–54 Fraser’s Magazine 78, 80 Frederick II [the Great], king of Prussia 153 Frederick III, emperor of Germany 147 Frederick William III, king of Prussia 67 Freeman’s Journal 146, 147, 150–51, 152 Freiligrath, Ferdinand 108, 146 Fried, Alfred 164, 165 Friedenthal, Richard 134–40 Brot und Salz 139 Die englische Kultur 137 German Study Guide 137 London zwischen Gestern und Morgen 135–40 Marie Rebscheider 135 Die Welt in der Nußschale 138 Fulda, Ludwig 164 Gentleman’s Magazine 73 Gentz, Alexander 58 Gessner, Salomon 186 Gibbon, Edward 126 Gladstone, William Ewart 149 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 84, 186 ‘Epilog zu Schillers Glocke’ 85 ‘Erlkönig’ 83 Goschen, George 137 Goupy, Joseph 140 Graf, Andreas 38 Grawe, Christian 25, 91 Grawe, Ursula 91 Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm 182, 183 Gross, John 183–85, 186 The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters 183–84 Großbeeren, battle of 9–10, 18–19 Grünhagen, Colmar 58 Guarda, Sylvain 25 Gubitz, Friedrich Wilhelm 16 Guest, Lady Charlotte 183 Haas, Renate 185 Haeckel, Ernst 164 Hall, Samuel and Anna Carter 187, 192 Handel, Georg Friedrich 135, 139, 140 Hardiman, James 79 Irish Minstrelsy 79, 82, 83 Harte, Bret 24, 37 Hartung, Otto 162

Heidegger, Johann Jacob 140 Heine, Heinrich 67, 84 Henrich, Dieter 185 Herder, Johann Gottfried 80, 107–18 Herwegh, Georg 146 Hesekiel, Georg 7 Himmel, Friedrich Heinrich 15–16 Hogarth, William 140 Hölty, Ludwig 84 Howard, Michael 154 Howells, William Dean 176, 178 Huber, Michael 186 Huber, Ludwig Ferdinand 186 Huber, Therese 186 Erzählungen 188 Huber, Victor Aimé 182–93 Die Englischen Universitäten 190–91 Englisches Lesebuch 189 Genossenschaftliche Briefe 188 Skizzen aus Irland 192 Skizzen aus Spanien 189 Ueber Friedrich von Raumer’s England im Jahr 1835, works listed 187–88 Hugo, Victor 166–67 Huguenots 19, 124 Humboldt, Alexander von 38, 182, 189 Hume, David 120, 121, 122, 129 Dialogues concerning Natural Religion 122 History of England 125 Natural History of Religion 123 A Treatise of Human Nature 129, 131 Huntgeburth, Hermine 61 Hutcheson, Francis 122 Israel, Jonathan 120 Jantzen, Mark 26, 28, 38 Johnson, Samuel 94 Jones, Inigo 136 Kames, Lord 126 Kant, Immanuel 129, 165 Kempf, Beatrix 163 Kerner, Justinus 84 Kielland, Alexander 175–76 Kinsella, Thomas 83 Kletke, Hermann 170 Klingner, Hermann 60 Knowles, James 183–84 Knyphausen, Baron 52–54, 59–60 Kraut, Charlotte von 50–57, 59–61 Kretzer, Max 175 Kreuzzeitung 9 Kugler, Franz 109 Lachmann, Karl 183 Lafitau, Joseph-François 126

Index Laube, Heinrich 67 Leeds Mercury 147 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 80 Liliencron, Detlev von 108 Lindau, Paul 24, 32, 37, 175 Aus der neuen Welt 32 Lindau, Rudolf 175 Literary Gazette 71, 72 London Journal 73 Lothar, Rudolf 162, 165 Lubbock, Sir John 127 Luppa, Annalies 25 MacCarthy, Denis Florence 80, 84 Book of Irish Ballads 82 MacIntyre, Alasdair 121 Manchester Courier 72 Mangan, James Clarence 78–88 Anthologia Germanica 78, 80, 83–87 Mann, Klaus 165–66 Marx, Karl 128, 135, 140 Matthisson, Friedrich von 84 May, Karl 24 Mayo Examiner 146 Mecklenburg, Norbert 176 Mennonites 23–25, 28, 31–38, 44–45 Metropolitan Magazine 71, 72 Meyer, Conrad Ferdinand 164 Meyer, Paul 37 Millar, John 126 Mitchel, John 80, 82 Jail Journal 80 Möllhausen, Balduin 38–39 Monthly Review 71 Moore, Thomas 79 Morning Post 71, 73, 75 Müller-Seidel, Walter 25 Napoleon 9, 56, 69, 123, 128, 136 Napoleon III 148–49, 177 Nash, John 136 Nation, The 80, 146, 147–48, 151, 153 Naturalism 161, 175 Naval and Military Gazette 73 Nenagh Guardian 146, 147, 150, 151 Nestroy, Johann, 102 Neuruppin 8 Newman, Francis William 187, 191–92 Newton, Isaac 129 Nietzsche, Friedrich 120–31 Also sprach Zarathustra 124, 128 Der Antichrist 122 Die fröhliche Wissenschaft 129 Jenseits von Gut und Böse 123–24, 129 ‘Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinne’ 128–29 Zur Genealogie der Moral 121, 122, 124–25

Nisbet, H. B. 121 Nobel, Alfred 163, 164, 167 Nordau, Max 164 Nürnberger, Helmuth 24, 107 O’Brien, Karen 126 Observer, The 72 O’Connell, Daniel 79 O’Neill, Patrick 84 O’Sullivan, Samuel 80 Ovid 174 Oz-Salzberger, Fania 126 Passy, Frédéric 159 Pastor, Ekart 26 Percy, Thomas 107 Reliques of Ancient English Poetry 107–17 Pöckl, Wolfgang 90 polysystems theory 81–82 Pratt, Hodgson 159–60 Pratt, Mary Louise 188 Prussia, criticism of 24, 45 Pückler-Muskau, Hermann von 65Briefe eines Verstorbenen 65, 66, 67, 73, 74 Südöstlicher Bildersaal 74 Tutti Frutti 65–75 Quidde, Ludwig 165 Racine, Jean 177 Raumer, Friedrich von 189 Rée, Paul 126 Reimarus, Hermann Samuel 122 Remarque, Erich Maria 166 Reuter, Hans-Heinrich 25, 179 Rhyn, Hans 107 Richter, Fritz K. 24 Ritter, Gerhard 154 Robertson, John 121 Rodenberg, Julius 182, 183 Rohr, Mathilde von 58 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 122 St Clair, William 193 Satirist, The 71, 75 Schiller, Friedrich 78, 84 ‘Das Lied von der Glocke’ 78, 84–86 ‘Der Gang nach dem Eisenhammer’, 84, 86–87 Schlegel, August Wilhelm 84 Schlenther, Paul 24, 61 Schmidt, Erich 109–10 Schreiber, William I. 32, 33 Schulz, Albert 183 Schwartz, Wilhelm 8, 11 Scott, Walter 107, 108, 175 Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border 107, 108 Seven Years War 147, 153–54

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Index

Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of 121 Simon, Sherry 87 Smith, Adam 121 Essays on Philosophical Subjects 130–31 The Wealth of Nations 126 Souvestre, Émile 188 Spectator, The 71, 139 Spencer, Edmund 67–74 Spielhagen, Friedrich 164, 175 Spiero, Heinrich 182–83 Stead, William 164 Stephany, Friedrich 37 Stewart, Dugald 125 Stockhorst, Stefanie 24 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 159 Sun, The True 71, 72 Sunday Times 72 Suttner, Bertha von 158–67 Ein Stück Leben 161 Das Maschinenzeitalter 160 Schriftsteller-Roman 160 Die Waffen nieder! 158-67

Turgenev, Ivan 175, 177 Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques 120 Tylor, Edward 126–27

Tatlock, Lynne 184–85 Thackeray, William Makepeace 175 Tieck, Ludwig 188, 189 Tietz, Friedrich 8, 10–19 Bunte Erinnerungen 8, 10 Times, The 139, 189 Tolstoy, Leo 159, 175 Town, The 71, 72 Trollope, Anthony 147 Tuam Herald 146, 152 Tunnel über der Spree 109

Yeats, W. B. 83

Uhland, Ludwig 84 Varnhagen von Ense, Karl August 65, 66, 73 Voltaire 124–25, 129 Le Siècle de Louis XIV 124–25 Voss, Lieselotte 24 Vossische Zeitung 9, 16, 24, 60 Wagner, Richard 138 War of Liberation 8–9 Wegmann, Carl 107 Wichern, Johnn Hinrich 192 Wilde, Lady 80 Wildenbruch, Ernst von 50 Die Quitzows 50 Wittmann, Reinhard 185 Wörffel, Udo 24 Wren, Christopher 136, 137

Zieglschmid, A. J. F. 26, 28, 38 Zola, Émile 170–79 La Conquête de Plassans 170, 171, 173–74 La Curée 177–78 La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret 176 La Fortune des Rougon 170, 171–73, 177 Nana 176 Zweig, Stefan 134–36, 138, 165 Die Welt von Gestern 135