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What Does it Mean to Hate God? – Misotheism and Literature

I have always been interested in faith. Growing up in a wasteland, with the boundless sea on one end of my vision and high mountains enclosing the other, it would probably be strange if I hadn’t been left feeling like something was out there. But for me, the faith itself has always been more interesting than the container into which that faith was poured. Perhaps that’s because I myself have believed in many things, and from each of them in turn departed, disappointed in either myself or in the ideas themselves.

Dostoevsky was my literary catalyst for thinking about faith. Time and time again, he produced characters who believe in something – whether it’s a kind of superman, like Raskolnikov; or God’s injustice, like Ivan; or that menacing nothingness of Stavrogin. For the Russian mind, faith is almost a fact of life. As Dostoevsky himself wrote, only a Russian can believe in atheism.

A photo showing the light and hills of Scotland
The Highlands of Scotland, the place where I grew up. To live in such a place without believing in something is impossible, whether it be named God or nature.

This piece was motivated not by Dostoevsky though, but by two poems, which recently made me think about a particular type of faith. Misotheism, or hating God, is not the same as disbelieving in him. It is an entirely different kettle of fish. It is not to consign oneself to an eternity of void and emptiness, but to actually take arms against a hostile God and willingly go to hell sooner than submit to his will and failed world. To me, it is the ultimate act of bravery, of courage – but it is an act that has lost its meaning. So part of this essay will also ask what action, what rebellion, could today hold the same significance as turning one’s back on God. Could anything?

Two poems of Misotheism

Two writers, both Germans, started me off on this train of thought. Goethe’s “Prometheus”, and Friedrich Hölderlin’s “Hyperion’s Song of Fate”, both present a view of the world where there is a turning against God, a rejection of him without a denial of his existence. It was the height of German Romanticism, where rebellion was valued for rebellion’s sake.

Goethe’s Prometheus

Goethe’s work is the one that most embodies Misotheism. In “Prometheus” Zeus, who stands for all gods, is subjected to an attack from Prometheus himself. There is no respect here, none whatsoever. The gods would die, “If children and beggars / Were not trusting fools”. They have never helped the speaker – his only source of strength and achievement has been “My sacred glowing heart”. The poem shows the journey from a positive belief to Misotheism. “While yet a child”, Goethe writes, “I turned my wandering gaze / Up toward the sun” – nature, the source of almost all great belief, is the source of Prometheus’s belief also, but it is a belief that dies. “Who helped me / Against the Titans’ insolence?” – not the gods, but his heart alone.

Prometheus, in rejecting god, finds strength in that rejection, as the last two stanzas show. He does not learn to hate life, “Because not all / My blossoming dreams grew ripe”. Instead, he builds a new race, a people “To suffer, to weep, / To enjoy, to be glad, / And thee to scorn, / As I!”. In opposition to the boring perfection and isolation of the gods, lopping off the heads of thistles up above, Prometheus demands the birth of a people who will experience life, in all of its colours and shades of feeling. Rebelling, we take our attention away from the gods, and bring it down to earth. In so doing, though we will suffer, we will also be able to create a pride in ourselves. Only in independent opposition to god can we truly love ourselves. Such is the idea of Goethe’s Prometheus.

A painting showing Prometheus bringing fire to humankind.
Heinrich Füger, Prometheus Brings Fire to Mankind. Goethe’s poem presents a Misotheism where our suffering becomes our salvation, letting us experience the world more intensely than the gods above.

Hölderlin’s Hyperion and his Song of Fate

Friedrich Hölderlin’s poem, “Hyperion’s Song of Fate”, is not in and of itself an example of Misotheism. As with any poem, it is highly interpretable, and as I tried just now to find a translation for the blog the matter gets even harder because none that I have found really seem to get at what I myself see when I read the German. Given that, I’ll have a go at translating the bits I need myself.

Hölderlin’s poem is broken up into three stanzas. The first two address the gods, who “wander above in the light / On soft ground”. Their life is easy, one of art and of breezes. Unlike us they are “Schicksallos” – fateless, or without a destiny controlling them. But Hölderlin, at least to me, does not find in this situation anything to be envious of. The gods are like children – he compares them to the “Säugling”, or “babe”. And I read in his description of their “eternally blooming” spirit and “eternal clarity” of their eyes, with his repetition of the word “ewig” – eternal – a kind of scorn. In another poem, “To the Fates”, Hölderlin asks the Fates not for eternal life, but just for “one more year” to ensure he can achieve all of his creative potential. He does not want to be a boring god, but a successful human being.

Compared to his treatment of the gods in the first two stanzas, this is how he describes our kind:

But for us it is given,
On no place to rest - 
We fade and we fall,
We sufferers of fate,
Blindly from one
Hour to the next,
Like water that's thrown
From cliff onto cliff,
Year by year down into the unknown.

I read rebellion in these lines. Not in Goethe’s sense, not in the sense of an active revolt. But rather in the sense that Hölderlin wishes to show that in spite of our suffering – he doesn’t shy away from showing it – we still have a kind of dignity. “Year by year” we suffer, the playthings of fate, but it is precisely in this suffering that we find our uniqueness and redemption. I admit my idea’s perhaps too much indebted to Dostoevsky, but I do think Hölderlin may have had something similar in mind. We have “no place to rest”, which sets us apart from the gods, eternally resting up above. But their rest is not valuable – in our struggle we are achieving great things, we are actively living. As with “Prometheus”, “Hyperion’s Song of Fate” finds humankind’s glory in terms of our activeness, versus the gods’ passivity.

Job

Both Goethe and Hölderlin turn to a kind of Misotheism in response to the gods’ passivity. Joseph Roth’s Job: The Story of a Simple Man, which I have written about here, takes a different approach. Here, Mendel Singer, the modern Job that is the hero of his story, turns against God because of God’s cruelty. Mendel teaches children his religion, he has served and believed in God all his life, and yet God has made him lose one son to the Russians, killed another son in war, disappeared the third, and left Mendel’s daughter in a mental asylum. Mendel’s faith has not simply not been rewarded – God has actively spat on it. As Mendel yells, “The devil is kinder than God. Because he is not as powerful, he cannot be as cruel”.

Mendel is ultimately unable to burn his bible, but for a moment his Misotheism has reached heights of emotional intensity that not even Goethe and Hölderlin are able to reach. The reason for this is simple – the distance that Mendel has to travel is greater. He goes not only from faith to hostile faith, but from a loving faith to a hostility that has all the signs of despair.

An illustration of Job, conversing with his friends. Job's Misotheism is powerful because of the emotional distance he needs to travel when rebelling.
Job, as illustrated by Gustave Doré. Job’s suffering gains its power by just how far he has to go to turn against God, from love all the way to hate.

Ivan

Ivan Karamazov, of Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, is no Job, but his Misotheism is equally powerful. When he declares that he is “returning his ticket to God” his reasons are not personal, but universal. He is concerned with the problem of evil, that thorny thicket that poses a challenge for anyone with religious belief – why does an omnipotent, omniscient God allow evil to exist? In the great chapter, “Rebellion”, Ivan tallies up God’s injustices not against adults, who after all have had time to sin, but against the children. For the suffering of children is the hardest suffering to justify, emotionally speaking, and for Ivan it is too much. He returns his ticket, turning his back on God without denying his existence. But unlike Job, or Goethe or Hölderlin, Ivan’s rebellion is not only Misotheism, but also a kind of Apotheosis – a kind of becoming God.

Because what Ivan wants is a better world. He wants, in a way, to be the God that God isn’t – kind and helpful and good. Because he turns our ideas of Misotheism on their head, he is in some sense unique among the misotheists. And his struggle is, for me, particularly tragic, precisely because it is doomed. One can successfully hate God, one can successfully rebel against him in the name of freedom for oneself, but one cannot rebel against God to make the world a better place. Or at least, one cannot achieve that goal, because we are not gods here on earth. But Ivan’s Christ-like determination to try, to take the sins of the world upon his shoulders and try to solve them, that makes his rebellion, his Misotheism, so glorious, so magnificent, so powerful.

Why is going against God so powerful?

It has been a whistle-stop tour of literature’s Misotheism. What we have seen is that under the unifying banner of rising against God or gods a great many motivations and aspirations can coexist. I find them all compelling, exciting. To go against God is to condemn oneself, it is to love life so much that we turn our back on anything beyond it. That requires great emotional depths – great suffering, great bravery. It requires, in short, determination and passion.  

But Misotheism has lost its touch. As a rule, we do not believe in God anymore, which means we cannot go against him. We can still be impressed when someone turns their back on God, but only at a surface level. Deep down, we’re still a little confused as to why they bother believing in the first place. I am not saying that society, in the West or anywhere else, has become atheistic. Instead, we have simply lost God. So when we have such anger, as felt Ivan, as felt Job, we have no outlet for it. There is no target. Our God now is the wind in the reeds, and just as difficult to catch. As a result, we cannot fight.

At its heart, Misotheism is a rebellion against a deeply held belief. This is still possible in our own time. A religious person can still go against God, a communist might turn against their beliefs after reading about their historical applications, while a capitalist might lose faith in their system’s ability to solve all problems. Someone who loves their family might turn against it. But what is true is that we have lost a universal belief, binding us all together. Almost everyone, publicly at least, believed in God in most of the 19th century. Charles Bradlaugh, the first British atheist MP, only joined Parliament at the end of that century. Misotheism was powerful in literature because it was a universal theme – now that is not the case. So perhaps the question is, what has replaced it?

Nietzsche – a modern alternative to Misotheism?

Friedrich Nietzsche is the person I naturally turn to when I think about religious faith in the modern era. In The Joyous Science section 125 he writes about the madman in the marketplace, who declares that “God is dead”. This declaration wasn’t designed to shock Nietzsche’s readers, just as it doesn’t shock those in the marketplace. Almost everybody in the 19th century, just as they publicly acknowledged God, privately also didn’t much care for his existence. But they went no further. Without God’s existence, Nietzsche points out, we must live differently. We must interrogate every one of our underlying conceptions and ideas to determine which have a solid basis, and which are only the legacy of a religious system we now ought to throw away. That was Nietzsche’s project, and it was a failure. Most still live by those past values as before.

A photo of Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche describes with his philosophical works a world in which the very rebellions that Misotheism describes – against the gods, to favour the lived life on earth – would become unnecessary. Unfortunately, nowadays we do not love the world like Nietzsche had hoped. And as a result, there is no modern act analogous in power to rebelling against the gods. We neither believe in God nor in the earth.

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche makes what I consider his hope for what a modern version of Misotheism would look like. It would be, essentially, a reversal of the traditional one. Zarathustra, the prophet of the book, declares in section 3 of his Prologue that “To blaspheme the earth is now the most dreadful offence, and to esteem the bowels of the Inscrutable more highly than the meaning of the earth”. With Goethe we saw the most powerful and touching rebellion as moving from a focus on the divine to a focus on the earthly. In its place Nietzsche sees the most spirited (but here wrong) rebellion as one that rejects the earth instead. If Nietzsche’s project had been successful, he would be right. We would all be stunned and impressed by those who reject the earth for God, even as we mostly disagree with them.

It is not so.

Religious Terrorism as a Nietzschean Misotheism in practice

We do not believe in anything. What Nietzsche feared most of all, the descent into nihilism he saw as inevitable so long as we continued along Christian lines of thought, has come to pass in the West. We have lost our spiritual centre but have put nothing in its place. Of course, there are exceptions. Many of us now have a weak spiritualism and think of a kind of God up there, even if we cannot quite make him out. But this faith is personal, and rebellion against it is an act of mind, and not of body, as it is with Ivan, with Job, with Hyperion and Prometheus. It is less tragic to witness, and more simply sad. Few of us love the earth, because we do not have a connection to it. We are trapped in cities, desperate to survive, preyed on by systems far more powerful than ourselves.

But to rebel against these systems is nothing special either. Because nobody really supports them. Terrorism is perhaps the closest thing to a reverse-Misotheism in Nietzsche mould, but I have not one positive word for it (obviously). There are no positive angles to terrorism for anyone except the perpetrators: none of the hope and kindness of Ivan, none of the love of freedom and emotion of Goethe’s Prometheus. The power of Misotheism lay in the fact that when we rejected God we rejected him for something that in our hearts seemed even greater. With terror we reject the world for something lesser.

Conclusion

I wish I knew what the answer was to these problems of faith. I wish I knew a way to bring a kind of faith back. Not one that takes us from the world, but one that binds us to it, and to each other, more closely. At times I have felt like literature, truly great literature, can achieve this. I think of Levin in the fields, or Ivan again – these people made me want to live. They affirmed life, when nowadays most of us only live it. But literature only offers a kind of personal salvation. The only way to make people live, that I have found, is to get out and live yourself, and lead by example. Only then do we recapture some of the heroism, some of the bravery, that makes Misotheism in these great works of literature so powerful.

Thanks for reading. For more Dostoevsky, here’s Crime and Punishment; my review of Roth’s Job is here; as for thinking about the state of the modern world, Joker, Capitalist Realism, and Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends all have things to say.

If you enjoyed the piece and have thoughts of your own, please leave a comment. I’d love to hear what others have to say about the ideas I have discussed here.

Crime and Punishment Revisited

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment is among the most accessible “classics” of world literature because its tale of murder and its consequences is immediately exciting. All the same, it took me about three attempts before I first finished it. I am now reading it a third time, and each time I feel I understand the book a little better. So far, I have read the first two parts of the book’s six, and I am already overflowing with impressions and observations that I would like to share. The book is so thought-provoking, that simply writing a post at its completion would be to do it an injustice.

World of Decay

I think the thing that has struck me the most this time round is just how grim and depressing the world of Crime and Punishment really is. Within the first two parts we have Marmeladov’s death, an attempted suicide, and plenty of other suggestions of abuse and suffering, not to mention the murder of the pawnbroker which forms the heart of the work.

Colour

Part of this grimness is delivered through Dostoevsky’s use of colour, especially the colour yellow, the traditional colour of sickness and decay. When we find it throughout the entire world of Crime and Punishment’s Saint Petersburg we are left with the feeling that the world itself is falling to pieces. We have Raskolnikov’s wallpaper, the “yellow glass filled with yellow water” that he is given at the police station, the yellow face of the woman who attempts suicide, Sonya’s yellow ticket legalising her work as a prostitute, and most memorably, the “ominous yellowish-black spot” that marks Marmeladov’s fatal wound from the horse’s hoof. There is also the red of blood. When Raskolnikov awakes in the beginning of part II he worries that his clothes are covered in it. Then, when he meets a member of the police later on, he is drenched in it – but in this case it’s Marmeladov’s.

A yellow and decaying wall
While I would like to say that the Saint Petersburg of today could not play host to a similar tragedy to that of Crime and Punishment, I feel like I’d be lying. Just last year a professor here killed and dismembered his student and tried to throw the pieces of her body and himself into the Neva river. Anyway, this is a view onto the inside of my courtyard. When I first moved in, my girlfriend said it looked like it had come from a Dostoevsky novel. Luckily the inside of my flat is nicer.

Clothes and Money

But colour is not the only thing that gives this world its feeling of decline. Money is constantly in focus in these early chapters, whether it be the landlady’s demands for rent, or else Marmeladov’s suffering family watching him drink his salary away, or else of course the pawnbroker herself with her miserliness. Like the characters themselves, who are always on the brink of destitution, we are unable to avoid reading about money in these chapters. Clothing in Crime and Punishment has a similar role, making us aware of the essential poverty of most of its characters. Razumikhin’s joke when he shows Raskolnikov the new clothes he has bought him, that “we have to make a human being out of you”, nonetheless expresses a fundamental truth about poverty’s ability to dehumanise its sufferers. These people can barely even dress themselves with dignity.

Women

But I think the final sign of decay that I’ve found hardest to avoid is Dostoevsky’s representation of women. In Crime and Punishment the women we come across are exclusively downtrodden and suffering. The differences between them concern simply whether they try to maintain some kind of dignity, like Raskolnikov’s mother and Marmeladov’s wife, or fail to, like the woman on the bridge who attempts suicide. Once, we meet a group of them: “some were over forty, but there were some younger than seventeen; almost every one of them had a black eye”. Dunya, Raskolnikov’s sister, suffers for him in a horrible job in their hometown. Sonya, likewise, suffers for her own family. Only by taking economic responsibility onto themselves to try to save others can the women have a chance of saving themselves. Even Nastasya, Raskolnikov’s comparatively not-falling-apart maid, has a “morbidly nervous laughter”. Everyone’s on edge here.

Crime and Punishment as a Horror Movie

Connected with the feverish yellow world of Crime and Punishment is the feeling I have had with this reading that Dostoevsky’s novel has a particularly intense portrayal of reality and bodies not far from their portrayal in works of horror, especially movies. Of course, there is the dinginess of the world, but there is also the murder itself. When Raskolnikov stands outside the pawnbroker’s door, he feels that “someone was standing silently just at the latch, hiding inside and listening, in the same way as he was outside, and also, it seemed, with an ear to the door…” Perhaps I am not explaining it well, but what I mean is this image of fear and closeness to mortal peril is just the sort of thing that we see in Alien when the xenomorph is right next to Ripley, but not yet aware of her.

A scene from the movie Alien 3 where Ripley, a human, is very close to an alien, but so far undetected
A scene in Alien 3 where Ripley has a close encounter with the xenomorph. In Crime and Punishment there are a lot of moments where characters seem to be unnaturally close to each other, both physically and sometimes spiritually, with the same horrific effect.

The incomprehensibility of violence is also an example of this. Raskolnikov’s terrifying dream, when he witnesses the brutal murder of a horse for very little reason, corresponds to that lurking question always present in horror movies with a vaguely humanoid villain – why? Why is this happening, why does this have to happen? When Raskolnikov is forced to kill the pawnbroker’s sister we are faced with another such moment, when the “why” we previously had – to give the crone’s money away to those who need it – is suddenly rendered inadequate, now that it seems to require a wholly innocent victim as well.

Dostoevsky’s language in Crime and Punishment has its own violent intensity too, such as when Raskolnikov feels “as if a nail were being driven into his skull”, or when he looks like he “had just been released from torture”. Our murderer’s mental tension is the same tensed suspense of a good horror movie, where danger is just around the corner.

Ideas and Responsibility

And then there are the ideas. I would not like to go into too much detail before I have finished the book, but I’d at least like to make some observations on the chessboard as it sits before me, as it were.

An illustration to Crime and Punishment by Nikolay Karazin, showing the moment Raskolnikov is forced to kill the pawnbroker's sister to defend himself from capture.
An illustration to Crime and Punishment by Nikolay Karazin, showing the moment Raskolnikov is forced to kill the pawnbroker’s sister to defend himself from capture.

For in Dostoevsky, there is always a war between ideas. We have by this point been introduced to one of Raskolnikov’s motivations in killing – that he could do some good with it by giving away the old woman’s money. But this theoretical approach has already come up against the unpredictability of the world – firstly in that he didn’t succeed in escaping with the money, secondly in that he was forced to kill the sister. Meanwhile, Razumikhin and Luzhin have already began arguing about the new ideas of progress, economic and otherwise. Extreme and self-centred rationality, we have already heard, will lead people to think it’s okay to put a knife into people. Obedience to much to a system is dangerous, as the wonderful image of Raskolnikov being dragged forwards, “as if a piece of his clothing had been caught in the cogs of a machine”, illustrates.

Glimpses of Redemption

Even as these two initial parts show some of the depths of the human soul, they also begin laying the foundations for later redemption. Raskolnikov’s isolation at the police station, “a dark sensation of tormenting, infinite solitude and estrangement suddenly rose to consciousness in his soul”, which is “more a sensation than an awareness, an idea”, is important for giving us understanding of the way that life is feeling just as much as it is idea. Marmeladov, in some way a double of Raskolnikov – they both have close encounters with horsemen and their whips – in his dying moments comes to understand the sacrifice that his family have made for him, and in doing so finds an implicit redemption, when he sees Sonya, “humiliated, crushed, bedizened, and ashamed”, for the first time in her prostitute’s garb. It is too late to change for life, but not too late for death.

Raskolnikov, meanwhile, through giving his money to Marmeladov’s family, has also found “a new, boundless sensation of a sudden influx of full and powerful life”. He has not found redemption yet, but he has taken his first step on the path to goodness, a journey that for me at least makes this novel so great.

Conclusion

For all this seriousness, I almost forgot to mention the humour in Crime and Punishment. Because this time round I’ve really started to find the whole thing quite funny. From this lovely exchange between Nastasya and Raskolnikov (one familiar, no doubt, to my fellow students) –

"Why don’t you do anything now?”
“I do something…” Raskolnikov said, reluctantly and sternly. 
“What do you do?” 
“Work…” 
“Which work?”
"I think.”

– to her comments when Raskolnikov awakes “And, what’s more, you were extremely interested in your own sock, extremely!”, with its equal measure for readers of humour and horror, Crime and Punishment is a hilarious book.

But the questions of guilt and redemption that lie at the heart of it are, and have always been, the ones that most appealed to me. I guess it was my Catholic upbringing that made me particularly aware of my own moral failures and need to atone for them, but I’ve always found these topics in literature, and elsewhere, the most compelling. Whether it be the Amnesia video games, to Tarkovsky’s Stalker, I’ve always enjoyed art that has challenged my ideas of personal responsibility, and shown how we can, and sometimes can’t, change. Perhaps it was thanks to Crime and Punishment that the first seeds towards my eventual time spent volunteering in prison were sowed. Who knows?

What do you think of Crime and Punishment and its themes?

Harsh Reality? Love and Class in Theodor Fontane’s On Tangled Paths

On Tangled Paths (Irrungen Wirrungen) is the fourth novel of the German author Theodor Fontane that I have read, and the third on this blog after No Way Back and Effi Briest. It is a love story, but an incredibly prosaic one. Its focus is the relationship of Lene, the adopted daughter of a washerwoman, and Botho, a young aristocrat and officer. The relationship is doomed from the start – Botho cannot possibly marry her. The great question is whether the characters will accept that and let what they have become a pleasant memory, or whether they will try to hold onto the past and potentially destroy their own futures. As with his other novels, Fontane writes simply, carefully, and intelligently about the social problems of the late 19th century. An old man when he published the novel in 1888, he treats his subject with corresponding warmth and wisdom.

Setting the Scene in On Tangled Paths

We begin with a house. Fontane demands a little initial patience – each one of his stories begins with a slow camera shot, drawing ever closer to a front door. The house in question is the one where Frau Nimptsch and Lene, her adopted daughter, live. From the beginning there is a note of plaintive nostalgia – Fontane mentions that the house is no longer there. We take this to mean that it has been consumed by the urban sprawl that transformed Berlin in the closing decades of the 19th century from a comparative backwater to a metropolis as great as any then in Europe. We are witnessing in this building something temporary as the relationships of the novel, but still we are asked to sit by, to watch, to find its beauty.

A painting showing a thriving Berlin scene
In the background of On Tangled Paths we have a sense of the churning development of the newly founded German Empire. Many of the locations featured in the novel had already been destroyed and replaced by new buildings to house the city’s ballooning population by the time Fontane published it. Painting by Adolph von Menzel

Alongside Frau Nimptsch is an old couple, the Dörrs. They grow a little produce that they sell at market. These four characters form the working class of the novel, an untraditional family of sorts. They bicker, they argue, but there is a tenderness and warmth here. We are introduced to Lene and her relationship through conversation between the two older women. Frau Dörr, whose husband married her in part because he considered her more attractive for once having had a relationship with someone from the higher classes, takes a somewhat cynical view of things – that one must remain detached. “When they start gettin’ ideas, that’s when things turn bad.” Love is not something that triumphs over all else, but one factor among many in determining what makes best sense.

Lene and her Love

Lene is perhaps my favourite heroine of Fontane’s. Though she is young, she evades many of the clichés authors, especially male authors, usually attach to their female creations. And indeed, perhaps that’s what I like about Fontane – for all his mundanity in style, his content is quietly revolutionary. I was genuinely surprised when I understood that On Tangled Paths was going to have such a focus on the lower classes. It was so natural, but at the same time unusual for a work of the 19th century. Though Lene is in love with Botho, her aristocrat, she also is intelligent enough to know that their time is limited. At one moment she’s putting a strawberry in her mouth for him to eat; in another, she’s admitting she knows this cannot last.

“Believe me, having you here now, having this time with you, that’s my happiness. I don’t worry about what the future holds. One day I’ll find you’ve flown away…”

Maybe words like these are dishonest. Maybe Lene uses them to try to convince herself to let him go. But they still speak to a deep self-knowledge and reflection, a kind of strength of character.

We meet Lene already into the relationship with Botho. They met after a boating trip went wrong and Botho intervened to save her party. That is in Easter, and before the end of the Summer things are finished between them. Time is short, and they aim to spend it well. One day, they go alone on a trip to an inn out in the countryside for a few days of peace and quiet. The whole experience is fragile, but beautiful for that very fragility. “Neither of them said anything. They mused on their happiness and wondered how much longer it would last.”

Botho…

Botho is less interesting than Lene, but then again, I’ve met far more of his kind in literature than I’ve met of hers. Botho is the kind of person I’d dismiss as a fool, no doubt because I see myself in him. He is terribly weak-willed, completely prey to external circumstances – his reputation, his family, and money. He is, at least at first, unable to do either what is necessary and part with Lene, or else to do battle against necessity and find a way for them to be together forever. Anything that suggests commitment he shies away from.

But at the same time, he is interesting more for what he and his role says about class in the early German Empire. Fontane is, after all, writing a book that is keenly attuned to slight and not-so-slight social differences. From the moment we meet him we’re aware that he’s not like the others: “He was visibly on the merry side, having come straight from imbibing a May punch, the object of a wager at his club”. He has been at the club, a place inaccessible to the women both on account of their gender and their class. He is jolly, but there is a hint of mockery about his joviality. When he declares that every station in life has its dignity, even that of a washerwoman, it’s hard to tell whether he really means it, or indeed anything he says.

…And his World

Fontane shows us Botho among Lene’s people, and then among his own. The change is immediately apparent. No longer is he Botho, but “Baron Botho von Rienäcker”. He lives in an apartment, with servants, with art on the walls and a bird in a cage for entertainment – the little hobbies of a certain social stratum. When he meets his friends they adopt masks in the form of names taken from books – Lene can read, but she hasn’t the cultural knowledge that is second nature to Botho’s coterie. He dines out with them, and we have a sense of further insurmountable linguistic barriers. Metaphors are invariably hunting related, or else concern the military – they are all officers. Botho’s enjoyment of Lene is tolerated, but not any suggestion that he would take it further. He is allowed entertainment, but not to go against his duty. He is trapped, but not like her.

A painting showing a restaurant scene of the sort Lene wouldn't have access too with her income and class
Max Liebermann, Restaurant Terrace in Nienstedten, 1902. Nienstedten is in Hamburg, but I like the painting. Food and drink is a part of Fontane’s repertoire of social commentary in On Tangled Paths. The Dörrs grow their own food, while Botho simply orders it. When he dines with Lene he gets filling meals of fish, but with Käthe he is forced into eating sweets – one woman provides what is nutritious, the other what is only on fulfilling on the surface.

But we should not judge him too harshly. He cannot truly know her life, just as she cannot truly know his. Each station has its sufferings, and while one certainly has it worse, we can only compare what we know. For Lene, the relationship is her life. “Lord, it’s such a pleasure just to have something going on. It’s often so lonely out here.” Her simple words speak to a deeper gulf. He can always find another Lene, but she can never find another Botho. Once, she describes seeing him in town among his people, riding. She cannot approach – her position is one of a spectator, doomed never to interact with him in the public space. She does not have the systematic advantage that is his by birth.

Two Perfect Matches?

Suddenly the relationship ends. Botho’s expenses have consistently eclipsed his spending, and his mother puts her foot down in a letter. Botho breaks with Lene, marries his rich cousin, and time skips forward two and a half years. Käthe, his wife, is a disappointment. Lene’s desire to learn is beautifully shown in a scene where she inspects a painting whose inscription is in English. She can mouth the letters with passionate interest, but their meaning is inevitably hidden from her. Käthe just doesn’t care. She epitomizes everything that Botho dislikes about his class – she is frivolous, full of empty words and phrases, and childish. Part of this is yet again a language problem – Botho wants authenticity; instead, he gets “chic, tournure, savoir-faire” – all French and fashionable words. He compares Käthe’s soulless letters from her time at a resort town to Lene’s misspelt but heartfelt ones.

And yet in On Tangled Paths there is no going back.

Meanwhile, Lene suffers into a new life of her own. She and Frau Nimptsch move out of their old home. In their new lodgings a religious man, Gideon Franke, falls in love with her. It is not the best match in the world, but Franke is hardworking, industrious – a new and modern man, through and through. He brings to Lene’s life much-needed stability, saving her from what no doubt would otherwise have been frightening poverty. Given a woman’s lot in the era, we should probably be as grateful as she is.

Pessimism or Realism? – the Morals of On Tangled Paths

Botho eventually comes to terms with his situation. In this lies the pessimistic, or perhaps realistic, side of On Tangled Paths and Fontane in general – no rash actions come in to save the day. But then again, no rash actions come in to spoil it. He doesn’t try to meet her again; in fact, he burns their love letters to better forget her. Lene, whose parentage is unknown, doesn’t turn out to be of royal blood. She doesn’t turn out to be anybody but herself. Botho, for his part, decides to find the good in his wife. It is not a wholly successful endeavour, but these things take a lifetime, and for Fontane it is enough to show the beginning of the process.

A photo of Theodor Fontane, author of On Tangled Paths, in his later years
Theodor Fontane. He started writing fiction when he was 57, and his works reflect that. There is a wisdom in On Tangled Paths and elsewhere, which though at times can strike one as pessimistic, nonetheless comes from a lifetime’s experience.

One day a colleague from the military meets him, Rexin, and asks his advice. He wants to know what to do about his own mistress: he hopes to marry her, or else escape Berlin altogether. He longs for “honesty, love and freedom” and hopes Botho will back him up. But Botho does not. He says that it is better to stop now, before the memories get too strong. No middle path is acceptable in the world they live in, and in the end staying within society’s bounds will always be the thing to do. It’s a surprisingly conservative message. But then, perhaps it’s the right one. The social bonds are simply too tight for anything beyond them to be worthwhile. There is no great love against the odds here, but we must remember that there is no great tragedy here either.

Perhaps “A silly young wife” really “is better than none at all”, as Botho concludes.

Conclusion

On Tangled Paths celebrates a pragmatic approach to life. Lene and Botho may not elsewhere reach the heights of bliss that they had had together, but they also remain alive and happy (enough) when the novel draws to a close. In the 19th century novel this is already a great achievement. The message that love does not, or oughtn’t, conquer all may strike us as pessimistic or overly conservative, but I find it hard to argue with here. Lene perhaps is perhaps right in her parting words to Botho: “If you’ve had a beautiful dream you should thank God for it and not complain when the dream ends and reality returns.” Better to have a beautiful dream than see life become a nightmare.

I have come to love Fontane. His novels are short, but they each display a great deal of variety in their subject matter, and they are all extremely well-written. However boring they may appear, they are all worthy of close and repeated reading. The only shame is that with On Tangled Paths I have now reached the end of Fontane’s novels easily available in English translation. There exist versions of both Jenny Treibel, and of The Stechlin, but they are hard to find. I may be forced, alas, to read him in the original again, as I did Effi. Luckily, Fontane’s worth it. Wish me luck!