Category: German Literature

Thinking Too Much: Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther

Goethe, whose heyday in the English language was in the 19th century, thanks to the efforts of men and women like George Eliot and Thomas Carlyle, is a writer whose greatness we hear about more often than we actually sit down and read him. He was an indisputably superhuman being: writer of plays, poetry, prose, a statesman, a scientist, a man who saw battle in the Napoleonic Wars – Goethe seemed to have the experience and the talents and the range of a hundred others. He even, unlike his contemporaries, Schiller and Hölderlin, managed to live the entirety of his life without dying prematurely or going mad – no small feat for someone whose dates might make us term him “Romantic”. But still, we don’t read him. We know his main works – Faust, Wilhelm Meister, and of course Werther, and perhaps a smattering of his poetry – but only second-hand.

I don’t know why that is. The common explanation is that Goethe ultimately came to embody a distant, lofty, Enlightenment-era sensibility that makes him boring to the modern reader, growing up in the shadow of emotional, irrational, Romanticism. Perhaps there are simply a dearth of good translations? In my time at Cambridge I have read precisely two works by Goethe – Urfaust, an early version of Faust: Part 1, and Iphigenia, a play. Yet for the German tradition he is as central as Shakespeare is in our own. And so I went and bought myself a 14-volume collected edition of his works, and hope to read at least some of them, over the coming year(s). Being interested in canonical European literature and not knowing Goethe is rather embarrassing, after all. And if he is really a genius, I am sure he will have something interesting to say to me.

It’s just a shame he doesn’t in Werther!

The Sorrows of Young Werther

With the publication of The Sorrows of Young Werther Goethe became an international sensation. But often what is initially popular doesn’t stand the test of time. Werther is perhaps more notorious now than anything else, on account of the various copycat suicides it inspired. I have to say, for me, a 21st century sad person, I find it strange how this book could have brought anyone to end their life. The gulf of sensibilities seems huge here. This story is not a semi-respectable literary love-triangle so much as one idiot’s selfish, solipsistic, obsession for another human being which brings torment to her and destruction to him. But, as always with German, it could just be that my understanding of the text was negatively impacted by my knowledge of the language. Anyway, Werther is important, so I suppose I must try to find what’s good and interesting in it. Let’s see.

Werther

Werther is structured predominantly as a series of letters from young Werther to his friend Wilhelm. Later on, the novel also includes a few letters to Lotte (the heroine), some of Werther’s translation work, and some third person narration. All of these formal elements are perhaps the most interesting thing about the novel, and I’ll write about them towards the end of this post.

The initial impression Werther’s letters make is that of an overwhelming emotional consciousness. Werther is emotional about absolutely everything. Even a decision like trying to live in the present is fraught with feelings: “I want to enjoy the present, and what has past should stay there in the past”. One of the central ideas of Werther is stated early on in a lamentation from Werther – “oh best of friends, what is the human heart!” The answer to the question, at least the one the book offers, is profoundly limited – we can’t really know the human heart. Werther’s letters, emotional, increasingly deranged, are only ever his letters. We are drawn into a world of pure subjectivity, so that it’s impossible to have any confidence about what is actually going on outside Werther’s head.

But we should have a go. Werther has ended up in a small village, there to do absolutely nothing. I believe the reason for his exile involves a romantic entanglement with Wilhelm’s sister, but I can’t be sure because the whole thing takes up a single page and is promptly forgotten. Here, in the peace and quiet, he makes friends with the locals, and eventually comes across a young lady, Charlotte – or Lotte, to her intimates. Lotte is, in Werther’s eyes, so absolutely amazing that to call her an angel is not enough. She is perfect, not just in her beauty, but in embodying a kind of idealised feminine existence: her mother is dead, so she looks after her younger siblings in her place. How amazing, how wonderful! Did I mention that she is engaged? Well… yes… but “I received the news somewhat indifferently”. Lotte reads, Lotte is natural and “artless”, a pure being plucked from Rousseau dreams.

Lotte

Yes, Werther is head-over-heels in love. What passion! But is it really passion, given that “often I didn’t even hear the words she spoke to me”. Werther’s imagination is so great, so hard-working, that it envelopes poor Lotte. They do have their moments, like when they are heading home after a storm and it’s all very spooky and intense. Memorably, she utters the name “Klopstock”, a well-known German poet of the day, while looking at the sky. Wilhelm, wisely, picks up on what Werther himself doesn’t, and suggests he leave before it’s too late. Werther, of course, does not. And at this point we have the first of his letters to Lotte: ridiculous, emotional, and dangerous too. Her husband-to-be has been away so far, but what will come of it when he returns?

“Wilhelm, is it just a phantom speaking, when we think all’s well?” Werther switches with alarming regularity from the deepest of joys to the deepest of sadnesses. “We long, ah, long to give our entire being over to something, and be filled with the bliss of a single, great, and powerful feeling”. He is an artist, who naturally barely gets anything done. He manages three incomplete portraits of Lotte. At one point he blames the peace and quiet of the rural idyll for his failure to work, but once he has tempestuous feelings he doesn’t become that much more successful either.

We hear Lotte rarely, at least while the narrative still consists of Werther’s letters. The effect of this is suffocating. We struggle to see her beneath Werther’s description of her, which is always filled with the possibility that he is deceiving himself (“Yes, I feel, and in this I am sure I can trust my heart… that she loves me!”).

Albert

In the first edition of Werther, published in 1774, Lotte’s fiancé Albert is a less sympathetic character than he appears in the revised version of Werther from 1787 which most people read these days. The thirteen years clearly gave Goethe time to mellow and let him turn upon his hero more than his youth once allowed. Albert is in many ways Werther’s opposite. Where Werther is emotional and prone to extremes, Albert is dour and serious and practical. Unlike Werther, who doesn’t appear to do any work at all, Albert’s main characteristic is his “Emsigkeit”, or industriousness. When the topic of passion comes up, Albert’s views are predictably sensible: “a man who lets his passions throw him about loses all his self-control and appears as a drunk or else as a madman”. For Werther, the Romantic, this is sacrilege. But Werther loves Lotte, so he keeps visiting their house.

The thought has just come to me that Werther and Theodor Storm’s Immensee have a lot in common. Both feature a love triangle where the emotional man loses out to the industrious man in the pursuit of the somewhat emotional girl. But the key difference is that Reinhard, the hero of Immensee, fails to propose to Elisabeth on time because of his sensibilities (he wants the proposal to be something special), while Werther arrives too late to make a proposal at all. Immensee is the tragic story of how emotions and hesitancy spoil a beautiful romance; Werther is the story of how a refusal to think rationally lets Werther imagine into being a romance where he has no right to, leaving him a far less sympathetic protagonist.

In the comparison between Albert and Werther we have played out what is one of the fundamental dramas of the 19th century – namely that of feeling against reason. In an increasingly industrial, increasingly business-driven world, feeling becomes a liability while hard-work and cool intelligence assume a dominant position in bourgeois society. In Werther, Lotte may regret that she is not with Werther, but she does not leave Albert, and Werther takes his own life. His sensibility dies with him, while Albert and Lotte will no doubt have plenty of little industrious children of their own. But perhaps all this is eminently sensible – only through the marriage of reason with feeling can feeling hope to survive. Werther, who wouldn’t know reason if it hit him over the head, just isn’t right for this world.  

Style and Structure

Werther’s second half, which details Werther’s precipitous decline into the abyss, is more interesting than the first, which had ended with him at last managing to leave Lotte’s village and do something else for a month. It is here that Goethe starts playing around with form. As long as we inhabit Werther’s insane letters, we are forced to accept his worldview: “What else is human fate but to go beyond its bounds, to drink the cup right to the dregs?”

But at about three quarters of the way through the book the letters stop and we have a message from the publisher, which comes as something of a shock. After the closed world of Werther’s letters, suddenly we have a sense of objectivity. It gives the reader the necessary perspective to realise that Werther really is going mad, just in case they hadn’t realise this earlier. We continue reading letters from Werther, but now they are broken up with information about how they were received, or what Werther was doing. We hear Lotte’s voice, her fear that perhaps “it is only because you couldn’t possess me that your desire gained so much power over you.” What a sensible thought. It is too bad that Werther is unwilling to listen to her.

The third person narration naturally allows us to hear about Werther’s suicide, as being dead makes it hard to write a letter (though of course there are plenty of literary workarounds). I think that the main effect of this narrative rupture is to ironize what had otherwise been deadly serious – Werther’s love. As the publisher goes through the letters left on Werther’s desk, including at least two letters that purport to be the last one’s he’ll ever send to Lotte, it’s hard not to feel that Werther is much less the emotional hero of the novel, and more a fool who came and destroyed the peace and happiness of others. His translation of part of the Ossian poems, by the Scottish poet James Macpherson, is beautiful, but at the same time hints at the unoriginality of his own feelings. Is Werther just imitating others, even at his most emotional?

Conclusion

I have written before about how writing a blog post makes me appreciate works of literature in ways I would not have otherwise and find enjoyment in works that otherwise frustrated me. But I am not sure that this is one of those times. Werther is too imbalanced – too much feeling, not enough reason. For the modern sensibility, Werther’s failings are too much his own. There are plenty of things to be sad about in life, in love as in everything else, without letting our imaginations create additional difficulties for us.

Werther was my first prose experience of the almighty Goethe, but it is a young man’s work, and I am glad I have finished it and can move on to something else. I am certain that better things await, if not in volume 6, then in one of the others! So, dear reader, know that the battle with Goethe has only just begun.

Readers, should you have read more Goethe to me and had a better experience, or indeed had a better experience with Werther, do let me know in the comments.

A Human Adultery Tale: Waves / Wellen by Eduard von Keyserling

Eduard von Keyserling is the latest German writer who publishers seem to have decided needs a revival. This is explained partly by his dates – he was born in 1855, and died in 1919 – which means there has been a flurry of attention upon him anyway thanks to the centenary of his death. My own edition of his late novels, which Waves / Wellen is included among, is a lovingly crafted hardback, filled with notes and the impressions of his contemporaries. The only problem is that it’s written in German. There are also new English translations of his works coming out all the time, Wikipedia suggests, including one of Waves itself which was released in 2019 and translated by Gary Miller.

Keyserling is interesting not only because he happened to die a hundred-ish years ago, though. He’s also the most well-known Baltic German writer. The Baltic Germans were the ethnically German ruling class who once inhabited Latvia and Estonia, a people who have now vanished for a variety of reasons. Keyserling is therefore interesting for representing a now vanished people, a now vanished way of life. But since every writer does that in some sense, we should perhaps look for reasons to read him elsewhere.

Waves, the short novel I finished yesterday, is a tender exploration of the life of a woman who has left her husband. It’s interesting to compare the life of Doralice, the heroine, with the heroines of the 19th century “adultery classics” – Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary, and Effi Briest. While those novels showed adultery ending in unpleasant deaths, here Keyserling tries to ask what life is like instead.

A Woman’s Story

Theodor Fontane, my favourite German novelist of the 19th century, once remarked that women were far more interesting to write about than men. At least at that time, he was on to something. The realist tradition often takes as its spiritual core the battle between the individual and his or her society, and since women in that period saw their lives and freedoms more constrained by society than men did, their lives generally provided a more interesting canvas for writing on than did those of men. It’s just a shame that our occasionally well-intentioned 19th century male authors did not realise that the “interesting lives” of women did not necessarily have to be about adultery or marriage. I forgive them, sometimes, this.

Waves, or Wellen in the original, was published in 1911. Taking place on the Baltic coastline, it centres around two groups of people. The first is Doralice and her partner, Hans Grill. Doralice, who only a year before the story begins had been living as the Countess of Köhne-Jasky in a big castle, abandoned her much older husband to be with Hans, who she met while he was painting her portrait. The second group centres around the aristocratic and respectable Buttlär family – father, mother, the mother’s mother, and various children – most importantly, Lolo, whose fiancé Hilmar joins them a little into the story. These two groups, forced together by the small size of the beach setting, are what leads to the novel’s central conflict.

Eduard von Keyserling is often called an Expressionist. So is Edvard Munch, whose paintings match the slightly expressive mood of Waves.

Doralice, or Countess of Köhne-Jasky?

Doralice, or the Countess of Köhne-Jasky, is our main character. By the time the story begins she has already left her husband for Hans Grill, who is a humble painter. Together they are relaxing in on the coast, making use of her money. But Waves begins not with Doralice, but with Mrs General von Palikow and her daughter, Baroness Buttlär. We are introduced to Doralice through the rumours about her and the fear that she inspires in other characters. Baroness Buttlär is so terrified of the influence this free woman could have upon her children that she forces them to go to bed early so that they might not hear about her past. The adults of the family are “like two fortresses, keeping out all those who do not belong to their kind”. (all translations are mine)

Of course such attempts do not work, and the children are fascinated by the beautiful countess. Waves is a novel about misperceptions, as much as anything else, and for the children their misperception is that this woman is a Romantic heroine. Doralice is far less passionate and far more human than they make her out to be. Even her love for Hans is startlingly normal, which is the problem. At times we are left asking whether she left her husband because of how awful he was, or because of how nice Hans was. Doralice herself sits and dreams of her old life, with its luxury and respectability. In meeting the Buttlärs she is confronted with what she has lost forever.

A Woman’s Identity

What is sad is that all around Doralice are people who, if not bad, are still unwilling to let her develop in her own way. From the words she remembers from her parents – “”when you will be married”” – to her old husband’s habit of saying “we” when he really means “you”, and even to Hans Grill himself (though in a less oppressive form), Doralice’s identity is always being determined by those around her. When she finally has her “freedom”, it is unpleasant. Locked out of society, but still by birth an aristocrat, her days at the beach are marked by idleness and English novels.

This is in stark contrast to the fishermen of the village, who are always hard at work, and to Hans himself. Although it seems unfair, Hans is right when he says: “Work and action – this is what we need in our lives”. For idleness is fallow ground for the imagination, and imagination (especially when English novels are involved) can lead to tragedy.

An Adulteress

When Hilmar, the dashing Lieutenant who is Lola’s husband-to-be, turns up, things take a turn for the dangerous. Where the aristocrats think Doralice is someone to be feared, and the children admire her, Hilmar sees her as someone to seduce. And within the world he lives in, his view is logical. Here, an adulteress is a woman who has shown herself to be a loose woman with loose morals. Within German society at the time there was very little opportunity to say that actually, one can make a mistake in marriage, and that the second love may be more successful than the first. And so, even though he breaks his fiancée’s heart, Hilmar sets about seducing Doralice. He takes her out sailing, he finds her alone while she’s reading… you know, the usual.  

Their meeting while she is reading in the forest is one of the saddest moments in the story. For Doralice is lonely, desperately lonely in her new life. And yet Hilmar, a new face, can only see her as an object.

““I was once told by a young Attaché that he thought it was impolite for him to spend more than a moment alone with a young lady without declaring his love for her””.

Doralice’s words made me laugh, but they also contain a deep sense of the emptiness of even what first appears to be passionate feeling. She inhabits a world – all of the characters inhabit a world – where behaviour is almost completely conditioned by society, and true feelings are repressed so deeply that they may never come out again. Hilmar of course denies that he is here to declare his love. But Doralice knows better – she doesn’t want to play his game. “”All of my ties with the world have been cut. You can either talk about the weather with me, or you can declare your love for me instead.”” Everything is socially determined, and Doralice’s deep loneliness is the result.

More Munch. Both artists, Keyserling and Munch, have an excellent sense for the intensity of loneliness.

Conclusion: Waves, Loves, and Other Things

One of the aspects of Waves that I haven’t been able to talk about yet is the style. Although much of it is written in the same realist style of Fontane or Turgenev, when dealing with passionate emotions Keyserling is not afraid to go into long, intense and very expressive paragraphs. Waves as a title calls to mind Woolf’s The Waves, and the beach setting and style occasionally reminded me of To the Lighthouse. Like Woolf, Keyserling can write a beautiful, thoughtful description when he wants to. In this he is a transitional figure between the realisms of his youth and the modernisms that took over in his late middle age.

And I think that this is an important part of why this story is interesting in the first place, and why it’s worth reading if you can find a translation (or read German). Keyserling really gives Doralice a soul – he lets her feel. She is not as cunning as Emma Bovary, or as passionate as Anna Karenina. Instead, she is a human being who was forced into a marriage and life that were wrong, and who made the brave decision to walk away from it. Her story is the working out of a difficult relationship with the man she left her husband for, rather than one of passion and punishment. And after so many adultery tales, it’s nice to read one that sees the adulteress for what she really is – a human like the rest of us, instead of a lamb to be sacrificed to make a point about society.

That’s why Waves is worth your time. And did I mention it’s under two hundred pages?

Thomas Mann: Mario and the Magician, Disorder and Early Sorrow

The dislike I have for Thomas Mann’s writing can be summarised as the sneaking suspicion that he does not have a soul. I do not doubt Mann’s intelligence, for how else could anyone write such long sentences on such fascinating topics, ranging from fascism to the conflicted identities of so many bourgeois artists, running around them so that they are illuminated from every possible angle? Yet every time Mann just leaves me cold. I have a certain dislike for the way that his stories always seem to be about educated rich German men, usually on holiday, musing about the same things over and over again. Only exams, and the sheer richness of his writing, makes me get anything out of him. He is the last writer who I would ever read for pleasure. In short: “how clever he is”, says the head; “how cold he is”, says the heart.

Disorder and Early Sorrow (Unordnung and frühes Leid) and Mario and the Magician (Mario und der Zauberer), as the first paragraph perhaps indicates, have not changed my opinion of Mann much. The first story is the description of a party held during the dark days of the Weimar Republic, while the second describes a middle-class holiday gone badly wrong. Both works, published in 1926 and 1930 respectively, are linked, I think, by a certain trepidation about the future. Mann was in his fifties and he had seen his country destroyed in a World War, and in the peace that followed for Europe he saw only its fragility and the growing resentment of individuals, the sort that led eventually to the rise of Hitler and the Second World War.

Disorder and Early Sorrow

“Disorder and Early Sorrow” takes us into the home of a family of what in German are called Bildungsbürger, or the educated middle class. As opposed to the standard bourgeois these people were well educated, but they were economically weak. The family here consists of a mother, a father – Professor Cornelius, two older children – Ingrid and Bert, and two younger children – Lorchen and Beißer (Ellie and Snapper in one English translation). In addition to these are various servants, of whom Xaver is the most important.

The story is about a party that the two older children are throwing. Over and above the difficult financial situation the family finds itself in, unable to repair their nice house or feed themselves properly – at one point they decide they need “a cake, or something cakish” – the problem facing Cornelius, who is the central figure here, is that of dealing with a changing world. Traditional barriers are falling all around him. Not only is language collapsing – as in the cake anecdote – so too are class barriers. Xaver and Bert look so much the same that Cornelius can’t tell them apart when he looks out of the window. For Cornelius, who is a history professor, it is difficult to keep track, so he retreats into his studies – of the beginnings of national debt in Spain and England. 

For the young ones, this breakdown of barriers is only a good thing. They are politically engaged, and make use of all the newest technology, such as telephones. At one point one of their hobbies is described – they go onto a tram and pretend to be other people, speaking in funny accents as if they have only just arrived in Berlin. Cornelius also acts, once the party gets underway, saying hello to his children’s guests, but his acting is far more awkward and nervous. He belongs to a generation where “good breeding” and “gallantry” are the key virtues. When the guests speak to him, they are terribly polite, but as soon as he turns away they speak naturally again.

Cornelius is gripped with a “Father’s pessimism”. His eldest children have already broken free, but the younger two may yet have their innocence saved. There are a number of touching moments in “Disorder and Early Sorrow”, and all of them are between Cornelius and his two youngest children. They play a game with a pillow, and it is Cornelius’s fatherly love for them that most successfully humanises him: “Tenderness floods Dr Cornelius’ heart as if it were wine”.

But even in this love there is something fragile. Lorchen, the girl and his favourite, suffers the “sorrow” of the title when she is rejected by one of the boys at the party who decides he wants to dance with someone his own age, instead of a toddler. She ends up crying tremendously, so that the boy in question eventually comes to wish her a good night. When she falls asleep afterwards, Cornelius reckons that she will forget everything by the next day. But one day Lorchen – whose name recalls the Lorelei myth that inspired so many German Romantic ballads – will grow up, and Cornelius will have to let her go just as he has his other children.

The story is filled with little details but one thing that stood out was the use of space in it. It’s quite a claustrophobic tale, with almost all the action taking place on one floor of Cornelius’s house. In this it reflects the cramping of his own power in the world as the Weimar economy falls apart and the politics of consensus that educated men such as himself had dominated falls apart with it. I almost enjoyed reading it. Perhaps if I had read it in English I would have. As it stands, it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. 

Mario and the Magician

“Mario and the Magician” is another one of those fun little beach-tales that Mann was so fond of – think “Death in Venice”. An unnamed family goes on holiday to Mussolini’s Italy only to find to their horror that the country is filled with fascists! This “tragic travel experience” is written like a chapter in a travel book, which is an interesting approach for Mann to take. The style tries to contain excessive outbursts of emotion, but the topic is inherently emotional, because the family had a dreadful time. In some way, this tension reflects the tension in European life at the time between resentment and apparent peace.

Anyway, the story is rather unsubtle. Mann really didn’t like fascism, which we can certainly forgive him for. The story was written before Hitler was a major force in Germany, and so we can call Mann prescient enough for noticing that fascism is bad. Considering he is an artist, it’s something of an achievement for him not to be drawn into it as so many were at the time, including Rilke, Wyndham Lewis, Yeats. But then again, I’ll just put that down to Mann not having a soul. Fascism manages to find so many supporters because it appears to offer salvation for the soul, and only the intellect can stand against that.

Before we meet the magician of the title, the main event is a trip to the beach. The beach is a rather unnatural place – we are supposed to relax here. Yet the beach instead is “lacking in innocence and aimlessness”. The children aren’t just children, but “patriotic children”, waving flags and being used by their parents as a pretext for nationalist fights with foreign tourists. At one point the narrator lets one of his children run around naked, only to be punished with a fine for it for offending public decency and “national dignity”.

The main event of this story, though, is the trip they take to watch a magician, Cipolla. Cipolla is a fascist demagogue. There is nothing more to it. He stands on stage and manipulates people, and the crowd cheers him for it. His volunteers are made to do embarrassing things, surrendering their will to him in the process. The narrator cannot make sense of it, calling him “the most effective hypnotist I have ever seen”. There is no rational explanation for why people seem to lose their self-control, but it happens anyway. Cipolla, this angry, ugly, monster of a man who is filled with resentment (vaguely related to women) is able to control everyone through the force of his voice and personality. However strange it seems to Mann, the approach worked in much of Europe then, and still works in parts of the world now.

As for Mario, I can’t tell you about his role in the story without spoiling its ending. He is a waiter who serves the children in one of the cafes they visit. But he also takes part in Cipolla’s performance.

“Mario and the Magician” appealed to me less than “Disorder and Early Sorrow”. Its lack of subtlety is not the main problem – after all, the fact that fascism is awful is something that needs to be made clear. I disliked the language of it – I read as much in English as I did in German – but most of all I disliked its message. Not the one that says fascism is bad, but the one that seems to propose a solution. I do not know what the answer is to fascism or radicalization, and perhaps there is nobody who truly does, but the one that Mann seems to put forward here is not one I can support at all. It is, to be frank, politically naïve. But then, perhaps, in 1930 we still had a right to be politically naïve. In a few more years we would lose that right forever.

Conclusion

Mann oh man, I wish I could like Thomas Mann. But I just find him too intellectual. It’s not that intellectuality is a problem per se, but rather that when intellectuality is there without a corresponding warmth of feeling it’s really hard to be excited while you are reading. Dostoevsky’s characters may be in some sense representatives of certain views or systems of thought, but they always feel like passionate people, motivated by ideas, rather than ideas who have been poured into people. Mann liked Dostoevsky – I haven’t read his thoughts on the Russian, but I’d be interested to know what they were.

I am going to read more Mann one day. Like Robert Musil, whose “Three Women” I enjoyed intellectually, there’s definitely something to enjoy in these two stories. But at the end of each you are – or at least I was – always left feeling that there is something missing, and that’s a great shame. Because Mann definitely knew how to write.