The 19th
century
The Romantic
Movement
The early years of German Romanticism have been
aptly termed the theoretical phase of a movement
whose origin can be traced back to the Sturm und
Drang era and, beyond Germany itself, to the French
philosopher and writer
Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
An interest in individual liberty and in nature as a
source of poetic inspiration is a common thread in
the sequence of the movements Sturm und Drang,
Weimar Classicism, and Romanticism, which from one
perspective can be regarded as separate phases in a
single literary development. Within this framework,
the German Romantics forged a distinctive new
synthesis of poetry, philosophy, and science. Two
generations of Romantic writers are usually
distinguished: the older group, composed in part of
Ludwig Tieck,
Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, Novalis,
Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Friedrich and
August Wilhelm von Schlegel; and the younger
group, comprising Achim von Arnim, Clemens
Brentano, Joseph Eichendorff,
Wilhelm and
Jakob Grimm, and the
painter Philipp Otto Runge.
Ludwig Tieck

born May 31, 1773, Berlin, Prussia
[Germany]
died April 28, 1853, Berlin
versatile and prolific writer and critic
of the early Romantic movement in
Germany. He was a born storyteller, and
his best work has the quality of a
Märchen (fairy tale) that appeals to the
emotions rather than the intellect.
The son of a craftsman, Tieck was
educated at the Berlin gymnasium
(1782–92) and at the universities of
Halle, Göttingen, and Erlangen
(1792–94). Through friendship with W.H.
Wackenroder, he began to realize his
talent; together, they studied William
Shakespeare, Elizabethan drama, Middle
High German literature, and medieval
town architecture.
Characteristic of early German
Romanticism are Tieck’s Die Geschichte
des Herrn William Lovell, 3 vol.
(1795–96; “The Story of Mr. William
Lovell”), a novel in letter form that
describes the moral self-destruction of
a sensitive young intellectual; Karl von
Berneck (1797), a five-act tragedy set
in the Middle Ages; and Franz Sternbalds
Wanderungen, 2 vol. (1798), a novel of
artistic life in the late Middle Ages. A
series of plays based on fairy
tales—including Ritter Blaubart
(“Bluebeard”) and Der gestiefelte Kater
(“Puss in Boots”)—that parodied the
rationalism of the 18th-century
Enlightenment were published in
Volksmärchen (1797), under the pseudonym
Peter Leberecht (“live right”). This
collection includes one of Tieck’s best
short novels, Der blonde Eckbert (“Fair
Eckbert”), the fantastic story of an
obsessive fear; this work won the praise
of August and Friedrich von Schlegel,
the leading critics of the Jena
Romantics.
In 1799 Tieck published a translation
of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and he
started a translation of Don Quixote
(published 1799–1801). His early work
culminated in the grotesque, lyrical
plays Leben und Tod der heiligen
Genoveva (1800; “The Life and Death of
the Holy Genevieve”) and Kaiser
Octavianus (1804). Phantasus, 3 vol.
(1812–16), a heterogeneous collection of
works in a narrative framework,
indicated a movement toward realism.
After 1802 Tieck’s creative powers
apparently became dormant. He studied
Middle High German, collected and
translated Elizabethan plays, published
new editions of 16th- and 17th-century
German plays, and acted as adviser to
the Shakespeare translation begun by
August von Schlegel. He also published
works by such contemporary German
writers as Novalis and Heinrich von
Kleist.
From 1825 to 1842 Tieck served as
adviser and critic at the theatre in
Dresden. During those years he became
the greatest living literary authority
in Germany after J.W. von Goethe. His
creative energies were renewed; he
turned away from the fantasy of his
earlier work and found his material in
contemporary middle-class society or
history. The 40 short novels of this
period contain polemics against both the
younger Romantics and the contemporary
“Young Germany” movement, which was
attempting to establish a national
German theatre based on democratic
ideals. Dichterleben (“A Poet’s Life”;
part 1, 1826; part 2, 1831) concerned
the early life of Shakespeare. Vittoria
Accorombona (1840; The Roman Matron) was
a historical novel. In 1842 he accepted
the invitation of Frederick William IV
of Prussia to go to Berlin, where he
remained the rest of his years, and
where, as in Dresden, he became the
centre of literary society.
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Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder

born July 13, 1773, Berlin, Prussia
[Germany]
died Feb. 13, 1798, Berlin
writer and critic who was the
originator, with his friend Ludwig
Tieck, of some of the most important
ideas of German Romanticism.
Wackenroder was the son of a senior
civil servant whose expectations that he
pursue a successful worldly career were
incompatible with the boy’s natural
sympathies and caused him severe
conflict throughout his short lifetime.
At school the shy and melancholy
Wackenroder, happy only when listening
to music, formed a friendship with the
more vital and creative Tieck. This
friendship was to be of great importance
for the work of both men.
After studying with Tieck at the
universities of Erlangen (1793) and
Göttingen (1793–94), Wackenroder
returned to Berlin in 1794. There he was
forced into the Prussian civil service
by his father, but his preoccupations
remained literary. He translated light
English novels and wrote anecdotal
accounts of the lives of Albrecht Dürer,
Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and
Raphael. He also wrote a “biography” of
Joseph Berglinger, an imaginary musician
and a spokesman for Wackenroder’s views
on art. In these stories he developed an
enthusiastic emotional aesthetic,
according to which the perfect work of
art is created by a divine miracle and
is a moral, aesthetic, and religious
unity to be grasped only by the heart,
not by the intellect. In 1797, on
Tieck’s advice, these writings were
published under a title chosen by the
publishers, Herzensergiessungen eines
kunstliebenden Klosterbruders
(“Outpourings of an Art-Loving Monk”).
In 1799 Tieck published the continuation
of Herzensergiessungen (with the
addition of some of his own essays) as
Phantasien über die Kunst (“Fantasies on
Art”). Wackenroder died of typhoid at
the age of 24.
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Novalis

pseudonym of Friedrich Leopold,
Freiherr von (baron of) Hardenberg
born May 2, 1772, Oberwiederstedt,
Prussian Saxony [Germany]
died March 25, 1801, Weissenfels, Saxony
[Germany]
early German Romantic poet and theorist
who greatly influenced later Romantic
thought.
Novalis was born into a family of
Protestant Lower Saxon nobility and took
his pseudonym from “de Novali,” a name
his family had formerly used. He studied
law at the University of Jena (1790),
where he became acquainted with
Friedrich von Schiller, and then at
Leipzig, where he formed a friendship
with Friedrich von Schlegel and was
introduced to the philosophical ideas of
Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottlieb
Fichte. He completed his studies at
Wittenberg in 1793, and in 1796 he was
appointed auditor to the Saxon
government saltworks at Weissenfels.
In 1794 Novalis met and fell in love
with 12-year-old Sophie von Kühn. They
were engaged in 1795, but she died of
tuberculosis two years later. Novalis
expressed his grief in Hymnen an die
Nacht (1800; Hymns to the Night), six
prose poems interspersed with verse. In
this work Novalis celebrates night, or
death, as an entry into a higher life in
the presence of God and anticipates a
mystical and loving union with Sophie
and with the universe as a whole after
his own death. In 1797 he went to the
Academy of Freiberg to study mining.
Novalis became engaged (to Julie von
Charpentier) in 1798, and a year later
he became a mine inspector at the
saltworks at Weissenfels. He died of
tuberculosis in 1801.
Novalis’s last years were
astonishingly creative, filled with
encyclopaedic studies, the draft of a
philosophical system based on idealism,
and poetic work. Two collections of
fragments that appeared during his
lifetime, Blütenstaub (1798; “Pollen”)
and Glauben und Liebe (1798; “Faith and
Love”), indicate his attempt to unite
poetry, philosophy, and science in an
allegorical interpretation of the world.
His mythical romance Heinrich von
Ofterdingen (1802), set in an idealized
vision of the European Middle Ages,
describes the mystical and romantic
searchings of a young poet. The central
image of his visions, a blue flower,
became a widely recognized symbol of
Romantic longing among Novalis’s fellow
Romantics. In the essay Die Christenheit
oder Europa (1799; “Christendom or
Europe”), Novalis calls for a universal
Christian church to restore, in a new
age, a Europe whose medieval cultural,
social, and intellectual unity had been
destroyed by the Reformation and the
Enlightenment.
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August Wilhelm von Schlegel

born Sept. 8, 1767, Hannover, Hanover
[Germany]
died May 12, 1845, Bonn [Germany]
German scholar and critic, one of the
most influential disseminators of the
ideas of the German Romantic movement,
and the finest German translator of
William Shakespeare. He was also an
Orientalist and a poet.
Schlegel was a son of a Protestant
pastor and a nephew of the author Johann
Elias Schlegel. He attended school in
Hannover and in 1787 began his studies
at the University of Göttingen, where he
studied classical philology and
aesthetics. In 1791 he took a post as a
private tutor in Amsterdam, but he moved
to Jena in 1796 to write for Friedrich
Schiller’s short-lived periodical Die
Horen. Thereafter, Schlegel—with his
brother Friedrich Schlegel—started the
periodical Athenäum (1798–1800), which
became the organ of German Romanticism,
numbering Friedrich Schleiermacher and
Novalis among its contributors.
In 1798 Schlegel became a professor
at the University of Jena, where he
began his long-planned translation of
the works of Shakespeare (1797–1810). He
himself translated 17 plays; the
remaining works were translated by
Ludwig Tieck’s daughter Dorothea and by
Wolf Heinrich von Baudissin under
Tieck’s supervision (1825–33).
Schlegel’s translations of Shakespeare
became the standard German translation
of that author and are among the finest
of all German literary translations.
Schlegel’s incomplete translations of
five plays by Calderón de la Barca
(Spanisches Theater, 2 vol., 1803–09)
likewise show his gift for carrying the
spirit of foreign literary works over
into German, as do his selected
translations of Petrarch, Dante,
Giovanni Boccaccio, Miguel de Cervantes,
Torquato Tasso, and Luís de Camões in
Blumensträusse italiänischer,
spanischer, und portugiesischer Poesie
(1804; “Bouquets of Italian, Spanish,
and Portuguese Poetry”).
In 1796 Schlegel married the
brilliant Caroline Michaelis, but in
1803 she left him for the philosopher
Friedrich W.J. Schelling. In 1801
Schlegel went to Berlin, where he
lectured on literature and art. In his
lectures, he comprehensively surveyed
the history of European literature and
thought, casting scorn on Greco-Roman
classicism and the Enlightenment and
instead exalting the timeless
spirituality of the Middle Ages. These
lectures were later published as
Vorlesungen über schöne Literatur und
Kunst (1884; “Lectures on Fine Art and
Literature”). After his divorce from
Michaelis, Schlegel accompanied Mme de
Staël on travels in Germany, Italy,
France, and Sweden, where he served in
1813–14 as press secretary to the crown
prince Bernadotte. The series of
important lectures Schlegel gave while
in Vienna in 1808, published as Über
dramatische Kunst und Literatur
(1809–11; Lectures on Dramatic Art and
Literature), attack French Neoclassical
theatre, praise Shakespeare, and exalt
Romantic drama. These lectures were
translated into many languages and
helped spread fundamental Romantic ideas
throughout Europe.
In 1818 Schlegel went to the
University of Bonn, where he remained
the rest of his life as professor of
literature. There he published the
scholarly journal Indische Bibliothek, 3
vol. (1820–30), and set up a Sanskrit
printing press, with which he printed
editions of the Bhagavadgītā (1823) and
Rāmāyana (1829). He founded Sanskrit
studies in Germany.
Critics of Schlegel’s poetry
(Gedichte, 1800; Ion, a tragedy based on
Euripides, 1803; Poetische Werke, 1811)
concede that it shows mastery of form
but that it amounts to only cultivated
verse. As a critic of poetry he has been
described as more empirical and
systematic and less speculative than his
brother Friedrich. Schlegel’s view of
world literature as an organic whole
influenced Samuel Taylor Coleridge. His
collected works were edited by E.
Böcking and published in 12 volumes in
1846–47; his letters were edited by J.
Körner and published in 1930.
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Friedrich Wilhelm von Schlegel

born March 10, 1772, Hannover,
Hanover
died Jan. 12, 1829, Dresden, Saxony
German writer and critic, originator of
many of the philosophical ideas that
inspired the early German Romantic
movement. Open to every new idea, he
reveals a rich store of projects and
theories in his provocative Aperçus and
Fragmente (contributed to the Athenäum
and other journals); his conception of a
universal, historical, and comparative
literary scholarship has had profound
influence.
Schlegel was a nephew of the author
Johann Elias Schlegel. After studying at
Göttingen and Leipzig, he became closely
associated with his elder brother August
Wilhelm Schlegel at Jena in the
quarterly Athenäum. He believed that
Greek philosophy and culture were
essential to complete education.
Influenced also by J.G. Fichte’s
transcendental philosophy, he developed
his conception of the Romantic—that
poetry should be at once philosophical
and mythological, ironic and religious.
But his imaginative work, a
semi-autobiographical novel fragment
Lucinde (1799; Eng. trans., 1913–15),
and a tragedy Alarcos (1802) were less
successful.
In 1801 Schlegel was briefly lecturer
at Jena University, but in 1802 he went
to Paris with Dorothea Veit, the eldest
daughter of Moses Mendelssohn and the
divorced wife of Simon Veit. He married
her in 1804. In Paris he studied
Sanskrit, publishing Über die Sprache
und Weisheit der Indier (1808), the
first attempt at comparative
Indo-Germanic linguistics and the
starting point of the study of Indian
languages and comparative philology. In
1808 he and his wife became Roman
Catholics, and he united his concept of
Romanticism with ideas of medieval
Christendom. He became the ideological
spokesman of the anti-Napoleonic
movement for German liberation, serving
in the Vienna chancellery (1809) and
helping to write the appeal to the
German people issued by the archduke
Charles. He had already edited two
periodicals on the arts, Europa and
Deutsches Museum; in 1820 he became
editor of the right-wing Catholic paper
Concordia, and his attack in it on the
beliefs that he had earlier cherished
led to a breach with his brother.
Two series of lectures Schlegel gave
in Vienna between 1810 and 1812 (Über
die neuere Geschichte, 1811; A Course of
Lectures on Modern History, 1849 and
Geschichte der alten und neueren
Literatur, 1815; Lectures on the History
of Literature, 1818) developed his
concept of a “new Middle Ages.” His
collected works were first issued in 10
volumes in 1822–25, augmented to 15
volumes in 1846. His correspondence with
his brother was published in 1890 and
that with Dorothea was edited (1926) by
J. Körner, who wrote major studies of
the brothers.
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Achim von Arnim

byname of Karl Joachim Friedrich
Ludwig von Arnim
born Jan. 26, 1781, Berlin, Prussia
[Germany]
died Jan. 21, 1831, Wiepersdorf,
Brandenburg
folklorist, dramatist, poet, and story
writer whose collection of folk poetry
was a major contribution to German
Romanticism.
Arnim was descended from a Prussian
noble family. His father was Joachim
Erdmann von Arnim (1741-1804),
associated with the Prussian court and,
among other roles, active as the
Director of the Berlin theater. His
mother, Amalia Carlonia Labes
(1761-1781), died immediately after
Arnim's birth.
Arnim spent his childhood with a
grandmother in Berlin. He went on to
study law and natural science at Halle
and Göttingen, though he inclined from
the first towards literature. His early
writings included numerous articles for
scientific magazines. He went on to
travel through Europe with his brother,
Carl Otto Ludwig, from 1801 to 1804. He
published the important romantic Zeitung
für Einsiedler (Newspaper for Hermits)
in Heidelberg in 1808.
Arnim was influenced by the earlier
writings of Goethe and Herder, from
which he learned to appreciate the
beauties of German traditional legends
and folk songs. Forming a collection of
these, published the result (1806-1808),
in collaboration with Clemens Brentano
under the title Des Knaben Wunderhorn.
He married Brentano's sister Bettina in
1811, who won wide recognition as a
writer in her own right, and his
daughter Gisela (one of five children)
became a writer as well.
He lived in Berlin from 1809, worked
on Heinrich von Kleist's paper there and
founded the political union "Deutsche
Tischgesellschaft" . From October 1813
to February 1814 he was publisher of the
Berlin paper "The Prussian
Correspondent." He remained connected
with the Prussian patriots (Adam
Heinrich Müller, Friedrich de la Motte
Fouqué, Heinrich von Kleist.) He moved
in 1814 to his family home, Schloss
Wiepersdorf, where he remained until his
death by heart attack in 1831. His
output, published in newspapers,
magazines and almanacs as well as
self-contained books, included novels,
dramas, stories, poems and journalistic
works. Following his death, his library
was taken over by the Weimar court
library. He is considered one of the
most important representatives of German
Romanticism.
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Clemens Brentano

born Sept. 9, 1778, Ehrenbreitstein,
near Koblenz [Germany]
died July 28, 1842, Aschaffenburg,
Bavaria
poet, novelist, and dramatist, one of
the founders of the Heidelberg Romantic
school, the second phase of German
Romanticism, which emphasized German
folklore and history.
Brentano’s mother, Maximiliane
Brentano, was J.W. von Goethe’s friend
in 1772–74, and Brentano’s sister,
Bettina von Arnim, was a correspondent
of Goethe’s. As a student in Jena,
Brentano became acquainted with
Friedrich von Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck,
the leaders of Jena Romanticism, the
first phase of German Romanticism.
Giving up his studies, Brentano traveled
throughout Germany. Settling temporarily
in Heidelberg, he met Achim von Arnim,
with whom he published the collection of
German folk songs Des Knaben Wunderhorn
(1805–08), which became an important
inspiration to later German lyric poets.
Among Brentano’s most successful
works are his fairy tales, particularly
Gockel, Hinkel and Gackeleia (1838). His
novella Geschichte vom braven Kasperl
und dem schönen Annerl (1817; The Story
of the Just Casper and Fair Annie)
displays themes from German folklore
within a fantasy atmosphere. His other
major works include the dramas Ponce de
Leon (1801) and Die Gründung Prags
(1815; “The Foundation of Prague”) and
the novel Godwi (1801), which forms an
important link between the older and the
newer forms of Romanticism.
Brentano was known for his
imagination and the extraordinarily
musical quality of his lyric poetry. His
personal life, too, reflected the
atmosphere associated with the German
Romantics. Emotionally unstable and
given to extremes of character and mood,
he led a troubled and unsettled life. In
1817 he suffered a severe depression and
turned to Roman Catholic mysticism,
spending six years in a monastery.
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Joseph Eichendorff

born , March 10, 1788, near Ratibor,
Prussia
died Nov. 26, 1857, Neisse
poet and novelist, considered one of the
great German Romantic lyricists.
From a family of Silesian nobility,
Eichendorff studied law at Heidelberg
(1807), where he published his first
verse and became acquainted with the
circle of Romantics. Continuing his
studies in Berlin (1809–10), he met the
leaders of the Romantic national
movement. When the Prussian war of
liberation broke out in 1813,
Eichendorff enlisted in the Lützowsche
Freikorps and fought against Napoleon.
The French Revolution appears in the
novella Das Schloss Dürande (1837;
“Castle Dürande”) and in the epic poem
Robert und Guiscard (1855). The
Napoleonic Wars, which brought about the
decline of the Eichendorff family and
the loss of the Lubowitz castle, are the
sources of nostalgia in his poetry.
During these war years he wrote two of
his most important prose works: a long
Romantic novel, Ahnung und Gegenwart,
(1819; “Premonition and Present”), which
is pervaded by the hopelessness and
despair of the political situation and
the need for a spiritual, rather than a
political, cure for moral ills; and
Novellen des Marmorbilds (1819;
“Novellas of a Marble Statue”), which
contains supernatural elements and is
described by Eichendorff as a fairy
tale. After the war he held posts in the
Prussian civil service in Danzig and
Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia)
and, after 1831, in Berlin.
Eichendorff’s poetry of this period
(Gedichte, 1837), particularly the poems
expressing his special sensitivity to
nature, gained the popularity of folk
songs and inspired such composers as
Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Richard
Strauss. In 1826 he published his most
important prose work, Aus dem Leben
eines Taugenichts (Memoirs of a
Good-for-Nothing, 1955), which, with its
combination of the dreamlike and the
realistic, is considered a high point of
Romantic fiction. In 1844 he retired
from the civil service to devote himself
entirely to his writing, publishing his
history of German literature and several
translations of Spanish authors.
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Wilhelm and
Jakob Grimm
"Grimms
Fairy Tales"
PART
I,
PART II,
PART III

German folklorists and linguists
German Brüder Grimm
Main
German brothers famous for their classic collections of folk songs and
folktales. Jacob Ludwig Carl Grimm (b. Jan. 4, 1785, Hanau, Hesse-Kassel
[Germany]—d. Sept. 20, 1863, Berlin) and Wilhelm Carl Grimm (b. Feb. 24,
1786, Hanau, Hesse-Kassel [Germany]—d. Dec. 16, 1859, Berlin) were best
known for Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812–22; also called Grimm’s Fairy
Tales), which led to the birth of the science of folklore. Jacob
especially did important work in historical linguistics and Germanic
philology.
Beginnings and Kassel period
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were the oldest in a family of five brothers and
one sister. Their father, Philipp Wilhelm, a lawyer, was town clerk in
Hanau and later justiciary in Steinau, another small Hessian town, where
his father and grandfather had been ministers of the Calvinistic
Reformed Church. The father’s death in 1796 brought social hardships to
the family; the death of the mother in 1808 left 23-year-old Jacob with
the responsibility of four brothers and one sister. Jacob, a scholarly
type, was small and slender with sharply cut features, while Wilhelm was
taller, had a softer face, and was sociable and fond of all the arts.
After attending the high school in Kassel, the brothers followed
their father’s footsteps and studied law at the University of Marburg
(1802–06) with the intention of entering civil service. At Marburg they
came under the influence of Clemens Brentano, who awakened in both a
love of folk poetry, and Friedrich Karl von Savigny, cofounder of the
historical school of jurisprudence, who taught them a method of
antiquarian investigation that formed the real basis of all their later
work. Others, too, strongly influenced the Grimms, particularly the
philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), with his ideas on folk
poetry. Essentially, they remained individuals, creating their work
according to their own principles.
In 1805 Jacob accompanied Savigny to Paris to do research on legal
manuscripts of the Middle Ages; the following year he became secretary
to the war office in Kassel. Because of his health, Wilhelm remained
without regular employment until 1814. After the French entered in 1806,
Jacob became private librarian to King Jérôme of Westphalia in 1808 and
a year later auditeur of the Conseil d’État but returned to Hessian
service in 1813 after Napoleon’s defeat. As secretary to the legation,
he went twice to Paris (1814–15), to recover precious books and
paintings taken by the French from Hesse and Prussia. He also took part
in the Congress of Vienna (September 1814–June 1815). Meantime, Wilhelm
had become secretary at the Elector’s library in Kassel (1814), and
Jacob joined him there in 1816.
By that time the brothers had definitely given up thoughts of a legal
career in favour of purely literary research. In the years to follow
they lived frugally and worked steadily, laying the foundations for
their lifelong interests. Their whole thinking was rooted in the social
and political changes of their time and the challenge these changes
held. Jacob and Wilhelm had nothing in common with the fashionable
“Gothic” Romanticism of the 18th and 19th centuries. Their state of mind
made them more Realists than Romantics. They investigated the distant
past and saw in antiquity the foundation of all social institutions of
their days. But their efforts to preserve these foundations did not mean
that they wanted to return to the past. From the beginning, the Grimms
sought to include material from beyond their own frontiers—from the
literary traditions of Scandinavia, Spain, The Netherlands, Ireland,
Scotland, England, Serbia, and Finland.
They first collected folk songs and tales for their friends Achim von
Arnim and Brentano, who had collaborated on an influential collection of
folk lyrics in 1805, and the brothers examined in some critical essays
the essential difference between folk literature and other writing. To
them, folk poetry was the only true poetry, expressing the eternal joys
and sorrows, the hopes and fears of mankind.
Encouraged by Arnim, they published their collected tales as the
Kinder- und Hausmärchen, implying in the title that the stories were
meant for adults and children alike. In contrast to the extravagant
fantasy of the Romantic school’s poetical fairy tales, the 200 stories
of this collection (mostly taken from oral sources, though a few were
from printed sources) aimed at conveying the soul, imagination, and
beliefs of people through the centuries—or at a genuine reproduction of
the teller’s words and ways. The great merit of Wilhelm Grimm is that he
gave the fairy tales a readable form without changing their folkloric
character. The results were threefold: the collection enjoyed wide
distribution in Germany and eventually in all parts of the globe (there
are now translations in 70 languages); it became and remains a model for
the collecting of folktales everywhere; and the Grimms’ notes to the
tales, along with other investigations, formed the basis for the science
of the folk narrative and even of folklore. To this day the tales remain
the earliest “scientific” collection of folktales.
The Kinder- und Hausmärchen was followed by a collection of
historical and local legends of Germany, Deutsche Sagen (1816–18), which
never gained wide popular appeal, though it influenced both literature
and the study of the folk narrative. The brothers then published (in
1826) a translation of Thomas Crofton Croker’s Fairy Legends and
Traditions of the South of Ireland, prefacing the edition with a lengthy
introduction of their own on fairy lore. At the same time, the Grimms
gave their attention to the written documents of early literature,
bringing out new editions of ancient texts, from both the Germanic and
other languages. Wilhelm’s outstanding contribution was Die deutsche
Heldensage (“The German Heroic Tale”), a collection of themes and names
from heroic legends mentioned in literature and art from the 6th to the
16th centuries, together with essays on the art of the saga.
While collaborating on these subjects for two decades (1806–26),
Jacob also turned to the study of philology with an extensive work on
grammar, the Deutsche Grammatik (1819–37). The word deutsch in the title
does not mean strictly “German,” but it rather refers to the
etymological meaning of “common,” thus being used to apply to all of the
Germanic languages, the historical development of which is traced for
the first time. He represented the natural laws of sound change (both
vowels and consonants) in various languages and thus created bases for a
method of scientific etymology; i.e., research into relationships
between languages and development of meaning. In what was to become
known as Grimm’s law, Jacob demonstrated the principle of the regularity
of correspondence among consonants in genetically related languages, a
principle previously observed by the Dane Rasmus Rask. Jacob’s work on
grammar exercised an enormous influence on the contemporary study of
linguistics, Germanic, Romance, and Slavic, and it remains of value and
in use even now. In 1824 Jacob Grimm translated a Serbian grammar by his
friend Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, writing an erudite introduction on
Slavic languages and literature.
He extended his investigations into the Germanic folk-culture with a
study of ancient law practices and beliefs published as Deutsche
Rechtsaltertümer (1828), providing systematic source material but
excluding actual laws. The work stimulated other publications in France,
The Netherlands, Russia, and the southern Slavic countries and has not
yet been superseded.
The Göttingen years
The quiet contentment of the years at Kassel ended in 1829, when the
brothers suffered a snub—perhaps motivated politically—from the Elector
of Hessen-Kassel: they were not given advancement following the death of
a senior colleague. Consequently, they moved to the nearby University of
Göttingen, where they were appointed librarians and professors. Jacob
Grimm’s Deutsche Mythologie, written during this period, was to be of
far-reaching influence. From poetry, fairy tales, and folkloristic
elements, he traced the pre-Christian faith and superstitions of the
Germanic people, contrasting the beliefs to those of classical mythology
and Christianity. The Mythologie had many successors all over Europe,
but often disciples were not as careful in their judgments as Jacob had
been. Wilhelm published here his outstanding edition of Freidank’s
epigrams. But again fate overtook them. When Ernest Augustus, duke of
Cumberland, became king of Hanover, he high-handedly repealed the
constitution of 1833, which he considered too liberal. Two weeks after
the King’s declaration, the Grimms, together with five other professors
(the “Göttingen Seven”), sent a protest to the King, explaining that
they felt themselves bound by oath to the old constitution. As a result
they were dismissed, and three professors, including Jacob, were ordered
to leave the kingdom of Hanover at once. Through their part in this
protest directed against despotic authority, they clearly demonstrated
the academic’s sense of civil responsibilities, manifesting their own
liberal convictions at the same time. During three years of exile in
Kassel, institutions in Germany and beyond (Hamburg, Marburg, Rostock,
Weimar, Belgium, France, The Netherlands, and Switzerland) tried to
obtain the brothers’ services.
The Berlin period
In 1840 they accepted an invitation from the king of Prussia, Frederick
William IV, to go to Berlin, where as members of the Royal Academy of
Sciences they lectured at the university. There they began work in
earnest on their most ambitious enterprise, the Deutsches Wörterbuch, a
large German dictionary intended as a guide for the user of the written
and spoken word as well as a scholarly reference work. In the
dictionary, all German words found in the literature of the three
centuries “from Luther to Goethe” were given with their historical
variants, their etymology, and their semantic development; their usage
in specialized and everyday language was illustrated by quoting idioms
and proverbs. Begun as a source of income in 1838 for the brothers after
their dismissal from Göttingen, the work required generations of
successors to bring the gigantic task to an end more than a hundred
years later. Jacob lived to see the work proceed to the letter F, while
Wilhelm finished only the letter D. The dictionary became an example for
similar publications in other countries: Britain, France, The
Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland. Jacob’s philological research
later led to a history of the German language, Geschichte der deutschen
Sprache, in which he attempted to combine the historical study of
language with the study of early history. Research into names and
dialects was stimulated by Jacob Grimm’s work, as were ways of writing
and spelling—for example, he used roman type and advocated spelling
German nouns without capital letters.
For some 20 years they worked in Prussia’s capital, respected and
free from financial worries. Much of importance can be found in the
brothers’ lectures and essays, the prefaces and reviews (Kleinere
Schriften) they wrote in this period. In Berlin they witnessed the
Revolution of 1848 and took an active part in the political strife of
the succeeding years. In spite of close and even emotional ties to their
homeland, the Grimms were not nationalists in the narrow sense. They
maintained genuine—even political—friendships with colleagues at home
and abroad, among them the jurists Savigny and Eichhorn; the historians
F.C. Dahlmann, G.G. Gervinus, and Jules Michelet; and the philologists
Karl Lachmann, John Mitchell Kemble, Jan Frans Willems, Vuk Karadžić,
and Pavel Josef Šafařik. Nearly all academies in Europe were proud to
count Jacob and Wilhelm among their members. The more robust Jacob
undertook many journeys for scientific investigations, visiting France,
The Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Denmark, and
Sweden. Jacob remained a bachelor; Wilhelm married Dorothea Wild from
Kassel, with whom he had four children: Jacob (who was born and died in
1826), Herman (literary and art historian, 1828–1901), Rudolf (jurist,
1830–89), and Auguste (1832–1919). The graves of the brothers are in the
Matthäikirchhof in Berlin.
Ludwig Denecke
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The French Revolution (1787–99) had had a decisive
impact on German Romantic writers and thinkers. The
Napoleonic Wars, beginning in 1792 and ending with
the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15, brought much
suffering and ultimately led to a major
restructuring of Germany. The upheavals of this
period gave rise to a new desire for a uniquely
German cultural movement that would explicitly
oppose French rationalism.
German Idealist
philosophy played an important role in the genesis
of Romanticism, which saw itself as grappling with a
crisis in human subjectivity and laying the
foundation for a new synthesis of mental and
physical reality. The first step was taken by
Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre
(1794; “Science of Knowledge”), which defined the
subject (“Ich,” or “I”) in terms of its relation to
the object-world (“Nicht-Ich,” or “Not-I”).
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling’s
Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur (1797; Ideas
for a Philosophy of Nature) posited a reciprocal
relationship between nature and mind: his famous
formulation “Nature is unconscious mind, mind is
unconscious nature” forms the groundwork for a great
deal of German Romantic literature. Friedrich von
Schlegel’s philosophical writings continued this
line of thinking by reevaluating the role of
creative imagination in human life. Poetry—the
Romantics’ term for all forms of creative
writing—was an anticipation of a future harmony in
which all forms of conflict would be resolved in a
vast productive unity. Adapting
Georg
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s dialectic (a
posited interaction of opposite ideas leading to a
synthesis), Schlegel developed his key
concept of “irony,” by which he meant a form of
thinking or writing that included its own
self-reflection and self-critique. Ironic poetry, in
Schlegel’s view, was a two-track form of
literature in which a naive or immediate perception
of reality is accompanied by a more sophisticated
critical reflection upon it.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte

German philosopher
born May 19, 1762, Rammenau, Upper Lusatia, Saxony [now
in Germany]
died Jan. 27, 1814, Berlin
Main
German philosopher and patriot, one of the great
transcendental idealists.
Early life and career
Fichte was the son of a ribbon weaver. Educated at the
Pforta school (1774–80) and at the universities of Jena
(1780) and of Leipzig (1781–84), he started work as a tutor.
In this capacity he went to Zürich in 1788 and to Warsaw in
1791 but left after two weeks’ probation.
The major influence on his thought at this time was that
of Immanuel Kant, whose doctrine of the inherent moral worth
of man harmonized with Fichte’s character; and he resolved
to devote himself to perfecting a true philosophy, the
principles of which should be practical maxims. He went from
Warsaw to see Kant himself at Königsberg (now Kaliningrad,
Russia), but this first interview was disappointing. Later,
when Fichte submitted his Versuch einer Kritik aller
Offenbarung (“An Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation”)
to Kant, the latter was favourably impressed by it and
helped find a publisher (1792). Fichte’s name and preface
were accidentally omitted from the first edition, and the
work was ascribed by its earliest readers to Kant himself;
when Kant corrected the mistake while commending the essay,
Fichte’s reputation was made.
In the Versuch, Fichte sought to explain the conditions
under which revealed religion is possible; his exposition
turns upon the absolute requirements of the moral law.
Religion itself is the belief in this moral law as divine,
and such belief is a practical postulate, necessary in order
to add force to the law. The revelation of this divine
character of morality is possible only to someone in whom
the lower impulses have been, or are, successful in
overcoming reverence for the law. In such a case it is
conceivable that a revelation might be given in order to add
strength to the moral law. Religion ultimately then rests
upon the practical reason and satisfies the needs of man,
insofar as he stands under the moral law. In this conclusion
are evident the prominence assigned by Fichte to the
practical element and the tendency to make the moral
requirements of the ego the ground for all judgment on
reality.
In 1793 Fichte married Johanna Maria Rahn, whom he had
met during his stay in Zürich. In the same year, he
published anonymously two remarkable political works, of
which Beitrag zur Berichtigung der Urteile des Publikums
über die französische Revolution (“Contribution to the
Correction of the Public’s Judgments Regarding the French
Revolution”) was the more important. It was intended to
explain the true nature of the French Revolution, to
demonstrate how inextricably the right of liberty is
interwoven with the very existence of man as an intelligent
agent, and to point out the inherent progressiveness of the
state and the consequent necessity of reform or amendment.
As in the Versuch, the rational nature of man and the
conditions necessary for its realization are made the
standard for political philosophy.
The philosophy of Fichte falls chronologically into a
period of residence in Jena (1793–98) and a period in Berlin
(1799–1806), which are also different in their fundamental
philosophic conceptions. The former period is marked by its
ethical emphasis, the latter by the emergence of a mystical
and theological theory of Being. Fichte was prompted to
change his original position because he came to appreciate
that religious faith surpasses moral reason. He was also
influenced by the general trend that the development of
thought took toward Romanticism.
Years at the University of Jena.
In 1793 there was a vacant chair of philosophy at the
University of Jena, and Fichte was called to fill it. To the
ensuing period belongs his most important philosophical
work. In this period he published, among other works: Einige
Vorlesungen über die Bestimmung des Gelehrten (1794; The
Vocation of the Scholar), lectures on the importance of the
highest intellectual culture and on the duties that it
imposed; several works on the science of knowledge
(Wissenschaftslehre), which were revised and developed
continually throughout his life; the practical Grundlage des
Naturrechts nach Prinzipien der Wissenschaftslehre (1796;
The Science of Rights); and Das System der Sittenlehre nach
den Prinzipien der Wissenschaftslehre (1798; The Science of
Ethics as Based on the Science of Knowledge), in which his
moral philosophy, grounded in the notion of duty, is most
notably expressed.
The system of 1794 was the most original and also the
most characteristic work that Fichte produced. It was
incited by Kant’s critical philosophy and especially by his
Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (1788; Critique of Practical
Reason . . .). From the outset it was less critical,
precisely because it was more systematic, aiming at a
self-sufficient doctrine in which the science of knowledge
and ethics were intimately united. Fichte’s ambition was to
demonstrate that practical (moral) reason is really (as Kant
had only intimated) the root of reason in its entirety, the
absolute ground of all knowledge as well as of humanity
altogether. To prove this, he started from a supreme
principle, the ego, which was supposed to be independent and
sovereign, so that all other knowledge was deduced from it.
Fichte did not assert that this supreme principle was
self-evident but rather that it had to be postulated by pure
thought. He followed, thereby, Kant’s doctrine that pure,
practical reason postulates the existence of God, but he
tried to transform Kant’s rational faith into a speculative
knowledge on which he based both his theory of science and
his ethics.
In 1795 Fichte became one of the editors of the
Philosophisches Journal, and in 1798 his friend F.K.
Forberg, a young, unknown philosopher, sent him an essay on
the development of the idea of religion. Before printing
this, Fichte, to prevent misunderstanding, composed a short
preface, “On the Grounds of Our Belief in a Divine
Government of the Universe,” in which God is defined as the
moral order of the universe, the eternal law of right that
is the foundation of all man’s being. The cry of atheism was
raised, and the electoral government of Saxony, followed by
all of the German states except Prussia, suppressed the
Journal and demanded Fichte’s expulsion from Jena. After
publishing two defenses, Fichte threatened to resign in case
of reprimand. Much to his discomfort, his threat was taken
as an offer to resign and was duly accepted.
Years in Berlin
Except for the summer of 1805, Fichte resided in Berlin from
1799 to 1806. Among his friends were the leaders of German
Romanticism, A.W. and F. Schlegel and Friedrich
Schleiermacher. His works of this period include Die
Bestimmung des Menschen (1800; The Vocation of Man), in
which he defines God as the infinite moral will of the
universe who becomes conscious of himself in individuals;
Der geschlossene Handelsstaat (also 1800), an intensely
socialistic treatise in favour of tariff protection; two new
versions of the Wissenschaftslehre (composed in 1801 and in
1804; published posthumously), marking a great change in the
character of the doctrine; Die Grundzüge des gegenwärtigen
Zeitalters (1806; lectures delivered 1804–05; The
Characteristics of the Present Age), analyzing the
Enlightenment and defining its place in the historical
evolution of the general human consciousness but also
indicating its defects and looking forward to belief in the
divine order of the universe as the highest aspect of the
life of reason; and Die Anweisung zum seligen Leben, oder
auch die Religionslehre (1806; The Way Towards the Blessed
Life). In this last-named work the union between the finite
self-consciousness and the infinite ego, or God, is handled
in a deeply religious fashion reminiscent of the Gospel
According to John. The knowledge and love of God is declared
to be the end of life. God is the All; the world of
independent objects is the result of reflection or
self-consciousness, by which the infinite unity is broken
up. God is thus over and above the distinction of subject
and object; man’s knowledge is but a reflex or picture of
the infinite essence.
Last years
The French victories over the Prussians in 1806 drove Fichte
from Berlin to Königsberg (where he lectured for a time),
then to Copenhagen. He returned to Berlin in August 1807.
From this time his published writings were practical in
character; not until after the appearance of the
Nachgelassene Werke (“Posthumous Works”) and of the
Sämmtliche Werke (“Complete Works”) was the shape of his
final speculations known. In 1807 he drew up a plan for the
proposed new University of Berlin. In 1807–08 he delivered
at Berlin his Reden an die deutsche Nation (Addresses to the
German Nation), full of practical views on the only true
foundation for national recovery and glory. From 1810 to
1812 he was rector of the new University of Berlin. During
the great effort of Germany for national independence in
1813, he lectured “Über den Begriff des wahrhaften Krieges”
(“On the Idea of a True War”).
At the beginning of 1814, Fichte caught a virulent
hospital fever from his wife, who had volunteered for work
as a hospital nurse; he died shortly thereafter.
Richard Kroner
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Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling

German philosopher
born , Jan. 27, 1775, Leonberg, near Stuttgart,
Württemberg [Germany]
died Aug. 20, 1854, Bad Ragaz, Switz.
Main
German philosopher and educator, a major figure of German
idealism, in the post-Kantian development in German
philosophy. He was ennobled (with the addition of von) in
1806.
Early life and career.
Schelling’s father was a Lutheran minister, who in 1777
became a professor of Oriental languages at the theological
seminary in Bebenhausen, near Tübingen. It was there that
Schelling received his elementary education. He was a highly
gifted child, and he had already learned the classical
languages at the age of eight. On the basis of his rapid
intellectual development, he was admitted, at the age of 15,
to the theological seminary in Tübingen, a famous finishing
school for ministers of the Württemberg area, where he lived
from 1790 to 1795. The youths at Tübingen were inspired by
the ideas of the French Revolution and, spurning tradition,
turned away from doctrinal theology to philosophy. The young
Schelling was inspired, however, by the thought of Immanuel
Kant, who had raised philosophy to a higher critical level,
and by the idealist system of Johann Fichte, as well as by
the pantheism of Benedict de Spinoza, a 17th-century
rationalist. When he was 19 years old Schelling wrote his
first philosophical work, Über die Möglichkeit einer Form
der Philosophie überhaupt (1795; “On the Possibility and
Form of Philosophy in General”), which he sent to Fichte,
who expressed strong approval. It was followed by Vom Ich
als Prinzip der Philosophie (“Of the Ego as Principle of
Philosophy”). One basic theme governs both of these
works—the Absolute. This Absolute cannot be defined,
however, as God; each person is himself the Absolute as the
Absolute ego. This ego, eternal and timeless, is apprehended
in a direct intuition, which, in contrast to sensory
intuition, can be characterized as intellectual.
From 1795 to 1797 Schelling acted as a private tutor for
a noble family, who had placed its sons under his care
during their studies in Leipzig. The time spent in Leipzig
marked a decisive turning point in the thought of Schelling.
He attended lectures in physics, chemistry, and medicine. He
acknowledged that Fichte, whom he had previously revered as
his philosophical model, had not taken adequate notice of
nature in his philosophical system, inasmuch as Fichte had
always viewed nature only as an object in its subordination
to man. Schelling, in contrast, wanted to show that nature,
seen in itself, shows an active development toward the
spirit. This philosophy of nature, the first independent
philosophical accomplishment of Schelling, made him known in
the circles of the Romanticists.
Period of intense productivity.
In 1798 Schelling was called to a professorship at the
University of Jena, the academic centre of Germany at the
time, where many of the foremost intellects of the time were
gathered. During this period Schelling was extremely
productive, publishing a rapid succession of works on the
philosophy of nature. It was Schelling’s desire, as attested
by his famous work System des transzendentalen Idealismus
(1800; “System of Transcendental Idealism”), to unite his
concept of nature with Fichte’s philosophy, which took the
ego as the point of departure. Schelling saw that art
mediates between the natural and physical spheres insofar
as, in artistic creation, the natural (or unconscious) and
the spiritual (or conscious) productions are united.
Naturalness and spirituality are explained as emerging from
an original state of indifference, in which they were
submerged in the yet-undeveloped Absolute, and as rising
through a succession of steps of ever-higher order. Fichte
did not acknowledge this concept, however, and the two
writers attacked each other most sharply in an intensive
correspondence.
The time spent in Jena was important for Schelling also
in a personal respect: there he became acquainted with
Caroline Schlegel, among the most gifted women in German
Romanticism, and married her in 1803. The unpleasant
intrigues that accompanied this marriage and the dispute
with Fichte caused Schelling to leave Jena, and he accepted
an appointment at the University of Würzburg.
At first, Schelling lectured there on the philosophy of
identity, conceived in his last years in Jena, in which he
tried to show that, in all beings, the Absolute expresses
itself directly as the unity of the subjective and the
objective. It was just on this point that G.W.F. Hegel
initiated his criticism of Schelling. Hegel had at first
taken Schelling’s side in the disagreement between Schelling
and Fichte, and complete unanimity seemed to exist between
them in 1802 when they coedited the Kritisches Journal der
Philosophie (“Critical Journal of Philosophy”). In the
following years, however, Hegel’s philosophical thought
began to move significantly away from Schelling’s, and his
Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807; The Phenomenology of Mind)
contained strong charges against Schelling’s system. To
Schelling’s definition of the Absolute as an indiscriminate
unity of the subjective and the objective, Hegel replied
that such an Absolute is comparable to the night, “in which
all cows are black.” Besides, Schelling had never explicitly
shown how one could ascend to the Absolute; he had begun
with this Absolute as though it were “shot out of a pistol.”
This criticism struck Schelling a heavy blow. The
friendship with Hegel that had existed since their time
together at the seminary in Tübingen broke up. Schelling,
who had been regarded as the leading philosopher of the time
until the publication of Hegel’s Phänomenologie, was pushed
into the background.
This situation caused Schelling to retreat from public
life. From 1806 to 1841 he lived in Munich, where, in 1806,
he was appointed as general secretary of the Academy of
Plastic Arts. He lectured from 1820 to 1827 in Erlangen.
Caroline’s death on Sept. 7, 1809, led him to write a
philosophical work on immortality. In 1812 Schelling married
Pauline Gotter, a friend of Caroline. The marriage was
harmonious, but the great passion that Schelling had felt
for Caroline was unrepeatable.
During the years in Munich, Schelling tried to
consolidate his philosophical work in a new way, producing a
revision that was instigated by Hegel’s criticism. Schelling
questioned all idealistic speculations built on the
assumption that the world presents itself as a rational
cosmos. Were there not also irrational things, he asked, and
was not evil the predominant power in the world? In his
Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesener menschlichen
Freiheit (1809; Of Human Freedom), Schelling declared that
the freedom of man is a real freedom only if it is freedom
for good and evil. The possibility of this freedom is
founded on two principles that are active in every living
thing: one, a dark primal foundation that manifests itself
in carnal desire and impulse; the other, a clearheaded
sensibleness that governs as a formative power. Man,
however, has placed the dark stratum of impulse, which was
meant only to serve the intellect as a source of power,
above the intellect and has thus subordinated the intellect
to the impulses, which now rule over him. This reversal of
the right order is the occurrence known in the Bible as the
Fall from grace, through which evil came into the world. But
this perversion of man is revoked by God, who becomes man in
Christ and thus reestablishes the original order.
Period of the later, unpublished philosophy.
The position developed in the work on freedom forms the
basis of Schelling’s later philosophy, covering the time
from 1810 until his death, which is known only through a
draft of the unpublished work Die Weltalter (written in
1811; The Ages of the World) and through the manuscripts of
his later lectures. In Die Weltalter Schelling wanted to
relate the history of God. God, who originally is absorbed
in a quiet longing, comes to himself by glimpsing in himself
ideas through which he becomes conscious of himself. This
self-consciousness, which is identical to freedom, enables
God to project these ideas from himself—i.e., to create the
world.
Schelling’s appointment to the University of Berlin in
1841 gave him an opportunity once again to develop public
interest in his conceptions. The Prussian king of that time,
Frederick William IV, hoped that Schelling would combat the
so-called dragon’s seed of Hegelianism in Berlin, where
Hegel had been working until his death in 1831. Schelling’s
first lecture in Berlin manifested his self-consciousness.
Schelling declared that in his youth he had opened a new
page in the history of philosophy and that now in his
maturity he wanted to turn this page and start yet a newer
one. Such notables as Friedrich Engels, Søren Kierkegaard,
Jakob Burckhardt, and Mikhail Bakunin were in his audience.
Schelling, however, had no great success in Berlin.
Moreover, he was embittered when his lectures were
plagiarized by an opponent who wanted to submit the positive
philosophy of Schelling, now finally disclosed in these
lectures, to the public for examination. Schelling initiated
a legal suit but lost the case. He resigned and discontinued
lecturing.
The content of these final lectures, however, represented
the climax of Schelling’s creative activity. Schelling
divided philosophy into a negative philosophy, which
developed the idea of God by means of reason alone, and, in
contrast, a positive philosophy, which showed the reality of
this idea by reasoning a posteriori from the fact of the
world to God as its creator. Schelling then explained
(referring to his work on freedom) that man, who wanted to
be equal to God, stood up against God in his Fall into sin.
God, however, was soon elevated again as the principle.
During the era of mythology, God appeared as a dark power.
During the era of revelation, however, God emerged in
history as manifestly real in the figure of Christ. Thus,
the complete history of religion should be conveyed through
philosophical thought.
Personality and significance.
Schelling is described as a man of thickset build, and,
according to favourable reports, his high forehead and
sparkling eyes were impressive. Opponents of his philosophy,
however, such as Karl Rosenkranz, a disciple of Hegel, spoke
of a sharp and piercing look. His character was unbalanced.
Schelling has been described as nervous, unpredictable, and
deeply sensitive in his proud fashion. Particularly striking
was his unwavering consciousness that it was his mission to
bring philosophy to a definite completion.
Great philosophical influence was denied to Schelling.
The philosophical situation at the time was determined not
by the few disciples of Schelling but by the Hegelians. The
right-wing Hegelians occupied all of the philosophical
professorial chairs and handed down the tradition of Hegel’s
system. The left-wing Hegelians explained that, even to
suspend Hegel’s system, an analysis of Hegel’s philosophy
was necessary. Thus, in tracing the development of German
Idealism, the early and middle Schelling—that is, the
Schelling who drew up the philosophy of nature and the
philosophy of identity—has been placed between the Idealism
of Fichte, who started from the ego, and Hegel’s system of
the Absolute spirit.
The independence of Schelling and his importance for
philosophy are only now being recognized, and that in
connection with Existential philosophy and philosophical
anthropology, which conceive themselves as counteracting the
philosophy of absolute reason. The later Schelling now turns
out to have been the first thinker to illuminate Hegel’s
philosophy critically. In particular, Schelling’s insight
that man is determined not only by reason but also by dark
natural impulses is now valued as a positive attempt to
understand the reality of man on a level more profound than
that attained by Hegel.
Walter Schulz
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Georg
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
"The
Philosophy of History"
PART I,
PART II,
PART III,
PART IV

German philosopher
born August 27, 1770, Stuttgart,
Württemberg [Germany]
died November 14, 1831, Berlin
Main
German philosopher who developed a
dialectical scheme that emphasized the
progress of history and of ideas from
thesis to antithesis and thence to a
synthesis.
Hegel was the last of the great
philosophical system builders of modern
times. His work, following upon that of
Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte,
and Friedrich Schelling, thus marks the
pinnacle of classical German philosophy.
As an absolute Idealist inspired by
Christian insights and grounded in his
mastery of a fantastic fund of concrete
knowledge, Hegel found a place for
everything—logical, natural, human, and
divine—in a dialectical scheme that
repeatedly swung from thesis to
antithesis and back again to a higher
and richer synthesis. His influence has
been as fertile in the reactions that he
precipitated—in Søren Kierkegaard, the
Danish Existentialist; in the Marxists,
who turned to social action; in the
Vienna Positivists; and in G.E. Moore, a
pioneering figure in British Analytic
philosophy—as in his positive impact.
Early life
Hegel was the son of a revenue officer.
He had already learned the elements of
Latin from his mother by the time he
entered the Stuttgart grammar school,
where he remained for his education
until he was 18. As a schoolboy he made
a collection of extracts, alphabetically
arranged, comprising annotations on
classical authors, passages from
newspapers, and treatises on morals and
mathematics from the standard works of
the period.
In 1788 Hegel went as a student to
Tübingen with a view to taking orders,
as his parents wished. Here he studied
philosophy and classics for two years
and graduated in 1790. Though he then
took the theological course, he was
impatient with the orthodoxy of his
teachers; and the certificate given to
him when he left in 1793 states that,
whereas he had devoted himself
vigorously to philosophy, his industry
in theology was intermittent. He was
also said to be poor in oral exposition,
a deficiency that was to dog him
throughout his life. Though his fellow
students called him “the old man,” he
liked cheerful company and a “sacrifice
to Bacchus” and enjoyed the ladies as
well. His chief friends during that
period were a pantheistic poet, J.C.F.
Hölderlin, his contemporary, and the
nature philosopher Schelling, five years
his junior. Together they read the Greek
tragedians and celebrated the glories of
the French Revolution.
On leaving college, Hegel did not enter
the ministry; instead, wishing to have
leisure for the study of philosophy and
Greek literature, he became a private
tutor. For the next three years he lived
in Berne, with time on his hands and the
run of a good library, where he read
Edward Gibbon on the fall of the Roman
empire and De l’esprit des loix, by
Charles Louis, baron de Montesquieu, as
well as the Greek and Roman classics. He
also studied the critical philosopher
Immanuel Kant and was stimulated by his
essay on religion to write certain
papers that became noteworthy only when,
more than a century later, they were
published as a part of Hegels
theologische Jugendschriften (1907).
Kant had maintained that, whereas
orthodoxy requires a faith in historical
facts and in doctrines that reason alone
cannot justify and imposes on the
faithful a moral system of arbitrary
commands alleged to be revealed, Jesus,
on the contrary, had originally taught a
rational morality, which was
reconcilable with the teaching of Kant’s
ethical works, and a religion that,
unlike Judaism, was adapted to the
reason of all men. Hegel accepted this
teaching; but, being more of a historian
than Kant was, he put it to the test of
history by writing two essays. The first
of these was a life of Jesus in which
Hegel attempted to reinterpret the
gospel on Kantian lines. The second
essay was an answer to the question of
how Christianity had ever become the
authoritarian religion that it was, if
in fact the teaching of Jesus was not
authoritarian but rationalistic.
Hegel was lonely in Berne and was glad
to move, at the end of 1796, to
Frankfurt am Main, where Hölderlin had
gotten him a tutorship. His hopes of
more companionship, however, were
unfulfilled: Hölderlin was engrossed in
an illicit love affair and shortly lost
his reason. Hegel began to suffer from
melancholia and, to cure himself, worked
harder than ever, especially at Greek
philosophy and modern history and
politics. He read and made clippings
from English newspapers, wrote about the
internal affairs of his native
Wurtemberg, and studied economics. Hegel
was now able to free himself from the
domination of Kant’s influence and to
look with a fresh eye on the problem of
Christian origins.
Early life » Emancipation from
Kantianism
It is impossible to exaggerate the
importance that this problem had for
Hegel. It is true that his early
theological writings contain hard
sayings about Christianity and the
churches; but the object of his attack
was orthodoxy, not theology itself. All
that he wrote at this period throbs with
a religious conviction of a kind that is
totally absent from Kant and Hegel’s
other 18th-century teachers. Above all,
he was inspired by a doctrine of the
Holy Spirit. The spirit of man, his
reason, is the candle of the Lord, he
held, and therefore cannot be subject to
the limitations that Kant had imposed
upon it. This faith in reason, with its
religious basis, henceforth animated the
whole of Hegel’s work.
His outlook had also become that of a
historian—which again distinguishes him
from Kant, who was much more influenced
by the concepts of physical science.
Every one of Hegel’s major works was a
history; and, indeed, it was among
historians and classical scholars rather
than among philosophers that his work
mainly fructified in the 19th century.
When in 1798 Hegel turned back to look
over the essays that he had written in
Berne two or three years earlier, he saw
with a historian’s eye that, under
Kant’s influence, he had misrepresented
the life and teachings of Jesus and the
history of the Christian Church. His
newly won insight then found expression
in his essay “Der Geist des Christentums
und sein Schicksal” (“The Spirit of
Christianity and Its Fate”), likewise
unpublished until 1907. This is one of
Hegel’s most remarkable works. Its style
is often difficult and the connection of
thought not always plain, but it is
written with passion, insight, and
conviction.
He begins by sketching the essence of
Judaism, which he paints in the darkest
colours. The Jews were slaves to the
Mosaic Law, leading a life unlovely in
comparison with that of the ancient
Greeks and content with the material
satisfaction of a land flowing with milk
and honey. Jesus taught something
entirely different. Men are not to be
the slaves of objective commands: the
law is made for man. They are even to
rise above the tension in moral
experience between inclination and
reason’s law of duty, for the law is to
be “fulfilled” in the love of God,
wherein all tension ceases and the
believer does God’s will wholeheartedly
and single-mindedly. A community of such
believers is the Kingdom of God.
This is the kingdom that Jesus came to
teach. It is founded on a belief in the
unity of the divine and the human. The
life that flows in them both is one; and
it is only because man is spirit that he
can grasp and comprehend the Spirit of
God. Hegel works out this conception in
an exegesis of passages in the Gospel
According to John. The kingdom, however,
can never be realized in this world: man
is not spirit alone but flesh also.
“Church and state, worship and life,
piety and virtue, spiritual and worldly
action can never dissolve into one.”
In this essay the leading ideas of
Hegel’s system of philosophy are rooted.
Kant had argued that man can have
knowledge only of a finite world of
appearances and that, whenever his
reason attempts to go beyond this sphere
and grapple with the infinite or with
ultimate reality, it becomes entangled
in insoluble contradictions. Hegel,
however, found in love, conceived as a
union of opposites, a prefigurement of
spirit as the unity in which
contradictions, such as infinite and
finite, are embraced and synthesized.
His choice of the word Geist to express
this his leading conception was
deliberate: the word means “spirit” as
well as “mind” and thus has religious
overtones. Contradictions in thinking at
the scientific level of Kant’s
“understanding” are indeed inevitable,
but thinking as an activity of spirit or
“reason” can rise above them to a
synthesis in which the contradictions
are resolved. All of this, expressed in
religious phraseology, is contained in
the manuscripts written toward the end
of Hegel’s stay in Frankfurt. “In
religion,” he wrote, “finite life rises
to infinite life.” Kant’s philosophy had
to stop short of religion. But there is
room for another philosophy, based on
the concept of spirit, that will distill
into conceptual form the insights of
religion. This was the philosophy that
Hegel now felt himself ready to expound.
Early life » Career as lecturer at
Jena
Fortunately, his circumstances changed
at this moment, and he was at last able
to embark on the academic career that
had long been his ambition. His father’s
death in 1799 had left him an
inheritance, slender, indeed, but
sufficient to enable him to surrender a
regular income and take the risk of
becoming a Privatdozent. In January of
1801 he arrived in Jena, where Schelling
had been a professor since 1798. Jena,
which had harboured the fantastic
mysticism of the Schlegel brothers and
their colleagues and the Kantianism and
ethical Idealism of Fichte, had already
seen its golden age, for these great
scholars had all left. The precocious
Schelling, who was but 26 on Hegel’s
arrival, already had several books to
his credit. Apt to “philosophize in
public,” Schelling had been fighting a
lone battle in the university against
the rather dull followers of Kant. It
was suggested that Hegel had been
summoned as a new champion to aid his
friend. This impression received some
confirmation from the dissertation by
which Hegel qualified as a university
teacher, which betrays the influence of
Schelling’s philosophy of nature, as
well as from Hegel’s first publication,
an essay entitled “Differenz des
Fichte’schen und Schelling’schen Systems
der Philosophie” (1801), in which he
gave preference to the latter.
Nevertheless, even in this essay and
still more in its successors, Hegel’s
difference from Schelling was clearly
marked; they had a common interest in
the Greeks, they both wished to carry
forward Kant’s work, they were both
iconoclasts; but Schelling had too many
romantic enthusiasms for Hegel’s liking;
and all that Hegel took from him—and
then only for a very short period—was a
terminology.
Hegel’s lectures, delivered in the
winter of 1801–02, on logic and
metaphysics, were attended by about 11
students. Later, in 1804, with a class
of about 30, he lectured on his whole
system, gradually working it out as he
taught. Notice after notice of his
lectures promised a textbook of
philosophy—which, however, failed to
appear. After the departure of Schelling
from Jena (1803), Hegel was left to work
out his own views untrammelled. Besides
philosophical and political studies, he
made extracts from books, attended
lectures on physiology, and dabbled in
other sciences. As a result of
representations made by himself at
Weimar, he was in February 1805
appointed extraordinary professor at
Jena; and in July 1806, on Goethe’s
intervention, he drew his first
stipend—100 thalers. Though some of his
hearers became attached to him, Hegel
was not yet a popular lecturer.
Hegel, like Goethe, felt no patriotic
shudder when Napoleon won his victory at
Jena (1806): in Prussia he saw only a
corrupt and conceited bureaucracy.
Writing to a friend on the day before
the battle, he spoke with admiration of
the “world soul” and the Emperor and
with satisfaction at the probable
overthrow of the Prussians.
At this time Hegel published his first
great work, the Phänomenologie des
Geistes (1807; Eng. trans., The
Phenomenology of Mind, 2nd ed., 1931).
This, perhaps the most brilliant and
difficult of Hegel’s books, describes
how the human mind has risen from mere
consciousness, through
self-consciousness, reason, spirit, and
religion, to absolute knowledge. Though
man’s native attitude toward existence
is reliance on the senses, a little
reflection is sufficient to show that
the reality attributed to the external
world is due as much to intellectual
conceptions as to the senses and that
these conceptions elude a man when he
tries to fix them. If consciousness
cannot detect a permanent object outside
itself, so self-consciousness cannot
find a permanent subject in itself.
Through aloofness, skepticism, or
imperfection, self-consciousness has
isolated itself from the world; it has
closed its gates against the stream of
life. The perception of this is reason.
Reason thus abandons its efforts to mold
the world and is content to let the aims
of individuals work out their results
independently.
The stage of Geist, however, reveals the
consciousness no longer as isolated,
critical, and antagonistic but as the
indwelling spirit of a community. This
is the lowest stage of concrete
consciousness, the age of unconscious
morality. But, through increasing
culture, the mind gradually emancipates
itself from conventions, which prepares
the way for the rule of conscience. From
the moral world the next step is
religion. But the idea of Godhead, too,
has to pass through nature worship and
art before it reaches a full utterance
in Christianity. Religion thus
approaches the stage of absolute
knowledge, of “the spirit knowing itself
as spirit.” Here, according to Hegel, is
the field of philosophy.
Gymnasium rector
In spite of the Phänomenologie, however,
Hegel’s fortunes were now at their
lowest ebb. He was, therefore, glad to
become editor of the Bamberger Zeitung
(1807–08). This, however, was not a
suitable vocation, and he gladly
accepted the rectorship of the
Aegidiengymnasium in Nürnberg, a post he
held from December 1808 to August 1816
and one that offered him a small but
assured income. There Hegel inspired
confidence in his pupils and maintained
discipline without pedantic interference
in their associations and sports.
In 1811 Hegel married Marie von Tucher
(22 years his junior), of Nürnberg. The
marriage was entirely happy. His wife
bore him two sons: Karl, who became
eminent as a historian; and Immanuel,
whose interests were theological. The
family circle was joined by Ludwig, a
natural son of Hegel’s from Jena. At
Nürnberg in 1812 appeared Die objektive
Logik, being the first part of his
Wissenschaft der Logik (“Science of
Logic”), which in 1816 was completed by
the second part, Die subjecktive Logik.
University professor
This work, in which his system was first
presented in what was essentially its
ultimate shape, earned him the offer of
professorships at Erlangen, at Berlin,
and at Heidelberg.
University professor » At Heidelberg
He accepted the chair at Heidelberg. For
use at his lectures there, he published
his Encyklopädie der philosophischen
Wissenschaften im Grundrisse (1817;
“Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical
Sciences in Outline”), an exposition of
his system as a whole. Hegel’s
philosophy is an attempt to comprehend
the entire universe as a systematic
whole. The system is grounded in faith.
In the Christian religion God has been
revealed as truth and as spirit. As
spirit, man can receive this revelation.
In religion the truth is veiled in
imagery; but in philosophy the veil is
torn aside, so that man can know the
infinite and see all things in God.
Hegel’s system is thus a spiritual
monism but a monism in which
differentiation is essential. Only
through an experience of difference can
the identity of thought and the object
of thought be achieved—an identity in
which thinking attains the
through-and-through intelligibility that
is its goal. Thus, truth is known only
because error has been experienced and
truth has triumphed; and God is infinite
only because he has assumed the
limitations of finitude and triumphed
over them. Similarly, man’s Fall was
necessary if he was to attain moral
goodness. Spirit, including the Infinite
Spirit, knows itself as spirit only by
contrast with nature. Hegel’s system is
monistic in having a single theme: what
makes the universe intelligible is to
see it as the eternal cyclical process
whereby Absolute Spirit comes to
knowledge of itself as spirit (1)
through its own thinking; (2) through
nature; and (3) through finite spirits
and their self-expression in history and
their self-discovery, in art, in
religion, and in philosophy, as one with
Absolute Spirit itself.
The compendium of Hegel’s system, the
“Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical
Sciences,” is in three parts: “Logic,”
“Nature,” and “Mind.” Hegel’s method of
exposition is dialectical. It often
happens that in a discussion two people
who at first present diametrically
opposed points of view ultimately agree
to reject their own partial views and to
accept a new and broader view that does
justice to the substance of each. Hegel
believed that thinking always proceeds
according to this pattern: it begins by
laying down a positive thesis that is at
once negated by its antithesis; then
further thought produces the synthesis.
But this in turn generates an
antithesis, and the same process
continues once more. The process,
however, is circular: ultimately,
thinking reaches a synthesis that is
identical with its starting point,
except that all that was implicit there
has now been made explicit. Thus,
thinking itself, as a process, has
negativity as one of its constituent
moments, and the finite is, as God’s
self-manifestation, part and parcel of
the infinite itself. This is the sort of
dialectical process of which Hegel’s
system provides an account in three
phases.
University professor » At Heidelberg
» “Logic”
The system begins with an account of
God’s thinking “before the creation of
nature and finite spirit”; i.e., with
the categories or pure forms of thought,
which are the structure of all physical
and intellectual life. Throughout, Hegel
is dealing with pure essentialities,
with spirit thinking its own essence;
and these are linked together in a
dialectical process that advances from
abstract to concrete. If a man tries to
think the notion of pure Being (the most
abstract category of all), he finds that
it is simply emptiness; i.e., Nothing.
Yet Nothing is. The notion of pure Being
and the notion of Nothing are opposites;
and yet each, as one tries to think it,
passes over into the other. But the way
out of the contradiction is at once to
reject both notions separately and to
affirm them both together; i.e., to
assert the notion of becoming, since
what becomes both is and is not at once.
The dialectical process advances through
categories of increasing complexity and
culminates with the absolute idea, or
with the spirit as objective to itself.
University professor » At Heidelberg
» “Nature”
Nature is the opposite of spirit. The
categories studied in “Logic” were all
internally related to one another; they
grew out of one another. Nature, on the
other hand, is a sphere of external
relations. Parts of space and moments of
time exclude one another; and everything
in nature is in space and time and is
thus finite. But nature is created by
spirit and bears the mark of its
creator. Categories appear in it as its
essential structure, and it is the task
of the philosophy of nature to detect
that structure and its dialectic; but
nature, as the realm of externality,
cannot be rational through and through,
though the rationality prefigured in it
becomes gradually explicit when man
appears. In man nature rises to
self-consciousness.
University professor » At Heidelberg
» “Mind”
Here Hegel follows the development of
the human mind through the subconscious,
consciousness, and the rational will;
then through human institutions and
human history as the embodiment or
objectification of that will; and
finally to art, religion, and
philosophy, in which finally man knows
himself as spirit, as one with God and
possessed of absolute truth. Thus, it is
now open to him to think his own
essence; i.e., the thoughts expounded in
“Logic.” He has finally returned to the
starting point of the system, but en
route he has made explicit all that was
implicit in it and has discovered that
“nothing but spirit is, and spirit is
pure activity.”
Hegel’s system depends throughout on the
results of scientific, historical,
theological, and philosophical inquiry.
No reader can fail to be impressed by
the penetration and breadth of his mind
nor by the immense range of knowledge
that, in his view, had to precede the
work of philosophizing. A civilization
must be mature and, indeed, in its death
throes before, in the philosophic
thinking that has implicitly been its
substance, it becomes conscious of
itself and of its own significance.
Thus, when philosophy comes on the
scene, some form of the world has grown
old.
University professor » At Berlin
In 1818 Hegel accepted the renewed offer
of the chair of philosophy at Berlin,
which had been vacant since Fichte’s
death. There his influence over his
pupils was immense, and there he
published his Naturrecht und
Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse,
alternatively entitled Grundlinien der
Philosophie des Rechts (1821; Eng.
trans., The Philosophy of Right, 1942).
In Hegel’s works on politics and
history, the human mind objectifies
itself in its endeavour to find an
object identical with itself. The
Philosophy of Right (or of Law) falls
into three main divisions. The first is
concerned with law and rights as such:
persons (i.e., men as men, quite
independently of their individual
characters) are the subject of rights,
and what is required of them is mere
obedience, no matter what the motives of
obedience may be. Right is thus an
abstract universal and therefore does
justice only to the universal element in
the human will. The individual, however,
cannot be satisfied unless the act that
he does accords not merely with law but
also with his own conscientious
convictions. Thus, the problem in the
modern world is to construct a social
and political order that satisfies the
claims of both. And thus no political
order can satisfy the demands of reason
unless it is organized so as to avoid,
on the one hand, a centralization that
would make men slaves or ignore
conscience and, on the other hand, an
antinomianism that would allow freedom
of conviction to any individual and so
produce a licentiousness that would make
social and political order impossible.
The state that achieves this synthesis
rests on the family and on the guild. It
is unlike any state existing in Hegel’s
day; it is a form of limited monarchy,
with parliamentary government, trial by
jury, and toleration for Jews and
dissenters.
After his publication of The Philosophy
of Right, Hegel seems to have devoted
himself almost entirely to his lectures.
Between 1823 and 1827 his activity
reached its maximum. His notes were
subjected to perpetual revisions and
additions. It is possible to form an
idea of them from the shape in which
they appear in his published writings.
Those on Aesthetics, on the Philosophy
of Religion, on the Philosophy of
History, and on the History of
Philosophy have been published by his
editors, mainly from the notes of his
students, whereas those on logic,
psychology, and the philosophy of nature
have been appended in the form of
illustrative and explanatory notes to
the corresponding sections of his
Encyklopädie. During these years
hundreds of hearers from all parts of
Germany and beyond came under his
influence; and his fame was carried
abroad by eager or intelligent
disciples.
Three courses of lectures are especially
the product of his Berlin period: those
on aesthetics, on the philosophy of
religion, and on the philosophy of
history. In the years preceding the
revolution of 1830, public interest,
excluded from political life, turned to
theatres, concert rooms, and picture
galleries. At these Hegel became a
frequent and appreciative visitor, and
he made extracts from the art notes in
the newspapers. During his holiday
excursions, his interest in the fine
arts more than once took him out of his
way to see some old painting. This
familiarity with the facts of art,
though neither deep nor historical, gave
a freshness to his lectures on
aesthetics, which, as put together from
the notes taken in different years from
1820 to 1829, are among his most
successful efforts.
The lectures on the philosophy of
religion are another application of his
method, and shortly before his death he
had prepared for the press a course of
lectures on the proofs for the existence
of God. On the one hand, he turned his
weapons against the Rationalistic
school, which reduced religion to the
modicum compatible with an ordinary
worldly mind. On the other hand, he
criticized the school of Schleiermacher,
who elevated feeling to a place in
religion above systematic theology. In
his middle way, Hegel attempted to show
that the dogmatic creed is the rational
development of what was implicit in
religious feeling. To do so, of course,
philosophy must be made the interpreter
and the superior discipline.
In his philosophy of history, Hegel
presupposed that the whole of human
history is a process through which
mankind has been making spiritual and
moral progress and advancing to
self-knowledge. History has a plot, and
the philosopher’s task is to discern it.
Some historians have found its key in
the operation of natural laws of various
kinds. Hegel’s attitude, however, rested
on the faith that history is the
enactment of God’s purpose and that man
had now advanced far enough to descry
what that purpose is: it is the gradual
realization of human freedom.
The first step was to make the
transition from a natural life of
savagery to a state of order and law.
States had to be founded by force and
violence; there is no other way to make
men law-abiding before they have
advanced far enough mentally to accept
the rationality of an ordered life.
There will be a stage at which some men
have accepted the law and become free,
while others remain slaves. In the
modern world man has come to appreciate
that all men, as minds, are free in
essence, and his task is thus to frame
institutions under which they will be
free in fact.
Hegel did not believe, despite the
charge of some critics, that history had
ended in his lifetime. In particular, he
maintained against Kant that to
eliminate war is impossible. Each
nation-state is an individual; and, as
Hobbes had said of relations between
individuals in the state of nature,
pacts without the sword are but words.
Clearly, Hegel’s reverence for fact
prevented him from accepting Kant’s
Idealism.
The lectures on the history of
philosophy are especially remarkable for
their treatment of Greek philosophy.
Working without modern indexes and
annotated editions, Hegel’s grasp of
Plato and Aristotle is astounding, and
it is only just to recognize that it was
from Hegel that the scholarship lavished
on Greek philosophy in the century after
his death received its original impetus.
At this time a Hegelian school began to
gather. The flock included intelligent
pupils, empty-headed imitators, and
romantics who turned philosophy into
lyric measures. Opposition and criticism
only served to define more precisely the
adherents of the new doctrine. Though he
had soon resigned all direct official
connection with the schools of
Brandenburg, Hegel’s real influence in
Prussia was considerable. In 1830 he was
rector of the university. In 1831 he
received a decoration from Frederick
William III. One of his last literary
undertakings was the establishment of
the Berlin Jahrbücher für
wissenschaftliche Kritik (“Yearbook for
Philosophical Criticism”).
The revolution of 1830 was a great blow
to Hegel, and the prospect of mob rule
almost made him ill. His last literary
work, the first part of which appeared
in the Preussische Staatszeitung while
the rest was censored, was an essay on
the English Reform Bill of 1832,
considering its probable effects on the
character of the new members of
Parliament and the measures that they
might introduce. In the latter
connection he enlarged on several points
in which England had done less than many
continental states for the abolition of
monopolies and abuses.
In 1831 cholera entered Germany. Hegel
and his family retired for the summer to
the suburbs, and there he finished the
revision of the first part of his
Science of Logic. Home again for the
winter session, on November 14, after
one day’s illness, he died of cholera
and was buried, as he had wished,
between Fichte and Karl Solger, author
of an ironic dialectic.
Personage and influence
In his classroom Hegel was more
impressive than fascinating. His
students saw a plain, old-fashioned
face, without life or lustre—a figure
that had never looked young and was now
prematurely aged. Sitting with his
snuffbox before him and his head bent
down, he looked ill at ease and kept
turning the folios of his notes. His
utterance was interrupted by frequent
coughing; every sentence came out with a
struggle. The style was no less
irregular: sometimes in plain narrative
the lecturer would be specially awkward,
while in abstruse passages he seemed
especially at home, rose into a natural
eloquence, and carried away the hearer
by the grandeur of his diction.
The early theological writings and the
Phenomenology of Mind are packed with
brilliant metaphors. In his later works,
produced as textbooks for his lectures,
the “Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical
Sciences” and the Philosophy of Right,
he compresses his material into
relatively short, numbered paragraphs.
It is only necessary to translate them
to appreciate their conciseness and
precision. The common idea that Hegel’s
is a philosophy of exceptional
difficulty is quite mistaken. Once his
terminology is understood and his main
principles grasped, he presents far less
difficulty than Kant, for example. One
reason for this is a certain air of
dogmatism: Kant’s statements are often
hedged around with qualifications; but
Hegel had, as it were, seen a vision of
absolute truth, and he expounds it with
confidence.
Hegel’s system is avowedly an attempt to
unify opposites—spirit and nature,
universal and particular, ideal and
real—and to be a synthesis in which all
the partial and contradictory
philosophies of his predecessors are
alike contained and transcended. It is
thus both Idealism and Realism at once;
hence, it is not surprising that his
successors, emphasizing now one and now
another strain in his thought, have
interpreted him variously. Conservatives
and revolutionaries, believers and
atheists alike have professed to draw
inspiration from him. In one form or
another his teaching dominated German
universities for some years after his
death and spread to France and to Italy.
The vicissitudes of Hegelian thought to
the present day are detailed below in
Hegelianism. In the mid-20th century,
interest in the early theological
writings and in the Phänomenologie was
increased by the spread of
Existentialism. At the same time, the
growing importance of Communism
encouraged political thinkers to study
Hegel’s political works, as well as his
“Logic,” because of their influence on
Karl Marx. And, by the time of his
bicentennial in 1970, a Hegelian
renascence was in the making.
Sir T. Malcolm Knox
|
The Romantic writer
Novalis (the pseudonym of Friedrich Leopold,
Baron von Hardenberg) put
Schlegel’s theory of irony into practice in
his unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen
(1802; Henry of Ofterdingen), which depicts the
development of a naive young man who is destined to
become a poet. Heinrich’s untutored responses to
experience are juxtaposed with a sequence of inset
narratives that culminate in an allegorical “fairy
tale” that was to be followed, according to the
author’s notes, by the depiction of an “astral”
counterreality. Each successive stage of the novel
was to move toward a higher and more complex
understanding of the world.
Many of the German
Romantics drew heavily on contemporary science,
notably on Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert’s Ansichten
von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaften (1808;
“Views about the Night Side of Science”). In
contrast to the Enlightenment, the Romantic Movement
reevaluated the power of rational thinking,
preferring instead more intuitive modes of thought
such as dreams (in Schubert’s terms, the “night
side” as opposed to the “day side” of reality). In
many ways, the German Romantics can be seen as
anticipating
Sigmund Freud
in their emphasis on the pervasive influence of the
unconscious in human motivation. Characteristic
Romantic motifs such as night, moonlight, dreams,
hallucinations, inchoate longings, and a melancholic
sense of lack or loss are direct reflections of this
interest in the unconscious.
According to the
Romantics, some minds are particularly adapted to
discern the hidden workings of nature. Poets, they
believed, possess the faculty of hearing the “voice
of nature” and transposing it into human language.
Lyric poetry was a dominant genre throughout the
period, with Ludwig Tieck,
Joseph Eichendorff, and Clemens Brentano
as its major practitioners. Folk traditions such as
the fairy tale, ballad, and folk song were also seen
as ways of gaining access to preconscious modes of
thought. Fairy tales and folk poetry were the object
of quasi-scholarly collections such as the Kinder-
und Hausmärchen (1812–15; “Children’s and Household
Stories,” commonly known as Grimm’s Fairy Tales),
assembled by
Jacob
and Wilhelm Grimm, and the poetry
anthology Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1805–08; “The Boy’s
Magic Horn”), edited by Achim von Arnim and
Clemens Brentano. At the same time, these
genres were also much imitated, as in Ludwig Tieck’s
sophisticated “art fairy tale” Der blonde Eckbert
(1797; “Blond Eckbert”). The Romantics were also
intensely interested in the Middle Ages, which they
saw as a simpler and more integrated time that could
become a model for the new political, social, and
religious unity they were seeking. Novalis’s
essay Die Christenheit oder Europa (1799;
“Christendom or Europe”) expressed this view.
As the Romantic
Movement unfolded, its writers became increasingly
aware of the tenuous nature of the synthesis they
were attempting to establish, and they felt wracked
by a sense of irreconcilable dualism. Later
Romanticism is perhaps best exemplified by
E.T.A. Hoffmann, whose best-known tales,
such as Der goldne Topf (1814; The Golden Pot) and
Der Sandmann (1816; The Sandman), turn upon a
tension between an everyday or philistine world and
the seemingly crazed mental projections of creative
genius. The poetry of
Heinrich Heine,
with its simultaneous expression and critique of
Romantic sentiment, is also characteristic of this
later phase of the movement; indeed,
Heine is best
seen as a transitional figure who emerged from late
Romanticism but had his most decisive influence
during the 1830s. His essay Die Romantische Schule
(1833–35; The Romantic School) presented a critique
of Romanticism’s tendency to look to the medieval
past.
Sigmund
Freud
Austrian psychoanalyst
born May 6, 1856, Freiberg, Moravia, Austrian Empire [now Příbor,
Czech Republic]
died Sept. 23, 1939, London, Eng.
Overview
Austrian neuropsychologist, founder of psychoanalysis, and one of the
major intellectual figures of the 20th century.
Trained in Vienna as a neurologist, Freud went to Paris in 1885 to
study with Jean-Martin Charcot, whose work on hysteria led Freud to
conclude that mental disorders might be caused purely by psychological
rather than organic factors. Returning to Vienna (1886), Freud
collaborated with the physician Josef Breuer (1842–1925) in further
studies on hysteria, resulting in the development of some key
psychoanalytic concepts and techniques, including free association, the
unconscious, resistance (later defense mechanisms), and neurosis. In
1899 he published The Interpretation of Dreams, in which he analyzed the
complex symbolic processes underlying dream formation: he proposed that
dreams are the disguised expression of unconscious wishes. In his
controversial Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), he
delineated the complicated stages of psychosexual development (oral,
anal, and phallic) and the formation of the Oedipus complex. During
World War I, he wrote papers that clarified his understanding of the
relations between the unconscious and conscious portions of the mind and
the workings of the id, ego, and superego. Freud eventually applied his
psychoanalytic insights to such diverse phenomena as jokes and slips of
the tongue, ethnographic data, religion and mythology, and modern
civilization. Works of note include Totem and Taboo (1913), Beyond the
Pleasure Principle (1920), The Future of an Illusion (1927), and
Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). Freud fled to England when the
Nazis annexed Austria in 1938; he died shortly thereafter. Despite the
relentless and often compelling challenges mounted against virtually all
of his ideas, both in his lifetime and after, Freud has remained one of
the most influential figures in contemporary thought.
Main
Austrian neurologist, founder of psychoanalysis.
Freud may justly be called the most influential intellectual
legislator of his age. His creation of psychoanalysis was at once a
theory of the human psyche, a therapy for the relief of its ills, and an
optic for the interpretation of culture and society. Despite repeated
criticisms, attempted refutations, and qualifications of Freud’s work,
its spell remained powerful well after his death and in fields far
removed from psychology as it is narrowly defined. If, as the American
sociologist Philip Rieff once contended, “psychological man” replaced
such earlier notions as political, religious, or economic man as the
20th century’s dominant self-image, it is in no small measure due to the
power of Freud’s vision and the seeming inexhaustibility of the
intellectual legacy he left behind.
Early life and training
Freud’s father, Jakob, was a Jewish wool merchant who had been married
once before he wed the boy’s mother, Amalie Nathansohn. The father, 40
years old at Freud’s birth, seems to have been a relatively remote and
authoritarian figure, while his mother appears to have been more
nurturant and emotionally available. Although Freud had two older
half-brothers, his strongest if also most ambivalent attachment seems to
have been to a nephew, John, one year his senior, who provided the model
of intimate friend and hated rival that Freud reproduced often at later
stages of his life.
In 1859 the Freud family was compelled for economic reasons to move
to Leipzig and then a year after to Vienna, where Freud remained until
the Nazi annexation of Austria 78 years later. Despite Freud’s dislike
of the imperial city, in part because of its citizens’ frequent
anti-Semitism, psychoanalysis reflected in significant ways the cultural
and political context out of which it emerged. For example, Freud’s
sensitivity to the vulnerability of paternal authority within the psyche
may well have been stimulated by the decline in power suffered by his
father’s generation, often liberal rationalists, in the Habsburg empire.
So too his interest in the theme of the seduction of daughters was
rooted in complicated ways in the context of Viennese attitudes toward
female sexuality.
In 1873 Freud was graduated from the Sperl Gymnasium and, apparently
inspired by a public reading of an essay by Goethe on nature, turned to
medicine as a career. At the University of Vienna he worked with one of
the leading physiologists of his day, Ernst von Brücke, an exponent of
the materialist, antivitalist science of Hermann von Helmholtz. In 1882
he entered the General Hospital in Vienna as a clinical assistant to
train with the psychiatrist Theodor Meynert and the professor of
internal medicine Hermann Nothnagel. In 1885 Freud was appointed
lecturer in neuropathology, having concluded important research on the
brain’s medulla. At this time he also developed an interest in the
pharmaceutical benefits of cocaine, which he pursued for several years.
Although some beneficial results were found in eye surgery, which have
been credited to Freud’s friend Carl Koller, the general outcome was
disastrous. Not only did Freud’s advocacy lead to a mortal addiction in
another close friend, Ernst Fleischl von Marxow, but it also tarnished
his medical reputation for a time. Whether or not one interprets this
episode in terms that call into question Freud’s prudence as a
scientist, it was of a piece with his lifelong willingness to attempt
bold solutions to relieve human suffering.
Freud’s scientific training remained of cardinal importance in his
work, or at least in his own conception of it. In such writings as his
“Entwurf einer Psychologie” (written 1895, published 1950; “Project for
a Scientific Psychology”) he affirmed his intention to find a
physiological and materialist basis for his theories of the psyche. Here
a mechanistic neurophysiological model vied with a more organismic,
phylogenetic one in ways that demonstrate Freud’s complicated debt to
the science of his day.
In late 1885 Freud left Vienna to continue his studies of
neuropathology at the Salpêtrière clinic in Paris, where he worked under
the guidance of Jean-Martin Charcot. His 19 weeks in the French capital
proved a turning point in his career, for Charcot’s work with patients
classified as “hysterics” introduced Freud to the possibility that
psychological disorders might have their source in the mind rather than
the brain. Charcot’s demonstration of a link between hysterical
symptoms, such as paralysis of a limb, and hypnotic suggestion implied
the power of mental states rather than nerves in the etiology of
disease. Although Freud was soon to abandon his faith in hypnosis, he
returned to Vienna in February 1886 with the seed of his revolutionary
psychological method implanted.
Several months after his return Freud married Martha Bernays, the
daughter of a prominent Jewish family whose ancestors included a chief
rabbi of Hamburg and Heinrich Heine. She was to bear six children, one
of whom, Anna Freud, was to become a distinguished psychoanalyst in her
own right. Although the glowing picture of their marriage painted by
Ernest Jones in his biography of Freud has been nuanced by later
scholars, it is clear that Martha Bernays Freud was a deeply sustaining
presence during her husband’s tumultuous career.
Shortly after his marriage Freud began his closest friendship, with
the Berlin physician Wilhelm Fliess, whose role in the development of
psychoanalysis has occasioned widespread debate. Throughout the 15 years
of their intimacy Fliess provided Freud an invaluable interlocutor for
his most daring ideas. Freud’s belief in human bisexuality, his idea of
erotogenic zones on the body, and perhaps even his imputation of
sexuality to infants may well have been stimulated by their friendship.
A somewhat less controversial influence arose from the partnership
Freud began with the physician Josef Breuer after his return from Paris.
Freud turned to a clinical practice in neuropsychology, and the office
he established at Berggasse 19 was to remain his consulting room for
almost half a century. Before their collaboration began, during the
early 1880s, Breuer had treated a patient named Bertha Pappenheim—or
“Anna O.,” as she became known in the literature—who was suffering from
a variety of hysterical symptoms. Rather than using hypnotic suggestion,
as had Charcot, Breuer allowed her to lapse into a state resembling
autohypnosis, in which she would talk about the initial manifestations
of her symptoms. To Breuer’s surprise, the very act of verbalization
seemed to provide some relief from their hold over her (although later
scholarship has cast doubt on its permanence). “The talking cure” or
“chimney sweeping,” as Breuer and Anna O., respectively, called it,
seemed to act cathartically to produce an abreaction, or discharge, of
the pent-up emotional blockage at the root of the pathological
behaviour.
Psychoanalytic theory
Freud, still beholden to Charcot’s hypnotic method, did not grasp the
full implications of Breuer’s experience until a decade later, when he
developed the technique of free association. In part an extrapolation of
the automatic writing promoted by the German Jewish writer Ludwig Börne
a century before, in part a result of his own clinical experience with
other hysterics, this revolutionary method was announced in the work
Freud published jointly with Breuer in 1895, Studien über Hysterie
(Studies in Hysteria). By encouraging the patient to express any random
thoughts that came associatively to mind, the technique aimed at
uncovering hitherto unarticulated material from the realm of the psyche
that Freud, following a long tradition, called the unconscious. Because
of its incompatibility with conscious thoughts or conflicts with other
unconscious ones, this material was normally hidden, forgotten, or
unavailable to conscious reflection. Difficulty in freely
associating—sudden silences, stuttering, or the like—suggested to Freud
the importance of the material struggling to be expressed, as well as
the power of what he called the patient’s defenses against that
expression. Such blockages Freud dubbed resistance, which had to be
broken down in order to reveal hidden conflicts. Unlike Charcot and
Breuer, Freud came to the conclusion, based on his clinical experience
with female hysterics, that the most insistent source of resisted
material was sexual in nature. And even more momentously, he linked the
etiology of neurotic symptoms to the same struggle between a sexual
feeling or urge and the psychic defenses against it. Being able to bring
that conflict to consciousness through free association and then probing
its implications was thus a crucial step, he reasoned, on the road to
relieving the symptom, which was best understood as an unwitting
compromise formation between the wish and the defense.
Psychoanalytic theory » Screen memories
At first, however, Freud was uncertain about the precise status of the
sexual component in this dynamic conception of the psyche. His patients
seemed to recall actual experiences of early seductions, often
incestuous in nature. Freud’s initial impulse was to accept these as
having happened. But then, as he disclosed in a now famous letter to
Fliess of Sept. 2, 1897, he concluded that, rather than being memories
of actual events, these shocking recollections were the residues of
infantile impulses and desires to be seduced by an adult. What was
recalled was not a genuine memory but what he would later call a screen
memory, or fantasy, hiding a primitive wish. That is, rather than
stressing the corrupting initiative of adults in the etiology of
neuroses, Freud concluded that the fantasies and yearnings of the child
were at the root of later conflict.
The absolute centrality of his change of heart in the subsequent
development of psychoanalysis cannot be doubted. For in attributing
sexuality to children, emphasizing the causal power of fantasies, and
establishing the importance of repressed desires, Freud laid the
groundwork for what many have called the epic journey into his own
psyche, which followed soon after the dissolution of his partnership
with Breuer.
Freud’s work on hysteria had focused on female sexuality and its
potential for neurotic expression. To be fully universal,
psychoanalysis—a term Freud coined in 1896—would also have to examine
the male psyche in a condition of what might be called normality. It
would have to become more than a psychotherapy and develop into a
complete theory of the mind. To this end Freud accepted the enormous
risk of generalizing from the experience he knew best: his own.
Significantly, his self-analysis was both the first and the last in the
history of the movement he spawned; all future analysts would have to
undergo a training analysis with someone whose own analysis was
ultimately traceable to Freud’s of his disciples.
Freud’s self-exploration was apparently enabled by a disturbing event
in his life. In October 1896, Jakob Freud died shortly before his 81st
birthday. Emotions were released in his son that he understood as having
been long repressed, emotions concerning his earliest familial
experiences and feelings. Beginning in earnest in July 1897, Freud
attempted to reveal their meaning by drawing on a technique that had
been available for millennia: the deciphering of dreams. Freud’s
contribution to the tradition of dream analysis was path-breaking, for
in insisting on them as “the royal road to a knowledge of the
unconscious,” he provided a remarkably elaborate account of why dreams
originate and how they function.
Psychoanalytic theory » The interpretation of dreams
In what many commentators consider his master work, Die Traumdeutung
(published in 1899, but given the date of the dawning century to
emphasize its epochal character; The Interpretation of Dreams), he
presented his findings. Interspersing evidence from his own dreams with
evidence from those recounted in his clinical practice, Freud contended
that dreams played a fundamental role in the psychic economy. The mind’s
energy—which Freud called libido and identified principally, but not
exclusively, with the sexual drive—was a fluid and malleable force
capable of excessive and disturbing power. Needing to be discharged to
ensure pleasure and prevent pain, it sought whatever outlet it might
find. If denied the gratification provided by direct motor action,
libidinal energy could seek its release through mental channels. Or, in
the language of The Interpretation of Dreams, a wish can be satisfied by
an imaginary wish fulfillment. All dreams, Freud claimed, even
nightmares manifesting apparent anxiety, are the fulfillment of such
wishes.
More precisely, dreams are the disguised expression of wish
fulfillments. Like neurotic symptoms, they are the effects of
compromises in the psyche between desires and prohibitions in conflict
with their realization. Although sleep can relax the power of the mind’s
diurnal censorship of forbidden desires, such censorship, nonetheless,
persists in part during nocturnal existence. Dreams, therefore, have to
be decoded to be understood, and not merely because they are actually
forbidden desires experienced in distorted fashion. For dreams undergo
further revision in the process of being recounted to the analyst.
The Interpretation of Dreams provides a hermeneutic for the unmasking
of the dream’s disguise, or dreamwork, as Freud called it. The manifest
content of the dream, that which is remembered and reported, must be
understood as veiling a latent meaning. Dreams defy logical entailment
and narrative coherence, for they intermingle the residues of immediate
daily experience with the deepest, often most infantile wishes. Yet they
can be ultimately decoded by attending to four basic activities of the
dreamwork and reversing their mystifying effect.
The first of these activities, condensation, operates through the
fusion of several different elements into one. As such, it exemplifies
one of the key operations of psychic life, which Freud called
overdetermination. No direct correspondence between a simple manifest
content and its multidimensional latent counterpart can be assumed. The
second activity of the dreamwork, displacement, refers to the decentring
of dream thoughts, so that the most urgent wish is often obliquely or
marginally represented on the manifest level. Displacement also means
the associative substitution of one signifier in the dream for another,
say, the king for one’s father. The third activity Freud called
representation, by which he meant the transformation of thoughts into
images. Decoding a dream thus means translating such visual
representations back into intersubjectively available language through
free association. The final function of the dreamwork is secondary
revision, which provides some order and intelligibility to the dream by
supplementing its content with narrative coherence. The process of dream
interpretation thus reverses the direction of the dreamwork, moving from
the level of the conscious recounting of the dream through the
preconscious back beyond censorship into the unconscious itself.
Psychoanalytic theory » Further theoretical development
In 1904 Freud published Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens (The
Psychopathology of Everyday Life), in which he explored such seemingly
insignificant errors as slips of the tongue or pen (later colloquially
called Freudian slips), misreadings, or forgetting of names. These
errors Freud understood to have symptomatic and thus interpretable
importance. But unlike dreams they need not betray a repressed infantile
wish yet can arise from more immediate hostile, jealous, or egoistic
causes.
In 1905 Freud extended the scope of this analysis by examining Der
Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten (Jokes and Their Relation to
the Unconscious). Invoking the idea of “joke-work” as a process
comparable to dreamwork, he also acknowledged the double-sided quality
of jokes, at once consciously contrived and unconsciously revealing.
Seemingly innocent phenomena like puns or jests are as open to
interpretation as more obviously tendentious, obscene, or hostile jokes.
The explosive response often produced by successful humour, Freud
contended, owes its power to the orgasmic release of unconscious
impulses, aggressive as well as sexual. But insofar as jokes are more
deliberate than dreams or slips, they draw on the rational dimension of
the psyche that Freud was to call the ego as much as on what he was to
call the id.
In 1905 Freud also published the work that first thrust him into the
limelight as the alleged champion of a pansexualist understanding of the
mind: Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie (Three Contributions to the
Sexual Theory, later translated as Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality), revised and expanded in subsequent editions. The work
established Freud, along with Richard von Kraft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis,
Albert Moll, and Iwan Bloch, as a pioneer in the serious study of
sexology. Here he outlined in greater detail than before his reasons for
emphasizing the sexual component in the development of both normal and
pathological behaviour. Although not as reductionist as popularly
assumed, Freud nonetheless extended the concept of sexuality beyond
conventional usage to include a panoply of erotic impulses from the
earliest childhood years on. Distinguishing between sexual aims (the act
toward which instincts strive) and sexual objects (the person, organ, or
physical entity eliciting attraction), he elaborated a repertoire of
sexually generated behaviour of astonishing variety. Beginning very
early in life, imperiously insistent on its gratification, remarkably
plastic in its expression, and open to easy maldevelopment, sexuality,
Freud concluded, is the prime mover in a great deal of human behaviour.
Psychoanalytic theory » Sexuality and development
To spell out the formative development of the sexual drive, Freud
focused on the progressive replacement of erotogenic zones in the body
by others. An originally polymorphous sexuality first seeks
gratification orally through sucking at the mother’s breast, an object
for which other surrogates can later be provided. Initially unable to
distinguish between self and breast, the infant soon comes to appreciate
its mother as the first external love object. Later Freud would contend
that even before that moment, the child can treat its own body as such
an object, going beyond undifferentiated autoeroticism to a narcissistic
love for the self as such. After the oral phase, during the second year,
the child’s erotic focus shifts to its anus, stimulated by the struggle
over toilet training. During the anal phase the child’s pleasure in
defecation is confronted with the demands of self-control. The third
phase, lasting from about the fourth to the sixth year, he called the
phallic. Because Freud relied on male sexuality as the norm of
development, his analysis of this phase aroused considerable opposition,
especially because he claimed its major concern is castration anxiety.
To grasp what Freud meant by this fear, it is necessary to understand
one of his central contentions. As has been stated, the death of Freud’s
father was the trauma that permitted him to delve into his own psyche.
Not only did Freud experience the expected grief, but he also expressed
disappointment, resentment, and even hostility toward his father in the
dreams he analyzed at the time. In the process of abandoning the
seduction theory he recognized the source of the anger as his own psyche
rather than anything objectively done by his father. Turning, as he
often did, to evidence from literary and mythical texts as anticipations
of his psychological insights, Freud interpreted that source in terms of
Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus Rex. The universal applicability of its plot,
he conjectured, lies in the desire of every male child to sleep with his
mother and remove the obstacle to the realization of that wish, his
father. What he later dubbed the Oedipus complex presents the child with
a critical problem, for the unrealizable yearning at its root provokes
an imagined response on the part of the father: the threat of
castration.
The phallic stage can only be successfully surmounted if the Oedipus
complex with its accompanying castration anxiety can be resolved.
According to Freud, this resolution can occur if the boy finally
suppresses his sexual desire for the mother, entering a period of
so-called latency, and internalizes the reproachful prohibition of the
father, making it his own with the construction of that part of the
psyche Freud called the superego or the conscience.
The blatantly phallocentric bias of this account, which was
supplemented by a highly controversial assumption of penis envy in the
already castrated female child, proved troublesome for subsequent
psychoanalytic theory. Not surprisingly, later analysts of female
sexuality have paid more attention to the girl’s relations with the
pre-Oedipal mother than to the vicissitudes of the Oedipus complex.
Anthropological challenges to the universality of the complex have also
been damaging, although it has been possible to redescribe it in terms
that lift it out of the specific familial dynamics of Freud’s own day.
If the creation of culture is understood as the institution of kinship
structures based on exogamy, then the Oedipal drama reflects the deeper
struggle between natural desire and cultural authority.
Freud, however, always maintained the intrapsychic importance of the
Oedipus complex, whose successful resolution is the precondition for the
transition through latency to the mature sexuality he called the genital
phase. Here the parent of the opposite sex is conclusively abandoned in
favour of a more suitable love object able to reciprocate reproductively
useful passion. In the case of the girl, disappointment over the
nonexistence of a penis is transcended by the rejection of her mother in
favour of a father figure instead. In both cases, sexual maturity means
heterosexual, procreatively inclined, genitally focused behaviour.
Sexual development, however, is prone to troubling maladjustments
preventing this outcome if the various stages are unsuccessfully
negotiated. Fixation of sexual aims or objects can occur at any
particular moment, caused either by an actual trauma or the blockage of
a powerful libidinal urge. If the fixation is allowed to express itself
directly at a later age, the result is what was then generally called a
perversion. If, however, some part of the psyche prohibits such overt
expression, then, Freud contended, the repressed and censored impulse
produces neurotic symptoms, neuroses being conceptualized as the
negative of perversions. Neurotics repeat the desired act in repressed
form, without conscious memory of its origin or the ability to confront
and work it through in the present.
In addition to the neurosis of hysteria, with its conversion of
affective conflicts into bodily symptoms, Freud developed complicated
etiological explanations for other typical neurotic behaviour, such as
obsessive-compulsions, paranoia, and narcissism. These he called
psychoneuroses, because of their rootedness in childhood conflicts, as
opposed to the actual neuroses such as hypochondria, neurasthenia, and
anxiety neurosis, which are due to problems in the present (the last,
for example, being caused by the physical suppression of sexual
release).
Freud’s elaboration of his therapeutic technique during these years
focused on the implications of a specific element in the relationship
between patient and analyst, an element whose power he first began to
recognize in reflecting on Breuer’s work with Anna O. Although later
scholarship has cast doubt on its veracity, Freud’s account of the
episode was as follows. An intense rapport between Breuer and his
patient had taken an alarming turn when Anna divulged her strong sexual
desire for him. Breuer, who recognized the stirrings of reciprocal
feelings, broke off his treatment out of an understandable confusion
about the ethical implications of acting on these impulses. Freud came
to see in this troubling interaction the effects of a more pervasive
phenomenon, which he called transference (or in the case of the
analyst’s desire for the patient, counter-transference). Produced by the
projection of feelings, transference, he reasoned, is the reenactment of
childhood urges cathected (invested) on a new object. As such, it is the
essential tool in the analytic cure, for by bringing to the surface
repressed emotions and allowing them to be examined in a clinical
setting, transference can permit their being worked through in the
present. That is, affective remembrance can be the antidote to neurotic
repetition.
It was largely to facilitate transference that Freud developed his
celebrated technique of having the patient lie on a couch, not looking
directly at the analyst, and free to fantasize with as little intrusion
of the analyst’s real personality as possible. Restrained and neutral,
the analyst functions as a screen for the displacement of early
emotions, both erotic and aggressive. Transference onto the analyst is
itself a kind of neurosis, but one in the service of an ultimate working
through of the conflicting feelings it expresses. Only certain
illnesses, however, are open to this treatment, for it demands the
ability to redirect libidinal energy outward. The psychoses, Freud sadly
concluded, are based on the redirection of libido back onto the
patient’s ego and cannot therefore be relieved by transference in the
analytic situation. How successful psychoanalytic therapy has been in
the treatment of psychoneuroses remains, however, a matter of
considerable dispute.
Although Freud’s theories were offensive to many in the Vienna of his
day, they began to attract a cosmopolitan group of supporters in the
early 1900s. In 1902 the Psychological Wednesday Circle began to gather
in Freud’s waiting room with a number of future luminaries in the
psychoanalytic movements in attendance. Alfred Adler and Wilhelm Stekel
were often joined by guests such as Sándor Ferenczi, Carl Gustav Jung,
Otto Rank, Ernest Jones, Max Eitingon, and A.A. Brill. In 1908 the group
was renamed the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and held its first
international congress in Salzburg. In the same year the first branch
society was opened in Berlin. In 1909 Freud, along with Jung and
Ferenczi, made a historic trip to Clark University in Worcester, Mass.
The lectures he gave there were soon published as Über Psychoanalyse
(1910; The Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis), the first of
several introductions he wrote for a general audience. Along with a
series of vivid case studies—the most famous known colloquially as
“Dora” (1905), “Little Hans” (1909), “The Rat Man” (1909), “The
Psychotic Dr. Schreber” (1911), and “The Wolf Man” (1918)—they made his
ideas known to a wider public.
As might be expected of a movement whose treatment emphasized the
power of transference and the ubiquity of Oedipal conflict, its early
history is a tale rife with dissension, betrayal, apostasy, and
excommunication. The most widely noted schisms occurred with Adler in
1911, Stekel in 1912, and Jung in 1913; these were followed by later
breaks with Ferenczi, Rank, and Wilhelm Reich in the 1920s. Despite
efforts by loyal disciples like Ernest Jones to exculpate Freud from
blame, subsequent research concerning his relations with former
disciples like Viktor Tausk have clouded the picture considerably.
Critics of the hagiographic legend of Freud have, in fact, had a
relatively easy time documenting the tension between Freud’s aspirations
to scientific objectivity and the extraordinarily fraught personal
context in which his ideas were developed and disseminated. Even well
after Freud’s death, his archivists’ insistence on limiting access to
potentially embarrassing material in his papers has reinforced the
impression that the psychoanalytic movement resembled more a sectarian
church than a scientific community (at least as the latter is ideally
understood).
Psychoanalytic theory » Toward a general theory
If the troubled history of its institutionalization served to call
psychoanalysis into question in certain quarters, so too did its
founder’s penchant for extrapolating his clinical findings into a more
ambitious general theory. As he admitted to Fliess in 1900, “I am
actually not a man of science at all. . . . I am nothing but a
conquistador by temperament, an adventurer.” Freud’s so-called
metapsychology soon became the basis for wide-ranging speculations about
cultural, social, artistic, religious, and anthropological phenomena.
Composed of a complicated and often revised mixture of economic,
dynamic, and topographical elements, the metapsychology was developed in
a series of 12 papers Freud composed during World War I, only some of
which were published in his lifetime. Their general findings appeared in
two books in the 1920s: Jenseits des Lustprinzips (1920; Beyond the
Pleasure Principle) and Das Ich und das Es (1923; The Ego and the Id).
In these works, Freud attempted to clarify the relationship between
his earlier topographical division of the psyche into the unconscious,
preconscious, and conscious and his subsequent structural categorization
into id, ego, and superego. The id was defined in terms of the most
primitive urges for gratification in the infant, urges dominated by the
desire for pleasure through the release of tension and the cathexis of
energy. Ruled by no laws of logic, indifferent to the demands of
expediency, unconstrained by the resistance of external reality, the id
is ruled by what Freud called the primary process directly expressing
somatically generated instincts. Through the inevitable experience of
frustration the infant learns to adapt itself to the exigencies of
reality. The secondary process that results leads to the growth of the
ego, which follows what Freud called the reality principle in
contradistinction to the pleasure principle dominating the id. Here the
need to delay gratification in the service of self-preservation is
slowly learned in an effort to thwart the anxiety produced by
unfulfilled desires. What Freud termed defense mechanisms are developed
by the ego to deal with such conflicts. Repression is the most
fundamental, but Freud also posited an entire repertoire of others,
including reaction formation, isolation, undoing, denial, displacement,
and rationalization.
The last component in Freud’s trichotomy, the superego, develops from
the internalization of society’s moral commands through identification
with parental dictates during the resolution of the Oedipus complex.
Only partly conscious, the superego gains some of its punishing force by
borrowing certain aggressive elements in the id, which are turned inward
against the ego and produce feelings of guilt. But it is largely through
the internalization of social norms that the superego is constituted, an
acknowledgement that prevents psychoanalysis from conceptualizing the
psyche in purely biologistic or individualistic terms.
Freud’s understanding of the primary process underwent a crucial
shift in the course of his career. Initially he counterposed a libidinal
drive that seeks sexual pleasure to a self-preservation drive whose
telos is survival. But in 1914, while examining the phenomenon of
narcissism, he came to consider the latter instinct as merely a variant
of the former. Unable to accept so monistic a drive theory, Freud sought
a new dualistic alternative. He arrived at the speculative assertion
that there exists in the psyche an innate, regressive drive for stasis
that aims to end life’s inevitable tension. This striving for rest he
christened the Nirvana principle and the drive underlying it the death
instinct, or Thanatos, which he could substitute for self-preservation
as the contrary of the life instinct, or Eros.
Social and cultural studies
Freud’s mature instinct theory is in many ways a metaphysical construct,
comparable to Bergson’s élan vital or Schopenhauer’s Will. Emboldened by
its formulation, Freud launched a series of audacious studies that took
him well beyond his clinician’s consulting room. These he had already
commenced with investigations of Leonardo da Vinci (1910) and the novel
Gradiva by Wilhelm Jensen (1907). Here Freud attempted to psychoanalyze
works of art as symbolic expressions of their creator’s psychodynamics.
The fundamental premise that permitted Freud to examine cultural
phenomena was called sublimation in the Three Essays. The appreciation
or creation of ideal beauty, Freud contended, is rooted in primitive
sexual urges that are transfigured in culturally elevating ways. Unlike
repression, which produces only neurotic symptoms whose meaning is
unknown even to the sufferer, sublimation is a conflict-free resolution
of repression, which leads to intersubjectively available cultural
works. Although potentially reductive in its implications, the
psychoanalytic interpretation of culture can be justly called one of the
most powerful “hermeneutics of suspicion,” to borrow the French
philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s phrase, because it debunks idealist notions
of high culture as the alleged transcendence of baser concerns.
Freud extended the scope of his theories to include anthropological
and social psychological speculation as well in Totem und Tabu (1913;
Totem and Taboo). Drawing on Sir James Frazer’s explorations of the
Australian Aborigines, he interpreted the mixture of fear and reverence
for the totemic animal in terms of the child’s attitude toward the
parent of the same sex. The Aborigines’ insistence on exogamy was a
complicated defense against the strong incestuous desires felt by the
child for the parent of the opposite sex. Their religion was thus a
phylogenetic anticipation of the ontogenetic Oedipal drama played out in
modern man’s psychic development. But whereas the latter was purely an
intrapsychic phenomenon based on fantasies and fears, the former, Freud
boldly suggested, was based on actual historical events. Freud
speculated that the rebellion of sons against dominating fathers for
control over women had culminated in actual parricide. Ultimately
producing remorse, this violent act led to atonement through incest
taboos and the prohibitions against harming the father-substitute, the
totemic object or animal. When the fraternal clan replaced the
patriarchal horde, true society emerged. For renunciation of individual
aspirations to replace the slain father and a shared sense of guilt in
the primal crime led to a contractual agreement to end internecine
struggle and band together instead. The totemic ancestor then could
evolve into the more impersonal God of the great religions.
A subsequent effort to explain social solidarity, Massenpsychologie
und Ich-analyse (1921; Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego),
drew on the antidemocratic crowd psychologists of the late 19th century,
most notably Gustave Le Bon. Here the disillusionment with liberal,
rational politics that some have seen as the seedbed of much of Freud’s
work was at its most explicit (the only competitor being the debunking
psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson he wrote jointly with William Bullitt
in 1930, which was not published until 1967). All mass phenomena, Freud
suggested, are characterized by intensely regressive emotional ties
stripping individuals of their self-control and independence. Rejecting
possible alternative explanations such as hypnotic suggestion or
imitation and unwilling to follow Jung in postulating a group mind,
Freud emphasized instead individual libidinal ties to the group’s
leader. Group formation is like regression to a primal horde with the
leader as the original father. Drawing on the army and the Roman
Catholic Church as his examples, Freud never seriously considered less
authoritarian modes of collective behaviour.
Social and cultural studies » Religion, civilization, and discontents
Freud’s bleak appraisal of social and political solidarity was
replicated, if in somewhat more nuanced form, in his attitude toward
religion. Although many accounts of Freud’s development have discerned
debts to one or another aspect of his Jewish background, debts Freud
himself partly acknowledged, his avowed position was deeply irreligious.
As noted in the account of Totem and Taboo, he always attributed the
belief in divinities ultimately to the displaced worship of human
ancestors. One of the most potent sources of his break with former
disciples like Jung was precisely this skepticism toward spirituality.
In his 1907 essay “Zwangshandlungen und Religionsübungen” (“Obsessive
Acts and Religious Practices,” later translated as “Obsessive Actions
and Religious Practices”) Freud had already contended that obsessional
neuroses are private religious systems and religions themselves no more
than the obsessional neuroses of mankind. Twenty years later, in Die
Zukunft einer Illusion (1927; The Future of an Illusion), he elaborated
this argument, adding that belief in God is a mythic reproduction of the
universal state of infantile helplessness. Like an idealized father, God
is the projection of childish wishes for an omnipotent protector. If
children can outgrow their dependence, he concluded with cautious
optimism, then humanity may also hope to leave behind its immature
heteronomy.
The simple Enlightenment faith underlying this analysis quickly
elicited critical comment, which led to its modification. In an exchange
of letters with the French novelist Romain Rolland, Freud came to
acknowledge a more intractable source of religious sentiment. The
opening section of his next speculative tract, Das Unbehagen in der
Kultur (1930; Civilization and Its Discontents), was devoted to what
Rolland had dubbed the oceanic feeling. Freud described it as a sense of
indissoluble oneness with the universe, which mystics in particular have
celebrated as the fundamental religious experience. Its origin, Freud
claimed, is nostalgia for the pre-Oedipal infant’s sense of unity with
its mother. Although still rooted in infantile helplessness, religion
thus derives to some extent from the earliest stage of postnatal
development. Regressive longings for its restoration are possibly
stronger than those for a powerful father and thus cannot be worked
through by way of a collective resolution of the Oedipus complex.
Civilization and Its Discontents, written after the onset of Freud’s
struggle with cancer of the jaw and in the midst of the rise of European
Fascism, was a profoundly unconsoling book. Focusing on the prevalence
of human guilt and the impossibility of achieving unalloyed happiness,
Freud contended that no social solution of the discontents of mankind is
possible. All civilizations, no matter how well planned, can provide
only partial relief. For aggression among men is not due to unequal
property relations or political injustice, which can be rectified by
laws, but rather to the death instinct redirected outward.
Even Eros, Freud suggested, is not fully in harmony with
civilization, for the libidinal ties creating collective solidarity are
aim-inhibited and diffuse rather than directly sexual. Thus, there is
likely to be tension between the urge for sexual gratification and the
sublimated love for mankind. Furthermore, because Eros and Thanatos are
themselves at odds, conflict and the guilt it engenders are virtually
inevitable. The best to be hoped for is a life in which the repressive
burdens of civilization are in rough balance with the realization of
instinctual gratification and the sublimated love for mankind. But
reconciliation of nature and culture is impossible, for the price of any
civilization is the guilt produced by the necessary thwarting of man’s
instinctual drives. Although elsewhere Freud had postulated mature,
heterosexual genitality and the capacity to work productively as the
hallmarks of health and urged that “where id is, there shall ego be,” it
is clear that he held out no hope for any collective relief from the
discontents of civilization. He only offered an ethic of resigned
authenticity, which taught the wisdom of living without the possibility
of redemption, either religious or secular.
Social and cultural studies » Last days
Freud’s final major work, Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische
Religion (1938; Moses and Monotheism), was more than just the
“historical novel” he had initially thought to subtitle it. Moses had
long been a figure of capital importance for Freud; indeed
Michelangelo’s famous statue of Moses had been the subject of an essay
written in 1914. The book itself sought to solve the mystery of Moses’
origins by claiming that he was actually an aristocratic Egyptian by
birth who had chosen the Jewish people to keep alive an earlier
monotheistic religion. Too stern and demanding a taskmaster, Moses was
slain in a Jewish revolt, and a second, more pliant leader, also called
Moses, rose in his place. The guilt engendered by the parricidal act
was, however, too much to endure, and the Jews ultimately returned to
the religion given them by the original Moses as the two figures were
merged into one in their memories. Here Freud’s ambivalence about his
religious roots and his father’s authority was allowed to pervade a
highly fanciful story that reveals more about its author than its
ostensible subject.
Moses and Monotheism was published in the year Hitler invaded
Austria. Freud was forced to flee to England. His books were among the
first to be burned, as the fruits of a “Jewish science,” when the Nazis
took over Germany. Although psychotherapy was not banned in the Third
Reich, where Field Marshall Hermann Göring’s cousin headed an official
institute, psychoanalysis essentially went into exile, most notably to
North America and England. Freud himself died only a few weeks after
World War II broke out, at a time when his worst fears about the
irrationality lurking behind the facade of civilization were being
realized. Freud’s death did not, however, hinder the reception and
dissemination of his ideas. A plethora of Freudian schools emerged to
develop psychoanalysis in different directions. In fact, despite the
relentless and often compelling challenges mounted against virtually all
of his ideas, Freud has remained one of the most potent figures in the
intellectual landscape of the 20th century.
Martin Evan Jay
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see also collection Pin-Up Weird Tales
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E.T.A.
Hoffmann
Weird
Tales. Vol. I
Weird
Tales, Vol. II

German writer, composer, and painter
in full Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann,
original name Ernst Theodor Wilhelm
Hoffmann
born January 24, 1776, Königsberg,
Prussia [now Kaliningrad, Russia]
died June 25, 1822, Berlin, Germany
Main
German writer, composer, and painter
known for his stories in which
supernatural and sinister characters
move in and out of men’s lives,
ironically revealing tragic or grotesque
sides of human nature.
The product of a broken home,
Hoffmann was reared by an uncle. He was
educated in law and became a Prussian
law officer in the Polish provinces in
1800, serving until the bureaucracy was
dissolved following the defeat of
Prussia by Napoleon in 1806. Hoffmann
then turned to his chief interest,
music, and held several positions as
conductor, critic, and theatrical
musical director in Bamberg and Dresden
until 1814. About 1813 he changed his
third baptismal name, Wilhelm, to
Amadeus in homage to the composer
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. He composed the
ballet Arlequin (1811) and the opera
Undine (performed in 1816) and wrote the
stories in Phantasiestücke in Callots
Manier, 4 vol. (1814–15; Fantasy Pieces
in Callot’s Manner), that established
his reputation as a writer. He was
appointed in 1814 to the court of appeal
in Berlin, becoming councillor in 1816.
Although Hoffmann wrote two novels, Die
Elixiere des Teufels, 2 vol. (1815–16;
The Devil’s Elixir), and
Lebens-Ansichten des Katers Murr nebst
fragmentarischer Biographie des
Kapellmeisters Johannes Kreisler, 2 vol.
(1820–22; “The Life and Opinions of
Kater Murr, with a Fragmentary Biography
of Conductor Johannes Kreisler”), and
more than 50 short stories before his
death from progressive paralysis, he
continued to support himself as a legal
official in Berlin. His later story
collections, Nachtstücke, 2 parts (1817;
Hoffmann’s Strange Stories), and Die
Serapionsbrüder, 4 vol. (1819–21; The
Serapion Brethren), were popular in
England, the United States, and France.
Continued publication of the stories
into the second half of the 20th century
attested to their popularity.
In his stories Hoffmann skillfully
combined wild flights of imagination
with vivid and convincing examinations
of human character and psychology. The
weird and mysterious atmosphere of his
maniacs, spectres, and automata thus
intermingles with an exact and realistic
narrative style. The struggle within
Hoffmann between the ideal world of his
art and his daily life as a bureaucrat
is evident in many of his stories, in
which characters are possessed by their
art. His use of fantasy, ranging from
fanciful fairy tales to highly
suggestive stories of the macabre and
supernatural, served as inspiration to
several operatic composers. Richard
Wagner drew on stories from Die
Serapionsbrüder for Die Meistersinger
von Nürnberg (1868), as did Paul
Hindemith in Cardillac (1926) and
Jacques Offenbach in The Tales of
Hoffmann (1881), in which Hoffmann
himself is the central figure. The
ballet Coppélia (1870), by Léo Delibes,
is also based on a Hoffmann story, as is
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s ballet suite,
The Nutcracker (1892).
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Heinrich
Heine
"Poems and
Ballads"

German author
in full Christian Johann Heinrich Heine, original name (until 1825)
Harry Heine
born December 13, 1797, Düsseldorf, Prussia
died February 17, 1856, Paris
Main
German poet whose international literary reputation and influence were
established by the Buch der Lieder (1827; The Book of Songs), frequently
set to music, though the more sombre poems of his last years are also
highly regarded.
Life
Heine was born of Jewish parents. His father was a handsome and kindly
but somewhat ineffectual merchant; his mother was fairly well educated
for her time and sharply ambitious for her son. Much of Heine’s early
life, however, was influenced by the financial power of his uncle
Salomon Heine, a millionaire Hamburg banker who endeavoured to trade
generosity for obedience and with whom Heine remained on an awkward and
shifting footing for many years. After he had been educated in the
Düsseldorf Lyceum, an unsuccessful attempt was undertaken to make a
businessman of him, first in banking, then in retailing. Eventually, his
uncle was prevailed upon to finance a university education, and Heine
attended the universities of Bonn, Göttingen, Berlin, and Göttingen
again, where he finally took a degree in law with absolutely minimal
achievement in 1825. In that same year, in order to open up the
possibility of a civil service career, closed to Jews at that time, he
converted to Protestantism with little enthusiasm and some resentment.
He never practiced law, however, nor held a position in government
service; and his student years had been primarily devoted not to the
studies for which his uncle had been paying but to poetry, literature,
and history.
Early works
Heine’s pre-university years are rather obscure, but during this period
he apparently conceived an infatuation for one, and possibly both, of
his uncle’s daughters, neither of whom had the slightest notion of
mortgaging her future to a dreamy and incompetent cousin. Out of the
emotional desolation of this experience arose, over a period of years,
the poems eventually collected in The Book of Songs. The sound of
Romantic poetry was firmly lodged in Heine’s ear; but the Romantic
faith, the hope for a poeticization of life and the world to overcome
the revolution, alienation, and anxiety of the times, was not in his
heart. Thus, he became the major representative of the post-Romantic
crisis in Germany, a time overshadowed by the stunning achievements of
Goethe, Schiller, and the Romantics but increasingly aware of the
inadequacy of this tradition to the new stresses and upheavals of a
later age. The most consistent characteristic of Heine’s thought and
writing throughout his career is a taut and ambiguous tension between
“poesy,” as he called the artistic sensibility, and reality. His love
poems, though they employ Romantic materials, are at the same time
suspicious of them and of the feelings they purportedly represent. They
are bittersweet and self-ironic, displaying at the same time poetic
virtuosity and a skepticism about poetic truth; their music is now
liquid, now discordant, and the collection as a whole moves in the
direction of desentimentalization and a new integration of the poet’s
self-regard in the awareness of his artistic genius.
The steady growth of Heine’s fame in the 1820s was accelerated by a
series of experiments in prose. In the fall of 1824, in order to relax
from his hated studies in Göttingen, he took a walking tour through the
Harz Mountains and wrote a little book about it, fictionalizing his
modest adventure and weaving into it elements both of his poetic
imagination and of sharp-eyed social comment. “Die Harzreise” (“The Harz
Journey”) became the first piece of what were to be four volumes of
Reisebilder (1826–31; Pictures of Travel); the whimsical amalgam of its
fact and fiction, autobiography, social criticism, and literary polemic
was widely imitated by other writers in subsequent years. Some of the
pieces were drawn from a journey to England Heine made in 1827 and a
trip to Italy in 1828, but the finest of them, “Ideen. Das Buch Le
Grand” (1827; “Ideas. The Book Le Grand”), is a journey into the self, a
wittily woven fabric of childhood memory, enthusiasm for Napoleon,
ironic sorrow at unhappy love, and political allusion.
Later life and works
When the July Revolution of 1830 occurred in France, Heine did not, like
many of his liberal and radical contemporaries, race to Paris at once
but continued his more or less serious efforts to find some sort of
paying position in Germany. In the spring of 1831 he finally went to
Paris, where he was to live for the rest of his life. He had originally
been attracted by the new Saint-Simonian religion (a socialistic
ideology according to which the state should own all property and the
worker should be entitled to share according to the quality and amount
of his work); it inspired in him hopes for a modern doctrine that would
overcome the repressive ideologies of the past and put what he variously
called spiritualism and sensualism, or Nazarenism (adherence to
Judeo-Christian ideals) and Hellenism (adherence to ancient Greek
ideals), into a new balance for a happier human society. His critical
concern with political and social matters deepened as he watched the
development of limited democracy and a capitalist order in the France of
the citizen-king, Louis-Philippe. He wrote a series of penetrating
newspaper articles about the new order in France, which he collected in
book form as Französische Zustände (1832; “French Affairs”) and followed
with two studies of German culture, Die Romantische Schule (1833–35; The
Romantic School) and “Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in
Deutschland” (1834–35; “On the History of Religion and Philosophy in
Germany”), in which he mounted a criticism of Germany’s present and
recent past and argued the long-range revolutionary potential of the
German heritage of the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and modern
critical philosophy. The books were conceived with a French audience in
mind and were originally published in French. In 1840–43 he wrote
another series of newspaper articles about French life, culture, and
politics, which he reedited and published as Lutezia, the ancient Roman
name for Paris, in 1854.
During these years, then, Heine’s attention turned from “poesy” to
writing of contemporary relevance. His second volume of poems, Neue
Gedichte (1844; New Poems), illustrates the change. The first group,
“Neuer Frühling” (“New Spring,” written mostly in 1830/31), is a more
mannered reprise of the love poems of Buch der Lieder, and the volume
also contains some ballad poetry, a genre in which Heine worked all his
life. But the second group, “Verschiedene” (“Varia”), is made up of
short cycles of sour poems about inconstant relationships with the
blithe girls of Paris; the disillusioning tone of the poems was widely
misunderstood and held against him. Another section is called
“Zeitgedichte” (“Contemporary Poems”), a group of harsh verses of
political satire. Several of these were written for Karl Marx’s
newspaper Vorwärts (“Forward”). Heine had become acquainted with the
young Marx at the end of 1843, and it was at this time that he produced,
after a visit to his family in Germany, a long verse satire,
Deutschland, Ein Wintermärchen (1844; Germany, a Winter’s Tale), a
stinging attack on reactionary conditions in Germany. Though Heine
remained on good, if not intimate, terms with Marx in later years, he
never was much taken with Communism, which did not fit his ideal of a
revolution of joy and sensuality. About the time that he met Marx, he
also wrote another long poem, Atta Troll. Ein Sommernachtstraum
(1843–45; Atta Troll, a Midsummer Night’s Dream), a comic spoof of
radical pomposity and the clumsiness of contemporary political verse.
Heine’s early years in Paris were his happiest. From an outcast in
the society of his own rich uncle, he was transformed into a leading
literary personality, and he became acquainted with many of the
prominent people of his time. In 1834 he found in an uneducated
shopgirl, Crescence Eugénie Mirat, whom for some reason he called
“Mathilde,” a loyal if obstreperous mistress. He married her in 1841.
But troubles were soon hard upon him. His critical and satirical
writings brought him into grave difficulties with the German censorship,
and, at the end of 1835, the Federal German Diet tried to enforce a
nationwide ban on all his works. He was surrounded by police spies, and
his voluntary exile became an imposed one. In 1840 Heine wrote a witty
but ill-advised book on the late Ludwig Börne (1786–1837), the leader of
the German radicals in Paris, in which Heine attempted to defend his own
more subtle stand against what he thought of as the shallowness of
political activism; but the arrogance and ruthlessness of the book
alienated all camps.
Though never destitute, Heine was always out of money; and when his
uncle died in 1844, all but disinheriting him, he began, under the eyes
of all Europe, a violent struggle for the inheritance, which was settled
with the grant of a right of censorship over his writings to his uncle’s
family; in this way, apparently, the bulk of Heine’s memoirs was lost to
posterity. The information, revealed after the French Revolution of
1848, that he had been receiving a secret pension from the French
government, further embarrassed him.
The worst of his sufferings, however, were caused by his
deteriorating health. An apparently venereal disease began to attack one
part of his nervous system after another, and from the spring of 1848 he
was confined to his “mattress-grave,” paralyzed, tortured with spinal
cramps, and partially blind. Heine returned again to “poesy.” With
sardonic evasiveness he abjured his faith in the divinity of man and
acknowledged a personal God in order to squabble with him about the
unjust governance of the world. His third volume of poems, Romanzero
(1851), is full of heartrending laments and bleak glosses on the human
condition; many of these poems are now regarded as among his finest. A
final collection, Gedichte 1853 und 1854 (Poems 1853 and 1854), is of
the same order. After nearly eight years of torment, Heine died and was
buried in the Montmartre Cemetery.
Assessment
Heine’s power to annoy was as great as his power to charm and move, and
rarely has a great poet been so controversial in his own country. His
aggressive satires, radical postures, and insouciance about his methods
made him appear to many as an unpatriotic and subversive scoundrel, and
the growth of anti-Semitism contributed to the case against him. Efforts
in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to erect monuments to him in
various German cities touched off riots and shook governments. In view
of the popularity of many of his songs, the Nazis were obliged to
include them in anthologies but marked them “author unknown.” For many
decades his literary reputation was stronger abroad, especially in
France, England, and America, where his wit and ambivalence were better
appreciated, than at home. Today the evaluation of Heine’s political
role and its relationship to Marxism supplies a bone of contention
between East and West. Deplorable as much of this history of his
reputation has been, it is testimony to the enduring impact of a
genuinely European poet and writer.
Jeffrey L. Sammons
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Realist modes
Bourgeois Realism
The deaths of
Hegel
in 1831 and of
Goethe in
1832 released many German writers from the feeling
that they stood in the shadow of great men. A new
group of writers, only very loosely connected, began
to emerge who felt that the aesthetic models of the
age of
Goethe
could be laid aside in favour of a distinctly
political form of literature. Inspired by the July
Revolution in France (1830), these young German
liberals aimed to have a direct impact on social,
political, and moral realities. They opted in the
main for literary forms such as pamphlets, essays,
journalism, and satire. The agitations of this
period gave rise to a tradition of political lyric,
exemplified by the work of Heinrich Heine, which
continued to provide models for political poetry
into the late 20th century. Many of the “Young
German” writers were prohibited from publishing
their writing in Germany, because of their
opposition to feudal absolutism and their promotion
of democratic ideals. Some produced their works in
exile, as in the case of
Heine, whose
long poem Deutschland, ein Wintermärchen (1844;
Germany, A Winter’s Tale) presented a damning
critique of his native land, and Ludwig Börne,
whose Briefe aus Paris (1831–34; Letters from Paris)
provided an influential record of the political
ferment in France. Others were condemned to periods
of imprisonment, as were Karl Gutzkow for his
novel Wally die Zweiflerin (1835; Wally the Sceptic)
and Heinrich Laube for his journalistic activity in
support of political liberalism. Georg Büchner
narrowly escaped imprisonment following the
publication of his radical socialist pamphlet Der
hessische Landbote (1834; “Messenger to the Hessian
Peasants”), an attack on authoritarian government in
his native
Hesse.
He is best known for his revolutionary drama Dantons
Tod (1835; Danton’s Death) and for his remarkable
dramatic fragment and critique of the social class
system, Woyzeck (1879; Eng. trans. Woyzeck),
published posthumously.
Ludwig Börne

Karl Ludwig Börne (6 May 1786 – 12
February 1837) was a German political
writer and satirist.
He was born Loeb Baruch at Frankfurt
am Main, son of Jakob Baruch, a banker.
He received his early education at
Gießen, but as Jews were ineligible at
that time for public appointments in
Frankfurt, young Baruch was sent to
study medicine at Berlin under a
physician, Markus Herz, whose house he
lived in. Young Baruch became infatuated
by his patron's wife, the talented and
beautiful Henriette Herz (1764–1847),
and expressed his adoration in a series
of remarkable letters. Tiring of medical
science, which he had subsequently
pursued at Halle, he studied
constitutional law and political science
at Heidelberg and Giessen, and in 1811
took his doctor's degree at Giessen
university. On his return to Frankfurt,
now constituted as a grand duchy under
the sovereignty of the prince bishop
Karl von Dalberg, he received (1811) the
appointment of police actuary in that
city.
In 1814 and he had to resign his post
due to his ethnicity. Embittered by the
oppression suffered by Jews in Germany,
he took to journalism and edited the
Frankfurt liberal newspapers
Staatsristretto and Die Zeitschwingen.
In 1818 he converted to Lutheran
Protestantism, changing his name from
Lob Baruch to Ludwig Börne. From 1818 to
1821 he edited Die Wage, a paper
distinguished by its lively political
articles and its powerful but sarcastic
theatrical criticisms. This paper was
suppressed by the police, and in 1821
Börne took a pause from journalismn and
led a quiet life in Paris, Hamburg and
Frankfurt.
After the July Revolution (1830), he
hurried to Paris, expecting to find
society nearer to his own ideas of
freedom. Although to some extent
disappointed in his hopes, he did not
look any more kindly on the political
condition of Germany; this lent
additional zest to the brilliant
satirical letters (Briefe aus Paris,
1830–1833, published Paris, 1834), which
he began to publish in his last literary
venture, La Balance, a revival of Die
Wage. The Briefe aus Paris was Börne's
most important publication, and a
landmark in the history of German
journalism. Its appearance led him to be
regarded as a leading thinker in
Germany. He died in Paris in 1837.
Börne's works are known for brilliant
style and for thoroughly French satire.
His best criticism is to be found in his
Denkrede auf Jean Paul (1826), a writer
for whom he had warm sympathy and
admiration; in his Dramaturgische Bltter
(1829–1834); and the witty satire,
Menzel der Franzosenfresser (1837). He
also wrote a number of short stories and
sketches, of which the best known are
the Mono graphie der deutschen
Postschnecke (1829) and Der Esskunstler
(1822).
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Karl
Gutzkow

born March 17, 1811, Berlin, Prussia
[Germany]
died Dec. 16, 1878, Sachsenhausen,
Frankfurt am Main
novelist and dramatist who was a pioneer
of the modern social novel in Germany.
Gutzkow began his career as a
journalist and first attracted attention
with the publication of Maha Guru,
Geschichte eines Gottes (1833; “Maha
Guru, Story of a God”), a fantastic
satirical romance. In 1835 he published
Wally, die Zweiflerin (“Wally, the
Doubter”), an attack on marriage,
coloured by religious skepticism, that
marked the beginning of the revolt of
the Young Germany movement against
Romanticism. The book excited virulent
discussion, and the federal Diet
condemned Gutzkow to three months’
imprisonment and ordered the suppression
of all his works. After his release he
produced the tragedy Richard Savage
(1839), the first in a series of
well-constructed and effective plays.
His domestic tragedy Werner oder Herz
und Welt (1840; “Werner or Heart and
World”) long remained in the repertory
of the German theatres. Gutzkow also
wrote Das Urbild des Tartüffe (1844;
“The Model for Tartuffe”), a clever and
topical satirical comedy; and Uriel
Acosta (1846), which uses the story of
the martyrdom of that forerunner of
Spinoza to make a plea for religious
freedom. By this time he had published
the novel Blasedow und seine Söhne
(1838; “Blasedow and His Sons”), a
humorous satire on the educational
theories of the time.
In 1847 Gutzkow went to Dresden,
where he succeeded the Romantic writer
and drama theorist Ludwig Tieck as
literary adviser to the court theatre.
In 1850 there appeared the first of the
nine volumes of Die Ritter vom Geiste
(“The Knights of the Spirit”), now
considered the starting point of the
modern German social novel; it also
anticipated the Naturalist movement.
His final well-known work, Der
Zauberer von Rom (1858–61; “The Magician
of Rome”), is a powerful study of Roman
Catholic life in southern Germany.
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Georg Buchner

born Oct. 17, 1813, Goddelau,
Hesse-Darmstadt [Germany]
died Feb. 19, 1837, Zürich, Switz.
German dramatist, a major forerunner of
the Expressionist school of playwriting
of the early 20th century.
The son of an army doctor, Büchner
studied medicine at the Universities of
Strasbourg and Giessen. Caught up in the
movement inspired by the Paris uprising
of 1830, Büchner published a pamphlet,
Der hessische Landbote (1834; The
Hessian Messenger), in Giessen calling
for economic and political revolution,
and he also founded a radical society,
the Society for Human Rights. He escaped
arrest by fleeing to Strasbourg, where
he completed a dissertation. This earned
him an appointment as a lecturer in
natural science at the University of
Zürich in 1836. He died in Zürich of
typhoid fever the following year.
Büchner’s three plays were clearly
influenced in style by William
Shakespeare and by the German Romantic
Sturm und Drang movement. In content and
form they were far ahead of their time.
Their short, abrupt scenes combined
extreme naturalism with visionary power.
His first play, Dantons Tod (1835;
Danton’s Death), a drama of the French
Revolution, is suffused with deep
pessimism. Its protagonist, the
revolutionary Danton, is shown as a man
deeply distraught at the bloodshed he
had helped unleash. Leonce und Lena
(written 1836), a satire on the nebulous
nature of Romantic ideas, shows the
influence of Alfred de Musset and
Clemens Brentano. His last work,
Woyzeck, a fragment, anticipated the
social drama of the 1890s with its
compassion for the poor and oppressed.
Except for Dantons Tod, not produced
until 1902, Büchner’s writings appeared
posthumously, the fragmentary Lenz in
1839 and Woyzeck not until 1879. Woyzeck
served as the libretto for Alban Berg’s
opera Wozzeck (1925).
Büchner, the elder brother of the
physician and philosopher Ludwig
Büchner, exercised a marked influence on
the naturalistic drama that came into
vogue in the 1890s and, later, on the
Expressionism that voiced the
disillusionment of many artists and
intellectuals after World War I. He is
now recognized as one of the outstanding
figures in German dramatic literature.
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German realism,
variously termed Bourgeois, or Poetic, Realism, is
usually thought to have begun about 1840. In its
earliest manifestations German realism is closely
linked with the Biedermeier movement in art and
interior decoration, a sedate and dignified style
that emphasized the value of real things, domestic
tranquility, and the social status quo. Writers
linked with Biedermeier are
Adalbert Stifter, Eduard Friedrich Mörike,
Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Karl
Immermann, and Nikolaus Lenau.
Adalbert Stifter paid loving attention to
detail, cherishing individual objects, plants, and
stones because, large or small, they bore witness to
the order of the cosmos as a whole. In the preface
to his collection of stories Bunte Steine
(1853; “Stones of Many Colours”), Stifter enunciates
most movingly his principle of the “sanftes Gesetz”
(“gentle law of nature”), according to which the
force that causes milk to boil over in the pot is
the same as that which causes volcanoes to erupt. By
attending to small phenomena that commonly recur,
Stifter argues, one can more effectively represent
reality than by focusing on more cataclysmic events.
His carefully controlled narrative style, with its
repeated motifs and structural symmetries, reveals
upon closer inspection an awareness of upheaval and
disruption.
Adalbert Stifter

born Oct. 23, 1805, Oberplan, Austria
died Jan. 28, 1868, Linz
Austrian narrative writer whose novels
of almost classical purity exalt the
humble virtues of a simple life. He was
the son of a linen weaver and flax
merchant, and his childhood experiences
in the country, surrounded by peasant
craftsmen, provided the setting for his
work.
Stifter was educated at the
Kremsmünster abbey school. He enrolled
as a law student in Vienna, but for the
most part he attended scientific
lectures and took no degree. After many
years of precarious living as a tutor,
artist, and writer, in 1840 he began to
publish stories, including Der Condor
(1840), Feldblumen (1841;
“Wildflowers”), and Die Mappe meines
Urgrossvaters (1841–42; “My
Greatgrandfather’s Portfolio”). In
Brigitta (1844) the basic structure of
his major work began to emerge: he saw
that an inner unity of the landscape and
people—a crucial part of life for
him—must also determine the shape of his
story. Collections of revised stories,
Studien, 6 vol. (1844–50; “Studies”) and
Bunte Steine (1853; “Colourful Stones”),
brought him fame. In the important
preface to the latter book, he expounded
his doctrine of the “law of gentleness”
as the enduring principle.
During the political turmoil of
1848–50, Stifter was deeply involved in
the debate over the role of education;
in 1850 he moved from Vienna to Linz,
becoming an inspector of schools. The
novel Der Nachsommer (1857; “Indian
Summer”), his greatest work, depicts a
young man learning and growing; the work
radiates a still and sun-soaked beauty
and a restrained idealism, set against
the landscape Stifter loved. His epic
Witiko (1865–67) uses medieval Bohemian
history as a symbol for the human
struggle for a just and peaceful order.
Other stories followed, but he was too
ill to finish his project of expanding
Die Mappe meines Urgrossvaters into a
novel: only the first volume was
completed.
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Eduard Friedrich Mörike

born Sept. 8, 1804, Ludwigsburg,
Württemberg [Germany]
died June 4, 1875, Stuttgart
one of Germany’s greatest lyric poets.
After studying theology at Tübingen
(1822–26), Mörike held several curacies
before becoming, in 1834, pastor of
Cleversulzbach, the remote Württemberg
village immortalized in Der alte
Turmhahn, where inhabitants and pastor
are seen through the whimsical but
percipient eyes of an old weathercock.
All his life Mörike suffered from
psychosomatic illnesses, which were
possibly intensified by an unconscious
conflict between his humanist
aspirations and his church dogmas. When
only 39, Mörike retired on a pension,
but after his marriage to Margarete von
Speeth in 1851, he supplemented his
pension by lecturing on German
literature at a girls’ school in
Stuttgart. After many years of rich
literary achievement, the tensions
caused by Margarete’s jealousy of Clara,
Mörike’s sister who lived with them,
almost killed his creative urge. Mörike
spent most of his last two years with
Clara and his younger daughter and was
separated from Margarete until shortly
before his death.
Mörike’s small output is
characterized by its variety. Everything
he wrote has its own distinctive
flavour, but in his early days romantic
influences preponderate. His novel,
Maler Nolten (1832), in addition to its
stylistic perfection and psychological
insight into mental unbalance, explores
the realm of the subconscious and the
mysterious forces linking the main
character and his early love even beyond
the grave. Mörike’s poems in folk-song
style and his fairy tales also show the
influence of German romanticism, though
his best folk tale, Das Stuttgarter
Hutzelmännlein (1853), is peculiarly his
own, with its Swabian background and
humour. In his Mozart auf der Reise nach
Prag (1856), Mörike penetrates deeper
into Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s
personality than do many longer studies.
It is, however, as a lyric poet that
Mörike is at the height of his powers.
Mörike worked with free rhythms,
sonnets, regular stanza forms, and, more
particularly in his later poems,
classical metres with equal virtuosity.
The “Peregrina” poems, immortalizing a
youthful love of his Tübingen days, and
the sonnets to Luise Rau, his one-time
betrothed, are among the most exquisite
German love lyrics.
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Annette von Droste-Hülshoff

born Jan. 10, 1797, Schloss Hülshoff,
near Münster, Westphalia [Germany]
died May 24, 1848, Meersburg, Baden
poet and prose writer, among the most
important poets of 19th-century Germany
and the author of a novella considered a
forerunner of 19th-century realistic
fiction.
Born into a family of Roman Catholic
aristocracy, she was educated by tutors
and lived most of her life in isolation.
She owed her introduction to literature
to a young novelist, Levin Schücking
(1814–83), for whom, despite their
difference in age, she developed a deep,
suppressed, and unreciprocated passion.
Her first collection of poetry, Gedichte
(1838; “Poems”), included poems of a
deeply religious nature. Between 1829
and 1839 she wrote a cycle of religious
poems, Das geistliche Jahr (1851; “The
Spiritual Year”), which contains some of
the most earnest religious poetry of the
19th century and reflects the inner
turbulence and doubt of her spiritual
life.
Her fame rests chiefly on her poetry
dealing with her native Westphalian
landscape. An extremely sensitive and
acute observer, she created detailed and
evocative descriptions of extraordinary
poetic beauty, capturing the atmosphere
of her homeland, particularly its gloomy
heaths and moorlands. Her only complete
prose work, a novella, Die Judenbuche
(1842; The Jew’s Beech), is a
psychological study of a Westphalian
villager who murders a Jew. For the
first time in German literature, the
fate of the hero is portrayed as arising
from his social environment; the crime
becomes understandable within the
context of the life in the village.
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Karl
Immermann

born April 24, 1796, Magdeburg,
Saxony
died Aug. 25, 1840, Düsseldorf, Prussia
dramatist and novelist whose works
included two forerunners in German
literary history: Die Epigonen as a
novel of the contemporary social scene
and Der Oberhof as a realistic story of
village life.
The son of a civil servant, Immermann
interrupted his legal studies in Halle
(1813–17) to fight in the last phase of
the Napoleonic Wars. While working in
the military court in Münster (1819–24),
he fell in love with Elisa von Lützow,
the wife of the Prussian general Adolf,
Freiherr von Lützow. Their passionate
love affair ended 14 years after the
Lützow divorce (1825) because Elisa
unwaveringly refused to enter upon a
second marriage. At the beginning of
1824, Immermann became judge in the
criminal court at Magdeburg, moving to
the provincial court at Düsseldorf three
years later. In Düsseldorf he designed
and built a “model” theatre where, in
accordance with Goethe’s theories, he
especially cultivated ensemble. In 1839
Immermann was married to the 20-year-old
Marianne Niemeyer, and the new life and
new happiness that his marriage gave him
found expression in his epic Tristan und
Isolde, which was left unfinished at his
death.
Immermann’s writing is deeply marked
by the transitional nature of his time.
He was an eyewitness of the decline of
the old aristocracy, the rise of the
bourgeoisie, and the spread of
industrialism and liberalism. His
dramatic works include Das Trauerspiel
in Tyrol (1828; remodeled in 1835 as
Andreas Hofer); Merlin (1832); the
trilogy Alexis (1832); and the comic
epic Tulifäntchen (1830), a witty parody
of the decline of the nobility and of
romantic chivalry. Immermann’s novels,
however, with their acute diagnosis of
the period, are more important than his
plays. Die Epigonen (1836) gives a cross
section of the society of his own
period, deploring both the nobility’s
decay and the dangers posed by
radicalism and money-worship. The
convoluted tale is a pessimistic picture
of society on the brink of a painful
adjustment to industrialized mass
society. The novel Münchhausen (1838–39)
consists of two parts: a highly
satirical and ludicrous portrayal of an
idle and mendacious aristocrat, and a
solidly visualized portrayal of peasants
rooted in their work and in their
countryside. In this latter section
Immermann glorifies the sturdy
respectability of the peasantry, in whom
he saw the strength of the German
national heritage and the means for its
regeneration.
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Nikolaus Lenau

born Aug. 13, 1802, Csatád, Hung.
died Aug. 22, 1850, Oberdöbling, near
Vienna, Austria
Austrian poet known for melancholy
lyrical verse that mirrors the pessimism
of his time as well as his personal
despair.
Severe depression and dissatisfaction
characterized Lenau’s life. He began,
but never completed, studies in law,
medicine, and philosophy. A legacy in
1830 enabled him to devote himself to
writing. Frequent moves, a number of
unhappy love affairs, and a disastrous
year-long emigration to the United
States in 1832–33 further exemplified
the general disappointment he felt at
the failure of his life and
acquaintances to measure up to his
artistic ideals. He recognized that his
inability to keep separate the spheres
of poetic expression and real life was
both the source of his depression and
the root of his art.
Lenau’s fame rests predominantly on
his shorter lyrical poems. These early
poems, which were published in Gedichte
(1832; “Poems”) and Neuere Gedichte
(1838; “Newer Poems”), demonstrate close
ties to the Weltschmerz (“World Pain”)
mood of the Romantic period and reveal a
personal, almost religious relationship
to nature. His later poems, Gesammelte
Gedichte, 2 vol. (1844), and the
religious epics Savonarola (1837) and
Die Albigenser (1842; “The
Albigensians”), deal with his relentless
and unsuccessful search for order and
constancy in love, nature, and faith.
Following J.W. von Goethe’s death in
1832, the appearance in 1833 of the
second part of his Faust inspired many
renditions of the legend. Lenau’s Faust:
Ein Gedicht (published 1836, revised
1840) is noticeably derivative of
Goethe’s, but Lenau’s version has Faust
confronting an absurd life that is
devoid of any absolute values, the same
position in which Lenau felt himself to
be. Lenau’s lifelong mental illness
resulted in a complete breakdown in 1844
and later to near-total paralysis from
which he never recovered. His epic Don
Juan (1851) appeared posthumously. His
letters to Baroness Sophie von
Löwenthal, with whom he was in love from
1834 to his death, were published in
1968.
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The Bourgeois
Realists refrained from depicting the larger social
and political world as exemplified in urban reality
and focused instead on village or peasant life and
isolated individuals cut off from world events.
Swiss writers Gottfried Keller and
Jeremias Gotthelf (Albert Bitzius) are
representative of this tendency, often known as
“provincial realism.” Keller’s representative
work is his collection of stories about life in his
home country, Die Leute von Seldwyla (1856–74; The
People of Seldwyla). Gotthelf is best known
for his novella Die schwarze Spinne (1842; The Black
Spider). Similarly, in his collection of stories
Studien (1844–50; “Studies”), Stifter prefers
isolated geographic settings, frequently the heart
of the forest, and lonely protagonists whose little
worlds are almost entirely of their own making.
Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’s novella Die
Judenbuche (1842; The Jew’s Beech), a murder mystery
set in a Westphalian village, also belongs to this
genre.
The Bourgeois
Realists saw themselves as epigones or latecomers
who could only inadequately emulate the great works
of their predecessor
Goethe. The
two major novels of Bourgeois Realism, Stifter’s
Der Nachsommer (1857; Indian Summer) and Keller’s
Der grüne Heinrich (first version 1854–55; Green
Henry) are suffused with an acute awareness of the
fragility of memory, a deep sense of personal loss,
and a consciousness that reality cannot live up to
the ideal. Nineteenth-century lyric poetry,
especially that of Eduard Friedrich Mörike
and
Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, is similarly
marked by a highly sensitive, elegiac relation to
experience.
In contrast to the
German Romantics, the German Bourgeois Realists did
not attempt to create an all-encompassing
philosophy. Instead, they focused on the essential
subjectivity of experience. The individual’s angle
of vision was fundamentally important to them, and
to illustrate that subjectivity they made frequent
use of metaphors having to do with sight and the
instruments of sight. The novella, originally
derived from the technique of embedding individual
stories within a large narrative frame, is used by
the Bourgeois Realists to draw attention to the
limitations of individual subjectivity and to the
problems of narration. Thus, despite its focus on
the world of “objects,” German realism is anything
other than objective. Later realist works, notably
those of
Wilhelm Raabe, explore the problem of how
human beings come to know what they do and draw
attention to the troublesome problem of gaps in
their knowledge. Perhaps the best example is
Raabe’s novel Stopfkuchen (1891; “Plumcake”), a
circuitous double-framework narrative about a
long-unresolved murder. Similarly, Theodor
Woldsen Storm’s doubly framed novella Der
Schimmelreiter (1888; The Rider on the White Horse)
strikes a precarious balance between rational
knowledge and superstition against the backdrop of
Frisian village life.
Gottfried Keller

born July 19, 1819, Zürich
died July 16, 1890, Zürich
the greatest German-Swiss narrative
writer of late 19th-century Poetischer
Realismus (“Poetic Realism”).
His father, a lathe artisan, died in
Keller’s early childhood, but his
strong-willed, devoted mother struggled
to provide him with an education. After
being expelled from secondary school for
a prank, he took up landscape painting.
Two years’ study in Munich (1840–42)
brought little success, so he returned
to Zürich, where he published his first
poems in 1846. From 1848 to 1850 the
Zürich government sponsored his studies
at Heidelberg, where he was deeply
influenced by the philosopher Ludwig
Feuerbach. From 1850 to 1855 he lived in
Berlin.
Intending to write for the theatre,
he wrote instead the long
autobiographical novel Der grüne
Heinrich (1854–55; Green Henry). It was
completely revised 25 years later
(1879–80), and in this version, which is
standard, the personal story of a young
man’s development becomes a classic
Bildungsroman (educational novel) in the
tradition of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister.
Green Henry (so called because his
frugal mother made all his clothes from
a single bolt of green cloth) sets out
to become an artist. After some success
and many disappointments, he returns to
his native city and wins some respect
and contentment in a modest post as a
civil servant. Keller returned to Zürich
in 1855 and became clerk to the canton
(1861–76). These 15 years allowed him
almost no time for writing. He resumed
his literary career late in life.
Keller is best known for his short
stories, some of which are collected as
Die Leute von Seldwyla (1856–74; The
People of Seldwyla) and Sieben Legenden
(1872; Seven Legends). His last novel,
Martin Salander (1886), deals with
political life in Switzerland in his
time.
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Jeremias Gotthelf

born Oct. 4, 1797, Morat, Switz.
died Oct. 22, 1854, Lützelflüh
Swiss novelist and short-story writer
whose vivid narrative works extol the
virtues of Bernese rural people and
defend traditional church and family
life.
The son of a pastor, Bitzius studied
theology at Bern and Göttingen and took
part in the political activities that
ended the rule of the aristocracy in
Bern. After becoming pastor of
Lützelflüh, in the Emmental, in 1832, he
made great efforts to enlighten the
local people and tried to bring about
universal education. He founded an
institution for the neglected.
When radical tendencies began to
appear in Swiss liberalism, Bitzius
became more conservative. His desire to
preserve Christian beliefs in a world
threatened by materialism stimulated him
to begin writing. His Der Bauernspiegel
(1837; “Mirror of the Peasants”) was
followed by other works dealing with
rural people, including Leiden und
Freuden eines Schulmeisters, 2 vol.
(1838–39; The Joys and Sorrows of a
School-master, 1864), Die Armennot
(1840; “Needs of the Poor”), and Uli der
Knecht (1841; Ulric the Farm Servant).
Although his purpose was didactic, he
showed exceptional literary talent. His
13 novels and more than 50 short stories
reveal not only his genius as an epic
writer and his poetic gifts but also his
intense interest in people.
Psychological observation, imagination,
and creative power of language enabled
him to achieve vivid portraits.
His complete works, in 24 volumes,
were edited by R. Hunziker and H.
Bloesch, with supplementary volumes of
letters, sermons, political writings,
and juvenilia (1911–37).
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Wilhelm Raabe

pseudonym Jakob Corvinus
born Sept. 8, 1831, Eschershausen,
near Hildesheim, Braunschweig
died Nov. 15, 1910, Braunschweig, Ger.
German writer best known for
realistic novels of middle-class life.
After leaving school in Wolfenbüttel
in 1849, Raabe was apprenticed for four
years to a Magdeburg book dealer, during
which time he read widely. Although he
attended lectures at Berlin University,
the important product of his time in
Berlin was his popular first novel,
published under his pseudonym, Die
Chronik der Sperlingsgasse (1857; “The
Chronicle of Sperling Street”), which
depicts episodes in the lives lived out
on one small street. In 1856 Raabe
returned to Wolfenbüttel, determined to
make a living as a writer. He published
a number of novels and story
collections, none of which attracted
much attention, and then set out to
travel through Austria and Germany.
In 1862 he married and settled in
Stuttgart, where he lived until 1870.
During the Stuttgart years he wrote his
then most successful novels, Der
Hungerpastor, 3 vol. (1864; The
Hunger-Pastor), Abu Telfan, oder Die
Heimkehr vom Mondgebirge, 3 vol. (1868;
Abu Telfan, Return from the Mountains of
the Moon), and Der Schüdderump, 3 vol.
(1870; “The Rickety Cart”). These three
novels are often viewed as a trilogy
that is central to Raabe’s generally
pessimistic outlook, which views the
difficulties of the individual in a
world over which he has little control.
Discouraged by a lack of public acclaim
in Stuttgart, Raabe returned to
Braunschweig, where he spent the last 40
years of his life. He specialized in
short stories and involved shorter
novels, which are now considered his
most original, revealing a mature
acceptance of compromise between the old
order and the bewildering changes
brought about by industrialization and
urbanization. They are less pessimistic
than his earlier books. Notable among
them is Stopfkuchen (1891; “Stuffing
Cake”; Eng. trans. Tubby Schaumann).
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Theodor Woldsen Storm

born Sept. 14, 1817, Husum, Schleswig
died July 4, 1888, Hademarschen
poet and novelist whose novellas are
among the finest in German literature.
He is an outstanding representative of
German poetic Realism, which had as its
aim the portrayal of the positive values
of everyday life. He took for his models
the late Romantics and Eduard Mörike,
who, along with Gottfried Keller, Paul
von Heyse, and the Russian writer Ivan
Turgenev, was his friend and
correspondent. Storm’s early lyrics
(Gedichte, 1852; “Poems”) are songlike
and characterized by their simplicity
and beauty of form. Their main themes
are love, nature, and an intense love of
homeland.
Storm practiced law in Husum until
1853, when the Danish occupation of
Schleswig forced him to move to Potsdam.
His strong patriotic feelings are
expressed in his poetry from this
period. After living in Heiligenstadt,
where he had been transferred as a
magistrate, he returned to Schleswig
when the Danish left it in 1864. A year
later his wife died, occasioning the
climax of his lyrics in the cycle Tiefe
Schatten (1865). By this time, however,
he had already begun to concentrate on
writing novellas. One of his most
important early works is Immensee (1850;
Eng. trans., 1863), a moving story of
the vanished happiness of childhood,
which, like so many of his works, is
coloured by a haunting nostalgia. As his
writing matured his novellas displayed
subtler psychological insight, greater
realism, and a wider scope of
themes—including class tensions, social
problems, and religious
bigotry—expressing his recurrent concern
with man’s isolation and struggle with
his fate. He retired in 1880 to
Hadermarschen, where he wrote his last
and greatest novella, Der Schimmelreiter
(1888; The Rider on the White Horse,
1917), which, with its forceful hero and
terse, objective style, shows vivid
imagination and great narrative verve.
Among his other major works are the
charming story Pole Poppenspäler (1874),
the historical novella Aquis submersus
(1875), and the novella Im Schloss
(1861).
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Theodor Fontane
While some German novelists, for example Gustav
Freytag in his novel about North German
merchants, Soll und Haben (1855; Debit and Credit),
did heed the economic circumstances of social
development, German realism was not greatly
concerned with this central theme of European
realism. The novels of
Theodor Fontane, however, owe much to
Sir Walter Scott’s
extensive use of conversation as a way of
moving narrative forward and
Gustave Flaubert’s
methods of enabling the reader to enter the minds of
his characters. Fontane’s novels of Berlin
life—Irrungen, Wirrungen (1888; Entanglements), Frau
Jenny Treibel (1892; Eng. trans. Jenny Treibel), and
Effi Briest (1895; Eng. trans. Effi Briest)—are
dazzling examples of social criticism and
psychological observation. The tension between
modern marriage and public life is depicted with a
fine sense of irony. In Effi Briest, for example, a
young woman who has imagined that marriage will
fulfill her social ambitions is frustrated when she
discovers that her husband, a Prussian official who
is part of Otto von Bismarck’s inner circle, is
constantly drawn away from domestic life by his
political duties. Like the Bourgeois Realists,
Fontane also depends on close description of
detail and repeated images that acquire the
significance of a leitmotiv; like the Bourgeois
Realists, too, he imbues his works with a poignant
sense of resignation in the face of forces too vast
to counteract. A famous phrase in Effi Briest,
repeatedly uttered by the heroine’s father—“Das ist
ein zu weites Feld” (“That is too big a
subject”)—epitomizes this spirit of capitulation.
Der Stechlin (published posthumously in 1899; The
Stechlin), the great novel of Fontane’s old
age, mourns the decline of the aristocracy through
the lens of a narrative about a single family that
bears the same name as a lake. The continued
existence of nature (i.e., the lake) is seen as a
consolation for the prospect of the family’s demise.
At the same time, Fontane’s novels also
criticize excessive conservatism, as in the complex
discussion in Effi Briest, a novel about adultery,
as to whether the wronged husband is obliged by the
code of honour of his class to challenge his rival
to a duel even though considerable time has elapsed
between the adulterous affair and its discovery.
Similarly, in several of his novels Fontane
criticizes the conservative restrictions on women’s
education, which he condemns as superficial, riddled
with gaps, and fraught with superstition.
Gustav Freytag

born July 13, 1816, Kreuzburg,
Silesia, Prussia
died April 30, 1895, Wiesbaden, Ger.
German writer of realistic novels
celebrating the merits of the middle
classes.
After studying philology at Breslau
and Berlin, Freytag became Privatdozent
(lecturer) in German literature at the
University of Breslau (1839), but he
resigned after eight years to devote
himself to writing. He was much excited
by the revolutions of 1848 and became,
with Julian Schmidt, joint editor of the
Leipzig weekly Die Grenzboten, which he
made into the leading organ of the
middle-class liberals. He abhorred both
the democratic radicalism of the
Jungdeutschen (“Young Germany”) and the
escapism of the Romantics. From 1867 to
1870 he represented the national liberal
party in the North German Reichstag, and
he served at the headquarters of the 3rd
Army in the Franco-German War until the
battle of Sedan (1870).
His literary work was influenced by
his early reading of English novelists,
especially Sir Walter Scott and Charles
Dickens, and of French plays. His name
was made with the comedy Die
Journalisten (1854; The Journalists),
still regarded as one of the most
successful German comedies, and he
acquired an international reputation
with his widely translated novel Soll
und Haben (1855; Debit and Credit,
1857). It celebrates the solid bourgeois
qualities of the German merchants, and
the close relationships between people’s
characters and the work they do is well
brought out. The success of the novel
was such that its author was recognized
as the leading German writer of his day.
He attempted to realize a similar
intention with Die verlorene Handschrift
(1864; The Lost Manuscript, 1865), which
depicts Leipzig university life in the
same realistic manner, but the plot is
much weaker and the effect less
successful. His most ambitious literary
work was the novel-cycle Die Ahnen, 6
vol. (1873–81) which unfolded the story
of a German family from the 4th century
ad up to Freytag’s own time. His Bilder
aus der deutschen Vergangenheit, 5 vol.
(1859–67; partial Eng. trans. Pictures
of German Life, 1862–63) were originally
contributed to Die Grenzboten and give a
vivid and popular account of the history
of the Germans, in which Freytag
stresses the idea of folk character as
determinative in history. His collected
works, Gesammelte Werke, 22 vol.
(1886–88) were reissued, edited by H.M.
Elster (12 vol.) in 1926.
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Theodor Fontane

born Dec. 30, 1819, Neuruppin,
Brandenburg
died Sept. 20, 1898, Berlin
writer who is considered the first
master of modern realistic fiction in
Germany.
He began his literary career in 1848
as a journalist, serving for several
years in England as correspondent for
two Prussian newspapers. From this
position he wrote several books on
English life, including Ein Sommer in
London (1854; “A Summer in London”) and
Jenseits des Tweed (1860; Across the
Tweed: A Tour of Mid-Victorian
Scotland). From 1860 to 1870 he wrote
for the conservative newspaper
Kreuzzeitung, and between 1862 and 1882
he published a four-volume account of
his travels in the March of Brandenburg.
He combined historical and anecdotal
material with descriptions of the
Prussian landscape and the seats of
historic families. He also wrote popular
ballads, Männer und Helden (1850; “Men
and Heroes”) and Balladen (1861;
“Ballads”), stirring celebrations of
heroic and dramatic events, some drawn
from Prussian history.
Fontane produced his best work after
he became the drama critic for the
liberal newspaper Vossische Zeitung and
was freed from the earlier conservative
restraint. Turning to the novel late in
life, he wrote, at the age of 56, Vor
dem Sturm (1878; Before the Storm),
considered to be a masterpiece in the
genre of the historical novel. He
portrayed the Prussian nobility both
critically and sympathetically. His aim
was, as he said, “the undistorted
reflection of the life we lead.” In
several of his novels Fontane also deals
with the problem of women’s role in
domestic life; L’Adultera (1882; The
Woman Taken in Adultery), Irrungen,
Wirrungen (1888; Delusions, Confusions),
Frau Jenny Treibel (1893), and Effi
Briest (1895) are among his best. Effi
Briest, in particular, is known for its
superb characterization and the skillful
portrayal of the milieu of Fontane’s
native Brandenburg. His other major
works are Der Stechlin (1899), which is
noted for its charming style, and Schach
von Wuthenow (1883; A Man of Honor), in
which he portrays the weaknesses of the
Prussian upper class.
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19th-century
drama
The tendency toward slowly unfolding plot that
characterizes much 19th-century German literature
was not especially conducive to the development of
drama. Nonetheless, at least three dramatists from
the period have found a place in the literary canon.
Reacting against Weimar Classicism and aspiring to
accede to the position that had been occupied by
Goethe and
Schiller,
these playwrights of the 1820s to ’50s experimented
with historical drama based variously on Greek,
biblical, or German themes. The patriotic drama
König Ottokars Glück und Ende (1825; King Ottocar:
His Rise and Fall), by Franz Grillparzer, and
Napoleon; oder, die hundert Tage (1831; “Napoleon;
or, The Hundred Days”), by
Christian Dietrich Grabbe, are examples of
this genre. These works can be seen as precursors of
an entire series of 20th-century history plays,
beginning with those of
Bertolt Brecht,
in which political and social issues are explored
through displacement into an earlier historical
period. Continuing a tradition established largely
by
Lessing,
the third important 19th-century dramatist is
Christian Friedrich Hebbel, who wrote, among
other plays, a bourgeois tragedy, Maria Magdalena
(1844).
Franz Grillparzer

born Jan. 15, 1791, Vienna [Austria]
died Jan. 21, 1872, Vienna
Austrian dramatist who wrote tragedies
that were belatedly recognized as the
greatest works of the Austrian stage.
Grillparzer’s father was a lawyer who
died in debt in 1809; his markedly
neurotic mother committed suicide 10
years later. Grillparzer studied law at
the University of Vienna and spent much
of his life in government service.
Beginning in 1814 as a clerk in the
department of revenue, he became a clerk
in the treasury (1818) and later
director of the treasury archives. His
hopes for a higher position were never
fulfilled, however, and he retired from
government service in 1856.
In 1817 the first performance of
Grillparzer’s tragedy Die Ahnfrau (The
Ancestress) evoked public interest.
Previously he had written a play in
blank verse, Blanka von Castilien
(Blanche of Castile), that already
embodied the principal idea of several
later works—the contrast between a
quiet, idyllic existence and a life of
action. Die Ahnfrau, written in the
trochaic Spanish verse form, has many of
the outward features of the then-popular
“fate tragedy” (Schicksalsdrama), but
the characters are themselves ultimately
responsible for their own destruction. A
striking advance was the swiftly written
tragedy Sappho (1818). Here the tragic
fate of Sappho, who is depicted as
heterosexual, is attributed to her
unhappy love for an ordinary man and to
her inability to reconcile life and art,
clearly an enduring problem for
Grillparzer. Work on the trilogy Das
Goldene Vlies (1821; The Golden Fleece)
was interrupted by the suicide of
Grillparzer’s mother and by illness.
This drama, with Medea’s assertion that
life is not worth living, is the most
pessimistic of his works and offers
humanity little hope. Once more the
conflict between a life of meditation
and one of action seems to lead
inevitably to renunciation or despair.
More satisfying, both aesthetically
and emotionally, is the historical
tragedy König Ottokars Glück und Ende
(written 1823, but because of censorship
difficulties not performed or published
until 1825; King Ottocar, His Rise and
Fall). Here the action is drawn from
Austrian history, and the rise of
Rudolph of Habsburg (the first of
Grillparzer’s characters to avoid guilt
and tragedy) is contrasted with the fall
of the tyrant Ottokar of Bohemia, so
that Ottokar’s fate is not presented as
representative of all humanity.
Grillparzer was disappointed at the
reception given to this and a following
play and became discouraged by the
objections of the censor. Although he
loved Katharina Fröhlich (1800–79), whom
he had met in the winter of 1820–21, he
felt unable to marry, possibly because
of a conviction that as an artist he had
no right to personal happiness. His
misery during these years is reflected
not only in his diaries but also in the
impressive cycle of poems entitled
Tristia ex Ponto (1835).
Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen
(1831; The Waves of Sea and Love), often
judged to be Grillparzer’s greatest
tragedy because of the degree of harmony
achieved between content and form, marks
a return to the classical theme in
treating the story of Hero and Leander,
which is, however, interpreted with a
psychological insight anticipating the
plays of Ibsen. Hero, the priestess, who
lacks a true sense of vocation, forgets
her vows in her blind passion for
Leander and, when her lover is ensnared
to his death, she dies of a broken
heart. The following of vital instincts
is shown to rob the individual of inner
harmony and self-possession. Der Traum
ein Leben (1834; A Dream Is Life) owes
much to Grillparzer’s intensive and
prolonged studies of Spanish drama. This
Austrian Faust ends happily, for the
ambitious young peasant Rustan only
dreams the adventures that involve him
in crime and awakes to a realization of
the vanity of earthly aspirations.
Grillparzer’s only comedy, Weh dem, der
lügt! (1838; “Woe to Him Who Lies!”),
was a failure with the public, chiefly
because the theme—the hero succeeds
because he tells the truth when everyone
thinks he is lying—was too subtle and
too serious for comic treatment.
Grillparzer wrote no more for the
stage and very little at all after the
1840s. The honours that were heaped on
him in old age came too late. In 1861 he
was elected to Vienna’s upper
legislative house (Herrenhaus), his 80th
birthday was the occasion for a national
celebration, and his death in Vienna in
1872 was widely mourned. Three
tragedies, apparently complete, were
found among his papers. Die Jüdin von
Toledo (The Jewess of Toledo), based on
a Spanish theme, portrays the tragic
infatuation of a king for a young Jewish
woman. He is only brought back to a
sense of his responsibilities after she
has been killed at the queen’s command.
Ein Bruderzwist in Habsburg (Family
Strife in Hapsburg), a profound and
moving historical tragedy, lacks the
theatrical action that would make it
successful in performance and is chiefly
remarkable for the portrayal of the
emperor Rudolph II. Much of
Grillparzer’s most mature thought forms
the basis of the third play, Libussa, in
which he foresees human development
beyond the rationalist stage of
civilization.
Apart from his critical studies on
Spanish drama and a posthumous
autobiography, Grillparzer’s finest
prose work is Der arme Spielmann (1848),
the story of a poor musician who
cheerfully accepts life’s failures and
dies through his efforts to help others.
Grillparzer’s work looks back to the
great Classical and Romantic
achievements and the painful evolution
from the disillusionment of idealism to
a compromise with reality. Grillparzer
was unusually gifted not only as a
dramatic poet but also as a playwright
capable of creating dramas suitable for
performance. Unlike his great
predecessors, Goethe and Schiller, he
distinguishes between the speech of the
cultured person and that of the
uneducated. He also introduces
colloquialisms, humour, and elements
from the popular farce. Although the
central dramatic conflict of
Grillparzer’s plays is often rooted in
his personal problems, it is presented
objectively. Grillparzer’s solution is
renunciation rather than acceptance. He
undoubtedly suffered from the censorship
and repression imposed by the Metternich
regime, but it is probable that his
unhappiness originated principally in an
inability to resolve his own
difficulties of character.
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Christian Dietrich Grabbe

born Dec. 11, 1801, Detmold,
Westphalia
died Sept. 12, 1836, Detmold
German dramatist whose plays anticipated
Expressionism and film technique.
Grabbe studied law in Leipzig
(1820–22) and made unsuccessful attempts
at acting and directing in Berlin. After
quarrelling with the poet Heinrich Heine
and members of Young Germany (a
politically radical literary movement)
and failing in attempts to get help from
the Romantic writer Ludwig Tieck, he
became a solicitor and then a military
justiciary in Detmold. He was unhappily
married in 1833 and was fired from his
job in 1834 for negligence. After
several months of poverty in Frankfurt,
he went to Düsseldorf, where he lived as
a freelance writer with the help of Karl
Leberecht Immermann, with whom he later
quarrelled also. Although he had been
successful in finding publishers for his
plays, his dissipated life led to an
early death from alcoholism and
tuberculosis.
Grabbe’s most important poetic work,
Napoleon; oder, die hundert Tage (1831;
“Napoleon; or, The Hundred Days”),
exemplifies the boldly experimental form
of his plays, in which he avoided
continuous action by the use of a series
of vividly depicted and contrasting
scenes. His tragedy Don Juan und Faust
(1829) is an imaginative and daring
attempt to combine the two great works
of Mozart and Goethe. Like many of his
plays, it exceeded the practical demands
of the theatre. Among his most enduring
is the mordant satire Scherz, Satire,
Ironie, und tiefere Bedeutung (1827;
Comedy, Satire, Irony, and Deeper
Meaning). He is also known for
Abhandlung über die Shakespearo-Manie
(1827; “Essay on Shakespeare Mania”), in
which he attacks Shakespeare and
advocates an independent national drama.
His other major works are the tragedy
Herzog Theodor von Gothland (1827; “Duke
Theodor of Gothland”), noted for its
scenes of violence; and two plays about
Hohenstaufen rulers, Kaiser Friedrich
Barbarossa (1829) and Kaiser Heinrich VI
(1830).
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Christian Friedrich Hebbel

born March 18, 1813, Wesselburen,
Schleswig-Holstein
died Dec. 13, 1863, Vienna
poet and dramatist who added a new
psychological dimension to German drama
and made use of G.W.F. Hegel’s concepts
of history to dramatize conflicts in his
historical tragedies. He was concerned
not so much with the individual aspects
of the characters or events as with the
historical process of change as it led
to new moral values.
Hebbel was the son of a poor mason
and was brought up in poverty. After his
father’s death in 1827, he spent seven
years as a clerk and messenger to a
tyrannical parish bailiff. He founded a
literary circle and had his first poems
published in a local newspaper and in a
Hamburg fashion magazine, whose editor,
Amalie Schoppe, invited him to Hamburg
in 1835 to prepare for the university.
He was supported during this time, both
spiritually and materially, by a
seamstress, Elise Lensing, with whom he
lived. At this time he started his
Tagebücher (published 1885–87;
“Diaries”), which became an important
and revealing literary confession.
Provided with a small income from his
patrons, he went to Heidelberg to study
law but soon left for Munich to devote
himself to philosophy, history, and
literature. Unable to publish his poems,
however, he returned penniless and ill
to Hamburg, where he was nursed by Elise
Lensing.
Hebbel’s powerful prose play Judith,
based on the biblical story, brought him
fame in 1840 upon its performance in
Hamburg and Berlin. His poetic drama
Genoveva was finished in 1841. Still in
need of money, Hebbel received a grant
from the Danish king to spend a year in
Paris and one in Italy. While in Paris
in 1843 he wrote most of the realistic
tragedy Maria Magdalena, published with
a critical and philosophical preface in
1844 and performed in 1846. This
skillfully constructed play, technically
a model “tragedy of common life,” is a
striking portrayal of the middle class.
In 1845 he met the actress Christine
Enghaus, whom he married in 1846. His
life became more tranquil, although he
was permanently weakened by rheumatic
fever as a result of his earlier
privation. The first tragedy written in
this period of his life was the verse
play Herodes und Mariamne (published
1850, performed 1849). A later work, the
Die Nibelungen trilogy (1862)—including
Der gehörnte Siegfried (“The
Invulnerable Siegfried”), Siegfrieds Tod
(“Siegfried’s Death”), and Kriemhilds
Rache (“Kriemhild’s
Revenge”)—grandiosely pictures the clash
between heathen and Christian. The prose
tragedy Agnes Bernauer (1852) treats the
conflict between the necessities of the
state and the rights of the individual.
Gyges und sein Ring (1854; Gyges and His
Ring), probably his most mature and
subtle work, shows Hebbel’s predilection
for involved psychological problems. His
other works include two comedies, a
volume of novellas and stories,
collections of poems, and essays in
literary criticism. On his 50th
birthday, nine months before he died, he
received the Schiller Prize.
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Naturalism
In the last two decades of the 19th century, the
influence of French realists and naturalists such as
Flaubert,
Honoré Balzac,
Guy de Maupassant,
and
Émile Zola
gave rise to a new concern for social problems, the
life of the lower classes, and the driven nature of
the human psyche. The two main centres of the German
naturalist movement were Munich and Berlin, where
its programmatic declarations were published in
small periodicals. The Freie Bühne (“Free Stage”) in
Berlin became the arena for new controversial plays
presented only to private audiences in order to
escape censorship.
Arno Holz and Johannes Schlaf published
three prose sketches under the title Papa Hamlet
(1889), in which the characters’ actions are
captured in minute, realistic detail. The technique
was known as Sekundenstil (“second-by-second
style”). The novella Bahnwärter Thiel (1888; Lineman
Thiel), by Gerhart Hauptmann, explores the
psychology of a railway-crossing guard who is driven
to insanity and ultimately to murder by the death of
his young son.
Hauptmann’s dramas, most notably his play
about the Silesian weavers and their futile
rebellion, Die Weber (1892; The Weavers), with its
emphasis on lower-class figures and their struggle
for bare existence, are the best examples of the
deterministic views of German naturalism. He won the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1912.
Gerhart Hauptmann

in full Gerhart Johann Robert
Hauptmann
born Nov. 15, 1862, Bad Salzbrunn,
Silesia, Prussia [Germany]
died June 6, 1946, Agnetendorf, Ger.
[now Jagniątków, Pol.]
German playwright, poet, and novelist
who was a recipient of the Nobel Prize
for Literature in 1912.
Hauptmann was born in a
then-fashionable Silesian resort town,
where his father owned the main hotel.
He studied sculpture from 1880 to 1882
at the Breslau Art Institute and then
studied science and philosophy at the
university in Jena (1882–83). He worked
as a sculptor in Rome (1883–84) and
studied further in Berlin (1884–85). It
was at this time that he decided to make
his career as a poet and dramatist.
Having married the well-to-do Marie
Thienemann in 1885, Hauptmann settled
down in Erkner, a suburb of Berlin,
taking lessons in acting and associating
with a group of scientists,
philosophers, and avant-garde writers
who were interested in naturalist and
socialist ideas. Hauptmann began writing
novellas, most notably Fasching (1887;
“Carnival”), but his membership in the
literary club Durch (“Through”) and his
reading of the works of such writers as
Émile Zola and Ivan Turgenev led him to
start writing plays.
In October 1889 the performance of
Hauptmann’s social drama Vor
Sonnenaufgang (Before Dawn) made him
famous overnight, though it shocked the
theatregoing public. This starkly
realistic tragedy, dealing with
contemporary social problems, signaled
the end of the rhetorical and highly
stylized German drama of the 19th
century. Encouraged by the controversy,
Hauptmann wrote in rapid succession a
number of outstanding dramas on
naturalistic themes (heredity, the
plight of the poor, the clash of
personal needs with societal
restrictions) in which he artistically
reproduced social reality and common
speech. Most gripping and humane, as
well as most objectionable to the
political authorities at the time of its
publication, is Die Weber (1892; The
Weavers), a compassionate dramatization
of the Silesian weavers’ revolt of 1844.
Das Friedensfest (1890; “The Peace
Festival”) is an analysis of the
troubled relations within a neurotic
family, while Einsame Menschen (1891;
Lonely Lives) describes the tragic end
of an unhappy intellectual torn between
his wife and a young woman (patterned
after the writer Lou Andreas-Salomé)
with whom he can share his thoughts.
Hauptmann resumed his treatment of
proletarian tragedy with Fuhrmann
Henschel (1898; Drayman Henschel), a
claustrophobic study of a workman’s
personal deterioration from the stresses
of his domestic life. However, critics
felt that the playwright had abandoned
naturalistic tenets in Hanneles
Himmelfahrt (1894; The Assumption of
Hannele), a poetic evocation of the
dreams an abused workhouse girl has
shortly before she dies. Der Biberpelz
(1893; The Beaver Coat) is a successful
comedy, written in a Berlin dialect,
that centres on a cunning female thief
and her successful confrontation with
pompous, stupid Prussian officials.
Hauptmann’s longtime estrangement
from his wife resulted in their divorce
in 1904, and in the same year he married
the violinist Margarete Marschalk, with
whom he had moved in 1901 to a house in
Agnetendorf in Silesia. Hauptmann spent
the rest of his life there, though he
traveled frequently.
Although Hauptmann helped to
establish naturalism in Germany, he
later abandoned naturalistic principles
in his plays. In his later plays,
fairy-tale and saga elements mingle with
mystical religiosity and mythical
symbolism. The portrayal of the
primordial forces of the human
personality in a historical setting
(Kaiser Karls Geisel, 1908;
Charlemagne’s Hostage) stands beside
naturalistic studies of the destinies of
contemporary people (Dorothea Angermann,
1926). The culmination of the final
phase in Hauptmann’s dramatic work is
the Atrides cycle, Die
Atriden-Tetralogie (1941–48), which
expresses through tragic Greek myths
Hauptmann’s horror of the cruelty of his
own time.
Hauptmann’s stories, novels, and epic
poems are as varied as his dramatic
works and are often thematically
interwoven with them. The novel Der Narr
in Christo, Emanuel Quint (1910; The
Fool in Christ, Emanuel Quint) depicts,
in a modern parallel to the life of
Christ, the passion of a Silesian
carpenter’s son, possessed by pietistic
ecstasy. A contrasted figure is the
apostate priest in his most famous
story, Der Ketzer von Soana (1918; The
Heretic of Soana), who surrenders
himself to a pagan cult of Eros.
In his early career Hauptmann found
sustained effort difficult; later his
literary production became more
prolific, but it also became more uneven
in quality. For example, the ambitious
and visionary epic poems Till
Eulenspiegel (1928) and Der grosse Traum
(1942; “The Great Dream”) successfully
synthesize his scholarly pursuits with
his philosophical and religious
thinking, but are of uncertain literary
value. The cosmological speculations of
Hauptmann’s later decades distracted him
from his spontaneous talent for creating
characters that come alive on the stage
and in the imagination of the reader.
Nevertheless, Hauptmann’s literary
reputation in Germany was unequaled
until the ascendancy of Nazism, when he
was barely tolerated by the regime and
at the same time was denounced by
émigrés for staying in Germany. Though
privately out of tune with the Nazi
ideology, he was politically naive and
tended to be indecisive. He remained in
Germany throughout World War II and died
a year after his Silesian environs had
been occupied by the Soviet Red Army.
Hauptmann was the most prominent
German dramatist of the early 20th
century. The unifying element of his
vast and varied literary output is his
sympathetic concern for human suffering,
as expressed through characters who are
generally passive victims of social and
other elementary forces. His plays, the
early naturalistic ones especially, are
still frequently performed.
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