Professional Documents
Culture Documents
German Novelists of The Weimar Republic
German Novelists of The Weimar Republic
Edited by
Karl Leydecker
CAMDEN HOUSE
Copyright © 2006 by the Editor and Contributors
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ISBN: 1–57113–288–0
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
Karl Leydecker
K. L.
January 2006
Introduction
Karl Leydecker
A s PETER GAY OBSERVED in his classic study of the culture of the Weimar
Republic, “For over a century Germans had looked upon politics with
a mixture of fascination and aversion.”1 German writers and intellectuals,
most notably those on the left of the political spectrum, had long dreamt
of having a direct involvement in political events and affairs of the state. In
the immediate aftermath of military defeat at the end of the First World
War and the collapse of the monarchy, it appeared that those dreams were
about to be realized. Indeed, some writers even briefly took political office
in the politically turbulent first months of 1919, most notable amongst
them the dramatist Ernst Toller, the anarchist writer Erich Mühsam, and
the intellectual Gustav Landauer, who took leading roles in the short-lived
Bavarian Republican government, an honor declined by Hermann Hesse,
while Ret Marut, who would become better known as the novelist B. Traven,
was also highly active in the Munich Republic. Certainly in no previous
period of German history did writers and intellectuals engage so directly
with political events and social forces and seek so actively to have a direct
influence on them as they were to do during the Weimar Republic. Nor
was this engagement confined to those on the left. Political and social
developments forced even conservative middle-class writers, who generally
had a conception of literature as high art that had no business dirtying its
hands with politics, and who would therefore have preferred to remain
above the fray, to abandon their Olympian detachment and enter the arena
to try to shape events.
As one commentator has noted, “the novel was the most consistently
politically charged genre of the time.”2 This volume focuses on the
response of German novelists from across the political spectrum to the
political and social events of the Weimar Republic. In doing so, it extends
in several cases to cover not just novels but also literary essays and
reportage, for several of the prominent novelists of the period, notably
Heinrich Mann, Gabriele Tergit, Jakob Wassermann, and the Austrian
novelist Joseph Roth, were prolific observers of the Republic in those
mediums. In order to set the scene, this introduction will briefly sketch the
political, social, and artistic context, which provides the necessary back-
drop for an understanding of the specific political and social engagement
of major novelists of the period.
2 KARL LEYDECKER
Such ideas were entirely alien to the mass of the populace. Despite the
agitation and bloodshed, the people as a whole were barely touched by the
revolution, and were not moved to support its aims.
Ebert was certainly not a revolutionary — if he had been he would
never have been offered the chancellorship. Ebert’s majority socialists (the
Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or SPD) and the smaller group
of independent socialists (Unabhängige Sozialdemokratische Partei
Deutschlands, or USPD, formed in 1917) could not agree on a response
to the events of November 1918. Ebert’s program was reformist; the Inde-
pendents, spurred on by the extreme left-wing Spartacists, had more gen-
uinely revolutionary principles. For seven weeks a coalition strove to find a
common policy, receiving its mandate directly from the Arbeiter- und Sol-
datenräte (workers’ and soldiers’ councils) that had sprung up in the major
cities throughout the country. However, the Independents withdrew their
support on 27 December, when it had become clear that their major aims
of socialization of the state, nationalization of industry, and democratiza-
tion of the army were not Ebert’s priorities. After the Independents left the
coalition, the Spartacists rose in armed rebellion in Berlin on 5 January
1919 and sought to take control of the state by force. When, in the face of
this, social democracy, in the person of SPD minister Gustav Noske, called
on the army (which had been at pains to keep itself intact in the midst of
these political upheavals) to put down the Spartacist rebellion, during
which Liebknecht and Luxemburg were murdered by a right-wing military
Freikorps unit, the realities of the situation became even plainer.
It was a situation that was to recur in Bavaria. The Independent Social-
ist leader Kurt Eisner had declared a Bavarian Republic on 8 November
1918. Although he was forced to concede defeat to right-wing parties in
elections held in January 1919, and was prepared to resign, he was mur-
dered by a nationalist student before he could do so. The reaction against
the right that this provoked led to the appointment of the SPD politician
Johannes Hoffmann as prime minister of the Bavarian Republic. As they
had in Berlin, the Independents rejected the SPD’s political aims as too
moderate, and sought to seize power themselves by setting up a more radi-
cally left-wing Räterepublik (Soviet-style republic) on 7 April 1919. This
new government included such figures as the writers Gustav Landauer and
Ernst Toller, whose actions were dictated by a naïve idealism and whose
lack of practical political experience became immediately obvious. The
Munich revolution was short-lived. Mirroring events in Berlin, the Social
Democrat Prime Minister Hoffmann brought in the Freikorps to stamp out
the rival government, thus provoking a civil war in which hundreds were
killed and imprisoned.
As Anton Gill has noted, “even as the plans for the new democracy
were being drawn up, the forces of reaction were crystallizing.”3 Loyalty to
the army as an agent of the government seemed to be unquestioned. There
4 KARL LEYDECKER
exchange rate at the beginning of 1914 was 4.21 marks to the dollar, by
December 1918 the figure was 8.28. By December 1921 a dollar was worth
191 marks. By December 1922 the figure had already reached 7,589 marks,
but it was in 1923 that hyperinflation reached truly epic proportions. By
August the dollar was worth 4.6 million marks, rising to 25.2 billion by
October, and peaking at an unimaginable 4.2 trillion marks to the dollar
in December 1923. Shoppers took to the street not with wallets but with
wheelbarrows full of money, and prices rose by the minute. As well as ruin-
ing the livelihoods and wiping out the savings of many, the inflationary cri-
sis “destroyed the trust and confidence of a whole generation.”4
On the political front the right-wing Kapp Putsch in Berlin of March
1920 collapsed, partly from internal weakness and differences, but also,
more encouragingly for the government, because of the loyalty of public
servants and a general strike of workers in Berlin. Both seemed to indicate
some popular support for the republic. But there was little cause for opti-
mism. Any national consensus that had existed was soon eroded. In the
Reichstag elections of 6 June 1920 the government coalition parties the
SPD, the Catholic Center Party (Zentrum), and the liberal Deutsche
Demokratische Partei (DDP) lost ground to parties both to the political
left and political right of them. On the left the Communists and the Inde-
pendent Socialists (USPD) gained an increased number of seats while on
the right the DDP lost much of its support to Gustav Stresemann’s monarchist
Deutsche Volkspartei (DVP), which had campaigned under the claim that
they were the only party that could resist the threat of tyranny by the left
wing. Even more indicative of the swing to right were the successes of the
nationalist Deutschnationale Volkspartei (DNVP) and the Deutsche
Volkspartei. Although they remained the largest single party in the Reichstag,
the Social Democrats temporarily withdrew from the government and
went into opposition.
The ensuing frequent changes of administration and varying fortunes
of the very high number of political parties and factions demonstrate how
little enthusiasm or loyalty these successive administrations enjoyed from
the general German public. They also showed that Germany lacked any
definable or acceptable political course. The threat of disorder and social
upheaval simply caused the middle classes to become increasingly reac-
tionary, to embrace the old authoritarian attitudes and to look to the mili-
tary as saviors of the national interest. The military in general were still
held in high regard. The officer class still commanded respect and was
regarded as socially superior, while the military values of loyalty and discip-
line were preserved by veterans’ organizations such as the Stahlhelm (steel
helmet), whose attraction grew for many as the internal fragmentation of
the republic continued apace.
Meanwhile, powerful industrial concerns resisted government attempts
to levy more tax from them. They argued that it was their patriotic duty to
6 KARL LEYDECKER
resist such taxation if the money raised was simply to be used to pay the
humiliating and unjust reparations. As inflation raged, these industrialists
made huge profits by selling goods abroad for hard foreign currency while
paying their workers in worthless Deutschmarks. Inflation was the greatest
destabilizing factor, undermining the whole of German society, and it was
a blow from which Weimar Germany never recovered, either politically or
socially. The middle classes had their savings wiped out and felt themselves
let down by the government as their security was shattered when social and
economic stability disappeared. This led to widespread disillusionment, not
only with the parties but with Weimar democracy as a whole.
Those that railed against the Treaty of Versailles attacked the political
representatives that had accepted it, the republican government in general,
the Allies, the Jews — in fact anything and anyone that might serve as a
scapegoat and persuade people of the acceptability of an authoritarian,
nationalistic, militant alternative to further national unity and national
pride. When, in 1921, Walther Rathenau, Minister of Reconstruction,
stated that it was Germany’s duty to follow the terms of the Treaty of
Versailles, whatever its injustices, he was accused of betraying the national
cause and of doing so because he was a Jew. The hatred generated against
Rathenau led to his assassination on 24 June 1922 by two ex-officers from
a Freikorps brigade, who were later turned into Nazi heroes for their exem-
plary “patriotism.”
The assassination of Rathenau is the subject matter of Vicki Baum’s
novel Feme (1926), discussed by Heather Valencia in this volume, and the
lives and motives of these two young men are portrayed in the novel Die
Geächteten (The Outlaws, 1930) by Ernst von Salomon. The author was
himself implicated in Rathenau’s murder and was sentenced to five years
imprisonment in 1922. After his release he became involved in anti-
republican activities among farmers in Schleswig-Holstein, activities that
are reflected in Hans Fallada’s novel Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben (Farmers,
Functionaries, and Fireworks, 1931), which is discussed in Jenny Williams’s
chapter on Fallada in this volume. Salomon depicts events from the end
of the war until Rathenau’s assassination. The novel portrays how patri-
otic and nationalistic organizations were created as a direct consequence
of the abortive revolution, and shows the extremes to which the members
of such groups were prepared to go in pursuit of their political principles.
Nor was Rathenau’s assassination an isolated case. Anton Gill notes that
“376 political murders were committed in Germany between 1918 and
1922.”5
At the beginning of 1923 the nationalist camp won further sympathy
for their claims of persecution by the French and other allies as the French
occupied the key industrial region of the Ruhr, which they justified as a
reaction to the failure to maintain reparation payments. The German
nationalists used this to stimulate further support for their political views.
INTRODUCTION 7
Weimar Culture
As Anton Gill noted in his lively account of Berlin between the wars, cul-
tural life flourished in Berlin even at the height of the revolutionary
upheavals in 1918/19,10 and if the Weimar Republic was characterized by
political instability, this went hand in hand with a vibrant cultural life that
quickly became the stuff of legend.11 Film, theater, cabaret, dance, art,
architecture and design, as well as novel writing, all experienced a creative
flowering during the period. Moreover, during the course of the 1920s
German culture became more open to influences from other cultures,
10 KARL LEYDECKER
most notably the United States, as financial credits went together with
cultural influence, and at the same time German culture was itself well-
received in the English-speaking world. To take one example, American
jazz became hugely popular in Germany, while in the other direction,
German Expressionist films were internationally acclaimed and distributed.
Novelists who rose to prominence in Germany were also often quickly
translated into English and enjoyed a wide readership and considerable
prestige in the United States as well as in their own country, notable exam-
ples being Thomas Mann, Jakob Wassermann, and Hermann Hesse, though
it is true to some extent of nearly all the novelists featured in this volume.12
Expressionism, initially associated primarily with the visual arts and
poetry, crystallized as a movement around 1910 and experienced its high
point during and in the immediate aftermath of the First World War.13 It
was therefore, along with its close companion Dada, which was particularly
in vogue in Berlin, still the dominant artistic mode in the early years of the
Weimar Republic. Characteristic of Expressionism is an oscillation between
messianic optimism and apocalyptic despair, which was perfectly in tune
with the times during the chaotic period of military defeat and the
revolutionary events of 1918–19. The greatest Expressionist poetry was
written on the eve and in the early years of the war. By the time Kurt
Pinthus published his seminal collection of Expressionist poems, which he
ambivalently called Menschheitsdämmerung (The Dawn [or Twilight] of
Mankind, 1918), many of the greatest poets, amongst them Ernst Stadler,
August Stramm, and Georg Trakl, were dead. Expressionist plays did begin
to appear on the eve of the war, notable examples being Reinhard Sorge’s
Der Bettler (The Beggar, 1912) and Walter Hasenclever’s Der Sohn (The
Son, 1914), which as the name implies focuses on the conflict between the
generations in a manner that would become typical of Expressionism. But
it was during the early years of the Weimar Republic that Expressionism
reached its high point in the theater, with the appearance of now-classic
Expressionist plays such as Ernst Toller’s Die Wandlung (The Transform-
ation, 1919) and Masse Mensch (Masses and Man, 1921), and Georg
Kaiser’s so-called Gas-Trilogie (comprising Die Koralle [The Coral, 1917]
and Gas I and Gas II [1918 and 1920]). With the first performance of
Bertolt Brecht’s early play Trommeln in der Nacht (Drums in the Night,
first performed in 1922 and published the following year) Expressionism
in the theater at least was a movement already in decline, Brecht’s play
marking a deliberate challenge to the excessive emotionalism of Expres-
sionism.14 Filmmakers meanwhile adopted the Expressionist style a little
later than the other arts. Robert Wiene’s Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari
(1919) is regarded as the first Expressionism film, and in film the style
remained in vogue well into the 1920s, with F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu
(1922) and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) among the masterpieces of
German Expressionist film.15
INTRODUCTION 11
Weimar Novelists
The Weimar Republic was a propitious time for novelists.25 Not only is the
novel a form that lends itself well to the exploration of the turbulent polit-
ical circumstances and rapid social change which characterized the Weimar
Republic, but there was a rapidly expanding readership, as literacy
improved, leisure time increased, and bookclubs proliferated.26 The result
was a large market for both high-brow and more popular novels during the
period. New genres became popular, such as the detective story and the
“Zeitroman” (novel of the times), while older genres such as the historical
novel were revived and given a new relevance for the times, notably by
Lion Feuchtwanger, discussed in Rolland Dollinger’s chapter in this vol-
ume.27 Also popular were novels set in exotic locations, none more so than
INTRODUCTION 13
read on both sides of the Atlantic. Each chapter contains a brief account of
the life of the novelist, his or her significant achievements before and after
the Weimar Republic where relevant, and the history of their reception,
but the principal focus is on the engagement of the novelists with Weimar
politics and society, be it in their novels or in essays or other non-fiction
such as the feuilleton, a series of subjective impressions that appeared in
the section of German newspapers with the same name. In the case of non-
fiction, particular attention is paid to this dimension of the Weimar writ-
ings of Heinrich Mann, Gabriele Tergit, and Jakob Wassermann, while
Joseph Roth’s Weimar journalism, a substantial sample of which has
recently become available to an English-reading public for the first time, is
given special attention in Helen Chambers’s chapter on the novelist.31
At its beginnings the Weimar Republic seemed to hold out the
promise that writers could have a direct influence on political and social
life. The fact that the National Socialists organized public book burnings
on 10 May 1933 in which works by many of the novelists featured in this
volume, including Baum, Feuchtwanger, Mann, Remarque, Roth, Traven,
and Wassermann, were destroyed, paradoxically illustrates the perceived
political and social power of novelists during the period, which the
National Socialists moved rapidly to curtail.32 At the same time, the book
burnings marked the end of all freedom of expression in Germany and the
abrupt termination of one of the most innovative and creative periods of
novel writing in the German language.
Notes
1
Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (London: Penguin, 1988), 73.
2
Alfred D. White, “Weimar Republic,” in Encyclopedia of German Literature, ed.
Matthias Konzett (Chicago and London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2000), 2:989–93;
here, 991.
3
Anton Gill, A Dance between Flames: Berlin between the Wars (London: John
Murray, 1993), 24.
4
Bernd Widdig, Culture and Inflation in Weimar Germany (Berkeley, Los
Angeles, and London: U of California P, 2001), 3. Widdig’s excellent book not
only contains a lively account of the experience of hyperinflation, but also a wide-
ranging investigation of the effects of that inflation on the culture of the Weimar
Republic.
5
Gill, A Dance between Flames, 72.
6
For an account of literary representations of the legal system in the Weimar
Republic, see Klaus Petersen, Literatur und Justiz in der Weimarer Republik
(Stuttgart: Metzler, 1988), and Jörg Hammerschmidt, Literarische Justizkritik in
der Weimarer Republik: Der Beitrag der Schriftsteller in der Auseinandersetzung mit
INTRODUCTION 15
der Justizwirklichkeit unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Werkes von Kurt Tuchol-
sky (Göttingen: Cuvillier, 2002).
7
On unemployment in the literature of the Weimar Republic, see Thorsten Unger,
Diskontinuitäten im Erwerbsleben: Vergleichende Untersuchungen zu Arbeit und
Erwerbslosigkeit in der Literatur der Weimarer Republik (Tübingen: Niemeyer,
2004).
8
Detlev J. Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity, trans.
Richard Deveson (London: Penguin, 1991), 266–67.
9
Peukert, The Weimar Republic, 259.
10
Gill, A Dance between Flames, chap. 2, 21–39.
11
Only a brief outline of the richness of Weimar culture can be given here. Useful
further reading on Weimar culture generally includes: Walter Laqueur, Weimar: A
Cultural History, 1918–1933 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974); John
Willett, The New Sobriety, 1917–1933: Art and Politics in the Weimar Period
(London: Thames and Hudson, 1978); Willett, The Weimar Years: A Culture Cut
Short (London: Thames and Hudson, 1984); Jost Hermand and Frank Trommler,
Die Kultur der Weimarer Republik (Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung,
1978); and Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg, eds., The Weimar
Republic Sourcebook (Berkeley and London: U of California P, 1994). On Weimar
literature more specifically, see Anthony Grenville, Cockpit of Ideologies: The Litera-
ture and Political History of the Weimar Republic (Bern, Berlin, New York: Peter
Lang, 1995); Keith Bullivant, ed., Culture and Society in the Weimar Republic
(Manchester: MUP, 1977); A. F. Bance, ed., Weimar Germany: Writers and Politics
(Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1982); and Richard Dove and Stephen
Lamb, eds., German Writers and Politics, 1918–1939 (Basingstoke and London:
Macmillan, 1992). On Weimar art, see Bärbel Schrader and Jürgen Scherera, The
“Golden” Twenties: Art and Literature in the Weimar Republic (New Haven and
London, Yale UP, 1990).
12
On American influences in Weimar, see Thomas W. Kniesche and Stephen
Brockmann, eds., Dancing on the Volcano: Essays on the Culture of the Weimar
Republic (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1994), part 2, 69–116.
13
On Expressionism, see A Companion to the Literature of German Expressionism,
ed. Neil H. Donahue (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2005).
14
On Weimar theater, see John Willett’s definitive study, The Theater of the Weimar
Republic (New York and London: Holmes & Meier, 1988).
15
On Weimar film, see Dietrich Scheunemann, ed., Expressionist Film: New Per-
spectives (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2003) and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis: Cin-
ematic Visions of Technology and Fear, ed. Michael Minden and Holger Bachmann
(Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000).
16
Gill, A Dance between Flames, 34.
17
Willett, The Weimar Years, 111.
18
Ibid., 7.
19
Erhard Schütz, “Beyond Glittering Reflections of Asphalt: Changing Images of
Berlin in Weimar Literary Journalism,” in Kniesche and Brockmann, Dancing on
16 KARL LEYDECKER
the Volcano, 119–26. Two further chapters of part 3 of that collection of essays
focus on Berlin as a case study in Weimar culture; see 127–63. The photojournalis-
tic representation of the Weimar Republic, with a particular focus on Berlin, is the
subject of the superbly illustrated The Weimar Republic through the Lens of the Press
by Torsten Palmér and Hendrik Neubauer (Cologne: Könemann, 2000).
20
On cabaret, see Alan Lareau, The Wild Stage: Literary Cabarets of the Weimar
Republic (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1995).
21
On Weimar photography, see Diethart Kerbs and Walter Uka, eds., Fotografie
und Bildpublizistik in der Weimarer Republik (Bönen: Kettler, 2004).
22
Erich Kästner’s novel Fabian (1931), in which the eponymous hero is employed
as a copywriter in the advertising industry, is a satirical literary reflection on the
advertising industry towards the end of the Weimar Republic.
23
For Piscator’s own account of the production of Hoppla, wir leben! see Erwin
Piscator, Das politische Theater (Berlin: A. Schultz, 1929, repr. Reinbek bei
Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1963), translated as The Political Theatre by Hugh Rorrison
(London: Eyre Methuen, 1980).
24
Jost Hermand, “Neue Sachlichkeit: Ideology, Lifestyle, or Artistic Movement?”
in Kniesche and Brockmann, Dancing on the Volcano, 57–68; here, 58.
25
The best recent study of the Weimar novel in English is David Midgley, Writing
Weimar: Critical Realism in German Literature, 1918–1933 (Oxford: Oxford UP,
2000). In English, see also Elke Matijevich, The Zeitroman of the Late Weimar
Republic (New York: Peter Lang, 1995). There has been considerable critical inter-
est in the Weimar novel by German critics in recent years, with important studies
including Erhard Schütz, Romane der Weimarer Republik (Munich: Fink, 1986);
Martin Lindner, Leben in der Krise: Zeitromane der Neuen Sachlichkeit und die
intellektuelle Mentalität der klassischen Moderne (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1994); Sabina
Becker and Christoph Weiß, eds., Neue Sachlichkeit im Roman: Neue Interpretatio-
nen zum Roman der Weimarer Republik (Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 1995);
Michael Hahn, Scheinblüte, Krisenzeit, Nationalsozialismus: Die Weimarer Repub-
lik im Spiegel später Zeitromane (1928–32/33) (Bern: Peter Lang, 1995); and
Walter Delabar, Was tun?: Romane am Ende der Weimarer Republik (Opladen/
Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1999).
26
On bookclubs, see Urban van Melis, Die Buchgemeinschaften in der Weimarer
Republik: Mit einer Fallstudie über die sozialdemokratische Arbeiterbuchgemein-
schaft “Der Bücherkreis” (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 2002).
27
On the historical novel during the Weimar Republic, see also Bettina Hey’l,
Geschichtsdenken und literarische Moderne: Zum historischen Roman in der Zeit der
Weimarer Republik (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994).
28
See Matthias Eberle, World War I and the Weimar Artists: Dix, Grosz, Beckmann,
Schlemmer (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1985).
29
On the feminist movements of the period, see Richard J. Evans, The Feminist
Movement in Germany, 1894–1933 (London and Beverly Hills: Sage, 1976).
30
On gender relations in the Weimar novel, see also Hartmut Vollmer, Liebes(ver)lust:
Existenzsuche und Beziehungen von Männern und Frauen in deutschsprachigen
Romanen der zwanziger Jahre: Erzählte Krisen — Krisen des Erzählens (Oldenburg:
INTRODUCTION 17
Igel Verlag, 1998). On female creativity in the Weimar Republic, see Practicing
Modernity: Female Creativity in the Weimar Republic, ed. Christiane Schönfeld
with Carmel Finnan (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006). On women
writers of the Weimar Republic, see Walter Fähnders and Helga Karrenbrock, eds.,
Autorinnen der Weimarer Republik (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2003); specifically on the
novel, see Kerstin Barndt, Sentiment und Sachlichkeit: Der Roman der Neuen Frau
in der Weimarer Republik (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: Böhlau, 2003).
31
Austrian novelists have not been included in the volume, with two exceptions:
Roth’s journalism and the works of Vicki Baum, who although Austrian by birth,
like Roth lived in Berlin during the Weimar Republic. Nor are there chapters on the
two giants of German novel writing in the first half of the twentieth century, Franz
Kafka (1883–1924) and Thomas Mann (1875–1955), on both of whom there is a
mass of critical literature readily available in English as well as German. Moreover,
Kafka was in any case a marginal figure during the Weimar Republic and was not
widely read until after the Second World War, while Thomas Mann’s major full-
length novel of the Weimar Republic, Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain,
1924) is set before the First World War and is more a diagnosis of the collapse of
the old prewar order than a direct engagement with the Weimar Republic. On
Mann’s politics during the Weimar Republic, see the opposing views of Keith Bul-
livant, “Thomas Mann and Politics in the Weimar Republic,” in Bullivant, Culture
and Society in the Weimar Republic, 24–38, and Martin Swales, “In Defence of
Weimar: Thomas Mann and the Politics of Republicanism,” in Bance, Weimar Ger-
many: Writers and Politics, 1–13. Limitations of space precluded the inclusion of
other writers for whom a case could be made, notably Werner Bergengruen, Willi
Bredel, Kasimir Edschmid, Marieluise Fleißer, Erich Kästner, Irmgard Keun, Hans
Henny Jahnn, and Anna Seghers.
32
On the book burning, see Ulrich Walberer, ed., 10. Mai 1933: Bücherverbrennung
in Deutschland und die Folgen (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1983). A selected list of
banned authors during the period from 1933–45 is given on p. 303.
1: Heinrich Mann and the Struggle
for Democracy
Karin V. Gunnemann
H EINRICH MANN WAS ONE OF THE most outspoken and visible literary
figures during the Weimar Republic. Other novelists were more popu-
lar in the twenties and early thirties, but none of them dealt with the polit-
ical, social, and cultural upheavals of the new republic with more energy
and courageous vision than he. Well before the First World War Mann had
criticized the repressive life under Wilhelm II in both essays and fiction.
His work had provoked the authorities to the point where his ninth novel,
Die kleine Stadt (The Little Town), was at first denied publication in 1909.
Mann had introduced the work as the song of songs of democracy, and it
was feared that it might contaminate the public’s faith in the authoritarian
national state.1
Mann’s political criticism comes as a surprise if one looks at his back-
ground. Born in 1871 into the world of a well-established bourgeois family
of merchants and civil servants, his literary beginnings were situated firmly
in the fin-de-siècle aestheticism and political conservatism prevalent at that
time. But even as a young man he began to develop a keen interest in the
intellectual and artistic history of France. He studied the French philoso-
phers of the Enlightenment, and he observed how a novelist like Honoré de
Balzac (1799–1850) stressed the importance of the writer as an anatomist
and legislator of his time and nation. As early as 1904 Mann defined his role
and that of all serious writers as moral and political educators of the people
and saw himself specifically as a teacher of democracy for Germany. From
then on, the French Revolution (naively stripped of its contradiction
between freedom and violence) became for Mann the pivotal event in
human history. The supreme task of a German artist-intellectual, a person
of Geist (intellect), he argued, was to educate his nation to follow the
demands of critical reason for truth and justice, just as the French people
had done in the Revolution of 1789. Along with other important writers of
the time such as Alfred Döblin and Georg Kaiser, Mann came to under-
stand intellect as irrevocably tied to action, a dissecting and equalizing force
working on society whenever power obscured social and political truth, and
threatened human justice and freedom.2 Intellect became for Mann the
spearhead in Germany’s attempt to establish a democratic government.
20 KARIN V. GUNNEMANN
with fascist tendencies. Historians are also interested in how the novel por-
trays the political role of the middle class with its antidemocratic national-
ism before and after the First World War.5
By close observation of German society under Wilhelm II and acute
premonition of its direction, Mann anticipated in this novel several of the
basic obstacles Germany faced in its attempt to become a viable democracy
during the years of the Weimar Republic. In Der Untertan he dramatized
a political system in which indecisive liberal parties helplessly watched the
coalition between an aggressive nationalism and monopoly capitalism.
Social Democrats had less interest in social reforms than in securing their
position in government, and the proletariat was unorganized and open
to coercion and corruption. Most important, Mann exposed what he
understood to be a uniquely German characteristic, the “Untertanengeist”
(spirit of an underling). The underling was the loyal subject who ironically
combined a masochistic subservience with a will to wield power over those
beneath him. In his late autobiographical memoir, Mann declared power as
his most fruitful theme, the topic around which he composed most of his
works.6 Through Der Untertan he wanted to warn his readers of the dev-
astating effect of the “Untertanengeist” on the political, social, and cul-
tural life of a nation. Together with the short story “Kobes,” from 1923,
this novel is the strongest example of Mann’s belief in the educational role
of fiction for public life.
Some historians would argue that the mentality of the German
“Untertan” survived the First World War and the German Revolution of
1918/19, and was in part the social-psychological basis for Hitler’s rise to
power in 1933. The protagonist of the novel, Diederich Heßling, the
underling, clearly prefigures fascist practices. Mann himself called Der
Untertan a “Kampfbuch” (polemical treatise) against Wilhelmine politics.7
As such it provides a thematic, critical background for Mann’s literary
engagement in the politics of the Weimar Republic.
Mann recognized that the attempt by Wilhelm II to combine a boom-
ing, modern, imperialist economy with a backward, restrictive, and authori-
tarian political system was a ludicrous anachronism. In order to subdue the
increasing opposition and socially integrate his subjects, the emperor had
built his personality into mythical heroic proportions. He presented this
invented self to the public with great histrionics. His dazzling words about
Germany’s unique grandeur and expansion through colonies, his boastings
about the might with which he was smashing the socialist onslaught, and
the hollow threats to his foreign enemies all served to intoxicate his sub-
jects with awe and fantasies of unrealistic goals. The emperor’s grand
behavior provoked in his people a desire for imitation.
The development of Diederich Heßling’s character is a reversal of the
unfolding of an individual described in the German “Bildungsroman.” In
this literary genre the protagonist goes through a slow process of inner
22 KARIN V. GUNNEMANN
Heßling, the monarchist and loyal subject, finds here the reason for his
existence. After the personal encounter with the Emperor, he feels ready to
imitate the monarch and become a pioneer of the spirit of the times in his
native town of Netzig.
Mann has Heßling imitate the Emperor in looks as well as in exact
speech. By taking the Emperor’s words out of context, he hopes to
heighten the reader’s understanding of their preposterous meaning. In
order to provide a critique of domestic and foreign policy in prewar
HEINRICH MANN AND THE STRUGGLE FOR DEMOCRACY 23
reflect the wide spectrum of the hardened political and cultural positions in
Germany after the war, a spectrum that made the realization of a democra-
tic state during the Weimar Republic so problematic right from the begin-
ning. The critique from the right went so far as to threaten Mann’s life for
what some called his unpatriotic and communist smear campaign. His
brother derided the book as an irresponsible social satire unrelated to real-
ity. He called the novel sheer nonsense (Unfug), and he added: “. . . .
wenn sie einen vornehmeren Namen verdiente, einen vornehmeren als den
der internationalen Verleumdung und der nationalen Ehrabschneiderei, so
laute er: Ruchloser Ästhetizismus” (. . . . and if it deserved a more noble
name, more noble than that of international defamation and national slan-
der, then it would be: ruthless aestheticism).11 On the other hand, the
young Activist-Expressionists hailed the novel as a long-overdue injection
of political blood into the German people, and there were those who
affirmed the book as the valuable account of a gullible people seduced by
power.12 Even though the heat of the responses and the number of reviews
diminished during the Weimar years, Der Untertan catapulted Mann into
the position of a public figure whose writings remained at the center of the
intellectual and political debates of the Weimar Republic.
Mann played his most public role in the so-called November Revolu-
tion, which followed the armistice of 11 November 1918. At the time, in
several German cities, Arbeiter- und Soldatenräte (Workers’ and Soldiers’
Councils) were formed, modeled on the Soviet Workers’ Councils. Unlike
their model, however, these councils did not promote radical social change
through revolutionary means. Rather, their primary goal was to establish
peace between the radical factions and to represent a strong democratic
presence in a newly elected social-democratic government. Kurt Hiller, an
activist among the expressionists and a great admirer of Heinrich Mann,
organized Intellectual Workers in several German cities that were to coop-
erate with the Councils of Workers, Soldiers, and Peasants. In Munich,
Mann’s adopted home town, the Independent Socialist Kurt Eisner had
established such a council, and Mann was asked to become its chairman. In
the Politische Räte geistiger Arbeiter (Councils of Intellectual Workers)
Mann saw an opportunity for the realization of the idea that was most
important to him, the unity of Geist und Tat (intellect and action). Eisner
himself combined the qualities Mann thought were necessary for a politic-
ally effective artist intellectual. He was a well-educated man though his
roots were in the working class. He was a philosopher, educator, writer,
politician, and pragmatist, who believed in political change through the
power of ideas rather than revolutionary force. Never before in German
history had the possibility of an effective involvement of intellectuals
in politics looked more hopeful than directly after the First World War.
Germany was finally ready to join the rest of the Western world in the pursuit
of freedom and justice. Persons of Geist hoped to assist the population in
HEINRICH MANN AND THE STRUGGLE FOR DEMOCRACY 27
sorting out the contradictory political claims made on them. The most
important task was the enlightenment of the future voters in order to pre-
vent a relapse into reactionary politics. Mann shared with Eisner the recog-
nition that after Germany’s long experience with power politics, the
creation of a democratic system would have to be a slow, dynamic learning
process, an approximation of an ideal, the realization of which, most prob-
ably, lay beyond their own lifetime.
The Councils only survived until May 1919, when “Freikorps” (free
corps), rightist military groups, put a bloody end to them. Eisner himself
was murdered by a rightist extremist in February 1919. But Mann’s work
for the Council in these short months provided for him public visibility
through speeches he gave expressing his thoughts about the kind of poli-
tics Germany needed. In his second address to the Political Council of
Intellectual Workers in December 1918 (one of the few that has been
translated into English), he stressed that the revolution was an attempt to
introduce Germany to the moral laws of the liberated Western world. Ger-
many’s defeat served as an opportunity to move toward absolute honesty
and away from its former position, where might took precedence over
right. He emphasized that intellectual boldness in the name of justice was
at this point in German history more important than material wellbeing or
the socialization of the means of production. As an example, he pointed to
Woodrow Wilson, who in 1918 had formulated the famous Fourteen
Points that he thought would make the world “safe for democracy.” Ignor-
ing, or at least putting aside, the bitter reality of postwar economic and
political chaos, Mann declared that a spiritual revolution had to precede
economic transformation. The fate of a nation was more determined by its
“way of feeling and thinking” than by economic principles. He called on
his fellow intellectual workers to help shape the German people into
responsible republicans who, through their insistence on justice, would
reconcile Germany with the rest of the world.13
In December 1919, Mann published Macht und Mensch (Power and
Humanity), which he called a textbook for the Republic. The volume con-
tains the sum of his political essays from 1910 onward with the addition of
one long, new piece called “Kaiserreich und Revolution” (Empire and
Revolution). This essay is not only a political complement to his novel Der
Untertan, but is also the first essay in which Mann clearly called for a social
democracy for Germany and spelled out concrete suggestions for its imple-
mentation. He was deeply concerned about the murderous hatred with
which the Communists were trying to get a foothold in Germany, thereby
radicalizing the attacks from the extreme right. Mann envisaged a new
German state in which the social classes moved toward equality guided by
reason, individual responsibility, and a shared interest in work and owner-
ship. For the sake of justice and humanity, he wrote, we must socialize.
Mann called for economic policies that would accomplish two basic
28 KARIN V. GUNNEMANN
changes. One, the proletarians would be raised and gentrified to the point
where they ceased to exist as a separate class. Two, the new bourgeoisie
would be forced to question its self-hatred and at the same time would be
freed from its addiction to being part of a master race. Mann believed that
only by abolishing class differences could Germans finally reach an ethic of
individual responsibility in politics.14
The utopian goal of a classless bourgeois society may seem to readers
of the twenty-first century (as it seemed to many readers of Mann’s own
time) as painfully out of touch with reality. By December 1919, all of
Germany was in brutal turmoil as assassinations by the right spurred reprisals
from the left. Since Bavaria was the most fertile breeding ground for vari-
ous counterrevolutionary groups, Munich experienced the pendulum of
political events with greater violence than any other city in Germany.
Mann’s vision of a social republic was based more on his idealistic admir-
ation of the French Revolution and the tradition of 1848 than on a realistic
assessment of the social and political struggle of postwar Germany. He
lacked insight into the importance of class identification and, in spite of his
very justified attacks on the current political situation, he was not suffi-
ciently aware of the entrenched power structures that were not about to
give up their grip on the government. He was unaware of the fear of the
middle class of descending the social ladder and of the genuine pride
others had in belonging to the working class. He underestimated the
heightened susceptibility of the middle class to antidemocratic challenges
precipitated by economic and sociopsychological factors arising from the
war and its aftermath. In spite of increasing counterevidence over the next
years, Mann preserved his idealistic view of the final victory of reason in
human history. He emphasized that the darker the times, the more import-
ant it was to keep the moral assets of humanity alive, a task ascribed to the
artist-intellectual above all.
True, the content of the Weimar Constitution adopted in August
1919 gave Mann concrete reasons for hope that Germany would finally
follow the other European nations in becoming a functioning democratic
state. Universal, equal, direct, and secret suffrage, and the right to free
assembly and association were established but, within a few months, the
Kapp Putsch (March 1920), an attempted coup d’état, made it clear that
the military represented a continuing threat to the new government. The
destructive presence of nationalism in politics was fed by the widely held
conviction that Germany had never fully been defeated in the First World
War, and also by the Versailles Treaty, with its demand for exorbitant puni-
tive reparations. Though the Constitution had provided for comprehensive
codes of labor, none of the socialization laws promised during the Revolu-
tion were ever passed. The alliance between the aristocracy and industry
that had dominated the Empire continued to exist, and Socialists and labor
unions watched powerless as multimillionaires formed large cartels across
HEINRICH MANN AND THE STRUGGLE FOR DEMOCRACY 29
borders. To many, it was obvious that French and German business mag-
nates were secretly negotiating the formation of an iron and coal cartel. In
a letter to his French friend Félix Bertaux in April, 1923, Mann reported
that he was working on a long article for Die neue Rundschau15 in which
he was going to expose the disastrous predominance of the economy,
above all of industry. In Germany, a helpless socialist party was standing by
while industry was destroying all human freedom. It was most urgent that
German and French intellectuals fight together against these industrialists
who wanted to prevent Europe from uniting (BW, 55–57).
On 11 August 1923, Germany celebrated the anniversary of the
Weimar Constitution in Dresden. The extent to which Mann was con-
sidered a spokesperson for the Weimar Republic is shown by the fact that
he was asked to contribute a formal address at this occasion in the Dresden
Opera House. The “Dresdner Rede,” as his speech was called, is one of the
short masterpieces of Mann’s political writings. Its impact went well
beyond Germany.16 That year, the celebration of the Weimar Constitution
took place under the burden of the Ruhr Invasion. In January, 1923,
France, with one Belgian division, had occupied the Ruhr region in order
not only to guarantee the flow of reparations but also to achieve the pre-
dominance of French industries in Europe.17
Mann focused his address on two issues, the continuing war-mad
nationalism of Germans, now heated by the French occupation, and the
danger of the concentration of capital for the welfare of the majority and
for a democratic political system. Fearless of the hatred he would cause in
some circles, he asked his audience, with high rhetorical skill, whether this
day was truly a time for celebration, or not rather a day for alarm. Had the
spirit of the Constitution not been to work for peace and social equality?
But what was the spirit reigning now other than hatred? Had the form of
government not become a republican plutocracy, a dictatorship of the
greediest? He conceded that the general reactionary tendencies in
Germany were partly the consequence of the continuing oppression by
foreign masters and the general spiritual exhaustion that followed war, but
he pointed to the blood-gorging profiteers who used the universal
exhaustion for their own profit. The Weimar Constitution had been con-
ceived in Weimar, a symbolic place for the renunciation of absolutism and
for the desire to live by humane ideas. But now the German people found
themselves thrown from a prewar military absolutism into the unlimited
power of capitalism, even though it was clear that only as a democracy
could the country survive. Nothing was to be expected from the bankrupt
Reichstag. In its inertia it resembled a house of ghosts playing a grotesque
ghost sonata. The chancellor himself fed the people with empty promises.
Mann ended his speech expressing his hope that spiritual leaders, intellec-
tuals like him, could save the Republic by keeping alive those moral values
on which the Constitution had been founded. The state and the economy,
30 KARIN V. GUNNEMANN
he pointed out, were only useful to the extent that they served human-
ity. All working people had to unite and follow those leaders who
regarded them as moral human beings to whom they felt responsible.
Mann assured the laborers that they could count on intellectuals as their
best friends.18
Another example of Mann’s passionate commitment to the survival of
the Republic, and to the active role of the intellectual in politics, is his open
letter to chancellor Gustav Stresemann in October 1923.19 By the fall of
1923, inflation had spiraled out of control. Reparation payments had been
well in arrears, and the Allies demanded that they be paid in gold. The
resulting adverse balance of payments and flight of capital meant that by
October, not millions or billions, but trillions of marks were needed to buy
a loaf of bread or mail a letter. There were food riots, and widespread star-
vation was reported. Early in August of 1923, the Social Democrats had
declared the need for a new national coalition to deal with the crisis, and
Gustav Stresemann was called upon to form a new cabinet. Though a Ver-
nunftrepublikaner (republican of the mind) rather than a fervent supporter
of democracy, Stresemann aligned himself firmly with the defenders of the
Weimar system. His brief tenure testifies to the chaotic state of the Repub-
lic. He was chancellor for only three months, during which his cabinet fell
twice. He foiled an attempt by the army in collaboration with leaders of
big business to force him to resign, and he also helped to crush Hitler’s
first attempted putsch.
Mann wrote his letter on 11 October, five days after Stresemann was
again forced to reshuffle his cabinet in order to escape a reactionary
takeover. His open letter was published in the Vossische Zeitung, Berlin, and
had the title “Diktatur der Vernunft” (Dictatorship of Reason). The
address to Stresemann is worth reading today for its masterful craftsman-
ship and powerful historical message. The piece exemplifies Mann’s keen
sense of dramatic wording and effect. In short, decisive, and provocative
statements, through repetitions, and forceful summonses, and imperatives,
he asked Stresemann to do three things: first, to avoid a dictatorship of
power, second, to establish a dictatorship of justice, and third, to adopt a
dictatorship of reason. He blamed the timidity of Social Democratic pol-
icies for the formation of a poisoning plutocracy of industry that acted as
hangman of the state. In terms that in their urgency prefigure warnings he
later voiced about the rise of National Socialism, Mann asked the chancel-
lor to get rid of those shabby rogues who were seducing the vulnerable
German people with empty promises. He assured Stresemann that it was
not too late to work on those issues of justice on which the Constitution
had been based: human rights, socialization of industries, redistribution
of land, state-controlled capitalism. And he emphasized again that
Germany required a social democracy in order to limit the abuse of power
by big industry. The disastrous effect of the last four years had shown the
HEINRICH MANN AND THE STRUGGLE FOR DEMOCRACY 31
waiting rooms that zoom up and down macabre elevator shafts. Characters
chase each other through labyrinthine, elusive spaces to find the phantom,
Kobes, who has his office somewhere in the upper regions of the building.
The story opens with an allegorical figure named Middle Class, who in
his full and ludicrous devotion to the power of Kobes reminds the reader
of Diederich Heßling’s destructive worship of the Emperor. In absolute
self-denial, the faceless figure has only one ambition: to serve the greatest,
to see him, and die. As in George Orwell’s 1984, Kobes advertises himself
through a thundering radio voice that fills all spaces. He declares: “Ich
habe einfache Gedanken, einfache Ziele. Ich bin nichts Vornehmes, Politik
verstehe ich nicht. Rühriger Kaufmann bin ich, Sinnbild der deutschen
Demokratie. Mich kann keiner. Ich bin Kobes” (I have simple ideas, simple
goals. I am nothing noble. Of politics I understand nothing. I’m a busy
businessman, symbol of German democracy. Nobody can touch me. I am
Kobes).23 Kobes’ wealth has grown to mythic proportions. It is the new
religion after which the whole world lusts.
While dramatically describing the sellout of the middle class and the
cunning and destructive power of industry, Mann does not spare his own
class, the intelligentsia. His attack on contemporary society includes every-
one, even if he thereby questions his own legitimacy as a critic. A meek lit-
tle doctor of philosophy and natural sciences introduces himself as “Sand.”
“Nicht Kant. Nur Sand” (182; Not Kant. Only Sand). Insubstantial like
sand, he trickles away at the end of the story, but not before he exposes the
horrific nature and disastrous effects of Kobes, the god of the economy
and the state, on the people. As the self-appointed chief of propaganda and
head of a variété, Sand directs a show in which he makes the audience
believe it is seeing and hearing Kobes himself speaking. Since the people in
the audience have never seen the master in person before, but recognize
his voice, they are ready to follow blindly the ideas and orders given by the
man on the stage. With awe they hear him demand that they sacrifice
themselves for the good of the whole. Eerily anticipating Hitler’s atroci-
ties, the would-be Kobes figure orders the people to check their wives. He
declares that only a first-rate certificate of good conduct entitles to procre-
ation. For children with tuberculosis there will be no support. Mesmer-
ized, the crowd listens as Kobes asks them to become like him and work
twenty hours a day. As a hard-working person, he boasts, he finds nothing
impossible. He is beyond good and evil, and therefore nothing is forbid-
den to him, not even the raping of his sister. To emphasize the irrationality
of evil and the alarming devotion to authority in Germany, Sand-Mann has
Kobes entice the crowd to jump into a Moloch, a glowing furnace that
appears on stage. Especially the little children are called to sacrifice them-
selves because Kobes promises that all those who jump into the furnace will
be invulnerable and can do whatever they wish. After an initial hesitation by
the adults, even mothers send their children to be burnt in reverence to
HEINRICH MANN AND THE STRUGGLE FOR DEMOCRACY 33
Kobes. When Kobes, the furnace master, has had enough human sacrifices,
he releases the people with the call to rape their sisters and to fly at each
other’s throats. An orgy of plunder, lust, and violence, of murderous
stench and screams, ends the evening in utter chaos. Helpless and in sad
irony Sand asks the crowd to hand over their reason as a last sacrifice to the
god Kobes. Sand’s attempt to expose Kobes’ evil ways in order to wake up
and frighten the people has been in vain. At the end of the story, Sand’s
enemy, the head of social affairs, consoles the intellectual like a child by
telling him that Kobes does not exist as one single human being but that
he is a mythical invention who stands for an organization, a mentality.
Even if eliminated, his economic interests and methods will survive well
beyond his own lifetime. Resigned to the ways of the world, Sand calmly
ends his own life.
In “Kobes” Mann gave a frightening example and a powerful warning
of what he saw as the contemporary mode of life. By showing the dangers
that lie in the absence of personal responsibility and in the susceptibility
to mass propaganda and self-sacrifice for an irrational evil cause, Mann
was anticipating the causes of the rise of fascism as early as 1923. He was
skeptical of his success in effectively warning his readers and teaching
democratic values, but, he confirmed: “Wäre die Gesellschaft vollkommen
und endgültig, so weiß ich nicht, was Literatur sollte” (If society were
perfect and final, I don’t know why there should be literature).24 His self-
affirmation as a writer depended on being a critical observer of his time
and a relentless voice for truth and justice independent of the question of
success.
By 1923 the immense obstacles to the creation of a democracy in
Germany were obvious. Even the resolution of the currency crisis in Novem-
ber of that year and the Dawes Plan in 1924, which put an extensive credit
system in place, were not able to calm the political polarization and unrest.
With the influx of foreign, mostly American, capital and the American way
of life, German culture was changed almost overnight into a mass culture
with large cultural industries. Humanistic education and privilege, up to
then associated in German public understanding with the arts, was chal-
lenged by the need for a democratization of all culture. The idea of the arts
as a means for the education of a mass audience in the twenties is primarily
associated with the political theater of Marxist writers like Erwin Piscator
and Bertolt Brecht, but there were also important left-bourgeois artists,
Heinrich Mann included, who took the change in society as a challenge for
new artistic experimentation. The basis for Mann’s modernity and there-
fore part of today’s interest in his works is his ability to shape his often
painful observations of Germany’s social and political development into a
challenge for his own creativity. For Mann, the role of the modern artist
was to tell the historical truth in an artistic medium that could grasp the
imagination of the broadest possible readership. Art could only function as
34 KARIN V. GUNNEMANN
an agent for social change if it adapted in form and content to the new
consumers of art. Intellect, on which art was based, was an enduring moral
strength beyond changing social and political fortunes and personal disap-
pointment. To Mann, the failure of democracy and the crisis of high cul-
ture were no reasons to give up attempts to salvage the humanizing ideas
on which his democratic utopia was based. His most ambitious literary
projects in fiction during the Weimar Republic that demonstrate these
insights are his social novels, the trilogy Mutter Marie (Mother Mary,
1927), Eugénie oder die Bürgerzeit (The Royal Woman, 1928), and Die
große Sache (The Big Deal, 1930).
In his search for a creative response to the new mass culture of the
twenties, Mann returned to his French models, Balzac and Zola, who had
written social novels in the nineteenth century. In a letter to Bertaux he
described the direct link that existed between social novels and the growth
of democracy. Germany did not have social novels; instead, German
authors wrote personal and timeless fiction. Balzac and Zola had depicted
the living sociology of their time. Their novels were criticisms of daily life,
understandable to everyone. Referring to his own writing projects, he
wrote that he hoped to introduce the genre of the social novel into Ger-
man literature (BW, 87).
In the so-called Weimar novels, Mann was determined to expose the
moral and political disasters of the Republic and at the same time to make
evident the moral imperatives that were essential to a working democracy
in the future. In 1926, when he started to write the first of these novels, he
described the state of the Republic in devastating terms in another letter to
Bertaux. Parliamentary democracy in Germany, he wrote, had taken on
unimaginably evil qualities. Not even a dictatorship could be more cor-
rupt, more unjust and lawless, more predatory and murderous than this
so-called republic (BW, 127–28). German culture too, had fallen to a mis-
erable level. Young people were absorbed by the pursuit of material goods
and sex. In their spare time they visited sports events, read detective stories
and illustrated magazines, and luxuriated in sparkling revues and in the
new glamour of movie theaters.
In light of these pessimistic observations, Mann’s confidence in the
future and the strength of his enduring belief in the mission and power of
literature to keep humanistic values alive was remarkable. In numerous
articles and speeches he discussed the youth of his day and the new role of
the contemporary artist in relationship to young readers. In spite of his
criticism, Mann was fascinated by the young generation. He admired their
enthusiasm and restless energy in their pursuit of personal happiness and in
their attempt to succeed in the economically highly insecure environment
of the late twenties. To Bertaux he confessed that, in spite of their dis-
tracted lives, young people gave him courage when he thought of their
future and they provided him with the impetus to improvise in his novels
HEINRICH MANN AND THE STRUGGLE FOR DEMOCRACY 35
(BW, 229). Wrestling to find an adequate literary form for his time, Mann
asked himself the question: How would Zola have written if faced by the
problems of the Weimar Republic? Mann was convinced that Zola, too,
would have made artistic concessions to the time. As always, he would have
fought for ideas that were based on his overarching love and compassion
for all humanity.25 He came to the conclusion that the social novel was still
able to speak to the new public and teach justice and love for humanity.
But in order to be effective, the novel had to be adjusted to modern read-
ers and their sensibilities.
Mann was fascinated by the reasons for the huge success in Germany
of Edgar Wallace (1875–1932) at the end of the twenties. This English
author of crime novels proved how important fantasy was for modern fic-
tion. Contemporary readers yearned to be lifted, through surprise and
mystery, out of anxious and uncertain lives. This insight informed all of
Mann’s Weimar novels: the harder people’s lives, the more their need for
the fantastic.26
Mutter Marie, Eugénie oder die Bürgerzeit, and Die große Sache are
respectively composed around the moral maxims of “learn to be responsible,”
“learn to endure,” and “learn to be joyful.” In order to draw the modern
reader into the text and make these imperatives more palpable, Mann
experimented with a number of narrative techniques. The speed of modern
life, whether in the form of cars or changing relationships, is reflected
in the concentration of time in the plot, in the use of hasty, incomplete
sentences, at times reduced to mere syllables, in the use of slang and
the simplification of characters. The stories are full of grotesque adven-
tures (especially in the depiction of figures dominant in the business
world), of surprise, and of fantastic occurrences. In the two novels with
contemporary plots, Die große Sache and Mutter Marie, Mann made use of
cinematic techniques, remarking in the introduction to Die große Sache
that modern society made the similarities with movies visible.27 The young
protagonists find themselves constantly mingling their experiences in the
real world with those they have seen on the screen. The reality of the one
blends with the other for a fleeting, fantastic effect. Mann wanted the
reader to notice and be alarmed by the way young people used fantastic
scenes from the cinema as solutions to daily problems instead of making
reasonable decisions and acting responsibly on urgent moral and social
issues in their lives.
Mann’s artistic flexibility — to the point of risking devastating criticism
from both his fellow writers and some young readers — is admirable. But
whether many contemporary readers could identify with the depicted
world, or were moved by it to contemplate the humanizing messages for
their own lives, is at best questionable. Mutter Marie appeared in three edi-
tions before 1930, but the other two novels were less successful. Neverthe-
less, these novels are well worth reading today as documents of their time.
36 KARIN V. GUNNEMANN
The many political essays, speeches, letters, and articles Mann wrote
during the latter part of the Weimar Republic are more skillfully crafted
from a literary point of view. They include urgent calls for a United States
of Europe, attacks on various anti-democratic practices damaging to the
struggling Republic, and warnings about the National Socialist movement.
From the beginning of the Weimar Republic, Mann had fought for the
unpopular goal of an understanding between Germany and France. A lively
document of this concern was his long friendship and extensive correspond-
ence with Félix Bertaux, the French scholar of German literature. French
intellectuals saw Mann’s “Zola” essay as the welcome testimony of a
German who wrote against the general war hysteria in 1914. They admired
him as someone who courageously attacked the practices of the Wilhelmine
Empire. When anti-French feelings were at their height in 1923 because of
the French-Belgian Ruhr occupation, Mann accepted Bertaux’s invitation
to take part in the “Entretiens de Pontigny,” a yearly meeting of French
writers, diplomats, and scientists. A year earlier Mann had expressed to
Bertaux the hope that his works would contribute to their joint cause, the
understanding between their two countries.
Mir liegt weit mehr daran, zu wirken, als bewundert zu werden, und ich
glaube, dass wahre Wirkung heute keine Landesgrenzen mehr kennen
darf. Schon längst ist es meine Überzeugung, dass, im Geistigen wie im
Materiellen, die Länder Europas, besonders aber Frankreich und
Deutschland, sich annähern und ausgleichen müssen, wenn unser Erdtheil
lebendig erhalten werden soll. (BW, 37)
[To me, being effective is far more important than being admired, and I
believe that today, true effectiveness may not stop at any borders. For a
long time it has been my conviction that in spiritual as well as in material
matters the countries of Europe, but especially France and Germany, have
to become closer, and work with each other if our world is to be kept
alive.]
shared the same view. Briand expressed amazement at the level of political
power big business wielded over the state in Germany, a power that had, as
Briand put it, its own private army in the form of the National Socialists. It
was incomprehensible to Briand that in a time of democratic crises a coun-
try fought against democracy. France was willing to discuss the end of all
reparation payments, but only under the condition of a promise for peace.
Briand suggested Mann should initiate an opinion poll containing the
names of all those who were sick of being led from one catastrophe to the
next by the convictions of weaklings.28
Mann was also among those intellectuals who forcefully expressed
their disgust at the Republic’s antidemocratic practices in controlling free-
dom of speech and artistic expression. Germany instituted film censorship
in 1920, as well as various arbitrary committees supervising radio broad-
casting. The government’s threat in 1926 to pass a law protecting youth
from publications it judged as “Schmutz und Schund” (filth and rubbish)
provoked Mann to some of his sharpest language. In an article entitled
“Letzte Warnung” (Last Warning), he tried to capture his readers’ atten-
tion by asking the repeated rhetorical question: “Wozu das Gesetz?” (Why
do we need this law?). The censorship law, he argued, would be useless in
changing the lives of the young, especially those who were poor and disad-
vantaged. He pointed out that they received a far more drastic education in
the vices of life by living in mass housing projects than through reading
trashy literature. Mann challenged the government to show young people
that life was more than an arena for wild animals by building affordable
apartments for the poor and providing them with a more dignified life,
instead of writing arbitrary laws.29 Shortly after this protest, the law against
certain kinds of literature came into effect anyway, but not before Mann
had directly addressed the prosecuting attorney on the matter.30
There was one encouraging event for those concerned about protecting
literature and education. In 1926, the more than two-hundred-year-old
Prussian Academy of Arts and Sciences added a literary section that, sur-
prisingly, enjoyed relative freedom from the interference of the state dur-
ing its first years. In 1928 Mann delivered a report to the Academy entitled
“Dichtkunst und Politik” (Writing and Politics) in which he stressed the
definition of the writer as the uncompromising defender of truth and just-
ice.31 He stated that literary persons based their lives on the belief in the
perfectibility of humankind, and therefore did not hesitate to express
moral outrage at the misuse of power by the state. Mann hoped that
through his membership in the Academy he would have influence on the
badly needed reform of the public school system. He claimed that equal
access to institutions of higher learning and revision of educational mater-
ials were to help train the German people in international understanding
and democratic values. Together with Alfred Döblin, Mann worked on
editing a new German textbook for the Prussian school system, but it was
38 KARIN V. GUNNEMANN
never published, even though it was approved by the last socialist minister
of education. Mann served as president of the Academy from 1931 to Feb-
ruary of 1933, when the Nazis expelled him.
Inequalities of the Weimar Republic’s judicial system were another tar-
get for Mann and other left-wing intellectuals. One of the obvious reasons
for the failure of the Republic was that it had taken over the antiquated
imperial judicial system. The dogma of the irremovability of judges had
survived, with the result that many judges continued to serve the Republic
in spite of their personal resistance to its democratic values. Consequently
sentences for politically motivated murders committed by the right were
much less severe than those committed by the left. Mann entered the
ongoing heated debate in the Reichstag on the abolition of the death
penalty in 1926. In speeches and articles he discussed individual cases in
which the death penalty had been erroneously applied without either pub-
lic outcry or official scrutiny of the judges who were responsible. While a
democratic system promised equality before the law, in Weimar Germany
the poor were continually disenfranchised and killed.32
Beginning in the late twenties, Mann focused his literary efforts on the
rise of National Socialism. In spite of repeated threats on his life, he fear-
lessly warned the German people about Hitler’s rise to power. He took the
occasion of a new edition of Der Untertan in 1929 to condemn the docil-
ity of the German people in the face of the government’s open boast about
a future war. Even in a republic one could be a despicable underling, he
argued in the introduction to this new edition. Indeed, the new powers to
which the Weimar citizens were subject were more dangerous than those
his “Untertan” had faced, because what Mann called their paths of atroci-
ties were more difficult to identify. Consequently, one didn’t need to wor-
ship and imitate those in power in order to be an underling — it was
sufficient to be passive, to accept them without questioning their authority.
By failing to insist on better laws, on social justice, and on justice in general
by renouncing personal responsibility, Weimar Germans resembled
Diederich Heßling, the “Untertan.”33
A few days before the 1932 election in which the Nazi party more
than doubled its vote and membership in parliament, Mann wrote his most
urgent and prophetic article entitled “Wir wählen” (We Vote). The party
called itself a National Worker’s Party, he wrote, but this was pure fraud.
Ever since its foundation the party was neither national nor social but was
working for and with the money of a select group of wealthy capitalists.
Betrayal and exploitation were its true mission. Hitler, whom Mann called
a “bösartiger Trottel”34 (malicious idiot) advocated the breeding of a mas-
ter race and at the same time was preparing for a vast blood bath. Mann’s
keen observation and understanding of the nature of the Nazi threat made
him anticipate future atrocities: “Sie werden die Massen vergasen müssen.
Wenn das national ist!” (They will have to gas the masses. As if that is love
HEINRICH MANN AND THE STRUGGLE FOR DEMOCRACY 39
for a nation!). Mann ended the article with a plea for the despicable drug
of nationalism not to become the cause again for the death of millions of
innocent people.35
Félix Bertaux rightly observed Mann’s unique simultaneous abilities as
novelist, philosopher, and psychologist (BW, 558). In one of his few arti-
cles translated into English,36 Mann claimed that psychological factors
were the basis of the economic situation in Germany. According to his the-
sis, one of Germany’s unique characteristics was its passivity. While other
countries also experienced the collapse of their economies, only in
Germany did the process achieve its maximum effect on the psyche. Only
the Germans did nothing to remedy the economic crisis. In reference to
the political situation, Mann posed the rhetorical question of whether the
Germans allowed National Socialism to come to power because they were
hearing once again the call of the abyss? Usually, people living in a democ-
racy had a healthy instinct for self-preservation. “Aber es muß doch
Witterung haben, wie selbst das Tier, wenn die Schlachtbank nahe rückt”
(But they must have the capacity that animals have, to smell the slaughter-
bench as it approaches). The Germans lacked even this fundamental sensi-
tivity for survival.37
Mann was already in exile in France when he gave Bertaux his psy-
chological explanations for the Nazis’ raging hatred and the reasons for
their pathological motives, their hysteria, their Freudian complexes. He
was convinced that Nazi hatred for the Republic did not have its origins
in the Republic’s weaknesses or its unforgivable mistakes. Rather, as crea-
tures stripped of all humanity, the Nazis could not bear the idea that the
Weimar Republic meant to make the emotional German people, a people
so little open to selfless reason, into a less violent nation (BW, 284). A
year earlier, in a discussion of Hitler’s anti-Semitism, Mann had offered a
similar account of the psychological origins of hatred of the Jews. He
argued that anti-Semitism develops from the inferiority complex of a
nation, that it serves as distraction from its own inner problems, and that
it is practiced most fervently by those who cannot forget the times of
national defeat.38
In 1932 a number of intellectuals were convinced that a coalition
between the Socialist and Communist Parties offered the last possibility for
preventing a Nazi dictatorship. A proclamation to that effect was signed by
Heinrich Mann, Käthe Kollwitz, and Albert Einstein, among others. After
Hitler’s takeover on 30 January 1933, the same proclamation appeared on
advertising pillars all over Berlin. The Völkische Beobachter launched a
tirade against Mann, calling him national vermin, and demanding that the
disagreeable Literary President should have a bomb put under him.39 The
proclamation and the furore it provoked caused Mann’s immediate expul-
sion from the Academy of the Arts and Sciences and precipitated his secret
flight to France six days later, on 21 February 1933.
40 KARIN V. GUNNEMANN
the United States), are extraordinary. Not only did he become the repre-
sentative for Germans in French exile, but he acted as honored mediator
among international political groups trying to prevent the Nazis from
coming to power in Germany. With his help, the Popular Front movement
was created, a movement that succeeded in persuading Stalin to work
together with the Social Democrats in this urgent cause.
Even with his intense political agenda, Mann continued his long-held
practice of writing fiction alongside his political essays. Between 1935 and
1938 he published the two volumes, over 1500 pages in length, of his highly
regarded historical novel, Die Jugend des Königs Henri Quatre (Young Henri
of Navarre, 1935) and Die Vollendung des Königs Henri Quatre (translated
as Henry Quatre, King of France, 1938). Mann had been collecting material
on the first Bourbon King (1553–1610) since 1925. To a large extent the
work is based on historical facts, but Mann invented additional events and
emphasized characteristics of Henri that exemplified those values and human
qualities the writer himself had advocated as essential for a politically and
humanely constructive society. Mann intended the Henri IV novels as moral
parables. They were to give a utopian alternative to German power politics
of the past and, more urgently, in the present. Obvious parallels exist
between the corrupt and powerful house of Habsburg and the National
Socialist dictatorship in Germany. The main spokesman for the Catholic
Habsburg rulers of Spain bears unmistakable resemblances to Hitler, who in
a raging voice preaches hatred against the moderates and calls for a powerful
cleansing of everything foreign. Preparing for an attack on France, he
addresses and hypnotizes the masses with promises and threats of “Boden”
(soil), “Blut” (blood), and “Gewalt” (force).43 But in contrast to twentieth-
century Germany, sixteenth-century France had a leader in King Henri IV who
had the qualities with which to counter and conquer evil, at least temporarily.
In the novel, Henri unites intellect and action, reason and kind tolerance,
skepticism and enduring belief in his mission, love for humanity and a fight-
ing spirit. He knows that evil will persist in human history, but succeeds in
implementing the Edict of Nantes (1598), which grants religious tolerance
and more social rights in France, strengthening the country against Habs-
burg expansionism. Henri is assassinated by a radical Jesuit, but the human-
ism for which he stands will survive. Mann ended the novel with Henri
speaking to Mann’s own generation, struggling three hundred years later.
Henri challenges it to continue his work for justice and peace. The world can
only be saved by love, he proclaims, but love means to act, to act even more
decisively and courageously than he had done. Moral decay encourages a
new beginning.
By the time Mann had finished the Henri Quatre novels, in 1938,
there was no more hope for peace in Germany and in Europe. Intellectual
politics, whether during the Empire, the Weimar Republic, or from exile,
had not made a noticeable difference to the course of history. Still, Mann’s
42 KARIN V. GUNNEMANN
Notes
1
Heinrich Mann, 1871–1950: Werk und Leben in Dokumenten und Bildern, ed.
Deutsche Akademie der Künste zu Berlin (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag,
1971), 112.
2
Heinrich Mann, “Geist und Tat,” Essays (Hamburg: Claassen Verlag, 1960), 14.
3
The latest striking example of this fact is a recent television movie that was a great
success in Germany in 2002. Heinrich Breloer, in his two-part documentary, called
Die Manns — Ein Jahrhundertroman, tells the intriguing story of two generations
of the infamous Mann family. Thomas Mann and two of his children figure large in
the tale, while Heinrich’s life and work play a subordinate role. His sociopolitical
passions are downplayed and his politically most engaged time, his exile in France,
is left out completely.
4
David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas (Berkeley:
U of California P, 1980), 140–41.
5
Reinhard Alter, Die bereinigte Moderne: Heinrich Manns “Untertan” und politische
Publizistik in der Kontinuität der deutschen Geschichte zwischen Kaiserreich und
Drittem Reich (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1995), 1. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Das
deutsche Kaiserreich, 1871–1918 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994), 93.
6
H. Mann, Der Untertan, in Materialien (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1991),
626. All page numbers from the novel given in the text are taken from this edition.
7
Pierre Bertaux, ed., Heinrich Mann — Félix Bertaux: Briefwechsel, 1922–1948
(Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2002), 95. Subsequent references to this work in the
text are given using the abbreviation BW and the page number.
8
H. Mann, Der Untertan, 50.
9
As one critic puts it, “odd juxtapositions, expressions out of place, paradoxes,
abrupt transitions and non sequiturs” all serve as an aesthetic corollary of the
Emperor’s-Hessling’s irrational, amoral governance. Mark Roche, “Self-Cancellation
of Injustice in Heinrich Mann’s ‘Der Untertan,’” Oxford German Studies 17
(1988): 88.
HEINRICH MANN AND THE STRUGGLE FOR DEMOCRACY 43
10
H. Mann, Der Untertan, 617.
11
Thomas Mann, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, in Politische Reden und
Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer — Werkausgabe, 1968), 1:422.
12
Gotthart Wundberg, ed., Heinrich Mann: Texte zu seiner Wirkungsgeschichte in
Deutschland (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1977), 95.
13
H. Mann, “The Meaning and Idea of the Revolution,” in The Weimar Republic
Source Book, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley: U of
California P, 1994), 38–40.
14
H. Mann, Macht und Mensch: Essays (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1989), 206–8.
15
H. Mann, “Europa: Reich über den Reichen,” Die neue Rundschau 34 (Die Freie
Bühne 7), July 1923: 577–602.
16
The Boston journal The Living Age published a practically full report of the
address in its October, November, December issue of 1923. “In Honor of the
Constitution,” Living Age 319 (October 1923): 57–60.
17
Hajo Holborn, A History of Modern Germany, 1840–1945 (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1969), 607.
18
H. Mann, Diktatur der Vernunft (Berlin: Verlag die Schiede, 1923), 66–75.
19
Ibid., 7–11.
20
Jürgen Haupt, “Die Entwertung des Geldes und der Gefühle: Heinrich Manns
‘Inflationsnovellen’ zur Gesellschaftskrise der zwanziger Jahre,” Heinrich Mann-
Jahrbuch 6 (1988): 64.
21
Deutsche Akademie der Künste zu Berlin, Heinrich Mann, 1871–1950, 212.
22
Henry Ashby Turner, Stresemann and the Politics of the Weimar Republic (Prince-
ton: Princeton UP, 1963), 69.
23
H. Mann, Ausgewählte Erzählungen (Zurich: Diogenes Verlag, 1964), 179.
24
H. Mann, “Theater der Zeit,” in Sieben Jahre: Chronik der Gedanken und
Vorgänge (Berlin, Vienna, Leipzig: Paul Zsolny Verlag, 1929), 267.
25
H. Mann, “Zeit und Kunst,” in Sieben Jahre, 546.
26
H. Mann, “Detective Novels,” in Kaes, Jay, and Dimendberg, Source Book, 521.
27
H. Mann, “Mein Roman,” in Das öffentliche Leben (Berlin, Vienna, Leipzig:
Paul Zsolnay Verlag, 1932), 331.
28
H. Mann, “Gespräch mit Briand,” in Das öffentliche Leben, 285–91.
29
H. Mann, “Letzte Warnung,” in Sieben Jahre, 296–99.
30
H. Mann, “Herr Staatsanwalt!” in Sieben Jahre, 286–91.
31
H. Mann, “Dichtkunst und Politik,” in Sieben Jahre, 498–516.
32
H. Mann, “Justiz,” in Sieben Jahre, 517–29.
33
H. Mann, Der Untertan, 617–19.
34
Heinrich und Thomas Mann: Ihr Leben und Werk in Text und Bild, Katalog zur
ständigen Ausstellung im Buddenbrookhaus (Lübeck: Dräger Druck, 1994), 314.
35
H. Mann, Das öffentliche Leben, 257–62.
44 KARIN V. GUNNEMANN
36
H. Mann, “The German Decision,” in Kaes, Jay, and Dimendberg, Source Book,
164–66.
37
H. Mann, Das öffentliche Leben, 309.
38
H. Mann, “Gut geartete Menschen,” in Das öffentliche Leben, 312–19.
39
Nigel Hamilton, The Brothers Mann (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979), 264.
40
Der Hass: Deutsche Zeitgeschichte (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag, 1983), 14.
41
The term “Haß” referred to the unprecedented hatred with which the Nazis
persecuted all who stood for reason and humanity.
42
Hamilton, Brothers Mann, 284.
43
H. Mann, Die Jugend des Königs Henri Quatre (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1952),
399–400.
44
Hamilton, Brothers Mann, 285.
45
H. Mann, Die kleine Stadt (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1998), in Materialien,
469.
2: Hermann Hesse and the
Weimar Republic
Paul Bishop
Even if the poet is able to reaffirm his confidence in the cold but com-
forting light of the moon, the conclusion of the poem is despairing: troops
of soldiers crawl forward, mines explode, bloodied limbs and soil fly into
the air, and the generals urge the limping horse of war on and on, driving
the wagon of misfortune deeper into the blood and filth:
relationship between morality, art, and life, and to rescue the prophet’s
teaching from its contemporary misuse.
During the War, Hesse had begun to experience difficulties in his
marriage — the first of three — as his wife slowly succumbed to a form of
mental illness, and his youngest son fell ill.5 On 8 March 1916 his father,
Johannes Hesse (1847–1916), died. As the war worsened, so Hesse found
himself close to physical and psychological collapse; in May 1916 he began
psychotherapy. The therapist, Josef Bernhard Lang (1883–1945), was a
follower of the Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung (1875–1961), and acted as
an important means of transmission of Jungian thought to Hesse’s writ-
ing.6 Within the first month, Hesse attended twelve sessions with Dr. Lang,
and between June 1916 and November 1917 he completed a further sixty
sessions. During the final months of his therapy in September and October
1917, Hesse began work on his novel Demian, which appeared in 1919,
the year he decided to leave his wife and family and moved to Casa
Camuzzi in Montagnola, but also the year of the general strike and the
Spartacus uprising in Berlin (5–12 January 1919), the murder of Rosa
Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht (15 January 1919), and the opening of
the National Assembly in Weimar (9 February 1919).
As well as a product of his personal engagement with Jungian ther-
apy, Demian is — and was widely read at the time as — a response to the
catastrophe of the First World War, out of which the Weimar Republic
emerged.7 Just as Peter Camenzind had found a welcome audience among
those dissatisfied with the stagnation of Wilhelmine Germany, so Demian
spoke to a generation demoralized by the war. Looking back in 1948 in his
foreword to the American edition, Thomas Mann wrote that “the electri-
fying influence exercised on a whole generation just after the First World
War” by Demian was “unforgettable”: “With uncanny accuracy this poetic
work struck the nerve of the times and called forth grateful rapture from a
whole youthful generation who believed that an interpreter of their inner-
most life had risen from their own midst.”8 A contemporary review in the
journal Die Tat of December 1922 confirms Thomas Mann’s memory: the
desperate postwar generation, wrote Lulu von Strauß und Torney, found
in Hesse’s work a solution to their most urgent concerns: “In dieser
inneren Not kam dem einen oder anderen der Demian in die Hände. Er
las, und es war ihm, als werde ihm eine Binde vom Auge genommen. Las
und fand — sich selber” (In this time of inner need this person or that
came across Demian — read it, and it was as if a blindfold were removed
from his eyes. Read it and found — himself).9 In Demian, Hesse produced
a heady cocktail of personal confession, Jungian analytical ideas, and arche-
typal imagery. The work is steeped in Gnostic tenets, mediated in part to
Hesse by Jungian theory. One cannot deny the appeal of the novel to read-
ers in the early years of the Weimar Republic (not to mention the German
reading public of the 1950s and 1960s and the American reading public of
48 PAUL BISHOP
the 1960s and 1970s); however, it is not clear whether Demian represents
a political response or a flight into mysticism (a charge frequently leveled at
Jung, the fons et origo of many of the ideas in the book).
Originally published using the pseudonym of the narrator figure in the
novel,10 Demian relates the story of the psychological development of Emil
Sinclair or, in the terms used in the work, how he manages “sich selber zu
suchen, in sich fest zu werden, den eigenen Weg vorwärts zu tasten, einerlei
wohin er führte” (GW 5:126; to find himself, become solid in himself, feel
his way forward along his own path, wherever it leads). Sinclair is encour-
aged along his path by his older classroom comrade, Max Demian, the
church organist Pistorius (based on Hesse’s therapist, Josef Lang), and
finally Demian’s mother, referred to as “Frau Eva.” Using Jungian and other
techniques to meditate on his dreams, Sinclair draws a picture of a bird
emerging from a globe as from a giant egg and flying up to God, to Abraxas
(GW 5:91). This deity, Abraxas, derives from ancient Gnostic beliefs, but is
also mentioned in a poem by Goethe in the West-östlicher Divan, and sym-
bolizes the coniunctio oppositorum — the union of “das Göttliche und das
Teuflische” (the divine and the demonic), of “Wonne und Grauen, Mann
und Weib gemischt, Heiligstes und Gräßliches ineinander verflochten, tiefe
Schuld durch zarteste Unschuld zuckend” (GW 5:94–95; bliss and horror,
man and woman intermixed, what is most sacred and what is most gruesome
entwined, deep guilt flashing through the most tender innocence). Where
does this leave morality? Like everything else, beyond good and evil: a pre-
carious location. For if, on the one hand, Demian reassures Sinclair that
knowing what is “allowed” and what is “forbidden” does not mean that one
can commit murder and rape (GW 5:65), Pistorius concedes that there
might be circumstances where it is possible to murder someone — just
because one finds that person repulsive (GW 5:111).
Those who separate themselves from the herd and follow the true path
— that is to say, their own, individual true path — are said to bear the mark
of Cain, a reference to the Biblical narrative deconstructed by Demian:
because he was different from the rest of the people, the story of how he
slew Abel was invented to destroy his reputation (GW 5:32). Thus the true
inheritors of Paradise are the “Cainites” (GW 5:142–43), also the name of
an early Christian heretical sect (GW 5:48), and it is no coincidence that
the communist-anarchist journal founded by Erich Mühsam (1878–1934)
in 1911 was called Kain.11 Mühsam was, like Hesse, a member of the eso-
teric community on the Monte Verità,12 whose values Demian embraces as
clearly as it rejects those of Wihelmine Germany — that is to say, the Pruss-
ian values of the German Reich presided over by Kaiser Wilhelm II
(1859–1941).
Even bearing the mark of Cain cannot prevent one from being killed,
however, and in the final chapter war breaks out, clearly identified with the
First World War because of the geopolitical circumstances of the conflict
HERMANN HESSE AND THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC 49
(GW 5:156). It turns out that Demian has the rank of lieutenant, and
there are strong hints in the novel that war will have a beneficial effect:
“In der Tiefe war etwas im Werden. Etwas wie eine neue Menschlichkeit”
(GW 5:160; cf. 134–35; Deep down something was coming into being.
Something like a new humanity). The dream of the Great Mother, Sin-
clair’s fantasy about Frau Eva in chapter 8, becomes the military reality of
war, in which Sinclair is injured, and the novel leaves him in his bandages,
still pondering the image of his “Freund und Führer” (friend and guide),
Max Demian.
The obsession with myth, which Sinclair demonstrates (GW 5:63),13
has reminded some of the way myth was used for dark political ends by
such National Socialist apologists as Alfred Rosenberg (1893–1946),
author of Der Mythus des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts (The Myth of the
Twentieth Century, 1928). Correspondingly, at least one critic has gone so
far as to accuse Hesse of sympathy with precisely the same proto-fascistic
tendencies that, so it is argued, led to National Socialism.14 In Hesse’s
defense, it might be argued that he was, at least in part, trying to do what
Thomas Mann attempted some two decades later in his Joseph tetralogy,
namely, to combine “Mythos plus Psychologie” and “den Mythos den
fascistischen [sic] Dunkelmännern aus den Händen zu nehmen und ihn ins
Humane ‘umzufunktionieren’” (to take myth out of the hands of the dark
men of fascism and “refunctionalize” it into something humane).15 Yet, as
Hesse made clear in his letter to Emil Molt of 19 June 1919, at the time he
conceived his task as a writer as an apolitical one: “Meine Aufgabe liegt auf
der Seite des Geists, nicht der Praxis, also auch nicht der Politik” (My task
lies on the side of Geist, not of praxis, and hence also not politics). This
relation had, Hesse emphasized, implications for how he executed that
task: “Dichterisch äußert sich das Erlebte bei mir in einer Vertiefung der
Psychologie, die mir aber zugleich viele neue technische Aufgaben stellt, so
daß die literarische Arbeit für mich zu einem schweren Ringen geworden
ist” (Briefe 1:403–4; What I experience manifests itself poetically in me by
involving me more deeply in psychology, which at the same time presents
me with many new technical tasks, so that literary work has become a diffi-
cult struggle for me). Hesse discovered just how difficult it had become
when writing his next novel, Siddhartha (1922).
In Berlin, the November Revolution of 1918 ended with the collapse
of the Spartacus uprising (Spartakusaufstand) and the execution of
Liebknecht and Luxemburg. In Munich in Bavaria, on the other hand, a
socialist republic was established by Kurt Eisner (1867–1919) in 1918 and
when Eisner was assassinated in February 1919, the Communists pro-
claimed a Soviet-style republic (Räterepublik). In March 1919, several
months before military intervention by forces from Prussia and Württem-
berg put an end to the Räterepublik, Hesse was invited by Johann Wilhelm
Muehlon to take over the presidency of the ruling cabinet. Hesse turned
50 PAUL BISHOP
down the offer; for one thing, he wrote to Muehlon on 11 March 1919, it
was against his nature (Briefe 1:392). No, his task was a different one and
involved the founding with the zoologist Richard Woltereck (1877–1944)
of a journal called Vivos voco, first published in October 1919. In this
journal (whose title called on the living, in memory of the dead, to help
create the new postwar culture)16 he indicated the kind of arena where he
wished to intervene; introducing “Zarathustras Wiederkehr,” he wrote:
“Wir müssen nicht hinten beginnen, bei den Regierungsformen und
politischen Methoden, sondern wir müssen vorn anfangen, beim Bau der
Persönlichkeit” (GW 10:467; We must not begin at the end, with govern-
mental reform and political methods, but we must begin at the beginning,
with the construction of the personality).
But Hesse was experiencing difficulty constructing his own personal-
ity, as the genesis of Siddhartha reveals.17 He had begun work on the text
in December 1919, producing in a burst of creativity the stories published
in Klingsors letzter Sommer: Erzählungen (Klingsor’s Last Summer, 1920),
and numerous watercolor paintings. As the months passed, however, 1921
turned into a year of crisis, to which some poems such as “Krankheit” (Sick-
ness), “Gebet” (Prayer), and “Media in vita” (In the Midst of Life) bear
witness (G, 493–97); Hesse turned again to psychoanalysis, this time con-
sulting Jung himself in Zurich in May 1921. For Hesse psychoanalysis was,
as he told Hans Reinhart in May 1921, neither a faith nor a philosophy,
but “ein Erlebnis” (Briefe 1:473; an experience). The extent of the success
of Hesse’s therapy with Jung can be gauged by the fact he was able to com-
plete work on Siddhartha, a work he saw as both continuing and comple-
menting the themes of Demian.18 The novel appeared in 1922, the same
year in which the cultural philosopher Theobald Ziegler (1881–1958)
published his study of Buddhism.19
Siddhartha complicates the legend of the Buddha by giving the name
of the historical Buddha, Siddhatta Gotama, to its central character, who,
however, rejects the Buddha’s teaching. In a moment of “epiphany,”
which has been compared to similar moments in modernist novels by, for
example, Joyce, Musil, or Proust, Siddhartha gains insight into the import-
ance, not of following the right teaching, but of accumulating the right
experience.20 Indeed, there are parallels between this emphasis on “experi-
ence” and the significance attached to Erfahrung by Walter Benjamin.21
Despite, or maybe because of, its archaic diction, Siddhartha met with a
warm critical response; Hesse reported with satisfaction that, after reading
the novel’s conclusion (which he described as “more Taoist than Indian”)
at the peace congress of the international women’s league in August 1922,
a Hindu professor from Calcutta congratulated him on the depth of his
engagement with Eastern thought.22 (In the fifties, the book achieved
great popularity in the United States, where Henry Miller described it as
superior to the New Testament.)23
HERMANN HESSE AND THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC 51
In 1924, Hesse acquired Swiss citizenship and two years later married
his second wife, the singer Ruth Wenger (from whom he separated in
1927). In 1926 he was elected a member of the Prussian Academy of Arts,
but his personal life had turned miserable again, as the collection of poems
published in 1928 under the title Krisis (Crisis) indicates. Hesse saw his
own writings in confessional terms, as he indicates in his letter to Heinrich
Weigand of 14 October 1926, where he also defends the “naïveté” of
Eichendorff against the “aesthetic perfection” of Stefan George (Briefe
2:154). Nor was Hesse any longer sure of the efficacy of therapy, as his cri-
tique of psychoanalysis in his letter to Theodor Schnittkin of 3 June 1928
suggests. For psychoanalysts, he writes, such figures as Novalis, Hölderlin,
Lenau, Beethoven, and Nietzsche would be nothing more than extreme
pathological cases; in their eyes, Schiller suffered from repressed patricidal
desires, and Goethe from certain complexes (Briefe 2:196).
While he was completing work on Siddhartha, Hesse began work on
what many regard as his most successful novel, Der Steppenwolf (1927). If
Siddhartha was able to see his life’s mission in terms of “die Welt lieben zu
können, sie nicht zu verachten” (GW 5:467; being able to love the world,
not to despise it), then the central character of Der Steppenwolf begged to
differ. This work constituted Hesse’s last major study of that important lit-
erary and social figure, “the outsider,” analyzed at length by Colin Wil-
son.24 (Thomas Mann also took up an outsider’s perspective by sending
Hans Castorp into the mountains in Der Zauberberg [The Magic Mountain,
1924], where he could see society through a clinical prism, in order to elu-
cidate the disease of modernity.) Shortly after the novel in its entirety had
appeared, Hesse wrote in a letter that neither its content nor its poetic form
had been understood,25 and nearly a decade and a half later he commented
in his “Nachwort” (1941) to the novel that it was, of his all works, the one
that had been more often and more badly misunderstood than any other.26
What most struck the novel’s early critics, though, was its honesty — “das
unbarmherzigste und seelenzerwühlendeste aller Bekenntnisbücher,
düsterer und wilder als Rousseaus Confessions” (the most remorseless and
most soul-churning of all confessional writings, gloomier and more savage
than Rousseau’s Confessions), as Kurt Pinthus put it27— in its depiction of
the fifty-year-old Harry Haller (Hesse shared the same initials and age as his
main character), the “Steppenwolf” of the title. For Harry Haller, beyond
doubt an “outsider,”28 is indeed the Steppenwolf, that is, a mixture of man
and wolf, “das in eine ihm fremde und unverständliche Welt verirrte Tier,
das seine Heimat, Luft und Nahrung nicht mehr findet” (GW 7:211; an
animal gone astray in a world it finds strange and incomprehensible, which
can no longer find its home, air, or nourishment). In this formally more
complex work — consisting of the Editor’s Preface, the Records of Harry
Haller, and the Treatise on the Steppenwolf — Haller learns, thanks to
the mysterious Hermine, how to dance, and enters the “magic theater” in
52 PAUL BISHOP
which his desires are acted out. In some respects, this is very much a novel
of the “roaring twenties,” but although the descriptions of the shady world
of Maria and Hermine (GW 7:328 and 333) are evocative of the social
world of the Weimar Republic, the names of some of the venues locate the
novel, if anywhere, in Zurich or Basel. (Haller’s wolf aspect, it has been
suggested, “has its analogue in the murders and assassinations in the new
Weimar Republic of the early 1920s, a decade pregnant with coming disas-
ter, as Germany marched relentlessly toward fascism.”)29 Nevertheless, the
world of smoke-filled cabaret halls, flappers, vamps, and jazz music func-
tions overall as a cultural signifier of modernity (Pablo’s saxophone and the
fox-trot “Yearning” have their counterpart in the recording of Sophie
Tucker singing “Some of These Days” in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausée (Nau-
sea, 1938), another work set in the late twenties or early thirties).
As a powerful amalgam of Nietzsche, Novalis, and Jung, the novel is a
sustained exercise in social critique, and, in parts, constitutes a savage
denunciation of society. A great deal of this critique derives from Hermann
Graf Keyserling (1880–1946) and Oswald Spengler (1880–1936), particu-
larly the latter’s two-volume work Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The
Decline of the West, 1918–22), with which Hesse was temperamentally
much in agreement.30 To begin with, Haller inveighs against jazz and
against modern culture in general; jazz, we read in the early pages of the
novel, is “Untergangsmusik” (music of decline) which, compared with
Bach and Mozart, is — like all our art, all our thought, all our would-be cul-
ture (Scheinkultur) — no more than a disgraceful deception (Schweinerei;
GW 7:219). In a letter to Josef Englert of 1 July 1923 about Handel’s
opera Rodelinde, Hesse wrote that, for many years now, every time he
heard this kind of music or saw Gothic or Baroque architecture he had
the feeling that this represented “eine vergangene, nicht wiederkehrende
Formenwelt” (a world of form that has gone and will never return) —
“grade dies spricht Spengler ja nun in seinem Werk systematisch aus”
(Briefe 2:63; this is precisely what Spengler articulates systematically in
his work).
Then again, the challenge presented to Harry Haller by Hermine (GW
7:298) is reminiscent of the “decisionism” of such so-called “Conservative
Revolutionaries” as Ernst Jünger (1895–1998) and Arnolt Bronnen
(1895–1959),31 and one critic has recently identified elements of the
thought of Ludwig Klages (1872–1956) in the discourse of Hermine.32 By
the same token, there are echoes of Ernst Jünger’s critique of the role of
technology in modern social and political economy, as well as of the suspi-
cion of technology expressed by the existential philosopher Martin Hei-
degger (1889–1976).33 In fact, there is a startling similarity between
Hesse’s novel and the critique of modernity offered by Heidegger.
After all, it was precisely in the twenties that Heidegger presented his
analysis of modernity in Sein und Zeit (Being and Time, 1927), published
HERMANN HESSE AND THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC 53
For its part, the Treatise on the Steppenwolf defines the contemporary
bourgeoisie in terms of an attempt to ensure preservation and security at
the cost of a feeling of “Lebensintensität” (GW 7:235–36; intensity of
life). It notes that the Steppenwolf loves, as if he were his own brother, the
political criminal, the revolutionary, or the intellectual seducer, but
deplores the thief, the burglar, the rapist — and, while in theory having
nothing whatever against prostitution, would in reality have been quite
unable of taking a prostitute seriously as his equal — in a way that suggests
this constitutes a fundamental shortcoming on Harry Haller’s part (GW
7:234). In political terms, bourgeois democracy is said to be born of weak-
ness (GW 7:235), and the bourgeois willingly sacrifices his so-called “per-
sonality” (a compromise born of the need to placate both nature and
Geist) to the great Moloch, the “state” (GW 7:245).
On the path of “Menschwerdung” (becoming truly human), those
who count are the great “Unsterblichen” (immortals), who have tran-
scended bourgeois values and have realized “daß das verzweifelte Hängen
am Ich, das verzweifelte Nichtsterbenwollen der sicherste Weg zum
ewigen Tode ist, während Sterbenkönnen, Hüllenabstreifen, ewige
Hingabe des Ichs an die Wandlung zur Unsterblichkeit führt” (GW 7:246;
that the desperate clinging to the ego, desperately not wanting to die, is
the surest way to eternal death, while being able to die, stripping away
one’s exterior, the eternal surrender of the ego brings about the transform-
ation to immortality). Elsewhere in the novel there are frequent allusions
to Harry Haller’s fear of death, and how he manages to overcome it (GW
7:318; cf. 339, 348). Indeed, his earlier fear of death (GW 7:318), which
determines his relationship to his razor and his decision to commit suicide,
becomes transformed into a desire for suffering that will prepare him for,
and make him willing to accept, dying (GW 7:339): on the night before
the masked ball, Haller senses that his “Angst vor dem Tode” (anxiety
about death) is about to become “Hingabe und Erlösung” (GW 7:348;
surrender and redemption).
Later on, the modern world is summarized by Hermine in terms of
eating and drinking, coffee and knitting, playing-cards and radio music,
bars, dance-floors, and jazz (GW 7:340–41); but unless, she says, we
accept that life is not a heroic poem, we remain no better than a fool or a
Don Quixote: “Wer statt Gedudel Musik, statt Vergnügen Freude, statt
Geld Seele, statt Betrieb echte Arbeit, statt Spielerei echte Leidenschaft
verlangt, für den ist diese hübsche Welt hier keine Heimat . . .” (GW
7:341; Those who want music instead of tootling, joy instead of pleasure,
soul instead of money, real work instead of bustle, passion instead of fool-
ing around, will find no home in this pretty little world of ours). Indeed, in
several places the novel deals with the question of the relationship between
high art and popular culture. In short, history amounts to no more than
a “swindle,” and to genuine human beings there remains nothing but
HERMANN HESSE AND THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC 55
death — death, and eternity (GW 7:342). In the novel, eternity is described
as a world outside time, as “das Reich des Echten” (the kingdom of the
truth), and as the kingdom of Mozart, the saints, and the other immortals
(GW 7:343).
It is no coincidence that Hesse’s critique of the lack of authenticity of
everyday life is developed from the example of an academic, in this case a
professor of oriental studies (GW 7:263). The novel shows Hesse asking
himself, through Harry Haller, what the task of the intellectual in the
modern world is (GW 7:324–35 and 340). In a long excursus, the rela-
tionship between the German spirit on the one hand, and music and matri-
archy on the other, is cast in terms of the significance of Logos (GW
7:324–25); subsequently, when he is in bed with Maria, the touch of Eros
initiates a flood of images and memories (GW 7:330–31).35 According to
Hesse’s “Nachwort,” however, what the critics had overlooked were the
positive aspects of the novel. After all, in the text itself the opposition
between man and wolf is deconstructed (GW 7:239–40) and, as Hesse
himself pointed out, the suffering world of the Steppenwolf stands in
contrast to “eine positive, heitere, überpersönliche und überzeitliche
Glaubenswelt” (a positive, cheerful, supra-individual and extra-temporal
world of faith), the world of such “immortals” as Mozart and Goethe.
(Indeed, Hesse emphasized a key episode, where Harry Haller has an
imaginary conversation with Goethe, by pre-publishing the passage sep-
arately in the Frankfurter Zeitung.)36 In short, then, Hesse emphasized
“daß das Buch zwar von Leiden und Nöten berichtet, aber keineswegs das
Buch eines Verzweifelten ist, sondern das eines Gläubigen” (that the book
tells of suffering and distress, but it is a book not about someone who
despairs but about someone who believes).37 Above all, the basis of bour-
geois democracy, the conception of the single, unitary self, is rejected by
the treatise in favor of the self as something plural, “eine höchst vielfältige
Welt, ein kleiner Sternenhimmel, ein Chaos von Formen, von Stufen und
Zuständen, von Erbschaften und Möglichkeiten” (GW 7:242; a highly
diverse world, a small galaxy, a chaos of forms, levels and conditions, of
legacies and possibilities), a view endorsed by Harry Haller (GW 7:315)
and confirmed by his experiences in the Magic Theater (GW 7:385).
The most significant images in the novel are the nexus play–
drama–theater, beginning with the play of a child. By means of his
relationship with Maria, Haller believes, he has learned “[s]ich kindlich
dem Spiel der Oberfläche anzuvertrauen, flüchtigste Freuden zu suchen,
Kind und Tier zu sein in der Unschuld des Geschlechts” (GW 7:348; to
entrust himself like a child to the play of surfaces, to seek the most fleeting
joys, to be a child and an animal in the innocence of sex) — or, in the Schil-
lerian and Nietzschean terms from which this passage derives, to appreciate
the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. This development takes place even
before the final, climactic scenes in the Magic Theater — although, as
56 PAUL BISHOP
Hesse once observed, the Magic Theater “beginnt schon mit dem
Auftreten Hermines” (begins the moment that Hermine enters).38 In the
Magic Theater itself, Haller finally learns, under the influence of the drugs
given to him by Pablo (whose unnaturally large eyes, presumably, indicate
his own excessive use of illegal substances),39 to escape the world of reality
and discover the self: “Sie wissen ja, wo diese andere Welt verborgen liegt,
daß es die Welt Ihrer eigenen Seele ist, die Sie suchen” (GW 7:366; After
all, you know where this other world lies hidden, that it is the world of
your own psyche you are looking for). This capacity to find a “universe
within” demonstrates Hesse’s indebtedness to Romanticism,40 but the
Magic Theater can also be read in Jungian terms as the world of “active
imagination” (on 19 February 1927 Hesse himself read the chapter about
the Magic Theater to the members of Jung’s Psychological Club in
Zurich).41
The thirties in Germany saw the rise of the National Socialist Party:
within ten years of the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich on 8 November 1923,
Hitler gained more and more political influence until, on 30 January 1933,
President Hindenburg named him chancellor. Thereafter, Hitler turned
Germany into a totalitarian state, the power of the Party reaching into all
aspects of economic, political, and cultural life. In 1931, the same year he
married his third wife, Ninon Dolbin, Hesse withdrew from the Prussian
Academy of Arts. Following its political takeover, Hesse’s publisher, the
S. Fischer Verlag, in 1935, was forbidden by the National Socialist govern-
ment to transfer overseas the publication rights to his works; in the Third
Reich itself, his works were suppressed after 1939. Thus Narziß und Gold-
mund (Narcissus and Goldmund, 1930) was one of his last works to be
published in Germany; this work, like Die Morgenlandfahrt (Journey to
the East, 1932), develops further the familiar question of integrating life’s
polarities in general, and Eros and Logos in particular, through the devel-
opment of the two eponymous characters. From 1932 to 1943, Hesse
worked on his largest novel, Das Glasperlenspiel (The Glass Bead Game,
1943), published in Zurich after Hesse had been unable to find a German
publisher.42 As Ronald Gray has pointed out, the novel contains indirect
political references;43 for direct comment on events in the Third Reich,
however, we must turn to Hesse’s correspondence. Following the collapse
of its successor state, Hesse, in a letter to Luise Rinser of 23 April 1946,
described the Weimar Republic as “die einzige erfreuliche Frucht des
ersten Weltkrieges” (the one single welcome fruit of the First World War),
in which, however, the roots of National Socialism were also to be found;
Hesse recalled “daß das deutsche Elend ja nicht erst mit Hitler begonnen
habe, und daß schon im Sommer 1914 der trunkene Jubel des Volkes über
Österreichs gemeines Ultimatum an Serbien eigentlich Manchen hätte
aufwecken können” (Briefe 3:341; that the misery of Germany had not
begin with Hitler, and that as early as the summer of 1914, the drunken
HERMANN HESSE AND THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC 57
Notes
1
Hermann Hesse, Die Gedichte (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 395
(henceforth cited as G). Hesse’s other works are cited from the following editions:
Hermann Hesse, Gesammelte Werke in zwölf Bänden (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1987), henceforth cited as GW; and Hermann Hesse, Gesammelte
Briefe, 4 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973–86), henceforth cited as Briefe.
2
GW 10:411–16. The article was first published in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on 3
November 1914.
3
See the extract cited in Volker Michels, Paul Rathgeber, and Eugen Würzbach,
Hermann Hesse, 1877–1862 [Marbacher Magazin 54/1990] (Marbach am Neckar:
Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 1990), 47.
4
GW 10:466–97. See chap. 5, “Zarathustra in the Trenches,” in Steven E.
Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890–1990 (Berkeley, Los Angeles,
London: U of California P, 1992), 128–63; here, 134.
5
The novel Roßhalde (1914) reflects the breakdown of the relationship with Maria
(GW 1:5–169).
6
On Hesse and Jung, see Malte Dahrendorf, “Hermann Hesses ‘Demian’ und
C. G. Jung,” Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 8 (1958): 81–97; Johanna Neuer,
“Jungian Archetypes in Hermann Hesse’s Demian,” Germanic Review 57 (1982):
9–15; and David G. Richards, The Hero’s Quest for the Self: An Archetypal Approach
to Hesse’s “Demian” and Other Novels (Lanham, MD: UP of America, 1987).
7
See Volker Michels, ed., Materialien zu Hermann Hesses “Demian,” vol. 1, Die
Entstehungsgeschichte in Selbstzeugnissen und Dokumenten, vol. 2, Die Wirkungss-
geschichte in Rezensionen und Aufsätzen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993 and
1997).
8
Thomas Mann, “Introduction” to Demian (New York: Bantam, 1970), ix.
9
Lulu von Strauß und Torney, Review of Demian, Die Tat, Dec. 1922; cited in
Hermann Hesse im Spiegel der zeitgenössischen Kritik, ed. Adrian Hsia (Bern:
Francke, 1975), 182–83.
10
Hesse’s authorship was uncovered by Eduard Korrodi in his article of 24 June
1920 in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, “Wer ist der Dichter des ‘Demian’?” (Briefe
1:564–66).
11
Heribert Kuhn, “Kommentar,” in Hermann Hesse, Demian (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), 230.
12
See Harald Szeemann et al, Monte Verità — Berg der Wahrheit: Lokale Anthro-
pologie als Beitrag zur Wiederentdeckung einer neuzeitlichen sakralen Topographie
(Milan: Electa Editrice, 1980).
HERMANN HESSE AND THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC 59
13
See Theodore Ziolkowski, “The Gospel of Demian,” in The Novels of Hermann
Hesse: A Study in Theme and Structure (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1965),
87–145; and “Der Hunger nach dem Mythos: Zur seelischen Gastronomie der
Deutschen in den Zwanziger Jahren,” in Die sogenannten Zwanziger Jahre: First
Wisconsin Workshop, ed. Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand (Bad Homburg
v.d.H.: Gehlen, 1970), 169–201.
14
Robert C. Conrad, “Socio-Political Aspects of Hesse’s ‘Demian,’ ” in Hermann
Hesse: Politische und wirkungsgeschichtliche Aspekte, ed. Sigrid Bauschinger and
Albert Reh (Bern: Francke, 1986), 155–65.
15
See Thomas Mann’s letter of 18 February 1941 in his correspondence with the
Hungarian classicist and associate of Jung, Karl Kerényi (1897–1973) (Thomas
Mann/Karl Kerényi, Gespräch in Briefen [Munich: dtv, 1967], 105).
16
Ralph Freedmann, Hermann Hesse: Pilgrim of Crisis; A Biography (London:
Jonathan Cape, 1979), 205.
17
See Volker Michels, ed., Materialien zu Hermann Hesses “Siddhartha.” 2 vols.
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975–76).
18
See Hesse’s letter of 3 February 1923 to Frederik van Eeden (Briefe 2:48).
19
Theobald Ziegler, Der ewige Buddho (Darmstadt: Otto Reichl Verlag, 1922).
20
Theodore Ziolkowski, “Siddhartha: The Landscape of the Soul,” in The Novels of
Hermann Hesse, 146–77.
21
Heribert Kuhn, “Kommentar,” in Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp BasisBibliothek, 1998), 138; see Walter Benjamin, “Der Erzäh-
ler,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2.2, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schwep-
penhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), 438–65.
22
Letter to Helene Welti of 29 August 1922 (Briefe 2:28).
23
See his letter to Volker Michels of 24 January 1973, cited in Michels, Materi-
alien zu Hermann Hesses “Siddhartha,” 2:302.
24
Colin Wilson, The Outsider (1956; London: Picador, 1978), 74.
25
Letter to Hilde Jung-Neugeboren of July 1927 (cited in Volker Michels, ed.,
Materialien zu Hermann Hesses “Steppenwolf” [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1972], 122).
26
Cited in Michels, Materialien zu Hermann Hesses “Steppenwolf,” 159.
27
Kurt Pinthus, “Hermann Hesse: Zum 50. Geburtstag,” in 8 Uhr Abendblatt
(Berlin), 2 July 1927 (cited in Friedrich Pfäfflin and Bernhard Zeller, Hermann
Hesse, 1877–1977: Stationen seines Lebens, des Werkes und seiner Wirkung [Munich:
Kösel, 1977], 229).
28
The term itself is used in the novel (64); in his letter to Emil Molt of 26 June
1923, Hesse did not hesitate to apply the expression to himself (Briefe 2:62).
29
Don Nelson, entry on “Der Steppenwolf,” in Encyclopedia of German Literature,
ed. Matthias Konzett, 2 vols. (Chicago and London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2000), 1:457.
30
See Hesse’s discriminating but ultimately positive comments on Keyserling and
Spengler in his letters to Romain Rolland of 6 April 1923, to Georg Reinhart of 17
April 1923, and to Italo Zaratin of January 1924 (Briefe 2:57; 60; 76); he
60 PAUL BISHOP
described Der Untergang des Abendlandes as the most significant work to have
emerged from Germany in the previous twenty years (letter to Josef Englert of 1
July 1923 [Briefe 2:63]).
31
Heribert Kuhn, “Kommentar,” in Hermann Hesse, Der Steppenwolf (Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp BasisBibliothek, 1999), 298–99. See Jeffrey Herf, Reac-
tionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984).
32
Eva-Maria Stuckel and Franz Wegener, Interpretationen zu Hermann Hesses
“Der Steppenwolf” — Interpretations on Hermann Hesse’s “Steppenwolf” (Gladbeck:
Kulturförderverein Ruhrgebiet, 2000).
33
Michael E. Zimmerman, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity: Technology,
Politics, Art (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990).
34
Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1986); In
English, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (London:
SCM P, 1962). Henceforth cited as SuZ with section number.
35
This opposition of Eros and Logos is derived, at least in part, from Ludwig
Klages Von kosmogonischen Eros (1922; Of Cosmogonic Eros), which Hesse much
admired (see his letter to Italo Zaratin of January 1924 [Briefe 2:76]).
36
See “Traum von einer Audienz bei Goethe,” in the Frankfurter Zeitung of 12
September 1926 (Briefe 2:154).
37
“Nachwort,” in Michels, Materialien zu Hermann Hesses “Steppenwolf,” 159–60.
38
See his letter to Reinhold Geheeb of 13 June 1927 (cited in Kuhn, “Kommen-
tar” to Demian, 296).
39
His reading of Steppenwolf prompted Walter Benjamin to record his experiments
with hashish, as well as opium and mescalin (Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Neg-
ative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute
[New York: The Free P, 1977], 126).
40
Compare with Schelling’s description of intellectual intuition in his Philosophische
Briefe über Dogmatismus und Kritizismus (Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and
Criticism, 1795), letter 8, in Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Historisch-kritische
Ausgabe, ed. Hans Michael Baumgartner, Wilhelm G. Jacobs, Hermann Krings,
Hermann Zeltner (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1976–), Reihe 1, Werke,
vol. 3, p. 87.
41
See Briefe 2:165. There is also a disguised allusion (GW 7:387) to the German
art historian and psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn (1886–1933).
42
Ronald Gray, “Hermann Hesse: The Prose and the Politics,” in Weimar Ger-
many: Writers and Politics, ed. Alan Bance (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic P,
1982), 14–25; here, 21.
43
Such as GW 9:392; see Gray, “Hermann Hesse,” 24.
44
Volker Michels, ed., Materialien zu Hermann Hesses “Das Glasperlenspiel,” 2
vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973–74), 1:295–96.
3: In Defense of Reason and Justice:
Lion Feuchtwanger’s Historical
Novels of the Weimar Republic
Roland Dollinger
that one may attribute to Süss also typify the multitude of German charac-
ters in Jud Süss. The scrupulousness with which Süss Oppenheimer and the
duke use each other to pursue their own selfish interests binds them
together in an uncanny love-hate relationship that both Süss Oppenheimer
and Karl Alexander acknowledge (JS, 297). The parrot that Süss Oppen-
heimer keeps in his villa in Stuttgart is not merely a symbol for his fascin-
ation with exotic objects. It also symbolizes the link between the German
sovereign and his Jewish subject, a relationship based on mutual imitation
and repetition. The Duke, for example, casts his eyes at Magdalen Sybille,
the only woman in the novel with genuinely positive feelings for Süss
Oppenheimer, only after he discovers “his Jew’s” desire for her. And when
Süss Oppenheimer convinces her to become the duke’s courtesan, he uses
the young woman to please the duke and obtain more power for himself,
power that is modeled after the absolute power of the monarch (JS, 223–29).
By executing the Jewish scapegoat who conveniently serves as a screen for
the projection of their own negative qualities, the people of Württemberg
cleanse the body politic of their own failures. It is a gross misrepresentation
of Jud Süss to suggest that certain character traits used by Feuchtwanger to
describe the many figures of his novel are specifically Jewish or German
attributes — an intentional misreading of the book that became the basis
for Veit Harlan’s viciously anti-Semitic film version of 1940.
In Feuchtwanger’s opinion, however, the key to understanding Jud
Süss is to be found not in Süss Oppenheimer’s morally questionable actions
but rather in his development from a man of power to a man of wisdom, in
the trajectory of his inner life that clearly sets him apart from the German
characters in the novel. He wants the reader to recognize the allegorical
significance of this exemplary Jew for all white Western Europeans: they
too must embark on a spiritual journey toward the Eastern culture of Asia:
they must enter “den Weg über die enge europäische Lehre von der Macht
. . . zu der Lehre Asiens vom Nichtwollen und Nichttun” (CO, 390; the
path from the narrow European teachings about power . . . to the teaching
of Asia about non-desiring and non-doing). In numerous autobiographical
sketches, commentaries on his literary works, and essays on the historical
significance of Judaism, Feuchtwanger repeatedly refers to the importance
of this idea for both his fictional characters and his self-understanding as a
German-Jewish intellectual. In his “Versuch einer Selbstbiographie”
(Attempt at an Autobiography, 1927) Feuchtwanger even claims that prior
to 1927 he had written only one book, which dealt with human beings
caught between the dualism of activity and inactivity or “Macht und
Erkenntnis” (CO, 363; power and knowledge). For Feuchtwanger, Jud
Süss was primarily a novel of ideas, dealing with a number of philosophical
oppositions such as vita activa versus vita contemplativa, outer versus inner
life, appearance versus essence, power versus wisdom, the pursuit of one’s
desires versus the denial of desires, Nietzsche versus Buddha (CO, 390).
66 ROLAND DOLLINGER
She joins other female characters in the modern German novel — for
example, the murdered women in Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) or Harry
Haller’s female counterpart Hermine in Hesse’s Steppenwolf (1927) —
whose deaths serve as the necessary sacrifice for the modern hero’s suc-
cessful spiritual development. Unlike her father, who chooses death,
Naemi is a victim.16
At the end of the novel, shortly before his execution, Süss Oppen-
heimer’s inner transformation is complete. A mystical union between Süss
and Rabbi Gabriel (JS, 462), the cabbalist seeking the presence of God in
the natural world, signifies that Süss Oppenheimer’s life of political
activism has now been replaced by his knowledge about the vanity of all
worldly desires and the futility of selfish individualism. Oppenheimer’s
forehead now bears the mark of religious wisdom, the Hebrew letter shin,
which is also the physical leitmotif characterizing Rabbi Gabriel. Although
Feuchtwanger’s idealization of self-denial and self-dissolution — deeply
Romantic notions that became part of twentieth-century German culture
via Wagner’s operas and Schopenhauer’s philosophy — may help Süss
Oppenheimer find his peace at the moment of death, Feuchtwanger’s mes-
sage should not be accepted without some reservations. At a time when
Thomas Mann published Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain, 1924),
his novel about the transcendence of the life-negating German fascination
with death, Feuchtwanger seems to have moved in the opposite direction.
If Süss Oppenheimer has become like Rabbi Gabriel, then one cannot
speak of a unity reconciling the juxtaposed lives of the Court Jew and the
mystic.17 And if Rabbi Gabriel embodies Feuchtwanger’s ideal, then his
mysticism prevails at the expense of all social and political activity.
Feuchtwanger’s dilemma at the end of Jud Süss expresses a fundamen-
tal problem for liberal intellectuals of the Weimar Republic. While sup-
porting the democratic principles of the new republic in Germany after the
First World War and hoping for free elections, the end to censorship, and
an economic policy that would end the material suffering of the people,18
Feuchtwanger and like-minded liberal writers such as Heinrich Mann
(1871–1950) and Alfred Döblin (1878–1957) were caught between the
desire to break down the barrier between literature and politics, on the one
hand, and the equally strong tendency to defend the “purity” of the cul-
tural sphere on the other hand. Feuchtwanger witnessed the leftist revolu-
tion in Munich in 1918–19, the active role that intellectuals such as Ernst
Toller, Erich Mühsam, and Gustav Landauer (1870–1919) played in it,
and their gradual disillusionment with the practical world of politics. In his
play Thomas Wendt (1920), an immediate response to the events in
Munich, Feuchtwanger created the character of a writer who initially joins
the revolution before coming full circle by abandoning politics completely
for the purer world of the spirit. Both Feuchtwanger’s Thomas Wendt and
Jud Süss deal with the problem of the intellectual who must negotiate his
FEUCHTWANGER’S HISTORICAL NOVELS 69
path between assuming power and accepting responsibility for his actions,
and defending the realm of knowledge and risking being sidelined by other
historical forces. In this light, the character of Jud Süss is perhaps less
an allegorical figure for the journey of so-called Western men toward an
imagined East than a character symbolizing the insecurity of an intellectual
like Feuchtwanger about his proper place within an increasingly class-
conscious modern German society. While this is true for most liberal
writers of the Weimar Republic who refused to put their literary production
in the service of party politics, Feuchtwanger’s Jewish background certainly
heightened his sense of not belonging. And he continued to pursue this
topic in his next novel, Die häßliche Herzogin.
Much smaller in scope than Jud Süss, Feuchtwanger’s novel about
Duchess Margarete, nicknamed “Maultasch” (HH, 112) because of the
ugly shape of her mouth, is both an action-filled political thriller and a psy-
chological portrait of an outsider. Set in Tyrol in the fourteenth century,
the novel tells a complex story of intrigue, deception, jealousy, greed, and
several murders. Revolving around the competing interests of German
dynasties such as the Luxemburgs, Wittelbachs, and Habsburgs, the Pope
(who was exiled in Avignon), local feudal lords, and the cities of Tyrol,
Feuchtwanger’s narrative about the life and politics of Margarete bears sev-
eral similarities to Jud Süss.
Inspired by Freud’s psychoanalysis, which Feuchtwanger began to
study after the First World War, this novel deals principally with the sublim-
ation of emotional and sexual satisfaction through political activity.
Spurned by all men due to her ugliness, Margarete, whose intellectual
capabilities are vastly superior to those of her male allies and enemies, seeks
personal fulfillment by becoming an important player on the European
political stage. Her first effort to substitute the idealization of a knightly
friend for her unfulfilled desires is cut short when he is executed after an
unsuccessful coup d’état directed against her first husband. Although Mar-
garete always pursues the interest of Tyrol against the more powerful
dynasties, who are intent on absorbing this bridge to Italy into their
domains, and implements a progressive, enlightened policy of moderniz-
ing her country, her smart leadership never produces the desired result,
that is, her recognition by others. The Volk, characterized by Feuchtwanger
as superstitious and governed by primitive instincts, attribute her political
success to her rival, the beautiful but cunning Agnes von Flavon, one of
Feuchtwanger’s invented characters. Consumed by jealousy and hatred,
Feuchtwanger’s ugly duchess seeks the death penalty for Agnes against the
resistance of the Tyrolean aristocracy and the masses, who worship Agnes’s
beauty and charisma. Before Margarete can spare Agnes’s life, Agnes is
killed by Konrad von Frauenberger, a cynical nihilist representing the
politician without conscience. Earlier in the novel, he had poisoned Mar-
garete’s second husband — with her knowledge, because her husband,
70 ROLAND DOLLINGER
Ludwig of Bavaria, had an affair with Agnes and deprived Tyrol of much-
needed income — and Konrad also kills Margarete’s son, the only heir, to
protect the power interests of his own social group, the gentry. While Mar-
garete buries her son alone, the aristocracy and the populace honor Agnes
by flocking together at her burial. Agnes, the beautiful “Other,” has
defeated Margarete even in death. At the end of the novel, the reader sym-
pathizes with a broken Margarete, who was unable to realize either her
personal desires or her political goals. Abandoned by her former friends,
allies, and subjects, who blame her wrongfully for Agnes’s death, she cedes
Tyrol to Duke Rudolf of Austria (1339–65), leaving the House of Habs-
burg to determine its future. Unlike the historical Margarete, who spent
the remaining years of her life in Vienna, Feuchtwanger’s protagonist
moves to Bavaria, where we see her disillusioned and resigned to a life of
solitude on a tiny island.
Like Süss, Margarete withdraws from the world of political intrigue by
renouncing all claims to power. But Margarete’s passivity at the end of her
life, unlike Süss Oppenheimer’s, does not signify Feuchtwanger’s Eastern
ideal of self-conscious “non-doing”; it is mere resignation, the result of the
many defeats she has suffered at the hands of her opponents.19 His dictum
that “der Handelnde niemals Gewissen hat, sondern nur der Betracht-
ende” (CO, 369; the man of action never has a conscience, only the
observing person has one) is a fitting characterization of Margarete’s long-
time advisor, Jakob von Schenna, who refuses to be drawn into the polit-
ical battle between the Duchess and Agnes (HH, 253). Always the
intellectual observer, he analyzes the all-too-human motives of the power-
ful and shares with the old Abbot Johannes von Viktring’s melancholic
insight into the transitoriness of happiness and fame (HH, 210).
Both Jud Süss and Die häßliche Herzogin take place at a historical time
that Feuchtwanger conceives of as a transitional period between the patri-
archally structured order of premodern times with an emphasis on lineage
and rank on the one side, and the onset of modernity on the other.20 And
in both novels the discourse of modernity is intimately linked to the sphere
of money and trade, urbanization, the rise of the bourgeoisie, and most
interestingly, the figure of the Jew, whose status as social outsider allows
him to take advantage of new economic opportunities. Margarete repre-
sents “modernity”: she opens the gates of Tyrolean cities to Jews, improves
the trading conditions, enhances the financial well-being of a rising urban
middle-class, but ultimately her project of modernization is doomed to
failure because the irrationality of her environment, still anchored in the
medieval value-system, proves to be too strong. An outsider herself, she
strongly identifies with her own Court Jew, Mendel Hirsch, who helps her
modernize the cities. Unlike Süss, however, Mendel Hirsch does not seek
entrance into the inner circles of power, but like his latter-day coreligionist
he and many other Jews are brutally murdered during a pogrom, the origin
FEUCHTWANGER’S HISTORICAL NOVELS 71
Erfolg
Erfolg (1930)21 is the first of three loosely connected novels — Die Geschwis-
ter Oppermann (The Oppermanns, 1933) and Exil (1940) were written after
Hitler’s ascent to power — that Feuchtwanger called “Wartesaal-Trilogie”
(Waiting-Room Trilogy).22 In his commentary on Exil, Feuchtwanger
explained that the German dictatorship was also made possible by the inex-
cusable passivity of the opponents of National Socialism, who had waited too
long before responding to the brutality of the Nazi regime with their own
72 ROLAND DOLLINGER
violence.23 While these comments, written two months after the beginning of
the Second World War in his French exile, reflect Feuchtwanger’s pugnacious
attitude, prompted by the aggression of Nazi Germany, we shall see that in
Erfolg he still hoped to defeat völkisch barbarism by means of an appeal to
human rationality and the power of literature.
When Feuchtwanger began to dictate his novel to his secretary, Lola
Sernau, at the end of 1927, two years after he had moved from Munich to
Berlin, the Weimar Republic was enjoying relative economic and political
stability. The public was not yet concerned with rising unemployment in
the wake of the Great Depression and the radicalization of the political
parties of both the left and the right that soon would weaken the moderate
political center. In May 1928 the National Socialists received less than
three percent of the votes to the Reichstag, and Feuchtwanger’s fictional
account of the origin of the National Socialist movement in Munich
seemed to revolve around an already historical event. This may have led
Feuchtwanger to choose a narrative perspective that supposedly looked
back at the narrated events from the year 2000.24 When Erfolg was pub-
lished in 1930, however, the National Socialists’ share of seats in the par-
liament had increased to 18.3 percent, and most reviewers did not read
Erfolg as a historical novel but rather as a political Zeitroman, the first
novel by a major Weimar novelist dealing with the origin of National
Socialism.25 Depending on the political viewpoint of the reviewer, Erfolg
was either praised as a warning against the Nazi movement or lambasted as
a book of hatred that — according to a Nazi reviewer — had earned its
author his exit visa from Germany.26 More recently, there have also been
critical attempts to establish Erfolg as a Schlüsselroman and identify some of
the characters of the novel as representations of historical persons:27 the
Marxist engineer Pröckl, for example, is said to be Feuchtwanger’s friend
Bertolt Brecht, the comedian Balthasar Hierl allegedly shows great resem-
blance to Karl Valentin, while the writers Matthäi, Pfisterer, and Tüverlin
are modeled after the writers Ludwig Thoma, Ludwig Ganghofer, and
Feuchtwanger himself.28 While such readings emphasize the resemblance
between fictional characters and real persons — Feuchtwanger’s friend
Brecht, for example, was offended by the character of Pröckl — they
downplay the aesthetic (fictitious) character of Erfolg, that is, Feucht-
wanger’s effort to analyze historical events and movements through the
perspective of fictional characters who become metonymic figures repre-
senting various social groups and their Weltanschauungen during the
Weimar Republic (CO, 397).
Formally, Erfolg is the most modern of Feuchtwanger’s novels, and is
often associated with the term Neue Sachlichkeit (New Sobriety), a term
that Feuchtwanger did not find particularly useful to describe his novels
(CO, 436). While Die häßliche Herzogin and Jud Süss often experiment
with language reminiscent of Expressionist prose — noteworthy is the
FEUCHTWANGER’S HISTORICAL NOVELS 73
Ein großer Mann, . . . er heißt Karl Marx meinte: die Philosophen haben
die Welt erklärt, es kommt darauf an, sie zu ändern. Ich für meine Person
glaube, das einzige Mittel, sie zu ändern, ist, sie zu erklären. Erklärt man
sie plausibel, so ändert man sie auf stille Art, durch fortwirkende Ver-
nunft. Sie mit Gewalt zu verändern, versuchen nur diejenigen, die sie
nicht plausibel erklären können. . . . Ich glaube an gutgeschriebenes
Papier mehr als an Maschinengewehre. (E, 785)
now become the principal driving force for his work, which can no
longer save Krüger’s life but can strive to keep his memory alive. Literature
(and art in general), Feuchtwanger suggests, may not be able to effect
immediate political results but brings about changes through its mnemosynic
function: by remembering the dead and bearing witness to the origins
of social calamities, literature might stimulate the numb emotions of its
readers and provoke them into political action. The sense of unease and
embarrassing helplessness that Johanna’s film and the screening of “Panz-
erkreuzer Orlow” (E, 495; Battleship Orlow) are able to elicit among the
viewers seem to confirm Feuchtwanger’s unabating faith in the political
effectiveness of literary works.
Romans of the first century A.D. with the Germans of the 1930s, even if
the second and third volume of the Joseph trilogy establish some parallels
between them. By essentially accepting the historical Flavius Josephus’s
(Roman) viewpoint, Feuchtwanger made sure that his readers would focus
on the philosophical content of his book and not just on the victimization
of the Jews. And by making the traitor Joseph and his development the
crucial aspects of his novel, Feuchtwanger’s Brechtian strategy was to strip
his protagonist of heroic qualities and thus turn his readers’ attention to
the novel’s ideas.
The historical Josephus seems to have been a complicated man whose
account of the Jewish war against the Romans became — despite its histor-
ical unreliability — the primary source of our knowledge about the Jewish
war (66–70 A.D.). During the revolt, Josephus was a Jewish leader who in
the end surrendered to the Romans. He began his career as the comman-
der of the Jewish revolutionary forces in Galilee who, when the Romans
began their campaign, fled with his forces to the fortress of Jotapata. After
a siege of seven weeks, the fortress was taken, and Josephus and his soldiers
fled to a nearby cave, where his men decided to commit suicide rather than
be taken prisoner by the Romans. Josephus, on the other hand, insisted
that surrender to the overpowering Roman military was the more rational
course of action; nevertheless, he reluctantly agreed to draw lots with the
rest to determine who would die first. As luck would have it, Josephus
drew last and convinced the only other remaining soldier that they should
give themselves up. He was taken to Vespasian; at this meeting he pre-
dicted that the general would soon become Roman emperor, a prophecy
that after Nero’s death would prove correct. After the destruction of
Jerusalem, he lived in Rome where he wrote his account of the war.
According to contemporary scholarship, his book sent a twofold message
to Jews and other peoples under Roman dominion: it was a strong warning
against revolt, and the uprising should be seen as the work of political
fanatics and criminals who by no means represented the political opinion
of all Jews.39
While Feuchtwanger follows the historian’s account with regard to the
main stages of the Jewish revolt from its first acts of resistance to the siege
and destruction of Jerusalem to the victory march in Rome, the main
theme of the novel is Joseph’s transformation from a staunch Jewish
nationalist to a cosmopolitan citizen of the civilized world, transgressing
national and ethnic identities.40 Recognizing nationalist politics as destruc-
tive and opposed to rationality, Feuchtwanger’s Joseph becomes an early
twentieth-century champion of the hybridization of “self” and “other”:
“Es kam darauf an, das eigene Gute überfließen zu lassen in die anderen,
das fremde Gute einzusaugen in sich selbst” (JK, 268; It was important to
let the good in oneself flow into others, the good of others into oneself).
Rejecting the racial Blut und Boden nationalism in Germany, Feucht-
FEUCHTWANGER’S HISTORICAL NOVELS 79
must pay for his lofty ideals is his sense of not belonging, of remaining an
outsider. Whereas Süss found his inner peace by returning to Judaism at
the end of his life, Joseph continues to suffer from the dilemma of, on the
one hand, not being Jewish enough and, on the other, of being too Jewish.
Feuchtwanger creates a drastic image of Joseph’s situation as an outsider
when Joseph, shortly before the destruction of the Temple, tries to bring
about a last-minute truce and is greeted by both Jews and Romans with
derisive mockery (JK, 384). He strives to preserve his Jewish identity by
overcoming it at the same time — a paradox that could only become lived
reality if the other nations of the novel made his cosmopolitan, spiritual
principles their own.
Joseph’s hope that he could reconcile Jews and Romans through the
authority of his writing (JK, 324) turns out to be unrealistic at a time when
the military machinery, incited by irrational politics, does not heed the
words of peace. When Joseph at the end of Der jüdische Krieg begins to
work on his book about the Jewish war, his intention is both to remember
its horror and to warn the next generations against the violence inherent in
nationalist ideologies (JK, 463). At the end of the trilogy, we see Joseph
recognize his failure and return to the side of the Jewish rebels. When the
last volume, Der Tag wird kommen, was published in 1942, the Second
World War had already claimed millions of lives, the extermination of the
Jews was accelerating, and Feuchtwanger was living out his second exile in
California. Forced to rethink his earlier conception, Feuchtwanger realized
that what was needed was not his rational utopian notion of a cosmopol-
itan multiculturalism but emotional involvement with the victims of
National Socialism. Joseph’s support for Jewish nationalism at the end of
his life is also symbolic of Feuchtwanger’s confession that a Jewish self-
identity, when threatened by extermination, cannot be based on universal,
rational principles alone.
Notes
1
Detlev Peukert, Die Weimarer Republik: Krisenjahre der klassischen Moderne
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987), 26–31. To mention a few from this gener-
ation: Alfred Döblin (1878–1957) and Arnold Zweig (1887–1968) who both
exerted a strong influence on Feuchtwanger’s literary and political development;
Herbert Ihering (1888–1977), the famous theater critic who like Feuchtwanger
wrote his first reviews for Siegfried Jacobsohn’s Schaubühne; Bruno Frank
(1887–1945), Erich Mühsam (1878–1934), Joachim Ringelnatz (1883–1934),
Ernst Toller (1893–1939) with whom Feuchtwanger shared his Bohemian life in
Munich. Heinrich Mann (1871–1950) and Frank Wedekind (1964–1918) should
be mentioned here as significant influences on Feuchtwanger’s career, although
they do not belong to the “war generation.” For Feuchtwanger’s biography, see
FEUCHTWANGER’S HISTORICAL NOVELS 81
Volker Skierka, Lion Feuchtwanger: Eine Biographie, ed. Stefan Jaeger (Berlin:
Quadriga Verlag, 1984), 21–78.
2
Wulf Köpke’s “Lion Feuchtwanger’s Discovery of Himself in Heinrich Heine,” in
The Jewish Reception of Heinrich Heine, ed. Stefan Jaeger (Berlin: Quadriga Verlag,
1984) analyzes Feuchtwanger’s dissertation.
3
In his essay “Vom Sinn und Unsinn des historischen Romans” (On the Meaning
and Meaninglessness of the Historical Novel, 1935) Feuchtwanger writes that he
uses historical facts as a means of creating distance between himself and the imme-
diacy of the present; historical material becomes “ein Gleichnis” (510; an allegory)
for his representation of the “now.” In Lion Feuchtwanger, Centum Opuscula, ed.
Wolfgang Berndt (Rudolstadt: Greifenverlag, 1956), 508–15. Subsequent refer-
ences to this collection of essays by Feuchtwanger are cited in the text using the
abbreviation CO and the page number.
4
See Wulf Köpke, Lion Feuchtwanger (Munich: Beck, 1983), 16–17.
5
Feuchtwanger and Brecht cooperated on the rewriting of Warren Hastings. The
new play, Kalkutta, 4. Mai premiered in 1928. The anticapitalist play Die Petroleum-
insel was also performed for the first time in 1928.
6
For an excellent analysis of Thomas Wendt, see Köpke, Lion Feuchtwanger, 69–75.
7
For a discussion of the relationship between assimilation and the crisis of Jewish
self-identity, see Noah Isenberg, Between Redemption and Doom: The Strains of Ger-
man-Jewish Modernism (Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 1999), esp. 1–17.
8
Lion Feuchtwanger, Jud Süss (Berlin: Aufbau Taschenbuch Verlag, 2000); Lion
Feuchtwanger, Die häßliche Herzogin (Berlin: Aufbau Taschenbuch Verlag, 2002).
Subsequent references to these works are cited in the text using the abbreviations
JS and HH and the page number.
9
For a brief comparison of Feuchtwanger’s drama and his novel, see David
Bathrick, “1925: Jud Süss by Lion Feuchtwanger is published,” in Yale Companion
to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture, 1096–1996, ed. Sander Gilman
and Jack Zipes (New Haven: Yale UP, 1997), 436–37.
10
Frank Dietschreit, Lion Feuchtwanger (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1988), 95–109.
11
Manfred Zimmermann, Joseph Süss Oppenheimer, ein Finanzmann des 18.
Jahrhunderts: Ein Stück Absolutismus- und Jesuitengeschichte; Nach den Vertheidi-
gungsakten und den Schriften der Zeitgenossen (Stuttgart: Rieger, 1874).
12
Paul Levesque, “Mapping the Other,” German Quarterly 71.2 (Spring 1998):
145–65, esp. 148–56.
13
Levesque, “Mapping the Other,” 148–50.
14
Ibid., 154.
15
Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New
Haven, Connecticut: Yale UP, 1996).
16
At the beginning of their journey through Europe and North Africa from 1912
to 1914, Marta Feuchtwanger gave birth to a daughter, who died soon afterwards.
The loss of a child became a motif in several of his novels (Die Geschwister Opper-
mann, 1933; Die Jüdin von Toledo, 1955; Jefta und seine Tochter, 1957) but it is
too reductive to read its significance for these works only biographically.
82 ROLAND DOLLINGER
17
The character of Rabbi Gabriel owes his presence in Jud Süss to Feuchtwanger’s
desire to present his readers with a positive example of a Jewish mystic, whose mere
possibility anti-Semitic stereotypes have stubbornly denied. Just three years before
the publication of Jud Süss, Werner Sombart had expounded in his Die Juden und
das Wirtschaftsleben (1911) that a Jewish mystic in the tradition of Jakob Böhme
was unthinkable. Reducing the “Jewish spirit” to an alleged Jewish preoccupation
with material and quantifiable phenomena, Sombart saw no room in Jewish life for
mysticism. By creating the character of Rabbi Gabriel and emphasizing the spiritual
qualities of Süss Oppenheimer, Feuchtwanger — like Martin Buber before him —
reserved for German Jews a place at the “metaphysical table” (Levesque, “Mapping
the Other,” 155).
18
Wilhelm von Sternburg, Lion Feuchtwanger: Ein deutsches Schriftstellerleben
(Königstein: Athenäum, 1984), 157.
19
Köpke, Lion Feuchtwanger, 88.
20
Köpke, Lion Feuchtwanger, 87.
21
Lion Feuchtwanger, Erfolg (Berlin: Aufbau Taschenbuch Verlag, 1996). Subse-
quent references to this work are cited in the text using the abbreviation E and the
page number.
22
See Feuchtwanger’s “Nachwort des Autors 1939” (when Feuchtwanger finished
writing Exil) in Lion Feuchtwanger, Exil (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1979), 787.
23
Feuchtwanger, “Nachwort” to Exil, 787.
24
Feuchtwanger, “Nachwort” to Exil, 790.
25
Sternburg, Lion Feuchtwanger, 226.
26
Skierka, Lion Feuchtwanger: Eine Biographie, 109; Dietschreit, Lion Feucht-
wanger, 51–52.
27
See Synnöve Clason, Die Welt erklären: Geschichte und Fiktion in Lion Feucht-
wangers Roman “Erfolg” (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1975), and Egon
Brückner and Klaus Modick, Lion Feuchtwangers Roman “Erfolg”: Leistung und
Problematik schrifstellerischer Aufklärung in der Endphase der Weimarer Republik
(Kronberg: Scriptor, 1978).
28
For a more complete list see Skierka, Lion Feuchtwanger: Eine Biographie, 106.
29
For example, chapter 4 of the first book is called “Kurzer Rückblick auf die Justiz
jener Jahre” (E, 28–29; A Brief Retrospection of The Judicial System during These
Years); in the second book, the chapter entitled “Einige historische Daten”
(E, 212–18; Some Historical Data) lists various sociological data about the popula-
tion of the world, Europe, Germany, and Bavaria in order to illustrate the back-
wardness of this particular German state.
30
Hermann Broch, in his James Joyce und die Gegenwart (new ed.; Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1971), summarizes this idea: “Aber eben diese Totalität ist ja die
Aufgabe der Kunst und der Dichtung, sie ist ja die Grundaufgabe schlechthin”
(67–68). For a discussion of the notion of totality in modern literature, see
Dollinger, “Die Welt als Sprache und der Mythos: Ganzheitsideen in der modernen
deutschen Literatur,” in Unus Mundus: Kosmos und Sympathie; Beiträge zum
Gedanken der Einheit von Mensch und Kosmos (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang,
1992), 75–92.
FEUCHTWANGER’S HISTORICAL NOVELS 83
31
Skierka, Lion Feuchtwanger: Eine Biographie, 109.
32
Sternburg, Lion Feuchtwanger, 217.
33
For a discussion of Feuchtwanger’s book Moskau 1937: Ein Reisebericht für
meine Freunde, a mostly positive representation of Stalin and the achievements of
the Soviet Union, see Köpke, Lion Feuchtwanger, 24–27; for the role of German
exile writers in the construction of a Volksfront, see Albrecht Betz, Exil und
Engagement, in Deutsche Schriftsteller im Frankreich der Dreissiger Jahre (Munich:
edition text ⫹ kritik, 1986), esp. 125–34.
34
Skierka, Lion Feuchtwanger: Eine Biographie, 107.
35
Köpke, Lion Feuchtwanger, 102; Brückner und Modick, Lion Feuchtwangers
Roman“Erfolg,” 77.
36
The ugly side of American capitalism became the reason for Feuchtwanger’s
book of ballads called PEP: J.L. Wetcheeks amerikanisches Liederbuch (1928).
37
Lion Feuchtwanger, The Day Will Come, vol. 3 of the Josephus trilogy, trans.
Caroline Oram (London and New York: Hutchinson, 1942).
38
Dietschreit, Lion Feuchtwanger, 110.
39
Shaye J. D. Cohen, “Roman Domination: The Jewish Revolt and the Destruc-
tion of the Second Temple,” in Ancient Israel: From Abraham to the Roman
Destruction of the Temple, ed. Hershel Shanks (Washington, DC: Biblical Archaeol-
ogy Society, 1999), 268.
40
Lion Feuchtwanger, Der jüdische Krieg (Berlin: Aufbau, 2002), 268. Subsequent
references to this collection of essays by Feuchtwanger are cited in the text using
the abbreviation JK and the page number.
41
Köpke, Lion Feuchtwanger, 122.
4: The Case of Jakob Wassermann:
Social, Legal, and Personal Crises
in the Weimar Republic
Karl Leydecker
Franconia, into a largely assimilated Jewish family that had little social or
religious connection to the Jewish community in the town, but the
young Wassermann nevertheless suffered discrimination on account of
his Jewishness.3 His childhood was not a happy one, particularly following
the early death of his mother in 1882 and his father’s subsequent remar-
riage the following year. The family suffered grinding poverty and Wasser-
mann was harshly treated by his stepmother. Leaving school at sixteen in
1889, he endured dull apprenticeships in his uncle’s business in Vienna,
one year’s military service, and several dead-end jobs before he got his big
break, being employed in Munich in 1894 by the writer and dramatist
Ernst von Wolzogen, who encouraged the young Wassermann’s literary
aspirations. In Munich, which was the literary capital of southern Germany
at this time, Wassermann began to move in literary circles, meeting such
promising young writers as Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Hugo
von Hofmannsthal. In 1896 Wassermann published his first short stories
and his first novel, Melusine, and also joined the staff of the legendary satir-
ical magazine Simplicissimus, where he worked for three years before mov-
ing to Vienna to take up a post as theater correspondent. In 1901 he
married Julie Speyer and lived with her in Vienna until their separation in
1919, at which time Wassermann moved to Altaussee in Steiermark to live
with Marta Karlweis, whom he was eventually able to marry in 1926 after
the conclusion of extremely acrimonious and protracted divorce proceed-
ings with Julie, an experience which would be reflected in several of the
late novels.
Wassermann’s second novel Die Juden von Zirndorf (The Jews of
Zirndorf, 1897), was his first work to gain critical attention. It also marked
his first literary engagement with the fate of Jews in Germany, a topic
which would preoccupy him in both his novels and his non-literary writ-
ings throughout his career. His next novel, Die Geschichte der jungen
Renate Fuchs (The Story of Young Renate Fuchs, 1901) was the first to be
published by Samuel Fischer in Berlin and marked his commercial break-
through. This popular if ultimately conservative women’s novel about a
fallen woman, which ends with the union of the eponymous heroine with
Agathon Geyer, who, like many of Wassermann’s characters, reappears
from an earlier novel (Die Juden von Zirndorf), marked the beginning of
an extremely lucrative relationship for Wassermann and Fischer.4 Wasser-
mann would become one of Fischer’s most commercially successful novel-
ists, with the result that by the time of Wassermann’s death the publishing
house had sold almost 1.5 million copies of his novels in Germany alone.5
Wassermann’s most significant prewar novel was Caspar Hauser oder
Die Trägheit des Herzens (Caspar Hauser or the Lethargy of the Heart,
1908), which has remained popular with successive generations of readers,
not least because interest in its subject matter was renewed by Werner Her-
zog’s 1974 film Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle (English title: The
JAKOB WASSERMANN: SOCIAL, LEGAL, AND PERSONAL CRISES 87
The World’s Illusion in 1920, only a year after its publication in German.
Translations of the other major prewar works quickly followed (only Die
Juden von Zirndorf had previously appeared in English, in 1918) as did
translations of his subsequent novels. Wassermann rapidly reached a wide
readership in English on both sides of the Atlantic, and would soon
become one of the most widely read German writers in North America in
the 1920s.8
now believed that politics was “der Augenpunkt jedes zu sittlicher Verant-
wortung bereiten Staatsbürgers” (L, 329; the focus of attention of every
citizen ready to accept moral responsibility). Faced with the rising tide of
anti-Semitism and fascism, writers like Wassermann and Thomas Mann
realized that they could no longer afford the luxury of an Olympian
detachment from political events that threatened the very existence of the
Weimar Republic.
In the same essay Wassermann went on to argue that the novel cannot
be anything other than a mirror of the reality of the time, and the very
meaning of an age (L, 330). He concluded the essay by arguing that his
analysis of the justice system and the relationship of society to the idea of
justice in Der Fall Maurizius was “im höheren Sinn auch ein politisches
Faktum” (L, 330; in a higher sense also a political fact). But the reference
to a higher sense is extremely revealing, suggesting as it does that Wasser-
mann was still uncomfortable with the idea of a direct engagement with
politics, and this is reflected even in the later Weimar novels, including Der
Fall Maurizius, as we will see below. As Neubauer has rightly observed,
Wassermann’s works avoided politically or ideologically explosive issues,
attacked no parties or persons, and remained rather vague in their socio-
political dimensions, which Neubauer identified as the reason for the lack
of interest in him by critics in the period after the Second World War.19
But as literary critics have come to focus less exclusively on the rela-
tionship of writers to party politics and have widened their interest to
encompass the social dimensions of writers and to explore the relationship
between literary history and social history, so also Wassermann’s works have
a new relevance and interest for the critic and the reader.20 Of particular
interest, in addition to his important critique of the justice system in Der
Fall Maurizius and elsewhere, is one other subject that was highly politi-
cally charged in the Weimar Republic and which Wassermann engaged with
repeatedly in his later novels, namely, the question of marriage.
Laudin und die Seinen underlines the point that Wassermann was
most able to engage with social issues of the day when focusing on the
concerns of the individual. Entirely typical also is the way in which Laudin,
and with him Wassermann, goes on to move from the analysis of a particu-
lar social ill to make a vaguer general plea for what he calls a transformation
of the social ideal (LS, 256), which would require a greater stock of some-
thing called “Menschenhumus” (LS, 257; human substance). The awk-
wardness of the word is a clue to the vagueness of the concept, and the
suggestion that this substance is something organic is highly revealing of
Wassermann’s tendency to move from the specifically social to the vaguely
mystical.
Marriage crises proliferate in Wassermann’s three later Weimar novels,
which comprise the Andergast trilogy. In the first book, Der Fall Mauriz-
ius, Etzel Andergast’s father and mother are divorced, Maurizius’s mar-
riage to his wife Elli is also in a state of crisis prior to her murder, and it is
even mentioned in passing that the enigmatic central Jewish figure, Gregor
Waremme, is divorced from his wife. The first part of the second book,
Etzel Andergast, deals with the collapse of Joseph Kerkhoven’s first mar-
riage and with the associated collapse of Marie Bergmann’s marriage, who
later becomes Kerkhoven’s second wife. The second part of the novel in
turn depicts the marriage of Kerkhoven and Marie in crisis, as she commits
adultery with Etzel, and this plot is carried over into Joseph Kerkhovens
dritte Existenz, which begins with the continuing crisis of the Kerkhoven
marriage and successful trial separation, but then shifts in focus to the
account of the marriage and divorce of Alexander Herzog, which is a thinly
veiled blow-by-blow account of Wassermann’s own marriage and divorce
and stretches to hundreds of pages. These depictions of marital difficulties
allow Wassermann to amplify his critique in Laudin of marriage and
divorce law. In Der Fall Maurizius, the eponymous hero goes so far as to
describe a loveless marriage as cursed, and entering into one as a crime,
possibly the most serious crime possible.26 But increasingly, these marriage
crises become vehicles to convey Wassermann’s ever sharper sense of a
wider social, psychological and even metaphysical malaise, which becomes
all-pervading by the last novel.27
who has been in prison for eighteen years for the murder of his wife.
Instrumental in his conviction was the senior public prosecutor, Baron
Andergast, who made his reputation through the successful prosecution of
the case. The case turned on the evidence of the polish Jew Gregor
Waremme. Andergast’s sixteen-year-old son, Etzel, is convinced of Maur-
izius’s innocence, and eventually gets Waremme, now living in Berlin
under the name Warschauer, to confess that he had perjured himself at the
trial and that it was Maurizius’s wife’s sister, Anna, with whom Maurizius
was having an affair, who had committed the murder. Meanwhile Baron
Andergast feels compelled by his son’s actions to reconsider the case him-
self and eventually visits Maurizius in prison. No longer able to justify the
conviction, he chooses to take the coward’s way out, arranging a pardon
for Maurizius, rather than see the original judgment overturned on appeal.
When Etzel learns of his father’s action, he breaks off all contact with him,
and his father suffers a complete breakdown. On his release, Maurizius
is unable to adapt to life outside prison and shortly afterwards commits
suicide.
Baron Andergast represents the Weimar justice system, and in criticiz-
ing him Wassermann joins the ranks of novelists who used their works to
attack that system during the Weimar Republic.28 Andergast’s moral bank-
ruptcy is doubly emphasized when it is revealed that he himself lied in
order to engineer the suicide of his wife’s lover (FM, 430), who was in turn
tricked into perjuring himself in order to protect her honor. Andergast’s
eventual complete breakdown is a metaphor for the bankruptcy of the
Weimar justice system, though characteristically Wassermann’s critique is
couched in general, almost philosophical terms, and does not, for example,
address the specific right-wing bias of judges during the Weimar Republic,
a matter which so exercised Heinrich Mann, Gabriele Tergit and Lion
Feuchtwanger, to name but three novelists who directly addressed this
issue.29 Thus, when Andergast realizes that Maurizius’s conviction is
unsafe, he is shaken by the abstract thought that truth might not be
absolute, but a product of the passage of time (FM, 418), but, in contrast
to Laudin und die Seinen there is little analysis in the novel of the specific
weaknesses of the legal system that could lead to miscarriages of justice.
Indeed, it can be argued that it is the personal moral weakness of
Waremme/Warschauer, allied to Andergast’s rush to prejudge the case,
that led to the injustice. In the end it is personal shortcomings as much as
social and political conditions that are shown to lead to injustice, and this
is emphasized by the fact that Andergast’s shortcomings in his private life
are given as much prominence as those in his public role and serve to illu-
minate it. Wassermann’s target remains the lethargy of the heart that he
had identified as the ultimate source of injustice as far back as the Caspar
Hauser novel. It is, however, true to say that Der Fall Maurizius is much
more concrete when it comes to exposing and condemning the harshness
96 KARL LEYDECKER
Conclusion
In Etzel Andergast and Joseph Kerkhovens dritte Existenz, the second and
third novels of the Andergast trilogy, Wassermann became increasingly
preoccupied with the themes of decay, disintegration, and death. The
growing sense of pessimism and futility that pervades these works went
hand in hand with an ever greater fascination with mysticism and irra-
tionalism, with critics seeing in these last works an affinity between Wasser-
mann and Existentialism (Martin Heidegger’s seminal work, Sein und Zeit
[Being and Time], appeared in 1927).30 A key late influence on Wasser-
mann was the work of the Swiss philosopher Constantin von Monakow
(1853–1930), from whom Wassermann borrowed whole passages for his
Kerkhoven novel and whose work provided the philosophical underpin-
ning for Wassermann’s search for metaphysical certainties in an ever more
hostile world.31
Wassermann was all too aware of the political realities of the Weimar
Republic in its final phase. His exclusion from the Prussian Academy of the
Arts in 1931 on account of his Jewishness was only the most obvious sign
of the worsening political situation in Germany. It was confirmation that
his cherished project of the assimilation of the Jews into German culture
and society, in which his own self-designated role was to be a bridge
between German and Jewish culture, had irretrievably failed.
Wassermann’s Weimar novels are symptomatic of the difficulties
that many bourgeois writers who had risen to prominence during the
Wilhelmine period encountered when trying to come to terms with the
new political, and indeed economic, realities of the Weimar period
(Wassermann was always short of money and some of his numerous minor
works were written in haste with an eye to generating income, not least to
allow him to make alimony payments to his ex-wife). There is considerable
continuity between the concerns and the form and style of the novels writ-
ten before the First World War and those written during the Weimar
period. It is not by chance that several of the Weimar novels are set either
wholly or at least in part before the First World War. Moreover, thanks to
the lack of specific focus on the political and to a lesser extent the social
realities of the Weimar Republic in the novels from that period, there is a
sense in which novels or parts of novels set during the Weimar period
could equally well have been set before the war, or indeed appeared before
the war. This is true even where he is at his most specific and most success-
ful in his focus on social concerns in the Weimar novels, as for example in
his discussion of marriage or the criminal justice system.
JAKOB WASSERMANN: SOCIAL, LEGAL, AND PERSONAL CRISES 97
Notes
1
Thomas Mann, in Marta Karlweis, Jakob Wassermann: Bild, Kampf und Werk, mit
einem Geleitwort von Thomas Mann (Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1935), 7.
2
Gerd-Dieter Stein, “Gesellschaftskritik und Kolportage: Überlegungen zu Struk-
turen des Trivialen in J. Wassermanns Roman Laudin und die Seinen,” in Literatur
und Sprache im Österreich der Zwischenkriegszeit: Polnisch-österreichisches Germanisten-
Symposion 1983 in Salzburg, ed. Walter Weiss and Eduard Beutner (Stuttgart:
Akademischer Verlag Heinz, 1985), 141–62; here, 142.
3
On this, see Wassermann’s detailed account of his early life in the strongly
autobiographical novel that he completed in 1905 but which he was dissuaded
from publishing and which appeared only in 1973: Jakob Wassermann, Engel-
hart oder Die zwei Welten (Munich: Langen-Müller, 1973). On Wassermann’s
life see also the account by his second wife, Marta Karlweis, Jakob Wassermann,
and more recently Rudolf Koester, Jakob Wassermann (Berlin: Morgenbuch
Verlag, 1996).
4
For a discussion of the novel, see Alan Corkhill, “Emancipation and Redemption
in Jakob Wassermann’s novel Die Geschichte der jungen Renate Fuchs,” Seminar 22,
no. 4 (1986): 299–310.
5
Martin Neubauer, Jakob Wassermann: Ein Schriftsteller im Urteil seiner
Zeitgenossen (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1994), 23–24.
6
For a full discussion of these elements in Christian Wahnschaffe, see Klaus Karl-
stetter, Das Bild des Jugendlichen in der deutschsprachigen Erzählliteratur der Zeit
zwischen dem Ersten Weltkrieg (1918) und der Diktatur (1933) (Uppsala: Berlings,
1980), 51–96, esp. 53–55 and 95–96.
7
Well-known dramatic examples include Walter Hasenclever’s Der Sohn (1914)
and Ernst Toller’s Die Wandlung (1919).
8
For details of the translations of Wassermann’s works into English and his recep-
tion in America in the 1920s, see Neubauer, Jakob Wassermann, 21–25.
9
See the catalogue of the exhibition in Bonn and other cities in 1984, Dierk
Rodewald, ed., Jakob Wassermann, 1873–1934: Ein Weg als Deutscher und Jude;
Lesebuch zu einer Ausstellung (Bonn: Bouvier, 1984); and the collection of Wasser-
mann’s essays and speeches on the Jewish question: Dierk Rodewald, ed., Jakob
Wassermann: Deutscher und Jude; Reden und Schriften, 1904–1933 (Heidelberg:
Lambert Schneider, 1984). See also the collection Rudolf Wolff, ed., Jakob
Wassermann: Werk und Wirkung (Bonn: Bouvier, 1987), where five of the six
main chapters focus on aspects of Jewishness in Wassermann’s works. The interest
in Wassermann and the Jewish question was part of a wider critical interest in Jew-
ish writers of the early twentieth century at the time. See the important collection
Gunter E. Grimm and Hans-Peter Bayerdörfer, eds., Im Zeichen Hiobs: Jüdische
Schriftsteller und deutsche Literatur im 20. Jahrhundert (Königstein im Taunus:
Athenäum, 1985).
10
Jakob Wassermann, Mein Weg als Deutscher und Jude (Berlin: Dirk Nishen,
1987), 50. Subsequent references are given using the abbreviation WDJ followed
by the page number.
98 KARL LEYDECKER
11
Jakob Wassermann, “Das Los der Juden,” in Dierk Rodewald, Jakob Wasser-
mann: Deutscher und Jude; Reden und Schriften, 1904–1933, 17–27; here, 24.
12
Jakob Wassermann, Der Literat oder Mythos und Persönlichkeit (Leipzig: Insel
Verlag, 1910), reprinted in Lebensdienst: Gesammelte Studien: Erfahrungen und
Reden aus drei Jahrzehnten (Leipzig and Zürich: Grethlein & Co., 1928), 502–49.
All references are to the latter edition and are given using the abbreviation LM fol-
lowed by the page number in the text.
13
Jakob Wassermann, “Der Jude als Orientale,” reprinted in Lebensdienst, 173–77;
here, 176.
14
Wassermann’s ambivalent attitude towards Jewishness is most evident in the
novels in his depiction of Gregor Waremme in Der Fall Maurizius. On this, see
Martina Landscheidt, “Mutmaßungen über Waremme, Annäherung an
Warschauer: Zu der jüdischen Doppelfigur Warschauer-Waremme in Jakob Wasser-
manns Roman Der Fall Maurizius,” in Wolff, Jakob Wassermann: Werk und
Wirkung, 14–32.
15
See Birgit Stengel, “Jakob Wassermanns Weg als Deutscher und Jude,” in Kurt
Tucholsky und das Judentum, ed. Michael Hepp (Oldenburg: bis Verlag, 1996),
137–50; here, 140, and her earlier essay, Birgit Stengel-Marchand, “Das tragische
Paradox der Assimilation — der Fall Wassermann,” Der Deutschunterricht 37
(1985): 38–41. In her book-length study of aspects of Jewishness in Wassermann’s
works, Christa Joeris is a generally much more sympathetic in her analysis, but she
too draws attention to the way in which his writings sometimes reproduce anti-
semitic stereotypes: see Christa Joeris, Aspekte des Judentums im Werk Jakob Wasser-
manns (Aachen: Shaker, 1996), esp. 63–73.
16
Jakob Wassermann, “Zu Walter Rathenaus Tod,” in Lebensdienst, 23–29; here, 29.
17
Jakob Wassermann, “Teilnahme des Dichters an der Politik,” in Lebensdienst,
328–30; here, 328. The date of first publication of the essay could not be
determined.
18
Thomas Mann, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (Berlin: Fischer, 1918).
19
“Seine Epik umging politisch oder ideologisch brisante Fragestellungen, attack-
ierte keine Parteien und Personen, sondern blieb in ihrer sozialpolitischen Dimen-
sion eher unbestimmt.” Neubauer, Jakob Wassermann, 30.
20
For an account and critique of this shift towards the exploration of the relation-
ship between literary history and social history, see Jörg Schönert, “The Reception
of Sociological Theory by West-German Literary Scholarship, 1970–1985,” in
New Ways in Germanistik, ed. Richard Sheppard (Oxford and New York: Berg,
1990), and Schönert, “On the Present State of Distress in the Social History of
German Literature,” Poetics 14 (1985): 303–19.
21
Well-known examples include Bertolt Brecht’s early play Trommeln in der Nacht
(Drums in the Night, 1919) and Ernst Toller’s play Der deutsche Hinkemann
(1924).
22
For a full account of the debate about marriage around the turn of the century
and beyond, see Karl Leydecker, Marriage and Divorce in the Plays of Hermann
Sudermann (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1996), 55–76.
JAKOB WASSERMANN: SOCIAL, LEGAL, AND PERSONAL CRISES 99
23
Graf Hermann Keyserling, Das Ehe-Buch: Eine neue Sinngebung im Zusammen-
klang der Stimmen führender Zeitgenossen (Celle: Niels Kampmann Verlag, 1925),
translated into English as The Book of Marriage: A New Interpretation by Twenty-
Four Leaders of Contemporary Thought, arranged and edited by Count Hermann
Keyserling (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1926). Wassermann’s chapter
“Bürgerliche Ehe: Offener Brief an den Grafen Keyserling” was reprinted in Jakob
Wassermann, Lebensdienst, 96–112. All references are to the latter edition using the
abbreviation L and the page number.
24
Marcel Reich-Ranicki, “Jakob Wassermann, der Bestsellerautor von gestern,” in
Nachprüfung: Aufsätze über deutsche Schriftsteller von gestern (erweiterte Neuaus-
gabe) (Munich: dtv, 1984), 47–52.
25
See Stephan Koranyi, “Nachwort,” in Jakob Wassermann, Laudin und die Seinen
(Munich: dtv, 1987), 337–44; here, 338. References to the novel are to this edi-
tion, using the abbreviation LS and the page number. For a biographical and psy-
choanalytical approach to the representation of marriage in Wassermann’s later
fiction, see Regina Schäfer, Plaidoyer für Ganna: Männer und Frauen in den
Romanen Jakob Wassermanns (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1992).
26
Jakob Wassermann, Der Fall Maurizius (Gütersloh: Mohn Verlag, 1960),
374–75. Subsequent references to the novel are to this edition, using the abbrevia-
tion FM and the page number.
27
As Garrin observes, “The marriages which are shown in these volumes as decay-
ing and crumbling are representative of the German middle class” (Stephen H.
Garrin, The Concept of Justice in Jakob Wassermann’s Trilogy [Berne, Frankfurt am
Main and Las Vegas: Peter Lang, 1979], 81).
28
On this, see Koester, Jakob Wassermann, 73.
29
See the chapters on Heinrich Mann, Gabriele Tergit, and Lion Feuchtwanger in
this volume.
30
On this development in Wassermann’s last novels, see the excellent article by
Esther Schneider-Handschin, “Aspekte des Wertezerfalls in Jakob Wassermanns
‘Andergast-Trilogie,’” Wirkendes Wort 43 (1993): 81–90.
31
On this see Geraint Vaughan Jones, “Jakob Wassermann’s Joseph Kerkhovens
dritte Existenz: Its Philosophy and Structure,” German Life and Letters 3
(1949–50): 169–84, and René Kaech, “Doktor Kerkhovens drei Existenzen: Als
Hinweis auf den Schriftsteller Jakob Wassermann,” Schweizer Monatshefte 51
(1971–72): 419–31.
5: Signs of the Times: Joseph Roth’s
Weimar Journalism
Helen Chambers
the issues of the time with an immediacy that retains his readers’ attention,
engaging their minds and hearts, he interrogates his own subjective
responses. He aims to translate the political into human and personal
terms. The relationship between his articles and the news reports is com-
parable to that between the novel and historiography, where the novel, as
has been argued, provides a more reliable narrative of the past than histor-
ical discourse. His process of composition involves reducing and filtering
events in order to arrive at a human perspective, which is the level at which
the reader can grasp the dynamics of a situation and in so doing gain a bet-
ter understanding of the bigger picture:
[In order to feel its greatness and weigh up its effect, I have to reduce
each world-history-quality occurrence to a personal dimension. To let it
run, as it were, through the filtration plant “ego” and purge it of the
dross of monumentality. My aim is to translate it from a political idiom
into a human one. From the areas above the line, to the regions below it.]
The ironic composite term “world-history-quality” in this programmatic
statement from a 1921 article signals Roth’s skepticism about the standard
press view of what is of primary importance for an understanding of the
contemporary world. Well aware of the major issues of the day, he none the
less more often turns his attention to aspects of ordinary, everyday exis-
tence and to marginalized groups and individuals in society. These both
command his interest and sympathy in themselves and are seen as sympto-
matic of wider problems. Losers, not winners, and the immediate milieu of
city life are frequently the focus of the over 800 articles Roth published in
the Berlin press alone between 1920 and 1932.4 More than 1,300
appeared between 1915 and 1939.
Joseph Roth’s journalism belongs in a literary tradition that he him-
self, in an article in defense of the feuilleton against charges that it was not
a serious publication, traces back to Herodotus. He also names Heinrich
Heine (1797–1856), saying his Reisebriefe (Travel Letters, 1826–29) are
both amusing and a great artistic achievement and equating their artistic
value with their moral import (W 1:617). A comparative study of the non-
fiction of these two humorously melancholic German Jewish writers who,
almost a century apart, responded in sensually rich, ironic prose to political
persecution in the land of their mother tongue would be a rewarding pro-
ject.5 Roth’s journalism is also directly descended from a Viennese line that
includes Peter Altenberg, Karl Kraus, and Alfred Polgar. Altenberg’s
SIGNS OF THE TIMES: JOSEPH ROTH’S WEIMAR JOURNALISM 103
knew his father, whose mental illness and early death were topics avoided
in the Jewish community. He distinguished himself at school, but his study
of German philology at the University of Vienna (1914–16) was inter-
rupted by the First World War. In Vienna he experienced a strongly anti-
Semitic atmosphere, exacerbated by the influx of eastern Jewish refugees
from the Russian campaign. Roth served in the army for two years, return-
ing to Vienna in 1918 to an irrevocably changed world. He had lost his
homeland, territory that fell to the victors; the Habsburg Empire, frame-
work of his early existence, was gone, as was its symbolic anchor, Emperor
Franz Josef, who had died in 1916. Roth had to earn a living and also cre-
ate a new identity for himself. Acutely conscious of his situation as a
Heimkehrer, a chance survivor of the war, Roth experienced the geographi-
cal and political losses of home town and Empire as emotional and cultural
traumas. These were to be replicated more brutally with the collapse of the
Weimar Republic and his resulting exile from the German state that
became the Third Reich in 1933; the annexation of Austria in 1938 only
added to his pain.
Roth’s journalistic career took him to Berlin in 1920, but also back
and forth to Vienna, and to Prague, particularly in the early twenties, and,
starting in 1925, on journeys in France, Russia, Albania, and Italy, as well
as Germany. From 1923 he was also writing and publishing novels. He
emigrated in January 1933, shortly before Hitler became Reichskanzler,
living in exile in France, Holland, and Belgium until his premature death in
Paris in 1939 from the effects of alcoholism.
In the early twenties Roth expressed socialist views and wrote for left-
wing publications, such as the Neue Berliner Zeitung-12-Uhr-Blatt, from
1920 to 1926. He also contributed regularly in 1921 and 1922 to the
more conservative Berliner Börsen-Courier, but resigned from it because of
lack of sympathy with its politics, placing articles instead from mid-1922 to
mid-1924 with the SPD party paper Vorwärts. The death in 1925 of social
democrat Friedrich Ebert, first president of the Republic, was a severe
blow to Roth, and the shift to the right, signaled by his replacement by the
nationalist Hindenburg, led Roth to stop contributing to the Berliner
Börsen-Courier altogether.10 From the beginning of 1923 he was employed
by the liberal, politically independent Frankfurter Zeitung.11 Despite the
high pay he could command, he was always short of money and sought
multiple outlets for his work. Throughout the Weimar Republic he wrote
occasionally for the Prager Tagblatt. In 1929 he signed a lucrative contract
with the conservative Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, breaking temporarily
with the Frankfurter Zeitung, and from January 1933 he refused to pub-
lish further in Germany with the result that subsequent articles appeared in
the exile press in Paris, Prague, and Amsterdam. These were largely polem-
ical essays attacking the Third Reich and rallying support for an Austrian
monarchist stance, as the only hope of countering the Nazis. Roth’s political
SIGNS OF THE TIMES: JOSEPH ROTH’S WEIMAR JOURNALISM 105
shift from left to right is technical rather than substantial. He never moved
from his conviction of the right of all humanity to freedom and dignity, or
from his resistance to the abuse of power and of language as an instrument
of power. What changed with events was his perception of the political cli-
mate best suited to deliver his ideal of humanity. At the same time he was a
career journalist, and his choice of outlets was influenced by pragmatic
financial considerations, just as the subjects and style of his articles inevitably
took account of the editorial expectations of the organs to which he
contributed.
Although our main concern here is with Roth’s Weimar journalism
and the light it casts on political and social issues of the age, the novels he
published in the period should not be passed over in silence. His first
novel, Das Spinnennetz (The Spider’s Web), though set in Berlin, was seri-
alized in 1923 in the Wiener Arbeiterzeitung, the official paper of the Aus-
trian Socialist Party. It is a remarkably prescient account of the danger from
right-wing conspiracy in postwar Germany. The petit-bourgeois protago-
nist Theodor Lohse, a “Heimkehrer” (returnee) without qualities, unable
to think for himself, humiliated and disorientated by his lack of role in the
postwar city, finds a spurious sense of self as spy, manipulator, and mur-
derer in the shady underworld of illegal nationalist activity. Roth commu-
nicates the threatening atmosphere of chaotic violence in the Berlin streets
and the subaltern mentality that was open to exploitation by power-seeking
ideologues. This novel, in which he includes both past and anticipated
future political events, concluded publication two days before the Hitler-
Ludendorff attempted putsch in Munich in November 1923. Both figure
in the novel, as does the failed bomb attack on the Victory Column outside
the Reichstag in 1921.12 Although it has been criticized for stylistic
unevenness, switching between an overheated Expressionist mode and the
distanced coolness of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity),13 and although
no evidence has been found of its influence on the readership of the day —
it first appeared in book form in 1967 — as Bronsen observes, Das Spin-
nennetz represented an important stand by Roth against his literary con-
temporaries, whom he publicly criticized for remaining indifferent to the
alarming political developments of the day (W 1:1068; 2:59–61). While
announcing central thematic concerns such as the fruitless search for order
and direction in a world without meaning, and the alienation and disorien-
tation of the individual, it equally demonstrates Roth’s finely tuned anten-
nae for the specifics of atmosphere and mentality as reciprocally influential
aspects of human existence, intangibles to which he gave tangible form in
his writing.
The novels that followed, Hotel Savoy (1924), Die Rebellion (1924),
Flucht ohne Ende (Flight without End, 1927), Zipper und sein Vater (Zipper
and His Father, 1928), and Rechts und Links (Right and Left, 1929), all set
in the present or recent past, portray protagonists who are engaged in the
106 HELEN CHAMBERS
with the first two, as Roth turned to the essay mainly in his last years in
response to the political situation. Early clues to Roth’s approach to his
writing, to a poetics of his reportage, can be found in a birthday wish to
Paula Grübel and a tribute to Peter Altenberg. In 1916, having no cash for
a gift, Roth wishes his cousin “Drei königliche Dinge: eine Krone, einen
Scharlachmantel und ein Szepter. Die goldene Krone der Phantasie, den
Scharlachmantel der Einsamkeit und das Szepter der Ironie” (B, 29; Three
royal things: a crown, a scarlet cloak, a scepter. The golden crown of imagina-
tion, the scarlet cloak of solitariness and the scepter of irony). These royal
gifts, attributes setting the owner above and apart from others, are ones
that set Roth himself apart, as an artist. The first, imagination, imparts the
power to create alternative or supplementary realities to those experienced
in the world of everyday existence. There are two main aspects to Roth’s
use of imagination in his reportage. The first is to give an impression of
truth, irrespective of whether what is written is literally true or not. The
underlying truth of a situation is what matters, and the literary imagination
can convey this more successfully than a documentary report, sometimes
by adjusting the facts, as Heine does (W 1:617), sometimes, as in the case
of Döblin in his Polish travelogue, by using exaggeration (W 2:535).22
This is close to Egon Erwin Kisch’s notion of the reporter’s “logical imagin-
ation,” as expounded in his programmatic article of 1918.23 It is generally
impossible to tell how much of the ostensible truth Roth presents is actu-
ally true and how much is adapted or invented. Any reading of Roth’s
nonfiction must be alert to this potential unreliability in factual terms. One
example will serve as an indication of how he operates. In the ironically
titled 1921 feuilleton, “Reise nach Kultur-Wien” (W 1:592; Journey to
Vienna, City of Culture) Roth draws on an article about the nefarious
activities of the Austrian lawyer Hof- und Gerichtsadvocat Smirsch, which
he found in an collected volume of pieces by Walter Rode. He gets the title
of the book and the name of the lawyer wrong, writing “Jurisprudenz,
Juristen und anderes” for Justiz, Justizleute und Anderes and “Smilasch”
for “Smirsch.” These approximations suggest that though the book had
only recently appeared, Roth neither had it to hand any longer nor felt the
need for accuracy.24 He further expresses the hope that he will meet this
symptom of local culture on his visit to Vienna, although Rode’s article
makes clear that Smirsch was already dead in 1913. Roth resuscitates
Smirsch/Smilasch in order to use his exploitative dishonesty humorously
to illustrate a contemporary ill.
Roth also employs imagination to shift reality into a surreal dimension.
By this technique Roth makes a strongly visual (sometimes aural) appeal to
his readers, which challenges their rational responses. It forces them to
look for the join, to consider where the real tips over into the imaginary,
and in so doing raises their consciousness of the underlying extremity of
situations accepted as normal. He uses this imaginative technique to create
110 HELEN CHAMBERS
[Millions leapt upwards and slapped gently against the ceiling, sticking
there like moistened cigarette paper, flung aloft by Schulz and Co.
Sardine oil poured over the horse blankets. The unguaranteed
matches struck themselves on the emery paper.]
and political mechanisms that conspire to distort human values. The same
small typeface in which the public flogging of criminals in the name of the
law in Delaware is reported has also been used to list fallen servicemen dur-
ing the First World War, Roth tells us. His sympathy is with the flogged
and fallen, as he seeks to restore the human dignity denied them by the
offhand textual communication of their fate. The semiotics of typography
are presented as a barometer of humane values. In the 1926 article “Einer
liest Zeitung” (Reading a Newspaper), a remarkable self-reflexive text, and
a tour de force about reader reception, Roth explicitly raises the issue of
reader manipulation by typeface, asking whether the individual is reading
the paper or vice versa (W 2:531–32). This is not a literary conceit, but a
serious political question.
In “Spaziergang,” Roth, as he goes for his walk, sets nature against the
value-impoverished leveler typography, and his seeing eye moves on to
record how the dazzling sunshine temporarily burns out the spurious
claims to attention of the clamorous text. The ensuing reflection on
nature, and on the limited possibilities for modern men and women to
escape into it beyond the city, works in two main ways: rhetorically and
poetically. The problem is presented rhetorically, as nature itself is reduced
to a mediated concept in composite expressions such as “Lesebuch-Natur”
(W 1:566; picture-book nature: H, 25) and “Naturbegriff” (W 1:566; idea
of nature: H, 25), and the way people view it in relation to its usefulness
for themselves, is conveyed by lists of purposes for which it is used (lakes
for rowing, mountains for walking tours, and so on). Nature is perceived as
entries in Baedeker’s Guide, as text and commodity, instead of sponta-
neously experienced reality. Nature has become heavily implicated in the
discourse of socialized existence in a consumer society.
Against this rhetoric Roth sets a brief paragraph, introduced by the
comment “Aber was ich sehe, kam nicht in den Baedeker” (W 1:566; But
what I see hasn’t made it into Baedeker: H, 26), which signals the unique-
ness of his immediate, subjective experience in an age of technical repro-
duction, to borrow Benjamin’s phrase. It sits outside the normative
framework symbolized by the guidebook. In a poetic evocation of a chance
combination of fleeting sights and sounds, characterized by distance,
insubstantiality, and delicate melancholy, Roth tentatively intimates the
existence of a metaphysical dimension, with a discreet allusion to the music
of the spheres. The horizons opened up by this brief vision of dancing
midges, a jasmine twig, and a child’s voice in the distance, are promptly
closed off by a bad-tempered aphorism-laden diatribe against the use of
nature for recreation, and a satirical representation of city types, deaf to the
tiny natural events that really matter.
By the end of the article Roth has asserted the primacy of the eye, the
gaze, which, for all his pleas against purpose-driven activity, does not
simply register but leads to critical reflection. He has presented external
116 HELEN CHAMBERS
reality as a text that can be read, and in which the small print merits more
attention than the headlines. The tone is of disillusion and disenchant-
ment, but despite this there is evidence of a clear moral purpose and tenta-
tive idealism. Through his examination of surface manifestations of
modern metropolitan life from an eccentric viewpoint, or, as he would put
it, on a diagonal trajectory (W 1:565), he has sought to reveal existing pat-
terns and structures and propose new ones. Above all, he has shown rela-
tionships between the significant and insignificant, suggesting a revision of
values in a world where established facts and order must be regarded with
suspicion if not contempt, and he has given a fugitive glimpse, created a
tantalizingly faint echo, of an ideal existence. The article’s last three sen-
tences shift successively through three distinct registers.34 A lyrical voice
evoking the unheard sounds of nature is replaced and so silenced by a sar-
donic, colloquial aphorism, the harsh, knowing voice of the urbanized
world. The final voice is prosaic too, its rational discourse and its labored
rhythm simultaneously pronouncing on, and ironically embodying, the
futility of the writer’s project. By the juxtaposition of clashing discourses
Roth urges the reader to distinguish between them, and to reflect on their
bearing on contemporary life and attitudes. The impulse behind these
clashes is comparable to Heine’s turn from lyrical forms to prose in the face
of the political situation from the 1820s, or to Brecht’s preoccupation with
the mismatch between traditional poetic diction and life in the Third
Reich.
A recurrent focus in Weimar reportage is Berlin’s entertainment indus-
try. For Roth it provides multiple points of departure for reflections on
urban civilization — often close to barbarism in his view — at a time when
mass entertainment increasingly provided temporary escape from the harsh
reality of city life. His 1925 piece “Das XIII. Berliner Sechstagerennen”
(The Thirteenth Berlin Six-Day Races), about the massive, hectic annual
cycling event in the velodrome on the Kaiserdamm, is not really about the
riders and races at all, but about the sociological phenomenon and about
communicating sights, sounds, and smells with a critical slant. This is bar-
barism, a temporary loss of humanity. It is a good example of Roth’s con-
cern with atmosphere and his strategies for capturing it (W 2:331–35;
H, 161–67). “Bekehrung eines Sünders im Berliner UFA-Palast” (The Con-
version of a Sinner in Berlin’s UFA Palace) in the same year, similarly, is not
about the entertainment itself — this time film not sport — but about the
discrepancy between content and form in a cinema that looks like a
mosque, and where the audience inside is dazzled by technology and sub-
jected to mass manipulation, in a travesty of religious practice. Cinema is
the new religion, and Roth shows its influence and emptiness simultan-
eously (W 2:512–14; H, 168–71). Alongside these it is worth reading
“Schillerpark” (1921) on popular recreation. This is a small gem, at once play-
ful and melancholy, which uses observations in a public park to combine
SIGNS OF THE TIMES: JOSEPH ROTH’S WEIMAR JOURNALISM 117
Wenn am Anfange das ganz große Warenhaus wie ein Werk des
Hochmuts und einer sündhaften menschlichen Herausforderung aussah,
so erkennt man mit der Zeit, daß es nur ein ernormes Gehäuse der men-
schlichen Kleinlichkeit und Bescheidenheit ist; ein riesiges Eingeständnis
der irdischen Billigkeit. (W 3:82)
[If at first the really big department store looked like a work of overween-
ing pride and of sinful human self-assertion, then with time it becomes
apparent that it is just an enormous shell for human pettiness and mod-
estness; a massive admission of earthly cheapness.]
Closely related to these two pieces are his 1922 article “Wolkenkratzer”
(W 1:765–67; Skyscrapers: H, 111–14) which, though skeptical of human
endeavor, takes a more lyrical and uplifting line, and the review of Werner
Hengemann’s Das steinerne Berlin (1930; W 3:228–31; H, 125–28),
which brings the contradictions of the time and place into even sharper
focus. Roth plays with words and meanings, but it is a serious game, which
shows that these are illogical and irrational times.
The Berlin selection by Bienert, translated by Hofmann, concludes
with “Das Autodafé des Geistes” (The Auto-da-Fé of the Mind), first pub-
lished in French in Cahiers Juifs in 1933 (W 3:494–503; H, 207–17). This
takes us beyond the Weimar Republic and is a clear example of Roth’s shift
toward the rational discourse of the essay in the face of growing National
Socialist irrationality. In exile he turned to the essay as a form of intellectual
resistance.43 It is the form he used too in “Betrachtung an der Klage-
mauer” (Wailing Wall, 1929) to attack Zionism and in “Dichter im Dritten
Reich” (Poets in the Third Reich, 1933) to attack Gottfried Benn for
betraying his art and language (W 3:86–89; H, 45–50; W 3:481–87). In a
120 HELEN CHAMBERS
plea for others to share his clear-sightedness and willingness to speak out,
Roth writes,
[The great gain to German literature from Jewish writers is the theme of
the city. Jews have discovered and written about the urban scene and the
spiritual landscape of the city dweller. They have revealed the whole diver-
sity of urban civilisation.] (H, 215)
Notes
1
Joseph Roth, Briefe (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1970) 87, Roth’s
emphasis. Subsequent references to this volume are cited in the text using the
abbreviation B and the page number. In English as Joseph Roth, What I Saw:
Reports from Berlin, 1920–1933, translated by Michael Hofmann (London:
Granta, 2003), 15–16. Subsequent references to this edition are cited in the text
using the abbreviation H and page number. For the purposes of a close reading of
the text, it has not always been possible to work with Hofmann’s translation,
which at times, as here, is idiomatic rather than precise, and loses some of the
original sense: “I draw the face of the times.” The significance of “face” is
addressed in the discussion of “Spaziergang.” Where no page reference for the
translation is given, it is my own.
2
“Es ist mein Bemühen, die Deutschen von ihrem Aberglauben zu heilen, die
Kunst sei etwas Abseitiges, die Literatur ein Ornament des Lebens, eine Sache der
stillen Abende und der Frauen. Die Literatur ist nötig wie eine Maschine, ein Win-
terrock und eine Medizin.” (Joseph Roth, Perlefter. Fragmente und Feuilletons aus
dem Berliner Nachlaß [Leipzig: Kiepenheuer, 1978], 247).
3
Joseph Roth, Werke, edited by Fritz Hackert and Klaus Westermann (Cologne:
Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1989–1991), 3:453. Subsequent references to this edition
are cited in the text using the abbreviation W and the volume and page number.
4
See Joseph Roth, Joseph Roth in Berlin: Ein Lesebuch für Spaziergänger, ed.
Michael Bienert (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1996), 58–59, for details.
5
Irmgard Wirtz, “Zur Poetik von Joseph Roths journalistischem Frühwerk,” Lit-
eratur und Kritik 29 (1994): 39–49 considers some of the parallels in particular in
relation to the discourse of the city (in Heine’s case, Paris) as a new manifestation
of the Zeitgeist (42). See also David Bronsen, Joseph Roth: Eine Biographie
(Munich: DTV, 1981), 87–88.
6
Bronsen, Joseph Roth, 185–207.
7
Hubert Lengauer, “Das Wiener Feuilleton im letzten Viertel des 19. Jahrhun-
derts,” Lenau-Forum 9/10 (1977/78): 60–77, 69.
8
See Lengauer, “Das Wiener Feuilleton,” 63.
9
Wirtz, Zur Poetik, 44.
122 HELEN CHAMBERS
10
His last contribution to the Berliner Börsen-Courier appeared on 15 April 1923
(W 1:986–88), not in August 1922, as Schweikert suggests (Uwe Schweikert,
“‘Der rote Joseph’: Politik und Feuilleton beim frühen Joseph Roth [1919–1926],”
in Joseph Roth, ed. Heinz Ludwig Arnold [Munich: Edition Text ⫹ Kritik, 1982],
40–55; here, 47).
11
See Klaus Westermann, Joseph Roth, Journalist: Eine Karriere, 1915–1939 (Bonn:
Bouvier, 1987), 42–45.
12
See Roth’s account of this, W 1:502; H, 179–81.
13
Bronsen, Joseph Roth, 240.
14
A number of Roth’s subsequent works share with Hiob a legendary or fairy-tale
tone. This can be seen as a strategy for turning away from the horrors of the pre-
sent and for dealing in an oblique way with the problem of evil and the search for
order in a world where rational moral standards have been abandoned. These
include Das falsche Gewicht, Die Geschichte von dem 1002. Nacht, and Die Legende
vom heiligen Trinker.
15
Juden auf Wanderschaft (Berlin: Die Schmiede, 1927). It has recently appeared
in English as The Wandering Jews, translated by Michael Hofmann (New York:
Norton, London: Granta, 2001). Individual chapters had appeared as articles in
the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1926 and 1927.
16
Corrected typescript and proofs held in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach.
94.114.8.
17
Produced by Knorr & Hirth, who published the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten,
for whom Roth was working at the time. The reprints are from the Frankfurter
Zeitung and other sources.
18
The three Roth works are Michael Bienert, ed., Joseph Roth in Berlin, Helmut
Peschina, ed., Joseph Roth — Kaffeehaus — Frühling: Ein Wien-Lesebuch (Cologne:
Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2003), and Ralph Schock, ed., Briefe aus Deutschland
(Blieskastel: Gollenstein, 1997).
19
Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg, eds., The Weimar Republic
Sourcebook (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1994), contains trans-
lated excerpts from “Der Kulturbolschewismus,” 169–71, and Juden auf Wan-
derschaft, 263–67. Iain Boyd Whyte and David Frisby, eds., The Metropolitan
Project: Berlin and Vienna, 1880–1940 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of
California P, forthcoming) contains translations of “Wenn Berlin Wolkenkratzer
bekäme . . . ,” “Das ganz große Warenhaus,” and “Bekenntnis zum Gleis-
dreieck.”
20
On the dramaturgy of the texts, see Schock, in Roth, Briefe aus Deutschland,
161.
21
Dietmar Goltschnigg, “Zeit-, Ideologie- und Sprachkritik in Joseph Roths
Essayistik,” Literatur und Kritik 25 (1990): 124–36; here, 124–25.
22
See Irmgard Wirtz, Joseph Roths Fiktionen des Faktischen: Das Feuilleton der
zwanziger Jahre und “Die Geschichte von der 1002. Nacht” im historischen Kontext
(Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1996) for a New Historicist discussion of the relationship
between fact and fiction in Roth’s feuilleton cycles “Wiener Symptome” and
“Berliner Bilderbuch.”
SIGNS OF THE TIMES: JOSEPH ROTH’S WEIMAR JOURNALISM 123
23
Egon Erwin Kisch, “Wesen des Reporters,” first published in Das Literarische
Echo in 1918, repr. in Literarische Reportage, ed. Erhard Schütz (Frankfurt am
Main: Diesterweg, 1979), 42.
24
Roth lived an itinerant existence all his adult life, staying in hotels or with friends.
He had no permanent library and kept his belongings in three suitcases, making
use of the Preußische Staatsbibliothek when he was in Berlin, so it is not surprising
that he did not have Rode’s book to hand.
25
See Thomas Düllo, Zufall und Melancholie: Untersuchungen zur Kontingenzse-
mantik in Texten von Joseph Roth (Münster: Lit, 1994), chap. 4, esp. 83–88, for a
discussion of Roth’s texts in the context of Walter Benjamin’s notion of the flaneur,
and also Ulrike Steierwald, Leiden an der Geschichte: Zur Geschichtsauffassung der
Moderne in den Texten Joseph Roths (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1994),
140.
26
Emphasis J. R.
27
“Was ich sehe, ist der lächerlich unscheinbare Zug im Antlitz der Straße und des
Tages” (W 1:564). The published translation here too goes for an idiomatic solu-
tion over a more precise rendering (What I see is the day in all its absurdity and
triviality [H, 23].). This is perhaps not surprising, as the intricacy of Roth’s style in
his nonfiction is particularly hard to replicate in translation. For the purposes of my
analysis the following is closer to the original: “What I see is what is absurdly incon-
spicuous in the countenance of the street and the day.”
28
As, for example, in Peter Altenberg, “Bei dem Photographen” (At the Photogra-
pher’s), in Gesammelte Werke, ed. Werner J. Schweiger (Vienna and Frankfurt am
Main: Löcker/S. Fischer, 1987), 1:131–34.
29
Georg Büchner, Werke und Briefe (Munich: DTV, 1965), 120.
30
See, for example, W 1:79; H, 90.
31
Hofmann’s translations, “purposeful bustle” and “full of the delights of idleness”
(H, 23) miss part of the point.
32
See Düllo, Zufall und Melancholie, 86.
33
“Mit diesem Zufall, der ihm eine Nagelfeile in die Hand gespielt hat, und durch
diese geringfügige Handlung des Nagelfeilens hat er symbolisch tausend soziale
Stufen übersprungen.” (W 1:565; The coincidence that has left the nail file in his
possession and the trifling movement of filing his nails are enough to lift him about
a thousand social classes: H, 25).
34
“Er hört nicht den Plätscherklang der Welle und weiß nicht, daß wichtig das Zer-
platzen einer Wasserblase ist.” The poetic rhythm and tone of the original are diffi-
cult to capture in translation. I suggest: (He neither hears the splashing sound of
the wave, nor knows the importance of a bursting bubble). “An dem Tage, an dem
die Natur ein Kurort wurde, war’s aus” (The day nature turned into a resort, that
was it). “Infolge aller dieser Tatsachen ist mein Spaziergang der eines Griesgrams
und vollständig verfehlt” (In consequence of all of these facts, my walk proves to be
that of a curmudgeon and utterly futile). W 1:567; translations HC.
35
See Steierwald, Leiden an der Geschichte, 127, on the tragicomic aspect of Roth’s
journalism.
124 HELEN CHAMBERS
36
See, for example, “Der Mann im Friseurladen” (The Man in the Barbershop),
W 1:621–23; H, 131–34 and his reports on the trial of Rathenau’s murderers,
W 1:873–88.
37
See, for example, “Das Hakenkreuz auf Rügen” (W 2:214–16; The Swastika on
Rügen).
38
Prümm, for example, sees a development from cultural critical reasoning in the
twenties to cultural critical despair in the thirties, arguing that in the end Roth is
using his own descriptive techniques as an aesthetic weapon to fend off the negative
sides of the city (Karl Prümm, “Die Stadt der Reporter und Kinogänger bei Roth,
Brentano und Kracauer: Das Berlin der zwanziger Jahre im Feuilleton der Frank-
furter Zeitung,” in Die Unwirklichkeit der Städte: Großstadtdarstellungen zwischen
Moderne und Postmoderne, ed. Klaus R. Scherpe [Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1988],
80–105; here, 84, 86).
39
Prümm, “Die Stadt der Reporter und Kinogänger,” 82.
40
See, for example, Ilse Planke, “Joseph Roth als Feuilletonist” (diss., Friedrich-
Alexander Universität, Erlangen-Nürnberg, 1967), 165; Prümm, “Die Stadt der
Reporter und Kinogänger”; and Carl Wege, “Gleisdreieck, Tank und Motor: Fig-
uren und Denkfiguren aus der Technosphäre der Neuen Sachlichkeit,” Deutsche
Vierteljahrsschrift 68 (1994): 307–32.
41
Wege, “Gleisdreieck,” 322.
42
The translation transposes the last two items (H, 121).
43
See Goltschnigg, “Zeit-, Ideologie- und Sprachkritik,” 125.
44
Nadine Gordimer, “The Main Course,” review of What I Saw: Reports from
Berlin, 1920–1933, accessed 7 March 2003 on http://www.threepennyreview.com/
samples/gordimer_sp03.html.
6: Ernst Jünger, the New Nationalists,
and the Memory of the First World War
Roger Woods
E RNST JÜNGER IS CHIEFLY KNOWN FOR his writings in the years of the
Weimar Republic, when he was one of the leading figures of the Con-
servative Revolution, the cultural and political movement that served as
“intellectual vanguard of the right.”1 Embracing some of the best-known
writers, academics, journalists, politicians, and philosophers of the period,
the Conservative Revolution produced a flood of radical nationalist writ-
ings in the form of war diaries and works of fiction, political journalism,
manifestos, and theoretical tracts outlining the development and destiny of
political life in Germany and the West. During the Weimar years the Con-
servative Revolutionaries became the major innovative interpreters of the
First World War for the Right, sometimes associating themselves closely
with the paramilitary war veterans’ organization, Stahlhelm, and with the
NSDAP, which they briefly saw as a revolutionary party that embraced
their ideals. Examining the tensions in their portrayal of the war and their
political exploitation of the war experience sheds light not just on their
personal preoccupations but also on the political culture of the Weimar
years.
Among the Conservative Revolutionaries it is particularly Ernst
Jünger whose work displays these tensions. In the Weimar period Jünger
was the most significant representative of that branch of the Conservative
Revolution known as new nationalism, which sought to carry forward
military values and structures into peacetime society, and which redefined
socialism in terms of the community of frontline soldiers. The following
analysis concentrates on Jünger’s accounts of the First World War, but,
as will become clear, the tensions and contradictions contained in his
writing also feature in the work of other new nationalists, so that what
emerges is a group identity based in part on a typical patterning of the war
experience.
Jünger was born in Heidelberg in 1895, and he enlisted as a volunteer
on the first day of the war at the age of nineteen. By the end of the war he
had reached the rank of temporary company commander. He was
wounded some seven times, and in 1918 he was awarded the pour le
126 ROGER WOODS
mérite, the highest military honor of the time. He remained in the Reich-
swehr until 1923, and during those years he worked on revising infantry
training methods. As a young writer he attracted the attention of the read-
ing public with his first account of his war experiences, In Stahlgewittern
(Storms of Steel), published in 1920. It was popular in its time, reaching
sales of around a quarter of a million by 1945, and he followed up this first
work with many more accounts of the war, ranging from war diaries such
as Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis (Struggle as Inner Experience, 1922),
Das Wäldchen 125 (Copse 125, 1925), Feuer und Blut (Fire and Blood,
1925) and the novel Sturm (Storm, 1923) to the edited collection of
essays Krieg und Krieger (War and Warriors, 1930), and essays in political
journals and Die Standarte, the supplement to Stahlhelm’s newspaper.
This body of work established Jünger as the leading right-wing writer from
the generation that had fought in the war and was openly hostile to
Weimar democracy.
Jünger’s thinking on politics and culture culminated in Der Arbeiter
(The Worker, 1932), seen by his harshest critics as a blueprint for the Nazi
state. Although Jünger’s early enthusiasm for the Nazis as comrades in the
nationalist struggle against Weimar democracy and the West had turned to
hostility in the later years of the Weimar Republic, a fundamental similarity
of outlook at the level of political philosophy meant that there was no clear
break until shortly before the party came to power. In 1939 Auf den Mar-
morklippen (On the Marble Cliffs) appeared, an account of how an ordered
society is overrun by the anarchic Mauretanians. With its emphasis on the
need for morality and for control of animal instinct, the book was not only
an indirect attack on the Nazis but also a move away from Jünger’s original
low regard for moral categories in the face of natural self-assertion.
Jünger spent most of the Second World War as an officer in occupied
Paris. In 1942 he published Gärten und Straßen (Gardens and Streets), an
unenthusiastic account of his experiences in the first years of the war. The
book was banned in 1943 after he refused to remove a reference to a pas-
sage on tyranny that he had quoted from the Bible. During the war Jünger
worked on the essay Der Friede (The Peace, 1945), which he regarded as a
form of opposition to Hitler’s regime, but after the war the Allies imposed
a ban on his publishing anything in Germany, which lasted until 1949. In
the years until his death in 1998 Jünger traveled widely and wrote accounts
of his experiences, but he mainly made the headlines whenever he was the
recipient of a public honor. The decision to award him the Goethe Prize of
the City of Frankfurt in 1982 was particularly controversial and revived the
debate about his antidemocratic stance in the Weimar Republic. In his later
years Jünger’s admirers included Helmut Kohl and François Mitterand,
both of whom visited him in his Wilflingen home.
The following analysis concentrates on Jünger’s portrayal of the First
World War in his war diaries and a novel written in the early years of the
JÜNGER, THE NEW NATIONALISTS, AND THE FIRST WORLD WAR 127
[We grew up in the spirit of a materialist age, and in all of us there lived a
yearning for the unusual, for great adventure. Then the war took hold of us
and intoxicated us. We marched off in a shower of flowers, as if drunk, like
gladiators about to die. The war just had to provide that great, powerful,
solemn experience.]
Yet he writes that after a short period with the regiment he and the other
new recruits lose nearly all the illusions with which they had started out:
instead of encountering the dangers they had hoped for, they find filth,
work, and sleepless nights (St, 6). Jünger rapidly comes to realize that tra-
ditional chivalry, glory, and heroism have little place in modern warfare,
which is dominated by an impersonal form of battle that consumes men as
it does munitions (St, v). At this level we see how the new nationalists
encounter one aspect of the “crisis of modernization” in the pre-Weimar
period: Jünger is well aware of the pacifist argument that in modern war-
fare technical progress results in meaningless slaughter and suffering.9
Jünger’s profound disillusionment distances him from those with
whom one might have expected him to share a view of the war, and it
places him in surprising company. For while this perspective marks his war
off from the war as retold in the more rigid form of the military memoir,10
it establishes close links with the anti-war authors of the Weimar years. The
possibility of meeting a meaningless death in fact runs both through
Jünger’s work and that of anti-war writers such as Erich Maria Remarque,
whose Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front) first
appeared in 1929 and angered so many in the nationalist camp. Remarque
emphasizes also that mere chance decides whether one will live or die.11
Similarly, Edlef Köppen’s anti-war novel, Heeresbericht (Military Report,
1930), had senseless death as one of its major themes.12
Put in most general terms, Jünger’s writings convey a sense not only of
the war’s meaning but also of its futility, not only a sense of community in
war but also a sense of isolation. They portray war not merely as a splendid
adventure in which heroic young men can prove themselves but also as a
profoundly disturbing event because in war pure chance governs one’s
JÜNGER, THE NEW NATIONALISTS, AND THE FIRST WORLD WAR 129
fate: a soldier may stay alive by the grace of “kleine Umstände” (little cir-
cumstances) or “Zufall” (St, 63, 119; chance), and may die from a wound
inflicted by “ein sinnloses Stück Blei” (St, 133; a meaningless fragment of
lead). The wounds of a dead soldier are “sinnlos” (meaningless).13 Con-
templation of the chaos of war can result in a laming mood of melancholy
(St, 67). And the war that had promised to bring the mental relief of total
commitment within a community of men could also bring “ein
unbeschreibliches Gefühl der Einsamkeit” (indescribable feelings of isol-
ation).14 In Sturm, the novel serialized for the Hannoverscher Kurier in
1923, Jünger describes how, when death hung over the trenches like a
storm cloud, each man was on his own; surrounded by howling and crash-
ing, dazzled by flashes of light, he felt nothing within himself but isolation
beyond measure (Sturm, 12).
The need to make sense of the war is complicated by the fact that
Jünger’s writing on the First World War goes through a systematic rejec-
tion of all those conventional sources of meaning that the more tradition-
bound nationalists were intent on upholding during the Weimar years.
Death on the massive scale encountered in the First World War is not, for
example, rendered meaningful by recalling Germany’s purpose in going to
war. This point is partly a political one that emerged after the war — not
least because the war had been lost and it was a psychological necessity for
Jünger to find its meaning outside the framework of victory. Jünger’s fel-
low new nationalist writer, Franz Schauwecker, makes the connection
between loss of meaning and the lost war when he describes the emotions
of the soldiers returning home after the war: he writes that all at once the
effect of the enormous demands made upon them erupted. Suddenly
everything had been in vain. The world seemed to have no meaning.15
But the feeling that the war had no meaning affected the new nation-
alists even while it was being fought, and this sense of futility could often
outweigh the idea that if Germany achieved its aims, the suffering would
be justified. New nationalists actually spent very little time discussing the
aims of the war, and Jünger conveys their mood well when he recalls that
soldiers greeted such discussions with an ironic smile. Similarly, in a contri-
bution to the new nationalist journal, Deutsches Volkstum, Rudolf Huch is
tempted to side with Remarque when he recalls a meeting of 1917 at
which politicians told businessmen of the need to secure certain territories
without which, comments Huch, the Germans had got on well enough
before the war.16 The wish to rescue something from the war without
resorting to conventional nationalism is an important distinguishing fea-
ture of Jünger’s work and that of his fellow new nationalists.
Despite Jünger’s doubts about the meaning of the war, there is a clear
tendency for the positive elements to come to the fore. The switch from
expectations of the war to disillusionment with its reality is not the last
stage in the development of his attitude towards it. He finds other sources
130 ROGER WOODS
[It seemed strange to him that he was sitting here. How close he had
come to being hit. How easily it could have been him lying on the
ground with twisted limbs like the corpse he had stumbled over in the
trench. With great meaningless wounds in his body, and his dirty face
spotted with dark blue powder grains . . . It was not death that frightened
him — that was bound to come sooner or later — but this element of
chance, . . . this feeling that he embodied certain values and yet was no
more than an ant to be trampled at the roadside by a careless giant. Why,
if there was a creator, did he give man this urge to bore deep into a world
he could never understand? Was it not better to live like an animal or like
a plant in the valley than to be consumed by this terrible anxiety that
lurked beneath the surface of everything one did and said?]
butcher’s knife, and he concludes that the nightmare wins out; terror and
existential dread are dominant.20
In Sturm the intolerable emotion of fear provokes the vision of an
alternative mode of existence that provides security by eliminating human
consciousness. It is the natural mode of existence. And this is the aspect of
man’s existence in war and of war itself that Jünger pushes to the forefront
of his accounts. The character Falk elaborates upon the point when he says
that sometimes he wishes he were a simple animal or a plant. He hates the
thought of any development towards higher sensibilities for this could only
serve to increase one’s sense of anguish (Sturm, 82). It is this simple form
of animal consciousness that emerges in Jünger’s accounts of war as a sus-
taining force. In Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis the unwelcome diversifica-
tion of existence is said to be replaced by just a few basic drives with the
advent of war:
Wir sind zu verästelt; der Saft steigt nicht mehr in die Spitzen. Nur wenn
ein unmittelbarer Impuls uns wie Blitz durchbrennt, werden wir wieder
einfach und erfüllt . . . Im Tanze auf schmaler Klinge zwischen Sein und
Nichtsein offenbart sich der wahre Mensch, da schmilzt seine Zersplit-
terung wieder zusammen in wenige Urtriebe von gewaltiger Stärke.21
[We have split into too many branches; the sap no longer climbs to the
tips. Only if we are shot through with a direct impulse like a bolt of light-
ning will we become simple and fulfilled once again. . . . In the dance on
the narrow blade between existence and non-existence true man reveals
himself, his fragmented being once more fuses into a few basic drives of
enormous strength.]
The theme of chance and the use of natural imagery alone do not dis-
tinguish Ernst Jünger and his fellow new nationalists from other writers on
the war, yet the specific functions of these elements certainly do: when
Remarque, for example, states that it is mere chance that decides whether a
soldier will live or die, he concludes that this makes the soldier indifferent;
Remarque blames the war for destroying a whole generation, including
those who escaped the grenades.22 For the new nationalists, however,
chance is countered by inevitability, and the main source of this inevitabil-
ity is to be found in the supposedly natural roots of war.
This patterning also occurs in the work of Oswald Spengler, famous
for his monumental Der Untergang des Abendlandes (Decline of the West),
which appeared between 1918 and 1922 and which suggested an
inevitability about the rise and fall of cultures. Spengler writes that whereas
plants have no choice, men and animals do. In times of stress they seek to
escape the freedom this gives them and to revert to a rooted, plant-like
existence. Spengler connects this with overcoming a sense of self and with
the unity that a regiment of soldiers can feel as it advances under fire.23
JÜNGER, THE NEW NATIONALISTS, AND THE FIRST WORLD WAR 133
reunion makes of the event a stylized ritual. His appeal to the tradition of
the soldier type, accentuated by the use of a vocabulary more suited to ear-
lier forms of battle (the “lansquenet” was a foot soldier in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries), establishes the authoritative framework within which
the death of one’s comrades can be seen as meaningful. The impersonal,
eternal qualities of the soldier transform the desolation of war and lend
meaning to what is elsewhere seen as futile suffering.27
The political response of Jünger and the new nationalists to the war is
determined in part by the simple fact that Germany did not emerge as the
victor: Kurt Hesse sets out the problem and reveals the mental process by
which a solution is reached. In Der Feldherr Psychologos (General Psychol-
ogos) he asks whether the fact that the war was lost is sufficient reason to
see this episode in the history of the nation as a negative experience. One
must try, he argues, to establish what positive aspects of the war remain.
After listing just how much Germany did lose in the war, he asks whether
there must not be some gain to emerge from a struggle that was kept up
with so much spiritual and physical effort. His suggestion of where mean-
ing is to be found helps explain a key feature of new nationalist writings
on the war. If the war was lost there must be a new battle cry: “es gilt,
geistige Werte zu annektieren!” (we must annex spiritual values).28 In this
suggestion we see how failure in the world of actual military power
prompted the new nationalists to internalize the war experience: why, for
example, Ernst Jünger called his war book of 1922 Der Kampf als inneres
Erlebnis (Struggle as Inner Experience). In this “inner experience” the
best qualities of the soldier — courage, heroism, selflessness — become
ends in themselves.29 Franz Schauwecker describes the situation of the
Germans in the war and concludes that they were fighting against hope-
less odds. In such a situation there is “no point” in fighting on. Yet if
fighting on has no point, says Schauwecker, it does have a “meaning.”
This meaning resides in the courage and commitment of the soldiers who
fight the losing battle.30
Werner Best, who went on to draw up the Boxheim Papers on Nazi
plans in the event of a communist revolution, pursues this idea when he
explains that new nationalism sees the world as dynamic, consisting of ten-
sion, struggle, and turbulence. He quotes Friedrich Nietzsche, referring to
the world as perpetually creating and destroying itself. And he quotes
Ernst Jünger’s dictum from Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis: “Nicht wofür
wir kämpfen, ist das Wesentliche, sondern wie wir kämpfen” (The crucial
thing is not what we are fighting for, but how we fight). Extending the
logic of his thinking, Best concludes that the aims of any struggle are
ephemeral and ever changing, and for this reason the success or failure of
the struggle is not important.31 Opponents of new nationalism argued that
there was a causal connection between such thinking and the lost war: in a
hostile essay in the liberal journal Das Tagebuch, Karl Tschuppik characterized
JÜNGER, THE NEW NATIONALISTS, AND THE FIRST WORLD WAR 135
the new nationalist idea of war being beyond the will of man and a primi-
tive force as the philosophy of defeat.32
What is clear is that the new nationalists’ heroic portrayal of war does
not directly tackle the insight into its futility: the feeling of one’s own
insignificance in war is not conquered by fixing one’s gaze on a higher goal
but is suppressed when writers revert to a preconscious, animal existence.
The reaction to the problem that the stated aims of the war are insufficient
to make sense of death on the huge scale encountered in the First World
War is not to find some other, worthier, aim but to suppress the problem
and make war an end in itself. The individual’s fate is not rendered mean-
ingful. Rather, the individual is disregarded and the focus switches to the
typical or the collective experience.
Crucially, the political response to the war was also influenced by the
postwar situation of the new nationalists in what they regard as the alien
environment of the Weimar Republic. Jünger shows how, as far as the new
nationalists are concerned, giving way to their nagging doubts about the
meaning of the war would be tantamount to conceding the superiority of
the thinking that underpinned the Weimar Republic. He writes that any
philosophy that sees the death of millions in war as meaningless must be a
philosophy devoid of God, spirit, and heart, and it must also be fundamen-
tally barren. He attributes this philosophy to liberalism in all its forms, and
claims that one of the leading politicians of the Weimar Republic, Walther
Rathenau, embraces this view of the war.33 Significantly, however, he also
acknowledges his own mixed feelings about the war: “wurde unser Herz
noch nie von jenem Gefühl der Leere belagert, das uns zur Übergabe auf-
fordert, indem es uns listig zuflüstert, es sei doch irgendwie alles umsonst
gewesen?” (were our hearts never besieged by the feeling of emptiness urg-
ing us to surrender by insidiously whispering to us that it [sacrifice in war]
was somehow really all in vain?)34
The view of war as natural and self-justifying was further developed in
the Weimar period in order to cope with what the new nationalists saw as
the spread of alien Western values across the German border. Two expres-
sions of these alien values were the war-guilt clause of the Versailles Treaty
and the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, which outlawed war. Thus a key fea-
ture of the new nationalist view of the war is the irrelevance of moral cate-
gories. A. E. Günther, coeditor of the Conservative Revolutionary journal
Deutsches Volkstum, felt uneasy about German propaganda that proclaimed
Germany did not start the war. This propaganda presented the German
cause not as the inner experience of the nation but as a legal dispute,
which, like any other, could be lost by trickery. It was dangerous to concen-
trate on the morality of self-defense. A nation’s right to exist includes attack,
yet, unlike in Mussolini’s Italy, this was not driven home in the German
public sphere as the philosophy of the nation. Referring to Germany’s efforts
to refute the war-guilt charge, Günther records his amazement at seeing
136 ROGER WOODS
Notes
1
This is Walter Struve’s assessment of their role in Elites against Democracy: Lead-
ership Ideals in Bourgeois Political Thought in Germany, 1890–1933 (Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1973), 227.
2
Martin Greiffenhagen, Das Dilemma des Konservatismus in Deutschland
(Munich: Piper, 1971), 277.
3
See, for example, Kurt Sontheimer, Antidemokratisches Denken in der Weimarer
Republik (Munich: Nymphenburg, 1968), 95.
4
Detlev Peukert, Die Weimarer Republik: Krisenjahre der klassischen Moderne
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987), 110–11.
138 ROGER WOODS
5
Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar
and the Third Reich (Cambridge, London: Cambridge UP, 1984), 72–75.
6
Wolfram Wette, “Ideologien, Propaganda und Innenpolitik als Voraussetzungen
der Kriegspolitik des Dritten Reiches,” in Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite
Weltkrieg, ed. Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, 10 vols. (Stuttgart: Deutsche
Verlags-Anstalt, 1979), 1:48.
7
Thus, when Modris Eksteins comments in general terms on the conservative view
of the war as “a necessity, tragic of course, but nonetheless unavoidable,” he does
not exploit the interpretative potential of what is, in the case of the Conservative
Revolution, a development of the themes of necessity and inevitability (Rites of
Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age [London, New York: Ban-
tam, 1989], 287).
8
Ernst Jünger, In Stahlgewittern (Hanover: published privately, 1920), 1. Subse-
quent references to this work are cited in the text as St followed by the page number.
9
Ernst Jünger, “Der Pazifismus,” Die Standarte 11 (15 November 1925): 2. For a
discussion of the theory of modernization as applied to the Weimar Republic, see
Peukert, Die Weimarer Republik, 87–190. George Mosse gives a convincing
account of the First World War as a “modern war” characterized by “organized
mass death” in his Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New
York, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990), 3.
10
See Martin Travers, German Novels on the First World War and Their Ideological
Implications, 1918–1933 (Stuttgart: Akademischer Verlag, 1982). Travers demon-
strates that military memoirs presented a paradigmatic view of war. This form sur-
vived through the First World War to emerge in the memoirs of Hermann von Stein,
for example, who had command of the XIV Reserve Division in a Bavarian Regi-
ment. His is above all an orderly view of war, in which all the events described have a
beginning, a middle, and an end. The typical memoir, argues Travers, does not rec-
ognize (does not have the categories to recognize) the less paradigmatic features of
war — the fortuitous, the random, the anomic, and the personal torments of hunger,
fear, and pain (German Novels on the First World War, 23). See also Hans-Harald
Müller, Der Krieg und die Schriftsteller (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1986), on senior officers
writing military memoirs in order to justify strategic decisions in the war (22).
11
See, for example, Erich Maria Remarque’s account of how the soldiers are made
indifferent by the fact that they can do little to avoid being killed: it is chance that
kills them or keeps them alive (Im Westen nichts Neues [Frankfurt am Main: Ull-
stein, 1976], 76).
12
See Michael Gollbach, Die Wiederkehr des Weltkrieges in der Literatur (Kron-
berg: Scriptor, 1978), 116. Travers has pointed out that Ludwig Renn’s Krieg
(War) stresses the formlessness of war and the soldier’s struggle to survive in an
environment governed by the random and fortuitous, by the failure of purpose and
the subversion of order (German Novels on the First World War, 68). See also Paul
Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (London, Oxford, New York: Oxford
UP, 1975) on the gap between expectations and reality, which became such an
important feature of British writing on the First World War (34–35). Fussell also
reports on the elaborate rumors that circulated in the war about how the Germans
gained information on the position of enemy artillery. These rumors reflected the
JÜNGER, THE NEW NATIONALISTS, AND THE FIRST WORLD WAR 139
need to make sense of events that would otherwise seem merely accidental or
calamitous (121).
13
Ernst Jünger, Sturm (Olten: Oltner Liebhaberdruck, 1963), 56–57. Subsequent
references are given in the text as Sturm followed by the page number.
14
Ernst Jünger, Feuer und Blut (Magdeburg: Stahlhelm, 1925), 16–17.
15
Franz Schauwecker, Deutsche allein (Berlin: Frundsberg, 1931), 9.
16
Rudolf Huch, “‘Im Westen nichts Neues,’” Deutsches Volkstum 11, no. 8
(August 1929): 598–603.
17
Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 155.
18
Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, 107.
19
Ernst Jünger, ed., Die Unvergessenen (Berlin and Leipzig: Andermann, 1928), 12.
20
Ernst Jünger, “Alfred Kubin,” Neues Forum 154 (October 1966): 629.
21
Ernst Jünger, Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis (Berlin: Mittler, 1922), 116.
22
Remarque, Im Westen nichts Neues, 5, 76.
23
Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Munich:
DTV, 1973), 2:558–59.
24
Kurt Hesse, Der Feldherr Psychologos: Ein Suchen nach dem Führer der deutschen
Zukunft (Berlin: Mittler, 1922), 139.
25
Quoted in Armin Mohler, ed., Die Schleife: Dokumente zum Weg von Ernst
Jünger (Zurich: Arche, 1955), 55.
26
Ernst Jünger, Das abenteuerliche Herz (Berlin: Frundsberg, 1929), 6.
27
Karl Prümm makes a similar point about In Stahlgewittern in his Die Literatur
des soldatischen Nationalismus der 20er Jahre (1918–1933), 2 vols. (Kronberg im
Taunus: Scriptor, 1974), 1:114–15.
28
Kurt Hesse, Der Feldherr Psychologos, 135.
29
Müller also sees a connection between Jünger’s failure to assign a meaning to the
war and his raising of soldierly qualities to the status of self-justifying values (246).
30
Franz Schauwecker, Der feurige Weg (Leipzig: Aufmarsch 1926), 132.
31
Werner Best, “Der Krieg und das Recht,” in Krieg und Krieger, ed. Ernst Jünger
(Berlin: Junker & Dünnhaupt, 1930), 151–52. Michael Gollbach (Die Wiederkehr
des Weltkrieges, 156) notes a similar process at work in Franz Schauwecker’s Auf-
bruch der Nation (Berlin: Frundsberg, 1930).
32
Karl Tschuppik, “Nicht daran denken, nicht davon sprechen?” Das Tagebuch
12 (September 1931): 1438–43. Tschuppik makes his view of the vitalist inter-
pretation of the war clear when he adds that this idea is part of the megalomania
of inferior generals, politicians who are incapable of thought, and their literary
followers.
33
See Jünger, “Vom absolut Kühnen,” Standarte 20 (12 August 1926): 462, and
“Die totale Mobilmachung,” in Jünger, Krieg und Krieger, 29.
34
Ernst Jünger, “Die Opfer,” Der Vormarsch 6 (November 1927): 114.
35
A. E. Günther, “Die Intelligenz und der Krieg,” in Krieg und Krieger, 91, 96–97.
140 ROGER WOODS
36
Kurt Hesse, Der Feldherr Psychologos, 142.
37
Franz Schauwecker, Der feurige Weg, 169.
38
Walter Benjamin, “Theorien des deutschen Faschismus,” Die Gesellschaft 2
(1930): 32–41, reprinted in Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Hella
Tiedemann-Bartels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), 3:238–50. Subsequent
references are to the 1972 edition.
39
Benjamin, “Theorien des deutschen Faschismus,” 240.
40
Ibid, 242, n. 2.
41
Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, 6. The broader significance of the new nationalist device
of describing the war in premodern terms is reflected in the style of many monu-
ments that were erected after the First World War and portrayed soldiers armed
with swords rather than modern weaponry. Our analysis of the evolution of mean-
ing in new nationalist texts on war supports Mosse’s interpretation of this phenom-
enon as the result of a confrontation with a new kind of mechanical warfare, which
resulted in an “urgent need to mask death” (101).
42
See Jürgen Kocka, Klassengesellschaft im Krieg, 1914–1918 (Göttingen: Vanden-
hoeck & Ruprecht, 1973), esp. 40–57, on the growing militancy of workers during
the war, shortages of food resulting in strikes among munitions workers in Berlin,
war weariness, and the desire for peace among the workers. Kocka also examines
the unequal provision made for officers and men at the front, a phenomenon mir-
rored at home by the easier life for those who could afford black market prices.
43
See Wette, “Ideologien, Propaganda und Innenpolitik,” 78–81.
44
Gollbach points out that from 1929 onwards the market share of nationalist anti-
democratic war books was overwhelming and made the proportion of books criti-
cal of the war insignificant. Gollbach takes this as an indication of the
popularization of antidemocratic and nationalist slogans, ideas, and groups in the
process of political polarization at that time (276).
7: Innocent Killing: Erich Maria
Remarque and the Weimar
Anti-War Novels
Brian Murdoch
after the war, and even Remarque’s novel of the Second World War, Zeit zu
leben und Zeit zu sterben (1954, translated as A Time to Love [sic] and a
Time to Die), albeit set in wartime Nazi Germany, shows parallel attitudes
to war as such.5 Later still, Der schwarze Obelisk (1956, The Black Obelisk,
1957), is set in the Weimar Republic, so that it follows Der Weg zurück in
historical sequence, although it is inevitably affected by hindsight after
another war and the experience of Nazism. The central figure, however,
Bodmer, is a close match for Bäumer and Birkholz.
Im Westen nichts Neues and Der Weg zurück, though, are Remarque’s
major contributions to the Weimar novel as such. The first presents the war
through the eyes of a young soldier, Paul Bäumer, who has — under the
influence of a crassly nationalistic teacher — joined the army after the start
of the war straight from high school, and who recounts his experiences,
sometimes as flashbacks, of many aspects of the war, from basic training to
coming under fire in the front line. The narrative alternates between scenes
of warfare at the front with periods of respite behind the lines, with some
French girls, at home on leave, or on one occasion defending a food store.
Against these scenes are set others at the front on wiring or sentry duty,
under heavy fire in a dugout, and on a reconnaissance patrol (during which
Bäumer kills a Frenchman in a panic). He is wounded and experiences a
military hospital. Gradually his immediate circle of fellow soldiers, some
schoolfriends, others from different walks of life, are all killed, the last of
them the older man Katczinsky, Bäumer’s mentor. Bäumer himself, now
alone, is killed at the end of the work, just before the end of the war, and
the last few lines of the novel are in another voice.
Such a bare description of the work conveys little except, perhaps, to
indicate that it holds the interest by rapid and varied scene changes. In fact
its structure is deceptively simple; because it is so skillfully done, the work
had general appeal and thus became extremely popular, but this itself led to
critical suspicion, and indeed to its dismissal as serious literature, in spite of
the fact that the subject could scarcely be more serious. It is, as indicated, a
first-person narrative, a work effectively with only one character, a young
soldier. This aspect of the fictionality is maintained carefully; the narrative
does not (apart from the final third-party comment) ever come out of
character. A young man is caught up in a war for which he can bear no
responsibility. Although clearly intelligent, just out of a classical Gymna-
sium, his experience of life itself is, as he well knows, limited. But he can
observe the war and also think about it from a limited perspective. Critics
who leveled the charge at Remarque that some of the characters encoun-
tered by the reader are less fully drawn than others failed to appreciate the
consistent viewpoint.6 Bäumer is naturally more aware of some things and
some people than of others; he knows his schoolmates well and he gets to
know other immediate comrades, but will do little more than register the
presence of “a graybeard,” or of an unpleasant major he meets once only,
144 BRIAN MURDOCH
Ich bin jung, ich bin zwanzig Jahre alt; aber ich kenne vom Leben nichts
anderes als die Verzweiflung, den Tod, die Angst und die Verkettung
sinnlosester Oberflächlichkeit mit einem Abgrund des Leidens. Ich sehe,
dass Völker gegeneinandergetrieben werden und sich schweigend, unwis-
send, töricht, gehorsam, unschuldig töten. (260)
The reference to innocent killing could refer either to those killing or those
being killed. This is the experience of his whole generation, he goes on,
and he blames the generation before: what would their fathers do, he asks,
if they were to be held to account? No answer is given in the novel,
of course, but the thought is significant for the Weimar Republic. The
young soldiers in the novel have grown up with killing as their principal
occupation and their knowledge of the world is limited to death. In asking
what will happen afterwards and what will become of them, Bäumer
expresses, though he himself dies, the views of the survivors who were still
young at the birth of the Weimar Republic. The despairing tone is histori-
cal and acceptable within the context, but it can function as a warning in
the contemporary world, and indeed in general terms. Bäumer presents
ERICH MARIA REMARQUE AND THE WEIMAR ANTI-WAR NOVELS 145
the facts of the war to the reader, but he is himself unable to think clearly
about many aspects of it, something that becomes clear when he and his
fellow soldiers attempt discussions, which end invariably with the circular
and ultimately meaningless assertion — it is no more than that — that
“Krieg ist Krieg” (war is war). The reader derives from Bäumer’s experi-
ences the universal message that war is a human disaster and that there
should be no more war, the pacifist-liberal message that ensures the
continuing importance of the work. It is perhaps still necessary to point
out, finally, that Bäumer is a character in a novel, and is not Remarque,
even if the author’s own experiences contributed to Bäumer, Birkholz, and
Bodmer.
Indeed, to refer to Im Westen nichts Neues as a first-person novel with-
out further qualification requires expansion to illustrate the skill with
which the work is fashioned and the way in which it could be read never-
theless on a universal level, and not just in Weimar Germany. Although
Bäumer is an individual, he is also part of a larger force, and the novel con-
tains a series of concentric rings, at the center of which is Bäumer himself.
Much of the novel, indeed, is a first-person plural narrative, and most of
the chapters begin with the pronoun “wir,” a pronoun that is both
ambiguous (since it can be exclusive, “not you,” or embracing, “all of us”)
and also variable. It is always entirely clear what is meant, however, and
Remarque manipulates its use for effect. When the work begins, the “wir”
refers, for example, to the remains of the company that has just returned
from the front, but it can also mean — as the broadest of the rings, “we
humans” (as opposed to the animals they become). Further, it can mean
“we, the Germans” (an idea Remarque even permits the soldiers to play
with grammatically at one point), or “we the German army.” It can also
refer to ordinary soldiers (on the German or even on both sides). Moving
inwards from the company, the first person plural may refer to the entire
platoon, or to the subgroups within it, of the former high-school boys, or
the wider group of friends including Tjaden and Westhus, who are not
from that background, and Katczinsky, who is older. Even closer to the
center, “wir” can refer to Bäumer and Katczinsky, two friends once per-
ceived (in an image Remarque was fond of) as two sparks of life on a noc-
turnal battlefield. In the brief final chapter, Bäumer is alone, now that most
of his closest friends, last of all Katczinsky, have fallen, and becomes, as it
were, a first person singular, though he is aware that behind his individual-
ity is a separate and independent life force: “dieses, was in mir Ich sagt”
(288; my conscious self, 207). But he falls, and now becomes the subject
of a third-person narrative in an objective report on his death and the lack
of official comment upon it. To the bare facts of his death is added a spec-
ulation that can carry none of the direct verisimilitude of the rest of the
novel.7 It also takes us back to a prefatory motto before the start of the
book, a statement about the novel, fixed in the reality of the present and
146 BRIAN MURDOCH
Ein Befehl hat diese stillen Gestalten zu unsern Feinden gemacht; ein
Befehl könnte sie in unsere Freunde verwandeln. An irgendeinem Tisch
wird ein Schriftstück von einigen Leuten unterzeichnet, die keiner von
ERICH MARIA REMARQUE AND THE WEIMAR ANTI-WAR NOVELS 147
uns kennt; und jahrelang ist unser höchstes Ziel das, worauf sonst die Ver-
achtung der Welt und ihre höchste Strafe ruht. (193–94)
[An order has turned these silent figures into our enemies; an order could
turn them into friends again. On some table, a document is signed by
some people that none of us knows, and for years our main aim in life is
the one thing that usually draws the condemnation of the whole world
and incurs its severest punishment in law.] (137)
He realizes that it is not yet the time to think this through, and in the
historical context of the book the matter has to be shelved. In the context
of the reader in the Weimar Republic, though, it was appropriate that
thought should now be given to this faux-naif view of the way in which
governments declare war. The question of murder as a crime is also raised
within the context of the war in Der Weg zurück.
The basic and most immediate form of prose war description is prob-
ably the diary: soldiers kept them and many were published, either after the
death of the writer in battle (these are the most immediate — that by the
nationalist nature poet and novelist Hermann Löns [1866–1914] is an
example) or later, in which case they may well have gone through a filtering
process by the diarist, as Ernst Jünger commented of his own In Stahlgewit-
tern (1920, Storm of Steel, 1929), perhaps the best known. Hans Carossa’s
Rumänisches Tagebuch (1924, A Roumanian Diary, 1929) and Rudolf
Binding’s Aus dem Kriege (1925; translated as A Fatalist at War, 1929) are
further examples. The diary form could also be entirely fictitious, as in the
case of Adrienne Thomas’s Die Katrin wird Soldat (1930, translated as
Cathérine Joins Up, also as Katrin Becomes a Soldier, both 1931). Im Westen
nichts Neues is not a diary but a fiction, though it strives for the immediacy
of the direct narrative, almost as reportage, while avoiding too much detail
of time and place and permitting both flashbacks and an arrangement of
contrasting scenes.10 In fact the structure of the work is as skilled as the con-
sistency with which the central character is presented. The chapters vary in
length considerably, the longest being a central chapter set at the front line
and presenting the experience of the horror of war in a way that is some-
times metaphorical (“Die Front ist ein Käfig” [103; The front is a cage,
72]) and sometimes physically, visually, and acoustically descriptive:
Die stickige Luft fällt uns . . . noch mehr auf die Nerven. Wir sitzen in
unserm Grabe und warten nur darauf, daß wir zugeschüttet werden.
Plötzlich heult und blitzt es ungeheuer, der Unterstand kracht in allen
Fugen unter einem Treffer . . . Es klirrt metallisch . . . (113)
[The stifling air . . . gets on our nerves even more . . . It’s as if we were
sitting in our own grave, just waiting for someone to bury us.
Suddenly there is a terrible noise and flash of light, and every joint in the
dugout creaks under the impact of a direct hit . . . There is a metallic rat-
tling. . . .] (79)
148 BRIAN MURDOCH
The description of the dugout as a grave is significant; later on, the men
take cover in blown-up graves, where they literally join the exhumed dead.
Bäumer comments that even an old man (by which he means someone
other than a recruit, and loss of youth is a recurrent theme) might have his
hair turned gray by the experience of a bombardment. There is always
commentary within the immediacy, but it is subtly done. A good example
is in a passage early in the work, when Bäumer visits a dying friend in a field
hospital, and states, as it were, to the reader, that this man is twenty and
does not want to die, adding that the whole world ought to be led past his
bed. This, of course, is just what Remarque does in the novel. Themes
once stated are picked up and reiterated, often in more concise form, like
themes in a fugue, as the last stages of the war and the real time of the
novel from 1917 to 1918 progress. The gradual attrition, Bäumer’s
increasing despair at what will come after, and the way he is increasingly
forced to confront his own thoughts on the war are examples of this, and
Bäumer develops throughout the novel.
It needs to be reiterated that the objective final statement in the work
is full of irony. Bäumer has in death “einen so gefaßten Ausdruck, als wäre
er beinahe zufrieden, daß es so gekommen war” (288; an expression that
was so composed that it looked as if he were almost happy that it had
turned out that way, 207). The subjunctive and the word “beinahe” must
not be overlooked, but the reader is aware that the composed look on his
face might equally derive from the resigned calm that he has achieved. He
does indeed not have to face the miseries faced by all of the characters with
some, little, or no success in the sequel; but the reader knows that he did
not want to die, since he had established an objective attitude towards
himself that depended upon the unquenchable quality of the life force, the
“Funke Leben,” as he had referred to himself earlier in a scene with
Katczinsky, and which Remarque would use as the title for his concentration-
camp novel of 1952, Der Funke Leben (Spark of Life). The interpretation of
what has been referred to simply as the rictus sardonicus11 is as ambiguous
as the comment that there was nothing new to report that day: “nichts
Neues zu melden,” “nothing new to report,” can mean, of course, that the
death of one soldier is not newsworthy, though he has been the subject of
an entire novel that is actually called a Bericht, or report. Or it can mean
that this pointless death just before the armistice is nothing new on the
front.12
For the survivors, of course, the struggle went on. In the short intro-
ductory statement that Remarque placed at the very beginning of the
book, Im Westen nichts Neues is related to the author’s present and thus to
the Weimar Republic, which contained so many of “those who were
destroyed by the war even if they escaped its shells.” The novel ends before
the Treaty of Versailles and thus focuses entirely upon the war, without ref-
erence to its beginning or to its end. The young central figure and his
ERICH MARIA REMARQUE AND THE WEIMAR ANTI-WAR NOVELS 149
war poetry began to include works from all the combatant nations, but in
the case of the novel, the way in which the universality of the experience of
the trenches overrode other considerations was underscored by the appear-
ance in German translation during the Weimar period of large numbers of
war novels from abroad. Equally, not just Remarque’s, but virtually all
other contemporary German war novels were (as is evident from the texts
referred to here) translated into English, as well as into French and other
languages, many of them in 1929. To give just two examples, one from
each side, Alexander Moritz Frey’s still unjustly neglected novel Die
Pflasterkästen was translated as The Crossbearers, and Evadne Price’s Not so
Quiet . . . as Mrs Biest pfeift. Neither was in the forefront of war literature
in the period, though they sold relatively well.17
A contemporary German critique of the Weimar war novels referred to
the way in which, through them, “die Vergangenheit, drückend und
quälend wie ein Alptraum, wird endgültig zu Grabe getragen” (the past,
depressing and agonizing as a nightmare, is at last laid to rest).18 This is the
essence of Remarque’s and the other antiwar novels for their time; in the
context of another war, the term Bewältigung der Vergangenheit would be
used, and after the Second World War would be applied by writers to the
question of how Germany had come to accept Hitler, but the Weimar
Republic needed to cope in the first instance with the nature of the war
itself. The antiwar novels, while serving as a reminder of the reasons
behind the rootlessness of those now entering maturity in a new society,
helped them to get it out of their system. What the pacifist war literature
did not do — at least not to any great extent, and certainly not overtly —
was to try to justify (or deny) the loss of the war, or to seek to promote a
way of avenging the perceived shame of the Treaty of Versailles. Weimar
pacifist war literature is a literature of closure, but not of the backward
look. Even within the consistent historical context, Bäumer constantly
looks forward to the time after the war, even though he cannot conceive of
what it will be like. Those who survived the war — as Bäumer should have,
and as Ernst Birkholz, the central figure and narrator of Der Weg zurück
actually does — view the postwar period without expectations and often
without an aim, but they look forward. The rootlessness and aimlessness of
the generation of those who went from school into the war is a theme of
many of Remarque’s later novels, and the central figure in Der schwarze
Obelisk shows the same qualities. But when they do look back they realize
that the prewar world is completely gone, and the war itself, once they
have come to terms with details, has to be remembered only as a warning
that it should not happen again. There was, of course, a different approach,
which did look back to a perceived and supposedly reclaimable past glory,
and hence concentrated upon the obliteration of what was seen as the
shame of Versailles, a treaty that, it was claimed, had imposed unreasonable
conditions upon an undefeated army.
152 BRIAN MURDOCH
Bäumer comments right away that maybe this is just melancholy, which
will vanish; but the words have been spoken. The “wir” in this case refers
to Bäumer’s exact contemporaries; those slightly older may have had jobs
and families before the war, and those who come after will push them
aside, but the various possibilities he gives for a reaction are observed by
Birkholz in Der Weg zurück. Remarque’s sequel to Im Westen nichts Neues
is in many respects even more of a Bericht, a report on how the road back
had to be taken by those destroyed by the war, even though they were not
killed. It presents to the reader once again a variety of experiences facing
the former soldiers as they return to life in Germany. The novel opens with
the last days of the war, the suddenness of the peace, and then with the
march home. But Birkholz and his comrades are not the first, and society is
already under way again. The question is always whether or not the return-
ing soldiers can cope with the changes (and in some cases the lack of
change) in society, and the changes in their own personalities and attitudes.
Novels of the war itself, like Im Westen nichts Neues, looked back; the para-
dox of Der Weg zurück is that, although still a historical novel at the time it
ERICH MARIA REMARQUE AND THE WEIMAR ANTI-WAR NOVELS 153
was written, it shows the ex-soldiers learning that they have to go forward.
To summarize the answer very succinctly: the lesson that Birkholz (and the
reader) learns is that the way back into life could not involve actually going
backward because the war had changed everything.
The characters parallel those in the first novel. Birkholz and Bäumer
are, as indicated, pretty well the same person, though Birkholz refers to the
deaths of Bäumer and the others. Tjaden survives anyway, and the
resourceful Katczinsky and the strong Haie Westhus, both killed in the first
novel, are merged and replaced by a younger but equally capable and prag-
matic ex-soldier, Willy Homeyer. The main characters try initially to take
up things where they left off, but they soon realize that they cannot. This
can be positive, for example, in the way they now react to their old teach-
ers, who no longer exercise the same authoritarian control over them, and
against whom they can now assert themselves. But the much vaunted com-
radeship of the trenches quickly breaks down, as those with a business
sense are already making deals at the end of the war and do well for them-
selves later. Der Weg zurück demonstrates that having been a good soldier
is no guarantee of doing well in postwar society, just as the first novel
showed that being good at mathematics at school would not save you from
being killed at the front. New social divisions open up, and the political
chaos and polarization after the war sets former comrades against one
another, until one of Birkholz’s immediate group is shot dead by another
when they find themselves on different sides of the barricades. This is the
first of several significant shots fired in a novel that is set, ostensibly, in
peacetime. The birth of the Weimar Republic comes about under fire as
the echoes of the war take a very long time to die away.
Some scores concerned with the war itself are settled, but although
this can be interpreted on an individual level as a form of closure, it can
also serve to indicate how much things have moved away from the war in a
very short time. In an echo of the revenge taken on a drill corporal in the
first novel, the soldiers beat up a former sergeant, who during the war had
caused the death of one of their friends. At first they are reluctant, because
the sergeant is now an innkeeper and therefore not really the same person.
Only his army trousers indicate that the guilt of the wartime happenings is
still there, which provides the impetus to punish him after all; the initial
reluctance is as important as the revenge.
Various scenes in Im Westen nichts Neues are deliberately picked up.
Bäumer had demanded, for example, that all the world be shown a dying
man in a field hospital, and had later taken the reader, as it were, on a tour
of the military hospital in which he himself was being treated. Birkholz
takes the reader to an asylum, where those literally driven mad by the war
maintain the delusion that it is still going on, and he observes too the post-
war situation of the war-wounded, the real results of the war, as they actu-
ally parade past as part of a demonstration. So too, where Bäumer had
154 BRIAN MURDOCH
been unable because of the immediate pressure of the war to think through
a given theme, these ideas are now worked out through Birkholz in the
later novel. After the Duval incident, Bäumer needed to cling to the circu-
lar “war is war” argument simply to be able to carry on, and hence was
made to watch the sniper at work. With the Russian prisoners, he drew
(and then withdrew from the implications of) the parallel between killing
in war — unschuldig töten — and murder. In the new novel, one of Birk-
holz’s friends, Albert Trosske, kills a man he finds with his girlfriend, and
at the trial he draws a distinction between this man, whom he hates, and
the men he has killed in the war but did not hate. Again the reader is made
aware of the inconsistency. Just before the trial, too, Birkholz visits a for-
mer sniper and finds him insisting still that the statement “war is war”
eradicates any need for reflection at all. For the former sniper, the argu-
ment that he was only obeying orders justifies his own pride in his achieve-
ments, which he parades much as if it had all been some kind of shooting
match (an idea played with in Glaeser’s Jahrgang 1902), albeit with live tar-
gets. The sniper Birkholz visited is a family man with a small daughter, and
he dismisses anyone who thinks differently from himself as a Bolshevik.
The small picture of the sniper, Bruno Mückenhaupt, is an indictment of
an attitude to the war that was itself a widespread method of coping with
the past; but the argument upon which it is based is still a circular one. War
is not justified simply by saying that it is what it is. Mückenhaupt’s con-
science is clear because it has never troubled him; he could be the sniper
from the first novel, and he represented a widespread attitude in the
Weimar Republic, an attitude Remarque wanted increasingly to highlight
at the time of the second novel.
If some of Birkholz’s colleagues do well, others do badly either finan-
cially or personally, and some do not survive at all. An older soldier, a
countryman, finds that his wife has been (briefly) unfaithful while he was
away, and he cannot forgive her in spite of her patent remorse; not only
does the relationship effectively break down, but they move away from the
country to the town, where they remain unhappy. This is not just a per-
sonal tragedy of the war but indicates a larger-scale breakdown in society.
Of the others, two commit suicide, unable to cope with the experience of
the war. Birkholz’s sensitive friend Ludwig, who was a lieutenant, has con-
tracted syphilis during the war — a fairly obviously symbol that he himself
interprets as having the war still in his blood. He cuts his wrists to exorcise
this ongoing disease and to get the war out of his system in a literal sense.
Another comrade, Georg Rahe, tries to go backward by rejoining the
army, since this is all he now knows, and when this does not work, he
returns to France to commit suicide by shooting himself. The phenom-
enon of survivor guilt was not uncommon after the First World War.
Birkholz and his closest friends survive, but sometimes only with diffi-
culty. Birkholz himself, for example, after trying to be a teacher, finds that
ERICH MARIA REMARQUE AND THE WEIMAR ANTI-WAR NOVELS 155
[a quiet, silent war raged over this landscape of memory as well, and it
would be senseless for me to carry on searching. Time is like a broad
canyon between then and now, and I can’t go back, so there is nothing
but to go forwards, marching, somewhere or other, because I have no
fixed goal. . . .]
The passage is one of the most important in the book, a stage in the learn-
ing process begun by Bäumer in the earlier novel and relevant to the set-
ting up of the Weimar Republic.19 The new republic had to look forward,
but of course, too many elements in it looked backward instead to Ver-
sailles. When writers like Remarque looked into the future from the van-
tage point of 1930, this was already apparent, and they saw how the future
would be determined by those who refused to let go of the past.
Der Weg zurück is set in the period from the end of 1918 (the war is
not yet over in the prologue, though Bäumer, who died in October, is
already dead) to 1920. The chronology is quite clear. At the very end of
the work it is said of one of the characters that: “Vor einem Jahr noch lag
der da . . . mit zwei Kameraden allein in einem Maschinengewehrnest . . .
und ein Angriff kam” (348; Only a year ago he was still in the trenches . . .
with two others in a machine gun nest . . . under attack). Only the epi-
logue, the brief Ausgang, is set in the spring of 1920, given that the char-
acters speak of themselves as “kaum erst raus” (364; barely out) of the forces.
Through Birkholz’s eyes we see the confused politics at the birth of the
Weimar Republic; just like Bäumer in the first novel, Birkholz makes judg-
ments to an extent and lays open questions for the audience. The revolu-
tionary chaos of the soldiers’ councils are shown, principally to
demonstrate the breakdown of comradeship and the emergence of social
realignments, both on a personal level and in the wider sense.
156 BRIAN MURDOCH
Wir haben mit zu wenig Haß Revolution gemacht, und wir wollten
gleich von Anfang an gerecht sein, dadurch ist alles lahm geworden. Eine
Revolution muß losrasen wie ein Waldbrand, dann kann man später zu
säen beginnen; aber wir wollten nichts zerstören und doch erneuern. Wir
hatten nicht einmal mehr die Kraft zum Haß, so müde und ausgebrannt
waren wir vom Krieg. (230)
In spite of the failure of the revolution, Breyer goes on to say that it is still
possible to get things right by hard work, even though he himself cannot
go on and commits suicide, as does Rahe later. But Birkholz, the listener
(representing the reader), does not, and he carries the message on and
transmits it symbolically to Weimar in 1931.21 By then, however, it was his-
torically too late for such a message: indeed, the revolution had not been
radical enough and too many earlier elements and attitudes had survived
too well. We need cite only the title of a documentary novel by Theodor
Plievier in this respect, a novel that appeared just before Hitler took power:
Der Kaiser ging, die Generäle blieben (1932; translated as The Kaiser Goes,
the Generals Remain, 1933). Remarque himself summed it up once again
ERICH MARIA REMARQUE AND THE WEIMAR ANTI-WAR NOVELS 157
in his later novel about the Weimar Republic, Der schwarze Obelisk: “Die
Revolutionäre selbst waren von sich so erschreckt, daß sie sofort die
Bonzen und Generäle der alten Regierung zu Hilfe riefen . . . und die
deutsche Revolution versank in rotem Plüsch, Gemütlichkeit, Stammtisch
und Sehnsucht nach Uniformen und Kommandos” (The revolutionaries
frightened themselves so much that they soon called in the bigwigs and
generals from the old regime to help them . . . and the German revolution
sank into red plush, coziness, the local pub and a longing for uniforms and
orders).22 Birkholz survives and goes forward, but without aims or hope.
One problem with Der Weg zurück is the question of narrative per-
spective. Although it is ostensibly a first person narrative once again (using
both the singular and the plural forms), Remarque appears to break this
perspective in a few cases. The story of the older man whose wife has
deceived him, Breyer’s suicide, and finally that of Georg Rahe, all seem to
be told from an omniscient point of view, although Bethke is visited by
Birkholz and presumably told him his story, and Birkholz falls into a fever
after Breyer’s suicide, so that the description forms part of his feverish
dreams.23 Rahe’s suicide, though, is different, since he is alone and on the
battlefield when he kills himself with the third shot fired in the work. The
first kills Max Weil, shot by a former comrade now on a soldiers’ council;
with the second Albert Trosske kills his rival in love, provoking the debate
about killing. Rahe, though, might almost be viewed as the last casualty of
the war, and thus this actual break from the narrative perspective is an
effective one, matching, perhaps deliberately, the death of Bäumer, which
was also presented with a shift of perspective. It is — apart from an epi-
logue — the last section in the work. The war is over for Rahe as it was for
Bäumer, but now it is also over for Birkholz and the others.
Equally significant, however, is the conclusion of Der Weg zurück, and
this Epilog (matching a Prolog set before the end of the war) is perhaps the
part most closely related to the contemporary Weimar situation, although
within the narrative timescale it is still not long after the close of the hostil-
ities, in the spring of 1920. Birkholz and his few remaining immediate
friends are out for a walk in the country. He notes that “wir sehen uns nur
noch selten” (359; we rarely see each other any more), and indeed there is
throughout the work a kind of attrition parallel to that in Im Westen nichts
Neues, as even the surviving former comrades-in-arms drift apart. The for-
mer soldiers watch a group of young Wandervögel, presumably some of
those members of the youth movement taken over after the war by the
Freikorps, being drilled as if at the front. When the ex-soldiers object, they
are mocked as cowards and Bolsheviks. The prewar Wandervogel and Frei-
deutsche Jugend movements were, in the general chaos, often taken over by
different political extremes. By 1926 the Hitler Youth was already in being,
but it did not really become prominent until 1933. There were independ-
ent right (and left) wing paramilitary youth groups from 1919, however,
158 BRIAN MURDOCH
stories about the war, and also works that are not so easily classified.
Remarque referred in his review of Jünger’s In Stahlgewittern to its
“wohltuender Sachlichkeit” (comforting objectivity; see note 31). Remar-
que was at pains to indicate (though the comment appeared in the
motto only in the English, and not the German printed edition) that
war was not an adventure, even if Im Westen nichts Neues has been accused
of having passages where the war might be seen that way. The meal
cooked by the men when they are guarding a supply store is usually cited,
but it is presented as a temporary idyll and Bäumer is wounded almost
immediately afterwards. There is nothing of the adventure in Remarque’s
novels.
In historical terms the antiwar novels failed in their intent just as the
Weimar Republic failed, for reasons that many of these writers foresaw. The
British satirist Peter Cook once gave a famously ironic credit to “those pre-
war German cabarets who did so much to combat Hitler and prevent the
outbreak of World War Two,” and of course the antiwar novels of the
Weimar Republic gave way to the pro-war attitudes of the right after
1933.36 Der Weg zurück ends with Birkholz, left alone, just as Bäumer was,
stressing that “das Leben ist mir geblieben. Das ist beinahe eine Aufgabe
und ein Weg” (366–67; I still have life. That is almost a task, almost a
path). But by then it was already too late, and Kosole, one of his friends,
had just commented of the boys playing soldiers: “Ja . . . so geht es wieder
los” (364; Yes, that’s the way it starts again).
Notes
1
Erich Maria Remarque, Frühe Romane, ed. Thomas F. Schneider and Tilman
Westfalen, vol. 1 of Das unbekannte Werk (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch,
1998). Die Traumbude was published in Dresden: Verlag Die Schönheit, 1920 as
the fourth in their Bücherei der Schönheit. Oddly enough it was translated at the
time into Bulgarian, Latvian, and Russian, as well as Dutch: see Thomas F. Schnei-
der and Donald Weiss, eds., Erich Maria Remarque, Die Traumbude . . . Bibliogra-
phie (Osnabrück: Rasch, 1995). Gam survives in a typescript in the Remarque
archive in New York, and Station am Horizont appeared in seven episodes between
25 November 1927 and 17 February 1928. All three works were published in
2000 in a Russian translation (Moscow: Vagrius, 2000). See Wilhelm von Stern-
burg, Als wäre alles das letzte Mal: Erich Maria Remarque; Eine Biographie
(Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1998) on the early works. Der Feind presents a
final interesting and relevant case: it is not a novel and it was first published in 1993
in German, but not in Remarque’s text, since the stories that make up the volume
were published originally in English translation in the USA. Remarque’s original
texts were not published in German and are not extant. The stories do, however,
complement the narratives of Im Westen nichts Neues and Der Weg zurück. “The
Enemy” and other stories, translated by A. W. Wheen, appeared in Collier’s
164 BRIAN MURDOCH
between 1930 and 1931; retranslated as Der Feind: Erzählungen by Barbara von
Bechtolsheim (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1993).
2
For a succinct introduction to the novels of the period, see the introduction by
Thomas F. Schneider and Hans Wagener in their important collection Vom
Richthofen bis Remarque: Deutschsprachige Prosa zum 1. Weltkrieg (Amsterdam and
New York: Rodopi, 2003). Perhaps the two most useful earlier works are Hans-
Harald Müller, Der Krieg und die Schriftsteller (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1986) and Ann P.
Linder, Princes of the Trenches (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1996). Further
introductions to the novels of the period include J. Knight Bostock, Some Well-
Known German War-Novels, 1914–1930 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1931); William K.
Pfeiler, War and the German Mind (New York: Columbia UP, 1941, repr., New
York: AMS, 1966); Wilhelm J. Schwarz, War and the Mind of Germany I (Frankfurt
am Main: Lang, 1975); Michael Gollbach, Die Wiederkehr des Weltkriegs in der
Literatur: Zu den Frontromanen der späten Zwanziger Jahre (Kronberg im Taunus:
Scriptor, 1978); Holger Klein, ed., The First World War in Fiction (London: Macmil-
lan, 2nd ed. 1978); Charles N. Genno and Heinz Wetzel, eds., The First World War
in German Narrative Prose: Essays in Honor of George Wallis Field (Toronto: U of
Toronto P, 1980); Michael P. A. Travers, German Novels of the First World War
and Their Ideological Implications, 1918–1933 (Stuttgart: Heinz, 1982); Margrit
Stickelberger-Eder, Aufbruch 1914: Kriegsromane der späten Weimarer Republik
(Zurich and Munich: Artemis, 1983); Herbert Bornebusch, Gegen-Erinnerung: Ein
formsemantische Analyse des demokratischen Kriegsromans der Weimarer Republik
(Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1985); Thorsten Batz, Allgegenwärtige Fronten —
sozialistische und linke Kriegsromane in der Weimarer Republik, 1918–1933 (Frankfurt
am Main: Lang, 1997); Horst D. Schlosser, ed., Das deutsche Reich ist eine Republik
(Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2003), the latter with essays on Jünger and Remarque.
3
Texts are cited from the first Ullstein book editions under their Propyläen
imprint: Im Westen nichts Neues (Berlin: Propyläen, 1929), translated as All Quiet
on the Western Front by A. W. Wheen (London: Putnam’s, 1929; the first American
edition published by Little, Brown in Boston was expurgated); new translation
with the same title by Brian Murdoch (London: Cape, 1994). Der Weg zurück
(Berlin: Propyläen, 1931), translated as The Road Back by A. W. Wheen (London:
Putnam’s, 1931). Translations of Im Westen nichts Neues are from my published
translation; other translations are my own. In references to other war novels, an
English translation of the title is given, followed by the year of original publication
in German. In general, if an English translation has been published, the year of the
first German publication is given, then the English title, in italics, and then the year
of publication of the translation.
4
There is an increasingly large number of books on Remarque, of which the fol-
lowing is only a selection (listed alphabetically): Anton Antkowiak, Erich Maria
Remarque: Leben und Werke (Berlin: Volk & Wissen, 1965; West Berlin, Das
europäische Buch, 1983); Christine Barker and Rex Last, Erich Maria Remarque
(London: Wolff, 1979); Franz Baumer, E. M. Remarque (Berlin: Colloquium,
1970); Richard Arthur Firda, Erich Maria Remarque: A Thematic Analysis of
His Novels (Bern: Lang, 1988); C. R. Owen, Erich Maria Remarque: A Critical
Bio-bibliography (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1984); Thomas Schneider, Erich Maria
Remarque: Ein Chronist des 20. Jahrhunderts (Bramsche: Rasch, 1991); Harley
ERICH MARIA REMARQUE AND THE WEIMAR ANTI-WAR NOVELS 165
U. Taylor, Erich Maria Remarque: A Literary and Film Biography (Bern: Lang,
1989); Tilman Westphalen, ed., Erich Maria Remarque, 1898–1970 (Bramsche:
Rasch, 1988). In addition to the biography by von Sternburg noted above, see also
Hilton Tims, The Last Romantic: A Life of Erich Maria Remarque (London: Con-
stable and Robinson, 2003).
5
For recent comment on these links, see Hans Wagener, “Erich Maria Remarque,
Im Westen nichts Neues — Zeit zu leben und Zeit zu sterben: Ein Autor, zwei
Weltkriege,” Remarque-Jahrbuch 10 (2000): 31–52.
6
Thus Bostock, German War Novels, 9, commented that “the situations are not
worked out in detail, and the characters are mere types.” Possibly pardonable in
1931, views like this persisted for a long time.
7
I have discussed the question of the use of “wir” elsewhere: Brian Murdoch,
“Narrative Strategies in Remarque’s Im Westen nichts Neues,” New German Studies
17 (1992/3): 175–203. See also Sternburg, Biographie, 169–70, and Harald
Kloiber, “Struktur, Stil und Motivik in Remarques Im Westen nichts Neues,”
Remarque-Jahrbuch 4 (1994): 65–78, esp. 68.
8
Schwarz, War and the Mind of Germany I, 26–27, points out that Remarque is
positive in both novels about lieutenants, but most of those (few) mentioned have
risen through the ranks.
9
See Holger M. Klein, “Grundhaltung und Feindbilder bei Remarque, Céline and
Hemingway,” Krieg und Literatur 1 (1989): 7–22.
10
See my paper “Paul Bäumer’s Diary” in Brian Murdoch, Mark Ward, and Mag-
gie Sargeant, eds., Remarque Against War (Glasgow: Scottish Papers in Germanic
Studies, 1998), 1–23. There is a discussion there of Löns’s diary. On the question
of fictive directness, see Ulrich Broich, “‘Hier spricht zum ersten Mal der gemeine
Mann’: Die Fiktion vom Kriegserlebnis des einfachen Soldaten in Ludwig Renn,
Krieg,” in Schneider and Wagener, Vom Richthofen bis Remarque, 207–16, and
Manfred Hettling’s interestingly titled “Arrangierte Authentizität: Philipp Witkop,
Kriegsbriefe gefallener Studenten,” in the same volume, 51–70. Witkop’s collection
was first published in 1916 as Kriegsbriefe deutscher Studenten, then in 1928 with
the amended title; it was translated as German Students’ War Letters by A. F. Wedd
(London: Methuen, 1929).
11
Richard Arthur Firda, All Quiet on the Western Front (New York: Twayne, 1993),
51, sees the ending as the expression of a delusive “retarding moment” as in classi-
cal tragedy, a pessimistic answer to those who saw the war as a source of patriotic
rebirth. This does not take account of the recurrent idea of the spark of life, and
(although the book considers Remarque’s other works, in spite of its title), does not
draw the connection between Bäumer and Birkholz, falling into the not unusual
(but not particularly useful) mode of linking Birkholz and Remarque instead.
12
This takes us back to the title of the work in German. See Uwe Zagratzki,
“Remarque und seine britischen Kritiker,” Remarque-Jahrbuch 10 (2000): 9–30,
esp. 21–22. All Quiet on the Western Front — the title suggested by Herbert Read —
is equally ironic and ambiguous.
13
Walther Tormin “Die Entstehung und Entwicklung der Weimarer Republik,” in
Die Weimarer Republik, ed. Walther Tormin (Hanover: Literatur und Zeitgeschehen,
166 BRIAN MURDOCH
1962, new ed. 1968), 82–135, here, 106. The comment was made before a parlia-
mentary commission. Hindenburg gives an emotionally more highly charged ver-
sion in his memoirs, Aus meinem Leben (Stuttgart: Hirzel, 1920), 401–2, claiming
that the revolution “reißt [dem deutschen Offizier], wie ein Fremdländer sagt, den
verdienten Lorbeer vom Haupte und drückt ihm die Dornenkrone des Martyriums
auf die blutende Stirne” (rips — as a foreigner puts it — the well-deserved laurels
from the head of the German officer and presses upon his bleeding brow the mar-
tyr’s crown of thorns).
14
John Wheeler-Bennett, Knaves, Fools and Heroes in Europe between the Wars
(London: Macmillan, 1974), 19. Note the name of the six-volume 1921 series Im
Felde unbesiegt! noted by Schneider and Wagener in their introduction to the essay
collection Von Richthofen bis Remarque, 15 and note 16.
15
The idea of a “lost generation” was not restricted to Germany: see Robert Wohl,
The Generation of 1914 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980). On the betrayal
and rootlessness in Im Westen nichts Neues, see Richard Shumaker, “Remarque’s
Abyss of Time: Im Westen nichts Neues,” Focus on Robert Graves and His Contem-
poraries 1,11 (1990–91), 24–36.
16
See Alan Bance, “Im Westen nichts Neues: A Bestseller in Context,” Modern Lan-
guage Review 72 (1977): 359–73; and Richard Littlejohns, “‘Der Krieg hat uns für
alles verdorben’: The Real Theme of Im Westen nichts Neues,” Modern Languages
70 (1989): 89–94. On the internationalism of the work, see Brian Murdoch:
“We Germans . . . Remarques englischer Roman All Quiet on the Western Front,”
Remarque-Jahrbuch 6 (1996): 11–34.
17
Alexander Moritz Frey, Die Pflasterkästen (1929), reprinted in the Verboten und
verbrannt/Exil series (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1986), published in English as
The Crossbearers, no translator given (London: Putnam’s, 1931). Helen Zenna
Smith (i.e. Evadne Price), Not so Quiet . . . (London: Newnes, 1930, repr., Lon-
don: Virago, 1988); trans. into German by Hans Reisiger as Mrs Biest pfeift . . .
(Berlin: Fischer, 1930).
18
Werner Mahrholz, Deutsche Literatur der Gegenwart (Berlin: Sieben-Stäbe, 1930),
432–33. Mahrholz comments that in reading the Weimar war novels the German
readers must not forget that the defeat was simply a result of the allied blockade. He
notes too that similar ideas are found in all the many translated foreign war novels
that appeared in Germany at the time. Mahrholz (1889–1930) had been cultural and
political editor of the Vossische Zeitung from 1925 (hence his acquaintance with
Remarque) and his literary history was seen through the press by Max Wieser.
19
Brian Murdoch, “Vorwärts auf dem Weg zurück: Kriegsende und Nachkriegszeit
bei Erich Maria Remarque,” Text⫹Kritik 149 (2001): 19–29.
20
This was a criticism leveled at Remarque’s early novels by critics like Antkowiak;
see on this Hans-Harald Müller, “Politics and the War Novel,” in German Writers
and Politics 1918–39, ed. Richard Dove and Stephen Lamb (London: Macmillan,
1992), 103–20.
21
On the revolution, see John Fotheringham, “Looking Back at the Revolution,”
in Murdoch, Sargeant, and Ward, Remarque Against War, 98–118; and Anthony
Grenville, Cockpit of Ideologies (Bern: Lang, 1995), 80–97. On the theme of the
revolutions and their effect on the Weimar Republic, see Benjamin Ziemann, “Die
ERICH MARIA REMARQUE AND THE WEIMAR ANTI-WAR NOVELS 167
Karl S. Guthke
1.
Ret Marut (which he had used from 1907 to 1915 as an actor in various
provincial theaters, and since 1912 as the author of short prose fiction
printed mostly in newspapers and magazines)1 he had published, and writ-
ten virtually single-handedly, an anarchist-leftist journal in Munich, begin-
ning in September 1917. Acerbic in its criticism of the social and political
life of the waning years of the imperial regime, it was called Der Ziegelbren-
ner (The Brickmaker), obviously with a view to providing building mater-
ials for the construction of a postwar, post-dynastic Germany. The time for
this renewal arrived even before the capitulation: on 7 November 1918 the
Republic was proclaimed in Munich. Marut’s Ziegelbrenner declared its
solidarity, seeing nothing less than “die Welt-Revolution” beginning at
that very moment. Marut himself played a highly visible role, primarily as
censor-in-chief, in the Central Committee of each of the two successive
Bavarian Räterepubliken, republics relying for their authority on the coun-
cils of workers, soldiers, and farmers that were established at the outbreak
of the revolution. When the revolution failed, on 1 May 1919, Marut was
arrested in a Munich street and would, he had reason to believe, have been
condemned to death by the cigarette-smoking lieutenant who summarily
sentenced the prisoners in a court-martial improvised in the Royal Bavarian
Residence — if he had not managed to give his captors the slip at the last
moment. Wanted for high treason by the Bavarian authorities, Marut went
underground, sheltered by friends in various parts of Germany — until,
after escaping first to London, where he eked out a precarious existence
without papers from August 1923 to April 1924, he turned up in the
Tampico region of Tamaulipas in the summer of 1924, working at odd
jobs and beginning to write prose works in German under the name of
B. Traven, works that clearly continue the critical sociopolitical stance of
Ret Marut.
By the time the Weimar Republic drew to its close, the inauspicious
and highly provincial literary beginnings of Ret Marut had blossomed into
the world fame of B. Traven. To hear Die Büchergilde, the publisher’s in-
house journal, tell it in 1931, “vor fünf Jahren war Traven noch ein
unbekannter Mann, heute ist er eine Größe in der Weltliteratur” (five years
ago, Traven was a nobody, today he is a major player in world literature),
with translations into eleven languages published or in preparation.2 And
just as Marut was more than a bystander in the unsettled political climate
out of which the Weimar Republic grew, so Traven’s work produced dur-
ing the mid- and late twenties and early thirties — seven novels, a volume
of stories and a kind of travelogue raisonné, all except Das Totenschiff about
the wilds of Mexico — was intimately and critically connected with the
sociopolitical life of the increasingly turbulent Weimar Republic, notably
with its left-of-center ideological factions. Less concerned with language in
the sense of le mot juste and stylistic artistry than with a stirring story line
implying a social message, these books were a rousing appeal to a sense of
IN “A FAR-OFF LAND”: B. TRAVEN 171
[It would make for another interesting story to inform your readers of the
hardships one must endure to write a manuscript in the jungle, particu-
larly when the writer does not enjoy the expensive amenities which rich
American universities or rich German patrons would supply. Lest I be
held for a liar, I cannot tell even you just how much one can skimp when
putting a tropical outfit together if one has no means, but more than
enough of an adventurous spirit.]5
[I wrote the novel in an Indian hut in the jungle, where I had neither
table nor chair, and I had to make my own bed out of string tied together
in the form of a hammock the likes of which has never before been seen.
The nearest store where I could buy paper, ink, or pencils, was thirty-five
miles away. At the time I had nothing much else to do, and had some
paper. It wasn’t much, and I had to write on both sides with a pencil, and
when the paper was used up, the novel had to come to a close as well,
although it really was just getting started. As I never could have submit-
ted the manuscript to anyone in its illegible state, and as no one would
have read it had I done so, I gave it to an Indian, who rode to the station
and sent it to America to be typed.]7
The milieu that generated Traven’s fiction is powerfully evoked in the open-
ing paragraph of “Der Nachtbesuch im Busch” (The Night Visitor):
[Impenetrable jungle covers the broad plains along the Panuco and
Tamesi rivers. Just two railway lines cross this ninety-thousand-square-
kilometer stretch of the Tierra Caliente. The settlements which do exist
have nestled themselves timidly near the few train stations. Europeans live
here only very sparsely and virtually lost to each other. The tiring mono-
tony of the jungle is interrupted by a few long ranges of hills covered with
tropical bush as impassable as the jungle, and in its depths, which are
always enveloped in twilight, all the mysteries and horrors of the world
seem to lie in wait. At a few favorable spots where there is water one finds
small Indian villages scattered among the hills, settlements which were
there before the first white man ever arrived. They lie far from the railway.
Mule carts bring what goods they need, mainly salt, tobacco, cheap cot-
ton shirts, work pants, muslin dresses, pointed straw hats for the men and
black cotton scarves for the women. In trade they offer chickens, eggs,
young donkeys, goats, parrots, and wild turkeys.]8
2.
Das Totenschiff, arguably his most famous book, was in fact the exception
to the rule. Purporting to be the yarn of an American sailor, and no doubt
in large parts autobiographical, Traven’s first novel is not set in Mexico,
IN “A FAR-OFF LAND”: B. TRAVEN 175
unlike the rest of his fiction (with the exception of his final novel, Aslan
Norval, of 1960, which is generally considered to be a failure). Chock-full
of crassly “realistic” accounts of the colorful if backbreaking daily lives and
labors of the lowest of the low in the social world of the merchant marine,
Das Totenschiff is also a philosophical reflection on the tyranny of the sup-
posedly enlightened and humane capitalist state bureaucracy. It is a tyranny
over those of its subjects who have, for one reason or another, not only
been reduced to powerlessness but also deprived of their identity as a result
of the loss of their identity papers. Such is the fate of the crew of the
Yorikke — a crying shame in social terms, but also the cue for a searching
examination of the existential mode of the nonperson in the modern
world: must the outsider succumb to sheer nonexistence, or can he learn,
contre coeur, to love his condition, to master his life by creating a proud
new identity out of this very namelessness, thus finding a fresh life and a
new sense of self-worth and even of community with other “nobodies” in
the Yorikke’s no-man’s-land of the living dead? Clearly, this theme points
back to the social and political conditions of Europe that the author was
leaving behind him as he wrote Das Totenschiff. (An English version was
begun in Brixton prison, London, where Marut was held 1923–24 for fail-
ing to register as a foreigner.)
Nonetheless, the anarchist temper of the first novel foreshadows the
“Mexican” ones to follow, with the significant difference that Mexico rein-
forced the transformation, already incipient in Das Totenschiff, of the “indi-
vidual anarchist” Ret Marut into the “anarcho-syndicalist” Traven, who
was more concerned with authentic forms of community life (Indian style)
than with the needs and desires of the subjectivist “self” (which had been a
keyword for Marut in his Munich days when he had published a home-
made journal entitled Der Selbe).9 Das Totenschiff, then, being no longer
“German” and not yet “Mexican,” is the product of a transitional phase.
The first of the Mexican novels, Der Wobbly (1926), was written too soon
after Marut’s arrival (and suggests too much of a transcription of diaries
kept in the early months of the author’s life in the New World) to allow his
characteristic new theme — the communality of the indios’ lifestyle versus
European and American moneygrubbing and selfishness — to come into
its own. Instead, one colorful episode loosely follows the other in the life
of a happy-go-lucky gringo living a hand-to-mouth life as an itinerant oil
driller, unskilled baker, cattle driver, and cotton picker in the “bush”
beyond Tampico, enjoying a country where nobody cares or asks about
one’s papers or real name. The native population comes into sight only
marginally. This changes with Die Brücke im Dschungel (The Bridge in the
Jungle, 1929; serialized, in a shorter version, in Vorwärts in 1927) and the
two novels to follow: Der Schatz der Sierra Madre (The Treasure of the
Sierra Madre, 1927) and Die weiße Rose (The White Rose, 1929). In all
three, the Indian idyll, austere as it is in its own way, is threatened by the
176 KARL S. GUTHKE
presence of Americans who are out to exploit its resources and “civilize”
the native population. The American boots worn by a normally barefoot
muchacho, causing his death as he slips off the unsafe bridge built by an
American oil company, disrupting the tranquil life of the preindustrial
community . . . the yen of the “civilized” for money working havoc with
the lives of gold diggers from north of the border, though one of them
overcomes the curse of lucre by seeing the wisdom of living, for the rest of
his life, in the sustaining harmony of a primordial Indian community . . .
the destruction of such family based agricultural community life, anchored
deep in history though it is, through American greed for the oil beneath
the nourishing land — wherever Traven looks, he perceives the clash of
cultures, the tragic threat to the native population. Yet, for all his misgiv-
ings about the future of the idealized Indian life, he is not without hope
(buoyed by his understanding of the social reform policies of the Mexican
federal government at the time) for the survival of the Indians’ archaic
existence under the onslaught of industrial ruthlessness driven by con-
sumerist demands. Their form of communal living Traven tends to see as a
panacea for all the shortcomings of modern industrial civilization. He edi-
torializes in Die Brücke im Dschungel:
Der Fluch der Zivilisation und die Ursache, warum die nicht-weißen
Völker sich endlich zu rühren beginnen, beruhen darin, daß man die
Weltanschauung europäischer und amerikanischer Gerichtsaktuare,
Polizeiwachtmeister und Weißwarenhändler der ganzen übrigen Erde als
Evangelium aufzwingt, an das alle Menschen zu glauben haben oder aus-
gerottet werden.
[The curse of civilization and the reason nonwhite peoples are finally
beginning to rouse themselves, is that people are forcing upon the whole
rest of the world the views of European and American court stenogra-
phers, police sergeants, and drapers as if it were the word of God, which
all men must believe or else be wiped out.]10
Traven’s first book to appear in the 1930s, Der Karren (1931), initi-
ated a coherent series of six novels culminating, in 1940, in Ein General
kommt aus dem Dschungel (General from the Jungle) and including, mid-
way, the grimmest and (thanks to the film based on Traven’s own script)
best-known of the sequence: Die Rebellion der Gehenkten (The Rebellion of
the Hanged, 1936). In these volumes, Traven’s confidence that a change
for the better lies just ahead for the Indian population seems to be some-
what shaken. For these crassly realistic novels, intended to document
present conditions (though the scene is set in the years immediately preced-
ing the national revolution of 1910), focus on the plight of the indios in the
backward state of Chiapas, who are brutally worked to death in the mon-
terías, the mahogany-logging camps, or at least in one of them. An appeal
IN “A FAR-OFF LAND”: B. TRAVEN 177
3.
Among the numerous books published in quick succession from 1926 to
1940, one does not fit the description of Traven’s literary output offered so
far. This volume, Der Busch (1928; enlarged from 12 to 20 stories, 1930) is
not a novel but a collection of stories about Mexico, frequently reissued in
several languages.13 Most of them are familiar to English-speaking readers
from The Kidnapped Saint and Other Stories, The Night Visitor and Other
Stories, and Stories by the Man Nobody Knows.14 Unlike the novels preceding
or following, the short fiction of Der Busch for the most part avoids the
sometimes ham-fisted sociopolitical editorializing from Traven’s leftist ideo-
logical stance. Instead, it is by and large a record of the European refugee’s
encounter with the indigenous population, its mores and culture and history,
told in an unpretentious, at times rough-and-tumble style, often without
subtlety of diction, but full of down-to-earth idiomatic German, sprinkled
with the usual anglicisms, not to mention Traven’s familiar irony, sarcastic
humor, and outrageously grotesque turns of phrase, which sometimes rub
shoulders with bits of Wilhelmine high-school erudition (120, 134, 165).
Of course, the novels following Das Totenschiff were set in Mexico as
well. But to the extent that they significantly focused on the native popula-
tion, they fitted the image of the indios into the ideological framework of a
somewhat schematic conflict of exploitative Yankee business mentality on
the one hand and the native values of deep-rooted communality and respect
for individual worth on the other. The six montería novels, too, are clearly
driven by Traven’s sociopolitical agenda. It is only in Der Busch, with its more
occasional pieces, that the author focuses more on the mind and the reali-
ties of the “far-off land” that he — like the protagonist of Marut’s “German
Fairy Tale” Khundar — had absconded to. At the same time he is to all appear-
ances still, as he was in Der Wobbly, somewhat personal in an autobiographical
way (introducing even a mule named Bala after the mule of his own Chiapas
178 KARL S. GUTHKE
diaries [152] and a narrator earning his keep by giving English lessons
[157], as Traven did in his early years in Mexico).15 And throughout, the
author-narrator is more relaxed in that he wields less fiercely the ideological
axe that he felt he had to grind in earlier (and later) works. What takes over
now is Traven’s sharp-eyed narrative exuberance. In a series of telling
vignettes of the life of the natives, he focuses on his encounter with the (as
he often puts it) “pure-blooded” Indian other, “in the bush in Mexico”
where, according to the “American Song” that serves as the overture of the
volume, he finds himself trapped, for better or for worse.
Der Busch, then, is an account of total immersion in the “fremde Land”
(183). And yet the narrator (who is often a first-person narrator whom, for
all our narratological sophistication that has become de rigueur, we may to
some extent identify with Marut-Torsvan-Traven himself) does not “go
native.” Far from it: he is critically alert to the strange and sometimes child-
ish ways and values of his new neighbors, but he is no less, and no less criti-
cally, aware of his own European or (as he claims) American cultural heritage
and perspective. For there are references, throughout these Mexican stories,
not only to Mexican pre- and post-Revolutionary history and politics (to
Presidents Porfirio Díaz, and Plutarco Elías Calles, for example) but also to
American, European, and specifically German conditions, customs, and facts
of socio-political life.16 The fact that these short narrative pieces are told
from a European perspective is never lost sight of, but neither is awareness
that this perspective can be reversed to show European-American-German
ways as they are perceived with the eyes of the inhabitants of a far-away
country with a very different culture. As a result of this dual perspective,
both cultures are critically brought into clear focus, mutually questioning
each other with their distinct cultural assumptions. It is this dual perspective,
too, that lends Der Busch not only its internal coherence and unity (which
give it a place of honor alongside the “novels,” which, for their part, tended
to dissolve the overall narrative sweep into incoherence) but also its intense
appeal to readers outside Mexico, and in Germany in particular. For it was
here, during the Weimar Republic — years of sociopolitical experimentation
and an attempted revolution of values and mores — that Traven’s, the ex-
German’s, challenge to conventional ways, derived from his refreshing expe-
riences in an alien “Wunderland” (198), could fall on eager ears. What
exactly, then, was the critical image of the nonwhite “other” with which the
celebrity author from nowhere confronted his German audiences?
4.
The world the narrator finds himself in is distinctly that of the indios, in their
jungle habitat, with only the very occasional mestizo, “Spaniard,” or Ameri-
can farmer or businessman thrown in. These stand out like a sore thumb,
IN “A FAR-OFF LAND”: B. TRAVEN 179
[It is foolish to try to get to the bottom of the true motivations of the
action of a member of a race that is not ours. Maybe we discover the
180 KARL S. GUTHKE
owes its existence to the discontent of Europeans with their own mores.
True, the Indian tribe that elevates the Spanish horse to the rank of a god
is touchingly “gastfreundlich” (hospitable) and full of “Güte und
Friedensliebe” (24; kindness and love of peace); another tribe thinks
nothing of treating the gringo holed up in his cottage in the wilderness as
one of their own, inviting him to their ritual dance. True, also, as early
travelogues often pointed out, prudishness is unknown to the natives,
and, like animals, they have an uncanny sense of hearing beyond the reach
of the white man (“Indianertanz im Dschungel”), to say nothing of their
fabulous health and longevity, which offers the narrator a welcome oppor-
tunity for time-honored satire on the medical profession (162). Further-
more, there is something appealingly authentic about the unrestrained
emotionality of the Indians, exemplified by the uncontrolled shrieks of
horror in the face of personal tragedy, like the loss of a child or another
loved one:
Der Schrei Teofilias kam nicht von dieser Welt, in denen die Gefühle und
Empfindungen der kaukasischen Rasse wurzeln. Man falle nicht in den
Irrtum, anzunehmen, daß diese Gefühlserregung Teofilias Komödie oder
Verstellung war, um vielleicht das Mitleid ihrer Herrin wachzurufen.
Dieses Stadium der Zivilisation, wo man mit vorgetäuschten Gefühlen
Geschäfte macht, Geldgeschäfte oder Gefühlsgeschäfte, haben die Indi-
aner noch nicht erklommen. Ihre Äußerungen des Schmerzes oder der
Freude sind noch echt, wenn sie uns auch manchmal gekünstelt oder
übertrieben erscheinen, weil sie in andern Instinkten wurzeln. (80)
[Teofilia’s scream did not come from this world, in which the feelings and
sensations of the Caucasian race are rooted. One should not make the
mistake of presuming that Teofilia’s emotional outbreak was a farce or
pretense, designed, perhaps, to arouse sympathy for her. The Indians have
not yet reached that stage of civilization where one simulates feelings to
conduct business, financial or emotional. Their cries of pain or of joy are
still genuine, even if they sometimes strike us as artificial or exaggerated,
because they are rooted in different instincts.]
the American mining company into granting higher wages, while the
matter of the teeth is not brought up again. Naiveté or cunning manipula-
tion of the gringos?
Cunning is everywhere in the Mexican bush and its villages, and all too
often it is hard to draw the line between criminal fraud and mere devious-
ness when it comes to outwitting the white man, even one so well-disposed
to the Indians as Gale. In “Ein Hundegeschäft” (Selling a Dog), the
Indian Ascension, a clever practitioner of double-talk, contrives to buy a
puppy from the American newcomer with the American’s own money.
This transaction, commercially complicated and logically sophisticated as it
is, does, on the part of Ascension, have a sort of innocent joy of virtual
trading about it. We find a similar tone in one of the longer stories, “Der
aufgefangene Blitz” (When the Priest is Not at Home), which foregrounds
Cipriano, a “Vollblut-Indianer” of long-time service as factotum to the
mestizo village priest. Given this constellation, it is not hard to guess who
gets the better of whom by hoodwinking him. Cipriano’s negligence leads
to the partial burning of the church’s statue of the Virgin Mary, but he
keeps his mouth shut when the vox populi proclaims that the mishap was a
matter of the mother of God sacrificing herself in order to deflect a bolt of
lightning from the rest of the church. The priest and the clerical adminis-
tration profit handsomely from the much-touted “miracle” that so clearly
favored them. Needless to say, it is the Indian, Cipriano, the man of indigen-
ous common sense, who emerges as the real hero, fooling the European
and mestizo authorities by not confessing his sacrilegious, if accidental,
mutilation of “das Allerheiligste,” which represents “Sinn und Inhalt der
ganzen Religion” (34; the most holy object, the meaning and content of
the entire religion).
Die Kirche wurde eine fette Pfründe. Und eine fette Pfründe ist sie heute
noch.
[The church became a cash cow. And a cash cow it is to this day.
Bombe” (The Story of a Bomb) takes the prize in this category. When the
Indian Guido Salvatorres discovers his wife has run away and shacked up
with another man, he, with routine competence, throws a homemade
bomb into his rival’s hut while a party is in progress; none of the survivors,
not even his unfaithful wife, will give evidence against him in court; acquit-
ted, he finds himself another wife the next day, only to be blown to bits by
a tin-can bomb of similar design in his hut the same evening.
It is a macho world. If a woman — a mestiza, significantly, not an
Indian — thinks otherwise, she will be taught a lesson. “Die Bändigung”
(Submission) is The Taming of the Shrew, Mexican-style. A parrot, a cat, a
favorite horse are shot point-blank for what is perceived as disobedience —
the bride gets the point and mends her ways in a matter of minutes. Would
Don Juvencio really have shot Doña Luisa too, if she had not brought him
his coffee as ordered? Of course he would have, he says; for after all, the
worst that could have happened to him would have been the death penalty,
whereas a good horse is very hard to find (145). Strangely, this matter-of-
fact statement, with its bizarre variation on ordinary logic, is interpreted to
be “das innigste Liebesgeständnis, das ein Mann einer Frau nur machen
kann” (the most tender confession of love a man can make to a woman,
145). The “fremde Welt” has a psychology all of its own.
Human relationships, it must be said, are among the most alienating
features of the new life that the narrator finds himself thrown into. As “Die
Geschichte einer Bombe,” where wives are changed more quickly and
more casually than shirts, or “Familienehre,” where the human loss is so
gloriously outweighed by the sartorial gain, or one or the other of the rest
of the stories touched upon might already have suggested: for all their pas-
sionate nature, human relationships are only skin-deep or seem to be.
Wives are chosen according to the value of the gifts to her family that the
prospective bridegroom can afford, and if one daughter is too expensive, it
is: “Ich kann auch die da nehmen” (I might just as well take that one
there), namely the older and less pretty and therefore bargain-priced sister
(52). Here is the concluding observation on the Indian in “Die Medizin”
who threatened to chop the gringo’s head off if he didn’t reveal the where-
abouts of the Indian’s wife who had eloped with another man: the gringo
sends him to a village some 600 miles away, confident that he will find a
“new woman” en route:
Er ist ein starker und gesunder Bursche. Er wird keine fünfzig Meilen gehen
und dann irgendeine Arbeit finden. Oder er stiehlt einem Farmer eine Kuh.
Inzwischen hat er Tortillas gegessen und Frijoles. Und wenn er Arbeit hat,
hängt ihm am nächsten Tage eine neue Mujer ihren Sack mit dem Son-
ntagskleide, den Strümpfen und den Schuhen in seine Hütte. (156)
[He is a strong and healthy fellow. He won’t go fifty miles before he finds
some kind of work. Or he’ll steal a farmer’s cow. Meanwhile he will have
IN “A FAR-OFF LAND”: B. TRAVEN 185
eaten Tortillas and Frijoles. And when he has found work, the next day a
new “wife” will hang her bag, packed with her Sunday dress, stockings,
and shoes, in his hut.]
To be sure, there is also sympathy with the indios, but while that does
not make the motivation for their not always admirable behavior any more
intelligible to the western observer, it does make it more plausible by
throwing into relief the hardships these people are laboring under. They
are oppressed and exploited by both the government and the Church.
The agencies of the state are corrupt and incompetent, and it is the
destitute Indians who bear the brunt of the pervasive malaise (though
there appears to be confidence that the new president, Calles [1924–28],
will make a difference [108]). The broadest pageant of corruption on all
levels of government and society, including the army, is painted in “Diplo-
maten” (The Diplomat), a story about a valuable pocket watch stolen at a
presidential ball in Chapultepec Castle and retrieved by means of thorough
familiarity with the forms and ubiquity of corruption. The overwhelming
majority of the population, the hungry and illiterate indios, this story
reveals, are exploited by the miniscule ruling class, which in turn is aided
and abetted by American industrial and business interests — the classic
proletarian-capitalist dichotomy with its inherent social injustice. These
conditions, to be sure, are presented as those prevailing under Porfirio
Díaz, the dictator overthrown by the 1910 revolution after decades of dic-
tatorship. But there is a reminder elsewhere that the unsuspecting indigen-
ous tribes had been “ausgebeutet” (exploited) even in the days of Córtez
(25), and there are precious few indications that life has since changed sig-
nificantly for the Indian “proletariat” as Traven calls it, his Marut vocabu-
lary still intact (46, 99). (The very first story sets the scene, with somewhat
heavy-handed symbolism, when an Indian youngster dies as a result of the
imperious ministrations of a would-be medical man who is introduced sim-
ply as “ein Spanier” [13].) Indeed, the real revolution of the indigenous
population is still to come; but “heute” (today) in the 1920s, the exploi-
tative class structure can already to seen to “wanken” under the “Ansturm”
(reel under the attack) of the Indian masses (99). This attack is nothing less
than a “heldenhafter Kampf um ihre geistige und wirtschaftliche
Befreiung” (46; heroic fight for their intellectual and economic liberation) —
and that, in turn, is part of a worldwide awakening of colonized popula-
tions ready to throw off the yoke of “Zivilisation” forced on them by white
exploiters. As the ghost of the Pakunese prince puts it in “Der Nachtbe-
such im Busch”: “Aber können Sie nicht hören, Senjor, wie alle nichtweißen
Völker der Erde ihre Glieder regen und strecken, daß man das Knacken der
Gelenke über die ganze Welt vernehmen kann?” (201; But, Señor, can’t
you hear all nonwhite peoples of the earth move and stretch their limbs so
that one can hear the cracking of the joints all over the world?). This, then,
186 KARL S. GUTHKE
is the overall sociopolitical and historical situation the indios are trapped in,
exploited by foreign business interests and oppressed by the domestic rul-
ing class propped up by corrupt and incompetent government agencies
such as the police and the military (see, for example, 183). Is it a wonder
that the proletarians, too, in their small-time manner, try to exploit the
exploitable — the gringo, for example, to whom they sell a mule they don’t
own, whom they threaten with a machete for failing to do the impossible,
whom they are likely to shoot even if he heals a wounded bandit, and
so on?
On the other hand, the natives, while no unadulterated “noble sav-
ages,” do have their own set of values with which to challenge the mores of
the powerful, be they foreign or domestic. But, of course, they are pre-
cisely the ones that are threatened by the power of the local or central gov-
ernment. These values are those of self-effacing family and community life,
with its awareness of the worth of individual selves, their feelings, aspira-
tions, and ways of living, even the things of their daily experience. Their
chance of surviving in a country increasingly taken over by American-style
business and industrialization is slim. Still, in “Der Großindustrielle,” one
of the most widely read of the stories under its English title, “Assembly
Line,” it is the indigenous values that triumph over the business mentality
imported from El Norte. The bast baskets that the indio weaves in his vil-
lage in the state of Oaxaca are “kleine Kunstwerke” (146; little works of
art), “Volkskunst” (147; folk art). Recognizing this, an American entre-
preneur offers to buy thousands of them — only to be told, after due con-
sideration, that the more baskets he would buy, the more each would cost.
This flies in the face of the basic commercial assumptions of mass produc-
tion, but the Indian has his reasons. Such a vastly increased manufacturing
scale would wreck his family and social life because his immediate and
extended family would have to be drawn into the business full-time, which
in turn would mean that their cornfields and their cattle would not be
attended to. But the more significant reason is cultural in yet a different
way: mass production of untold identical items would replace the beauty of
objects that are truly one of a kind. “Aber sehen Sie, Senjor, tausend Körb-
chen kann ich nicht so schön machen wie zwanzig. Die hätten alle ausge-
sehen eines wie das andere. Das hätte mir nicht gefallen” (151; But, you
see, Señor, a thousand little baskets will not turn out as beautiful as twenty.
They would all look the same. I wouldn’t have liked that). Not compre-
hending such lack of greed, the businessman returns to New York; Indian
self-sufficiency and wisdom win the day, but will they win the days to
come?18
Another oppressive and exploitative power has only been touched
upon so far, in “Der aufgefangene Blitz” — institutionalized religion. In
this case, too, the indios emerge as superior in more respects than one.
The pattern of domination is only a matter of surface conformity, at best.
IN “A FAR-OFF LAND”: B. TRAVEN 187
The Catholic Church, its functionaries, its teachings, its rituals, and its
hierarchy are accepted by the native population; yet in their hearts they
know better, and remain “Indian.” No amount of repressive indoctrina-
tion, brutal as it can be (and what missionizing is not), will change the
overt or instinctive allegiance to the old gods or prevent the appropriation
of Catholicism by the Indians for their own purposes in a sort of counter-
colonization. If a saint who is called upon — and paid — to help find a
lost watch doesn’t perform, he will be punished by being dunked and
then dumped in a stinking snake-infested well — just like the underper-
forming peons on any Spanish-run hacienda (“Der ausgewanderte Anto-
nio” [The Kidnapped Saint]). Conversely, if a burglar does not pay the
appropriate saint his promised share of the loot, who can expect the bur-
glar not to be caught by the police (“Spießgesellen” [Accomplices])?
Believers in Catholic supernaturalism are put in their place by native real-
ism and common sense, as “Der aufgefangene Blitz” shows amusingly:
faced with natural facts, such as a bolt of lightning, the narrator com-
ments, an Indian Catholic will always revert to his “pagan” way of think-
ing, “trotz aller christlichen Erziehung” (36, cp. 38; in spite of all
Christian education). In other words, miracles, divine interventions, don’t
happen in Mexico (38–40). Church officials who don’t understand such
down-to-earth native wisdom end up with a lot of egg on their faces, tar-
gets of Traven’s irony. The priest in the tale about the bolt of lightning
deflected by the Virgin Mary is proud to have been honored by this
“milagro” (miracle) that will bring in so much money from believers in
miracles; the priest in the story about the failure of Saint Antonio to find
a lost watch will make the most of the miraculous “emigration” of the
saint from his church to the bottom of the abandoned well — this clearly
supernatural event will cure his parishioners of their “verdammenswerten
Unglauben” (77; damnable unbelief). Such deft touches remind the
reader: in this Indian world, European religion is but a veneer, which
cracks easily. What opens up between the cracks is that history (“pre-
history” in Western terms) which nurtures the culture of the indios, no
matter how deprived of dignity they may seem at the present time. A bit
like Napoleon lecturing his soldiers in front of the towering Egyptian
pyramids that thousands of years of history are looking down on them,
the narrator of “Nachtbesuch im Busch” reminds us of the six thousand
years of “hohe Kultur” (advanced culture) that look down on us in
Mexico from its pyramids:
Ich war nicht wenig erstaunt, als ich vernahm, daß diese Leute die Ver-
gangenheit ihres Volkes gut kannten. . . . Viele jener Indianer beteten
noch ihre alten Götter an, während alle übrigen die Hunderte von Heili-
gen, die ihnen ganz unbegreiflich erscheinende unbefleckte Empfängnis
sowie die ihnen ebenso unverständliche Dreieinigkeit derart mit ihrer
188 KARL S. GUTHKE
alten Religion verwirrt hatten, daß sie in ihren Herzen und ihren Vorstel-
lungen die alten Götter hatten, während sie auf den Lippen die Namen
der unzähligen Heiligen trugen. (199)
[I was not a little astonished to hear that these folks knew the past of their
people well. . . . Many of those Indians still prayed to the ancient gods,
while all others had confounded the hundreds of saints, the (to them
totally incomprehensible) immaculate conception and the equally incom-
prehensible trinity with their ancient religion so that in their hearts and
minds they had the ancient gods, while the names of countless saints were
on their lips.]
For they provide an alternative both to the Catholic Church, sterile in its
self-serving ritual, and to the ruthlessly profit-minded capitalist-industrial
complex. This is the message (in “Nachtbesuch im Busch”) of the ghost of
the pre-conquista Panukese prince buried in a mound near Gale’s hut in
the jungle of Tamaulipas. His peace has been disturbed by the gringo who
robbed the mummy of the precious gifts it had been interred with:
Im Angesicht der Ewigkeit zählt nur die Liebe, die wir gaben, die Liebe,
die wir empfingen, und vergolten wird uns nur in dem Maße, als wir
liebten. Darum, Freund, geben Sie mir zurück, was Sie mir nahmen, so
daß, wenn am Ende meiner langen Wanderung vor dem Tore stehend ich
gefragt werde: “Wo sind deine Beglaubigungen?,” ich sagen kann:
“Siehe, o mein Schöpfer, hier in meinen Händen halte ich meine
Beglaubigungen. Klein sind die Gaben nur und unscheinbar, aber daß ich
sie tragen durfte auf meiner Wanderung ist das Zeichen, daß auch ich
einst geliebt wurde, und also bin ich nicht ganz ohne Wert.”
[When we face eternity, only love will count, the love we gave, the love
we received, and we will be rewarded only to the extent that we loved.
Therefore, my friend, return to me what you took away so that when at
the end of my pilgrimage I am asked at the gate: “Where are your cre-
dentials?” I can say: “Look, o my Creator, I am holding my credentials in
my hands. The gifts are small and inconspicuous, but the fact that I was
allowed to have them with me on my pilgrimage is an indication that I
too was loved once, and so I am not entirely worthless.”
readers he had from the first — in fact, an ever swelling stream of them.
Not only were the stories of Der Busch among the most widely read of all
of Traven’s works, and in several languages at that, they still are (as a glance
at Treverton’s bibliography will quickly confirm).19 Looking back on
Traven’s entire oeuvre, which is increasingly gaining recognition as a signal
contribution to the “serious” literature of the world, one may well wonder
whether Traven did not make his most significant and most lasting impact
with his short fiction, rather than the full-length novels.
Notes
A version of this chapter focused on the epistemology of the “encounter” with the
“other” is included in my book Die Erfindung der Welt: Globalität und Grenzen in
der Kulturgeschichte der Literatur (Tübingen: Francke, 2005).
1
Some were collected in Der blaugetupfte Sperling (The Blue-Spotted Sparrow,
1919); the epistolary novella An das Fräulein von S. . . (To Miss von S. . .) came
out in 1916 under the pseudonym Richard Maurhut.
2
Quoted from Karl S. Guthke, B. Traven: Biographie eines Rätsels (Frankfurt am
Main: Büchergilde Gutenberg, 1987), 435. Translations are my own, unless indi-
cated otherwise.
3
Ibid.
4
I take this phrase from the concluding sentence of Marut’s tale “Khundar” in
Ziegelbrenner, vol. 4, issues 26–34, page 72 (repr., Berlin: Guhl, 1976). For con-
text, see Guthke, B. Traven, 255.
5
Guthke, B. Traven, 347; translation taken from B. Traven: The Life behind the Leg-
ends, trans. Robert C. Sprung (Brooklyn, NY: Lawrence Hill Books, 1991), 220.
6
Ibid.
7
Ibid., 347 and 221, respectively.
8
Der Busch (Berlin: Büchergilde Gutenberg, 1930), 195; Guthke, B. Traven: The
Life behind the Legends, 219–20.
9
On this transformation, see Heidi Zogbaum, B. Traven: A Vision of Mexico
(Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 1992), xxi.
10
Die Brücke im Dschungel (Berlin: Büchergilde Gutenberg, 1929), 170; transla-
tion taken from Guthke, B. Traven: The Life behind the Legends, 216.
11
For a reading of the series as a statement of Traven’s disappointment with the
Revolution and its aftermath, see Zogbaum, A Vision of Mexico, 200–202, 208,
209–11.
12
Zogbaum sees this return of some of the revolutionaries to communal life as a
sign of complacency and acquiescence to “the system that they have vowed to
destroy” (A Vision of Mexico, 202).
13
Edward N. Treverton, B. Traven: A Bibliography (Lanham, MD, and London:
Scarecrow, 1999), 103–12. My references are to the enlarged edition of Der Busch
IN “A FAR-OFF LAND”: B. TRAVEN 191
(Berlin: Büchergilde Gutenberg, 1930). Some of the stories of Der Busch had been
published previously in periodicals. See the textual apparatus in volume 2 of Tra-
ven, Erzählungen, ed. Werner Sellhorn (Zürich: Limmat, 1968). Jörg Thunecke
elaborates on Michael Baumann’s discovery that five of the Busch stories (“Die
Dynamit-Patrone,” “Der Wachtposten,” “Die Wohlfahrtseinrichtung,” “Die
Geschichte einer Bombe,” and “Familienehre”) had been told in Owen White’s “A
Glance at the Mexicans,” The American Mercury, 4:14 (February, 1924): 180–87
(Jörg Thunecke, ed., B. Traven the Writer/Der Schriftsteller B. Traven [Notting-
ham: Edition Refugium, 2003], 37–45). A detailed comparison of the texts is still
outstanding. Thunecke reports few actual contacts. Until an exhaustive compara-
tive study is available, it is, in principle, not impossible that Traven might have
heard these anecdotes independently. Further study should reveal what Traven
made of what he read (if he read these texts). In the meantime, one might con-
clude that Traven chose these “anecdotes” because they conveyed reactions to
Mexico that he shared in some measure — subject to his own rearticulation of
them, or even thematic reorientation, as in “Die Wohlfahrtseinrichtung” referred
to below. In any case, this has nothing to do with the so-called “Erlebnisträger-
Hypothese” in that it presupposed manuscripts (of novels, at that); see Dictionary
of Literary Biography, vol. 9, part 3, p. 103 (Detroit: Gale Research Comp., 1981).
14
Traven, The Kidnapped Saint and Other Stories (New York: Hill, 1975), The
Night Visitor and Other Stories (New York: Hill and Wang, 1966), and Stories by the
Man Nobody Knows (Evanston, Illinois: Regency, 1961). The English titles of indi-
vidual stories cited in what follows are those used in these volumes. However, some
Busch stories are not included in them; so their English titles are my own improvi-
sations.
15
Zogbaum, A Vision of Mexico, 21. To be sure, Traven taught an American
farmer’s daughter, whereas the narrator in “Der Banditendoktor” teaches bandits
eager to rob American residents in their own language. Other possibly autobio-
graphical asides remain tantalizing, as, for example, the confession of the first-
person narrator that from early on he had to be “reisefertig” (ready to travel) at all
times (163). (Was his mother a traveling actress, as has been surmised?) —
Zogbaum’s book (note 9) contains a chapter on Traven’s “Discovery of the Mexi-
can Indian,” which does not, however, touch upon the points made here.
16
For references to Europe, see 22, 75, 91, 117, 127, 137; to the United States,
23, 68, 100, 163, 165, 197; and to Germany, 137, 147, 214.
17
See Karl S. Guthke, “Rassentheorien von links: Der Fall B. Traven,” in K.S.G.,
Die Entdeckung des Ich (Tübingen: Francke, 1993), 235–42.
18
Scott Cook, “B. Traven and the Paradox of Artisanal Production in Capitalism:
Traven’s Oaxaca Tale in Economic Anthropological Perspective,” Mexican Stud-
ies/Estudios Mexicanos, vol. 11, issue 1, 75–111.
19
Treverton, B. Traven, 103–12.
9: Weimar’s Forgotten Cassandra:
The Writings of Gabriele Tergit in
the Weimar Republic
Fiona Sutton
Success had come quite late to Tergit, or rather had been postponed as
a result of her own feelings of inadequacy. Her first article, “Frauendienst-
jahr und Berufsbildung” (Women’s Year of Service and Vocational Train-
ing, 1915), had appeared in a supplement of the Berliner Tageblatt as early
as 1915, when she was twenty-one, under her real name of Elise
Hirschmann. By her own account, she was overcome with a sense of her
own ignorance on the eve of publication and resolved to further her edu-
cation by completing her high-school leaving certificate. She went on to
university studies in history, philosophy, and sociology, which she com-
pleted in 1925 with a doctoral dissertation on Karl Vogt, scientist and lib-
eral member of the short-lived (1848–49) Frankfurt Parliament. During
this period, she wrote some feuilletons for the Berliner Tageblatt and
began submitting articles on trials from Moabit to the Berliner Börsen
Courier in 1923. She adopted the pseudonym Gabriele Tergit to spare the
sensibilities of her bourgeois Jewish family, who were reserved about her
chosen career. The first name was an old favorite of hers and the surname
was an inversion of the syllables in “Gitter” (here: trellis), a word she chose
while seated near a garden trellis. Tergit also published as Thomasius, a
reference to Christian Thomasius (1655–1728), professor of law at Halle
University and an enemy of superstition and prejudice, famed for his vigor-
ous opposition to the persecution and burning of witches.6 However,
whereas Thomasius’s work is reputed to have been influential in bringing
an end to witch trials in Prussia, Tergit’s articles and her one novel pub-
lished during the Weimar Republic represent vain calls to reason in the
increasingly volatile political and economic atmosphere.
Nonetheless, her work represented enough of a threat to the Nazis
that they ordered her arrest on 4 March 1933. Remarkably, the interven-
tion of local police deterred the SA and Tergit was able to flee that night to
Czechoslovakia, where she wrote for the Prager Tageblatt. In 1934 she
joined her husband, the architect Heinz Reifenberg, whom she had mar-
ried in 1928, and their son Peter in Palestine. Her feuilletons and articles
from this period chart the challenges facing the new immigrants from all
parts of Europe.7 In 1938, the family moved to London where Tergit took
British citizenship; after 1945, she only returned to Germany as a visitor.
For twenty-five years Tergit played a pivotal role in supporting other
German writers in exile and, as secretary of the branch for German writers
in exile of the writers’ association PEN, devoted a huge amount of time to
maintaining a network of contacts.
In common with many writers who went into exile, Tergit found it dif-
ficult to reestablish herself with her audience in her native country once
dislocated from the context, material, and readership that had stimulated
her writing. None of her subsequent publications found the same resonance
as Käsebier, not even her epic second novel, Effingers (The Effingers,
1951), which traces the history of a German family from 1871 to 1945.
THE WRITINGS OF GABRIELE TERGIT IN THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC 195
She also published short texts on the cultural history of the bed and of
flowers, but these did not have the contemporary relevance of her Weimar
writings.8
It was only in the wake of renewed public and academic interest in the
Weimar era during the 1970s that Tergit’s work saw a revival in popularity
and, although Effingers was reissued, it was Tergit’s Weimar writings that
caught the imagination of the critics and the public.9 The elderly Tergit
was fêted in mainstream magazines such as Der Stern as the discovery of
the year in 1977, and she was flown to Berlin to give readings.10 However,
this interest remained largely confined to the daily and weekly press. It is
only in recent years that Tergit’s oeuvre has become the subject of acade-
mic attention, largely within the context of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Object-
ivity) or literary presentations of the city, although Eva-Maria Mockel’s
monograph explores power relationships in Tergit’s literary writings.11
Jens Brüning has made a considerable contribution to focusing interest on
Tergit’s work through his editions of her journalism, and increasing aware-
ness of the author was also demonstrated by the recent naming of a prom-
enade after Tergit near the new Potsdamer Platz in Berlin.
Tergit died in London on 25 July 1982, leaving an extensive body of
writing housed at the German Literary Archive in Marbach am Neckar and
at the German Exiles Archive in Frankfurt am Main. It includes two unpub-
lished novels, sketches of radio plays, a drama, and literary and historical
essays.12 Her autobiography, Etwas Seltenes überhaupt: Erinnerungen
(Something Rare Indeed: Memoirs, 1983), was published posthumously.
paragraph brought some minor amendments to the law in 1926, and the
pro-choice campaign gathered momentum again with the economic
depression in 1931.16 Tergit frequently reports on abortion trials, but she
reserves her criticism for the law itself, often praising the judges for what
she considers to be their humane administration and interpretation of
Paragraph 218. In one case where two short sentences of probation are
given, she comments it is “ein Urteil, das gefällt erscheint, mehr um dem
Buchstaben des Gesetzes zu genügen, als aus Überzeugung von der Straf-
barkeit dieser Handlung” (WS, 117; a judgment that seems to have been
passed more to fulfill the letter of the law than from the conviction that
this action should be punished). This emerges again in another case of
1931 where a young woman dies from infection at the hands of an
untrained backstreet abortionist. Tergit feels that the sentences are fair,
turning her criticism on the politicians who have failed to abolish the law
(WS, 142).
Nonetheless, these cases are exceptions in Tergit’s depiction of the
attitudes of male judges towards women. For the most part, she is critical
of their conservative and condescending attitude, which is at odds with the
increasing emancipation of women in the Weimar Republic. In one trial,
female witnesses are asked to explain their feelings about an event rather
than to provide an objective description of the facts, and Tergit notes with
heavy irony: “‘Gefühl’ und ‘Empfindung,’ das sind die richtigen Frauen-
vokabeln” (WS, 69; Feeling and sensation — that’s the right kind of
vocabulary for women). In an article devoted to women in the courtroom,
Tergit asserts that the legal apparatus is populated almost exclusively by
male judges and lawyers. The only exceptions are the occasional female lay
judge, the odd defense lawyer, officials from the juvenile court support ser-
vice, and the daily cleaners (WS, 173–75). In addition, Tergit lists the
crimes for which women defendants mostly appear in court as abortion,
prostitution, procurement, infanticide, theft, and defamation. Significantly,
the first four of these crimes are linked to female sexuality and mother-
hood, which became fiercely contested focal points of anxieties and aspira-
tions about modernization in Weimar public discourse.17 Moreover, they
highlight the conflicting values held by the judges and those who appear
before them, particularly as the young women often have a very pragmatic
attitude towards their sexuality. The largely conservative attitude of the
judges in sentencing those who committed these crimes, as evinced in the
conviction for the female transvestite described above, gave some legi-
timacy and force to those who advocated a return to the traditional role of
wife and mother.
Another key area in which Tergit is highly critical of the use judges make
of their discretionary powers is the partisan sentencing for political violence
and racially motivated assaults. Such cases constitute a recurrent theme of
Tergit’s legal journalism from 1925 onwards, although her anxiety about the
198 FIONA SUTTON
Käsebier — A Roman-À-Clef?
Tergit’s first novel not only shares preoccupations with her journalism:
many of the passages are adapted or even taken verbatim from her feuilletons
200 FIONA SUTTON
Ich plante schon lange eine Satire auf den “Betrieb,” den ich für den Zer-
störer aller echten Werte hielt, um etwas Nichtexistierendes zu
schreiben. . . . Aber ich erkannte, daß ein Buch, aus dem man nicht
erfährt weswegen telefoniert, telegrafiert, in Autos gerast wird — ein
Kafka-Thema —, unmöglich ist. (S, 77–78)
Conclusion
In her autobiography, Tergit writes that in her later years, she was often
haunted by the thought of how she sat so close to Hitler during the libel
trial in 1932 that she could have easily shot him at point-blank range and
thus spared the death and suffering of many millions around the world.
This regret over a lost opportunity for action and her sense of survivor’s
guilt is a harsh self-judgment that does not do justice to the commitment,
engagement, and sense of social responsibility that Tergit displays in her
writing. These qualities were responsible for her putting a whole series of
highly controversial, uncomfortable issues on the public agenda in the
Weimar Republic, including the abortion laws, the impact of the judiciary’s
conservative attitude upon proliferating street violence, turning popular
culture into a commodity, the influence of advertising and the cult of
celebrity, and the question of how to accommodate shifting values in the
modern world. With her writing, Tergit sought not only to make these
issues known and accessible to a wide readership but also to influence pub-
lic debate and to warn of their future implications. Moreover, many of these
issues are still at the heart of social and political debates in our own time,
which lends a continuing resonance to Tergit’s analysis of them. Tergit’s
voice was powerful and authoritative enough that the Nazis endeavored to
silence it at the first opportunity. As such, her contribution is worthy of
continued attention in academic debates about the Weimar Republic.29
Notes
1
Gabriele Tergit, Wer schießt aus Liebe? Gerichtsreportagen, ed. Jens Brüning
(Berlin: Das neue Berlin, 1999), 80. Hereafter referred to as WS.
2
Gabriele Tergit, Käsebier erobert den Kurfürstendamm: Roman (Berlin:
arani, 1997). Originally published by Rowohlt in 1931. Hereafter referred to
208 FIONA SUTTON
17
Peukert, Die Weimarer Republik, 101–11; Katharina von Ankum, “Introduc-
tion,” in Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture, ed.
Katharina von Ankum (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: U of California P,
1997), 1–11.
18
“Up to 1921, 13 murder cases involving left-wingers were brought to court
which imposed eight death sentences and a total of 176 years’ imprisonment; by
contrast some 314 murders committed by right-wingers led to one life sentence
and a total of 31 years’ imprisonment. Also in later years, a political murder perpe-
trated by a Communist earned either a high prison sentence or the death penalty;
right-wing Feme murderers, on the other hand, tended to be let off very lightly”
(Berghahn, Modern Germany, 76).
19
Peukert, Die Weimarer Republik, 94–100; Berghahn, Modern Germany, 120.
20
Compare, for example, the flânerie of Otto Lambeck or Lotte Kohler in Käsebier
(35–37 and 90–93) with Tergit’s feuilletons “Vorfrühlingsreise nach Berlin” and
“Eingewöhnen in Berlin,” in Atem einer anderen Welt: Berliner Reportagen (Air of
Another World. Berlin Reports), ed. Jens Brüning (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1994), 17–21.
21
Lion Feuchtwanger, Erfolg: Drei Jahre Geschichte einer Provinz; Roman (Berlin:
Aufbau, 1999).
22
See, for example, Margarete Dierks, “Berlin-Romane und Blumen-Kul-
turgeschichte,” Frankfurter Hefte 36 (1981): 65–68; Horst Hartmann, “Eine
goldene Seifenblase platzt,” tat, 17 March 1978, 14; Hedwig Rohde, “Es lag was
in der Luft,” Tagesspiegel, 9 September 1977, 4; Schütz, Romane der Weimarer
Republik, 155–57.
23
Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 1990).
References to this work in the text are given using the abbreviation CM and the
page number.
24
Matthias Flügge, “Heinrich Zilles grafische Zyklen und sein Werk der zwanziger
Jahre,” in Heinrich Zille, 1858–1929, ed. Renate Altner et al. (Berlin: Berlin-
Information, 1988), 165–206.
25
Walter Benjamin, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzier-
barkeit,” in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rudolf Tiedemann and Hermann
Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 1.2:471–508.
26
Joseph Roth, “Der Kurfürstendamm,” in Werke (Cologne and Amsterdam:
Kiepenhauer & Witsch and Allert de Lange, 1991), 3:98–100; here, 100. First
published 1929.
27
Franz Hessel, Spazieren in Berlin: Beobachtungen im Jahr 1929 (Berlin: Morgen,
1979), 132. First published 1929.
28
Mary Nolan, Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of
Germany (New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994), 84–103.
29
I gratefully acknowledge the Arts and Humanities Research Council for support-
ing the doctoral research upon which this chapter is based.
10: Radical Realism and Historical
Fantasy: Alfred Döblin
David Midgley
[We should learn from psychiatry, the only science that concerns itself
with the psychic reality of the individual human being in its entirety. It has
long since recognized the naivety of psychology, and confines itself to
noting processes and developments — with a shake of the head, a shrug
of the shoulders for everything else and the whys and wherefores. Lin-
guistic formulations serve only the purposes of practical communication.
“Anger,” “love,” “contempt” are terms for complex phenomena that our
senses register; beyond that, these primitive and worn-out combinations
of letters yield nothing. They denote processes, changes in action and
effect that were originally visible, audible, and up to a point measurable.
These opaque disks can never serve as microscopes or telescopes; they
cannot become the guiding thread for any act of representing life.]
What Döblin was advocating in 1913 went further than this insistence
on precise observation and notation, however. In order to convey
the impression of a world speaking through the text, he wanted to suppress
the sense of a narrating presence entirely, to break the “hegemony of the
author,” as he put it. The “steinerne Stil” (stony style) he envisaged in his
214 DAVID MIDGLEY
expect him to adopt in the workplace, seeking to show his thoughts “who
is boss” and put his own feet “in their place.” Modes of behavior that
belong in the sphere of formal social relations become ludicrous when
transferred into the domain of his private fantasy: he devises elaborate ges-
tures of remorse towards the plant he has decapitated, and even sets up
procedures for paying it compensation. By the end of the story his behav-
ior has become quite manic, and he disappears into the forest in search of
further buttercups to murder. A poignant counterpart to the title story is
“Die Tänzerin und der Leib” (The Dancer and the Body), in which an
accomplished dancer falls into a terminal sickness at the age of 19. What
she has achieved by the exercise of discipline and sheer willpower over her
body has led to a fatal loss of personal identity and vitality. Fuller accounts
of these and other early works by Döblin, supported by a comprehensive
bibliography, can be found in Gabriele Sander’s recent book, Alfred Döblin.7
The work that really established Döblin’s reputation, and brought him
the Fontane Prize in 1916, was Die drei Sprünge des Wang-Lun (1916;
translated as The Three Leaps of Wang-Lun, 1991), the first of his works to
be published by the prestigious S. Fischer Verlag. Although the way
Döblin deploys Taoist concepts in this novel has been questioned in recent
years by Chinese scholars,8 his choice of a quasi-mythical Chinese setting
appears to have liberated his imagination to depict the human potential for
extremes of behavior, while also providing him with rich opportunities for
reflecting issues of power distribution in his own society. Wang-Lun, a fish-
erman’s son, grows up as a prankster and a thief, but his physical strength
and his general demeanor lead others to look to him for leadership. When
a friend is killed by an imperial officer, Wang-Lun avenges that death by
killing the murderer and then flees with a band of followers to the moun-
tains, where he is initiated into the doctrine of nonviolence by a former
Buddhist monk. Oppression by the imperial regime makes it impossible to
maintain this nonviolent doctrine in practice, and Wang-Lun eventually
dies leading an insurrection, which is defeated amid increasingly brutal
atrocities on either side. Published early in 1916,9 the year of the notorious
mass offensives at Verdun and on the Somme, the work caught the
wartime mood with its themes of power, injustice, the ultimate futility of
violent action, and the dialectic relation between force and renunciation.
Critics were also favorably impressed by the vividness of Döblin’s descript-
ive writing and his innovative way of evoking crowd behavior, which have
often been interpreted as the fruit of his earlier critique of Marinetti’s
Mafarka. The merging of the fate of the individual into that of a mass
movement is a feature of Die drei Sprünge des Wang-Lun that anticipates
Döblin’s treatment of the relationship between the individual and the
modern city in Berlin Alexanderplatz.
Wadzeks Kampf mit der Dampfturbine (Wadzek’s Struggle with the
Steam Turbine, 1918), the second novel Döblin wrote during a particularly
216 DAVID MIDGLEY
energetic phase between 1912 and 1915, exemplifies his tendency to swing
from one extreme to another between one work and the next. By contrast
with the broad historical sweep of Die drei Sprünge des Wang-Lun, it
focuses narrowly on the private war of a Berlin industrialist, Franz Wadzek,
against his chief competitor (the manufacturer of the steam turbine men-
tioned in the title) and the power of the monopoly capitalism he repre-
sents. Döblin was evidently attracted by the tragicomic potential of
Wadzek as a Quixotic figure who subsides into petit-bourgeois obscurity
and escapes to America at the end of his struggle; that aspect of the
novel — its repudiation of tragic heroism — was one reason why Döblin’s
writing appealed to the young Brecht.10 In retrospect it is also possible to
recognize Wadzeks Kampf mit der Dampfturbine as an important experi-
ment on the way to Döblin’s evocation of life in the industrial city in Berlin
Alexanderplatz.11 But critics at the time felt, rather, that in this instance
Döblin had simply succumbed to his own appetite for grotesque character-
ization.12
By the end of the First World War, then, Döblin had established him-
self as an incisive critic of conventional literary writing and a pioneer of
innovative narrative techniques, but his standing as a novelist was as yet
uncertain. Not until Berlin Alexanderplatz: Die Geschichte vom Franz
Biberkopf (1929; translated as Alexanderplatz, Berlin: The Story of Franz
Biberkopf, 1931) was he to achieve a major marketing success, and his rela-
tions with the S. Fischer Verlag became strained in the meantime.
Throughout the Weimar period, however, he made significant contribu-
tions to cultural debates, and in particular to discussions of how the func-
tion of literature should be conceived in relation to modern thinking about
human nature and the world at large.
Long before Brecht and Piscator were thinking in terms of “epic the-
ater” as the means of transcending the limitations of conventional drama,
Döblin was promoting the idea of “epic” writing as part of his campaign
against subjectivism in the novel. In 1919 he crossed swords with his fel-
low novelist Otto Flake, whose programmatic foreword to his novel Die
Stadt des Hirns (The City of the Brain, 1919) spoke of wanting to put the
reader into a “philosophical” state. Döblin took this as an opportunity to
challenge, once again, the principle of a sovereign authorial intellect, and
to insist that epic writing should not be subordinated to an ethical purpose
but should communicate in ways that were “sinnlich anschaulich” (imme-
diate to the senses) and affective.13 In the lecture he gave at Berlin Univer-
sity in December 1928, “Der Bau des epischen Werks” (The Structure of
the Epic Work), he also emphasized the sense in which nature itself was the
great creator of epic works, and spoke of the individuality of the author as
one of the “facts” that should be allowed to speak through the text, but
not to dominate it.14 Radicalism, for Döblin, really meant going back to
basics. What distinguished the epic writer from the novelist as traditionally
RADICAL REALISM AND HISTORICAL FANTASY: ALFRED DÖBLIN 217
conceived, he argued, was the ability to pass beyond mere mimesis and
present fundamental and exemplary aspects of human existence through
whatever subject matter was being treated (BeW, 218–19). Sweeping aside
all niceties about the formal distinctions between epic, dramatic, lyric, and
reflexive writing, he spoke of the epic mode as an infinitely flexible way of
writing, capable of integrating all manner of linguistic material to its pur-
poses, and as free as linguistic communication can be to play on the imagi-
nation of the reader or listener (BeW, 224–26). As Dietrich Scheunemann
and others have shown, Döblin’s emphatic proclamation of these views can
be seen as a major contribution to the transformation of the novel in par-
ticular, and to the modernist revolution in literary writing in general.15
While his programmatic writings do not, of course, automatically account
for the way he wrote in practice, they do help us to recognize clearly some
aspects of what he accomplished in his novels of the 1920s.
It was with reference to his novel Wallenstein (1920) that Döblin, in
his 1928 lecture, chose to illustrate his own experience of the writing
process and of the author’s relation to his material. He explained that he
saw a role for the author’s conscious intellect in the initial search for likely
material on which his imagination could go to work, and in the critical
assessment of the text produced; but in the actual creative process there
came a moment of crystallization or visionary cohesion that defied expla-
nation (BeW, 230–34). In the case of Wallenstein, that moment had come
when, after a period of exploratory reading, a chance incident triggered his
vision of the Swedish King, Gustavus Adolphus, sailing across the Baltic
Sea with an immense fleet of ships, to intervene in the Thirty Years’ War —
and we can read Döblin’s description of that vision at the start of book 5 of
the novel.16 The name of Wallenstein would have been familiar to German
readers above all from Schiller’s dramatic trilogy of 1797–99, but what
Döblin provides is not the grand tragedy of a historical individual as
Schiller had constructed it but an evocation of history as the vast and
impersonal experience of human populations. His Wallenstein is an
unscrupulous power-monger and profiteer, and while his narrative makes
allusion to the religious conflict with which the Thirty Years’ War was asso-
ciated, it is much more concerned with the sheer cynicism of power politics
and economic speculation. There is a contrast at the personal level between
the demonic and brutal figure of Wallenstein and the melancholic Emperor
Ferdinand II, on whom the narrative increasingly comes to concentrate;
but the depiction of each is expressly linked with primal natural forces.
Wallenstein is imagined as a reptilian creature emerging from the swamp,
and Ferdinand, after gradually abandoning his aspirations to political influ-
ence, eventually retreats into a forest and becomes enthralled by a hobgob-
lin, who murders him. That surreal moment apart, Döblin’s narrative
broadly reflects the record of historical events from the Battle of the White
Mountain (1620) to the death of Ferdinand (1637), but he dispenses with
218 DAVID MIDGLEY
all mention of dates in the text and his evocation of events dwells on the
capacity of mankind for collective brutality. When the personal story is
complete, on the final page of the text the butchery is set to continue
unabated.
Wallenstein is generally seen as Döblin’s darkest novel. Frequently the
narrative flow is halted by sustained descriptions of carnage, pillage, pesti-
lence, putrefaction, and sadistic acts, such as the graphically detailed
account of the burning of a Jewish couple at the stake as a public spectacle
(Wa, 439–45). It is particularly from such passages as these in Wallenstein
that W. G. Sebald illustrates his case for accusing Döblin of an obsessive
fascination with violence and of turning cruelty into an aesthetic experi-
ence.17 Sebald’s claim, on the final page of his study, that the aims of such
literature are indistinguishable from those of inhumane political ideologies
is unsustainable in the light of Döblin’s record as a writer and a person; but
he has a serious point when he argues that Döblin’s evocation of such vio-
lence in connection with the religious fervor of the seventeenth century
confers an apocalyptic atmosphere on the work, which indicates, perhaps, a
readiness to understand the mortification of the flesh as preparing the way
for spiritual regeneration (Wa, 51, 81, 158). Other commentators have
stressed what was instantly apparent to reviewers in 1920: Döblin’s Wal-
lenstein is an indirect way of conveying the sheer awfulness of the war of
attrition he had witnessed on the Western Front in the First World War,
including the wholesale dislocation of societies that it entailed, and the
desperateness of the search for alternative ways of living that it brought in
its wake — admittedly perceived as a cycle of violence.18 In the context of
Hans Vilmar Geppert’s broad-based study of historical fiction (1976), the
aestheticization of horror in Döblin’s Wallenstein appears as an effective
means of subverting other ways of looking at history that might seduce us
with their aesthetic coherence.19
Having drawn on distant historical experience to conjure up his bleak
vision of human existence in Wallenstein, Döblin then let his imagination
play on possibilities that lay in the distant future in Berge Meere und Gigan-
ten (Mountains Oceans and Giants, 1924). This work begins with an evo-
cation of the First World War as a distant memory, but the scenario it
presents is again clearly inspired by the experience of intensive techno-
logical warfare. The colonization of Africa and Asia by the nations of Europe
has been taken to its logical conclusion, and the technological expertise of
the western world has increasingly been put to work in harnessing natural
energy sources. Over a period of centuries, wealth has increased, but so too
have social disparities, and as the world’s population becomes concentrated
in huge city-states, the technocratic senates that rule over those states
become increasingly adept and increasingly ruthless at quelling and divert-
ing social conflict. Eventually, in the twenty-sixth century, the senates in
Europe achieve monopoly control over food supplies by secretly developing
RADICAL REALISM AND HISTORICAL FANTASY: ALFRED DÖBLIN 219
Cybele and the worship of mountains, rocks, water sources, and fire as fea-
tures of “mother earth.”22
Mythic thinking is also fundamental to the resolution of the conflict
between human ambition and the world of nature Döblin describes at the
end of the work. In part, the scope for such resolution is kept before the
reader’s mind by descriptive passages that evoke a bountiful and ultimately
benevolent nature, particularly as suggested by the landscape of southern
France. More specifically, Döblin introduces an exotic and stereotypically
feminine demigod figure, Venaska, who counters the destructive fury of
the giants with her unfailing erotic power. But among the humans who
remain, too, the mythic awareness of the experiences they have shared
becomes the key to safeguarding a future life against technological folly
without lapsing into the illusion of an idyllic harmony with nature. The
survivors of the Greenland expedition, led by the Scandinavian engineer,
Kylin, who had masterminded the splitting of the Iceland volcanoes, com-
mit themselves to a bond of fellowship in the sign of the sundered moun-
tain and the flame. It is under this sign, symbolizing their determination to
preserve the knowledge of the potential for catastrophe and the need for
remorse, that they reestablish their communities in a regenerating natural
world. They go forward conscious that they themselves are the custodians
of the flame of destruction and the spark of life.
In 1932, Döblin published a shortened version of this work under the
title Giganten (Giants). It is recognized to be an uneven, and perhaps hastily
written, attempt to recast the work in a more popular mode, but it also
shows how the controversies of the Weimar period had persuaded him that
he ought to draw a clear line between himself and the purveyors of cultural
pessimism by making his convictions about the future role of technology in
society plain. The revised version ends with Kylin’s group restoring industrial
culture, but placing it in the service of humanity at large, rather than that of
a technocratic elite. It is also clear from his long essay “Der Geist des natu-
ralistischen Zeitalters” (The Spirit of the Naturalist Age), which appeared in
Die neue Rundschau (The New Review) in 1924, that Döblin positively wel-
comed the scientific materialism of the modern age, including what he saw
as its political manifestation in Soviet Russia, and in that context he firmly
endorsed the culture of technology and physicality that was challenging the
abstract values of traditional humanism in postwar Germany.23 But at the
same time he continued to reach out for a metaphysical worldview that
would resolve the tensions between materialistic and spiritualistic concep-
tions of human existence. It is in his writings on this subject that we find
strong affinities with the Romantic nature philosophy of Schelling
(1775–1854) and Fechner (1801–87). In Das Ich über der Natur (The I
above Nature, 1927) and Unser Dasein (Our Existence, 1933), Döblin
makes the case, not just for viewing the universe as coherently ordered, but
for conceiving all elements of the natural world as “beseelt” (animate). He
RADICAL REALISM AND HISTORICAL FANTASY: ALFRED DÖBLIN 221
analyses human individuality into its component parts, and sees it as related
through each of these to the “Ur-Ich,” or prime mover, behind the material
world, which itself stands in a relationship of mutual dependency with all
individual phenomena. Döblin’s arguments on these points are unlikely to
appear wholly convincing to either scientists or philosophers, but they repre-
sent his personal attempt to resolve the intellectual puzzle about how the
human mind could aspire to comprehend the natural world while yet being
part of it and subject to the impulses of its own biological nature.24 In Unser
Dasein he also sets out his thinking about the “resonance” that may exist
between all domains of the natural world, animal, vegetable and mineral;25
and this thinking has been seen to provide an important clue to the organi-
zation of the underlying themes in Berlin Alexanderplatz.
In 1927, the year he published Das Ich über der Natur, Döblin also
published Manas, a verse epic based on Hindu myths and legends. Because
it is in verse, and because of its exotic subject matter, it has tended to be
viewed as something of an anachronistic extravagance within Döblin’s oeu-
vre, and within twentieth-century narrative writing generally, although its
vivid and incantatory language was hailed at the time by Robert Musil as
an extraordinary achievement in a scientific age.26 Döblin himself consid-
ered it important enough to make it the starting point for the afterword he
wrote for Berlin Alexanderplatz when it was reissued in the GDR in
1955,27 and his reasons for doing so undoubtedly relate to a dimension of
Berlin Alexanderplatz that might not be immediately obvious to the unini-
tiated reader: Manas was again an attempt to evoke elemental aspects of
human existence. It tells the story of a prince who enters the kingdom of
the dead in order to take upon himself the burden of all the suffering in the
world, is destroyed by the experience, and is redeemed by the self-sacrifice
of the goddess Savitri, the embodiment of love. The final third of the work
depicts the struggle of the revived Manas to achieve true human identity
by becoming self-aware. Manas can therefore be seen to mark a step
beyond the emphasis on collective action and instinct-driven behavior that
had characterized Döblin’s earlier works, and towards the balance he
strikes in depicting the relationship between the individual and society in
Berlin Alexanderplatz: Die Geschichte vom Franz Biberkopf.
Precisely what prompted Döblin, in his next work, to turn his atten-
tion to the Berlin milieu that was so familiar to him is not certain, but the
enthusiastic reception accorded to Berlin Alexanderplatz, initially in the
form of public readings and extracts published in journals and newspapers
in the course of 1928, suggests that it satisfied a demand for a bold literary
representation of the contemporary world, and of the ambience of Berlin
in particular. As Walter Benjamin emphasized in his review of the work, it
spoke through the substance of life in Berlin and it spoke with the vernac-
ular voice of Berlin.28 While the experimental character of the text and the
scurrilous nature of its underworld plot was received with some degree of
222 DAVID MIDGLEY
Notes
1
Cf. Erich Kleinschmidt, “Döblin-Studien II: ‘Es gibt den eisklaren Tag und
unseren Tod in den nächsten 80 Jahren’; Alfred Döblin als politischer Schrift-
steller,” Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft 26 (1982): 401–27.
2
See Inge Jens, Dichter zwischen rechts und links (Munich: Piper, 1971). For
Döblin’s biography up to 1933, see also Leo Kreutzer, Alfred Döblin: Sein Werk bis
1933 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1970).
3
Alfred Döblin, “Futuristische Worttechnik: Offener Brief an F. T. Marinetti,” in
Schriften zu Ästhetik, Poetik und Literatur (Olten/Freiburg im Breisgau: Walter,
1989), 113–19; here, 117.
RADICAL REALISM AND HISTORICAL FANTASY: ALFRED DÖBLIN 225
4
Döblin, “An Romanautoren und ihre Kritiker,” in Schriften zu Ästhetik, Poetik
und Literatur, 120–23; here, 120–21.
5
Döblin, “An Romanautoren,” 122.
6
In a later programmatic note, Döblin was to insist that a novel was not worth its
salt unless it could be cut into sections like an earthworm and go on living. See
“Bemerkungen zum Roman” (1917), in Schriften zu Ästhetik, Poetik und Liter-
atur, 123–27; here, 126.
7
Gabriele Sander, Alfred Döblin (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2001), 100–131.
8
Cf. Sander, Alfred Döblin, 138, 366–67.
9
1915 is the date shown in the first edition of the work, but publication was
delayed by wartime conditions.
10
See Bertolt Brecht, Werke (Berlin and Frankfurt am Main: Aufbau/Suhrkamp,
1994), 26:153; cf. also 167.
11
Cf. Sander, Alfred Döblin, 141–42.
12
See Ingrid Schuster and Ingrid Bode, eds., Alfred Döblin im Spiegel der zeit-
genössischen Kritik (Bern: Francke, 1973), 52–61.
13
Döblin, “Reform des Romans,” in Schriften zu Ästhetik, Poetik und Literatur,
137–51; here, 138–40.
14
Döblin, “Der Bau des epischen Werks,” in Schriften zu Asthetik, Poetik und Lit-
eratur, 215–45; here, 226–28. Further references to this work are given in the text
using the abbreviation BeW and the page number.
ˆ ˆ
15
See Viktor Zmegac, “Alfred Döblins Poetik des Romans,” in Deutsche Roman-
theorien, ed. Reinhold Grimm (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1968), 2:341–64;
Dietrich Scheunemann, Romankrise: Die Entwicklung der modernen Romanpoetik
in Deutschland (Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer, 1978); Judith Ryan, “From Futur-
ism to ‘Döblinism,’” German Quarterly 54 (1981): 415–26; Erich Kleinschmidt,
“Döblin-Studien I: Depersonale Poetik; Dispositionen des Erzählens bei Alfred
Döblin,” Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft 26 (1982): 383–401.
16
Döblin, Wallenstein (Olten/Freiburg im Breisgau: Walter, 1965), 489. Further
references to this work are given in the text using the abbreviation Wa and the page
number.
17
Winfried G. Sebald, Der Mythos der Zerstörung im Werk Döblins (Stuttgart: Ernst
Klett, 1980), 49–51, 156–60.
18
See Dieter Mayer, Alfred Döblins Wallenstein: Zur Geschichtsauffassung und
Struktur (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1972), esp. 94–117 and 146–51; Adalbert
Wichert, Alfred Döblins historisches Denken: Zur Poetik des modernen Geschichtsro-
mans (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1978); and Klaus R. Scherpe, “‘Ein Kolossalgemälde für
Kurzsichtige’: Das Andere der Geschichte in Alfred Döblins Wallenstein,” in
Geschichte als Literatur: Formen und Grenzen der Repräsentation von Vergangen-
heit, ed. Hartmut Eggert et al. (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1990), 226–41.
19
Hans Vilmar Geppert, Der “andere” historische Roman (Tübingen: Niemeyer,
1976), 107–14 and 161 (cited in Sander, Alfred Döblin, 154); cf. also Harro
Müller, “‘Die Welt hat einen Hauch von Verwesung’: Anmerkungen zu Döblins
historischem Roman Wallenstein,” Merkur 39 (1985): 405–13.
226 DAVID MIDGLEY
20
Cf. Klaus Müller-Salget, Alfred Döblin: Werk und Entwicklung (Bonn: Bouvier,
1972), 216–18 and Ardon Denlinger, Alfred Döblins “Berge Meere und Giganten”:
Epos und Ideologie (Amsterdam: B. R. Grüner, 1977), 38–44 and 55–60.
21
Cf. David Midgley, Writing Weimar: Critical Realism in German Literature,
1918–1933 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000), 322–27; see also Peter Sprengel, “Kün-
stliche Welten und Fluten des Lebens oder: Futurismus in Berlin: Paul Scheerbart
und Alfred Döblin,” in Faszination des Organischen: Konjunkturen einer Kategorie
der Moderne, ed. Hartmut Eggert, Erhard Schütz, Peter Sprengel (Munich: Iudi-
cium, 1995), 73–102.
22
Cf. Denlinger, Alfred Döblins “Berge Meere und Giganten,” 81–93.
23
Döblin, “Der Geist des naturalistischen Zeitalters,” in Schriften zu Ästhetik,
Poetik und Literatur, 168–90.
24
For a concise summary of this dimension of Döblin’s thinking, with references to
further secondary literature, see Sander, Alfred Döblin, 312–26.
25
Alfred Döblin, Unser Dasein (Olten/Freiburg im Breisgau: Walter, 1964),
168–75.
26
See Schuster and Bode, Alfred Döblin im Spiegel der zeitgenössischen Kritik,
187–92; Robert Musil, Gesammelte Werke (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1978), 2:1674–80.
27
Alfred Döblin, “Nachwort,” in Schriften zu Leben und Werk (Olten/Freiburg im
Breisgau: Walter, 1986), 463–65.
28
Walter Benjamin, “Krise des Romans,” in Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), 3:230–36; here, 233; also in Schuster and Bode, Alfred
Döblin im Spiegel der zeitgenössischen Kritik, 240–54; Matthias Prangel, ed., Mate-
rialien zu Alfred Döblin, “Berlin Alexanderplatz” (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1975), 108–14.
29
See Werner Stauffacher, “Nachwort des Herausgebers,” in Alfred Döblin, Berlin
Alexanderplatz (Zurich and Düsseldorf: Walter, 1996), 837–75; here, 853–54; cf.
Prangel, Materialien, 60–61.
30
Axel Eggebrecht, “Alfred Döblins neuer Roman,” in Die literarische Welt 5
(1929), no. 45:5–6; here, 6; also in Prangel, Materialien, 62–66.
31
Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 3:230.
32
Cf. Sander, Alfred Döblin, 176; Stauffacher, “Nachwort des Herausgebers,”
864–65.
33
See Prangel, Materialien, 88–100.
34
Cf. Klaus Müller-Salget, Alfred Döblin: Werk und Entwicklung, 2nd ed. (Bonn:
Bouvier, 1988), 345–56. See also J. H. Reid, “Berlin Alexanderplatz — a Political
Novel,” German Life & Letters 21 (1968): 214–23; Matthias Prangel, “Franz
Biberkopf und das Wissen des Wissens: Zum Schluss von Döblins Berlin Alexan-
derplatz unter der Perspektive einer Theorie der Beobachtung der Beobachtung,”
in Gabriele Sander, ed., Internationales Alfred Döblin-Kolloquium, 1995 (Jahrbuch
für Internationale Germanistik, Reihe A, 43) (Bern: Peter Lang, 1997), 169–80;
Anke Detken, “Zum Politischen in Döblins Berlin Alexanderplatz und Die Ehe —
Versuch einer Revision,” in Engagierte Literatur zwischen den Weltkriegen, ed.
Stefan Neuhaus et al. (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2002), 69–88.
RADICAL REALISM AND HISTORICAL FANTASY: ALFRED DÖBLIN 227
35
Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz, 454.
36
Otto Keller, Döblins Montageroman als Epos der Moderne (Munich: Fink, 1980);
see also David Midgley, “The Dynamics of Consciousness: Alfred Döblin, Berlin
Alexanderplatz,” in The German Novel in the Twentieth Century: Beyond Realism,
ed. David Midgley (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1993), 95–109.
37
Döblin, “Mein Buch Berlin Alexanderplatz”: Schriften zu Leben und Werk,
215–17; here, 217. See also Breon Mitchell, James Joyce and the German Novel,
1922–1933 (Athens, Ohio: Ohio UP, 1976).
38
See Joris Duytschaever, “Joyce — Dos Passos — Döblin: Einfluß oder Analo-
gie?” in Prangel, Materialien, 136–49.
39
Cf. Gabriele Sander, Erläuterungen und Dokumente: Alfred Döblin, “Berlin
Alexanderplatz” (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1998), 216–20. See in particular Harald Jäh-
ner, Erzählter, montierter, soufflierter Text: Zur Konstruktion des Romans “Berlin
Alexanderplatz” von Alfred Döblin (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1984); Klaus
R. Scherpe, “Von der erzählten Stadt zur Stadterzählung: Der Großstadtdiskurs in
Alfred Döblins Berlin Alexanderplatz,” in Diskurstheorien und Literaturwis-
senschaft, ed. J. Fohrmann and H. Müller (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988),
418–37 (In English, “The City as Narrator: The Modern Text in Alfred Döblin’s
Berlin Alexanderplatz,” in Modernity and the Text, ed. Andreas Huyssen and David
Bathrick [New York: Columbia UP, 1989], 162–79); Midgley, “The Dynamics of
Consciousness”; Ernst Ribbat, “Die Wirklichkeit der Zitate: Döblins diskontinuier-
liche Rede,” in Gabriele Sander, Internationales Alfred Döblin-Kolloquium, 1995,
115–29; Gabriele Sander, “Döblin’s Berlin: The Story of Franz Biberkopf,” in A
Companion to the Works of Alfred Döblin, ed. Roland Dollinger, Wulf Koepke, and
Heidi Thomann Tewarson (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004), 141–60.
11: Vicki Baum: “A First-Rate
Second-Rate Writer”?
Heather Valencia
V ICKI BAUM (1888–1960) WAS AUSTRIAN BY BIRTH and spent her first
twenty-eight years in Vienna. She lived in Germany from 1912 until
1932, then in the United States until her death in 1960. Before moving to
Germany she had published little apart from some short stories and arti-
cles, but during her Weimar period she wrote five volumes of novellas and
eleven novels, including her two most successful works. The themes of the
major works reflect many contemporary concerns and prevailing literary
trends. In order to place Vicki Baum in context, it is helpful to review these
aspects of Weimar society.
In the early 1920s, the Expressionism of the previous decade began to
give way to a more sober view of art and literature, based on the intent to
convey an authentic picture of contemporary society. The term Neue Sach-
lichkeit — the New Objectivity — described this trend. This turning away
from the visionary effusions of Expressionism was undoubtedly inspired not
only by disillusionment with such idealistic dreams, following the failure of
the revolutionary hopes of 1919, but also by the economic and political tur-
moil of the early years of the Weimar Republic. Moreover, the concept of
art as the province of the privileged was being challenged by social and
technological developments. Cheaper printing methods and the conse-
quent expansion in books, newspapers, and magazines went hand in hand
with a fast-developing mass readership. Since the nineteenth century, liter-
acy had grown dramatically; this, coupled with increased leisure resulting
from shorter working hours, created a greater demand for reading material,
with middle-class women constituting a substantial proportion of the read-
ing public.1 The idea of a popular literature that would address the concerns
of this expanding readership was a key element of the literary New Object-
ivity. Hermann Kesten expressed this as a program for Weimar literature:
Die Kunst soll wieder ein Handwerk werden, . . . eine Produktion, die
sich wie jede andere an dem Bedarf des Konsumenten regelt; eine
Tätigkeit, die der Raschheit und Beweglichkeit unseres Daseins
entspricht, deren Ergebnisse sich in der Regel mit dem Tag verbrauchen,
für den sie entstanden.2
230 HEATHER VALENCIA
[Art should become a craft again, . . . a product that, like any other, suits
itself to the needs of the consumers, that reflects the speed and mobility
of our existence, and whose products are usually used up on the day for
which they came into existence.]3
Leben (The Dances of Ina Raffay: A Life).6 At this point Baum, not wish-
ing to be exclusively identified with the populist publisher, placed her next
four books, which she considered of greater literary merit, with the
Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, a publisher of more “serious” literature.7 In 1925
she won a literary prize for her story Der Weg (The Way); since Thomas
Mann, whom Baum revered, was the chief judge, she regarded this as a
sign of her acceptance in the sphere of “high” literature.8 In 1926, how-
ever, the insecurity of her husband’s professional position in Mannheim,
coupled with the enticing prospects that Ullstein held out to her, per-
suaded her to sign a contract with them, and from 1926 until 1931 she
worked as an editor and writer for various Ullstein newspapers and jour-
nals. Her major novels were published by Ullstein until her departure for
America.
In 1929 her most famous novel, Menschen im Hotel (translated as
Grand Hotel) appeared.9 Gustav Gründgens and Erwin Piscator staged a
dramatized version in Berlin in 1930. In the same year an English transla-
tion of the play was a Broadway hit; the film version, Grand Hotel, starring
John Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore, Joan Crawford, and Greta Garbo, was
made in 1931. Vicki Baum visited New York at the invitation of Nelson
Doubleday, the novel’s American publisher, after which, fearing future
developments in Europe, she migrated with her family to the United States
in 1932. Her work was banned by the Nazis, but continued to be pub-
lished in Europe by Querido, an Amsterdam publisher of exile literature.
Baum lived in Hollywood, becoming a US citizen in 1938, and writ-
ing a further sixteen novels. After 1941 she wrote almost entirely in Eng-
lish, though the unfinished draft of her posthumously published memoirs,
Es war alles ganz anders: Erinnerungen (It Was All Quite Different: Mem-
oirs, 1987) was in German. She died on 29 August 1960.
Vicki Baum’s memoirs illuminate her perception of herself as a writer.
She made no secret of the fact that she wrote for money, but stressed that
her works were always executed with care: “Jedesmal, wenn ich unbedingt
Geld verdienen mußte, habe ich Bücher geschrieben, die nicht mehr sein
wollten als gut lesbar und unterhaltsam — Entspannungslektüre. Nie aber
habe ich dabei geschludert. Ich habe auch diese leichte Lektüre immer so
gewissenhaft und sorgfältig wie möglich gearbeitet” (Alles, 463; Whenever
I had to earn money, I wrote books that did not aspire to be anything
more than very readable and entertaining — leisure reading. But I was
never sloppy. Even this light reading I crafted as conscientiously and care-
fully as I could). Her often-quoted assessment of herself as “a first-rate
second-rate writer” is in fact the later English translation of her remarks:
“Ich weiß, was ich wert bin; ich bin eine erstklassige Schriftstellerin zweiter
Güte.” (Alles, 377; I know what I am worth; I am a first-class writer of the
second rank). Baum, who, as seen above, was confident in her own crafts-
manship, almost certainly did not intend to convey the rather pejorative
232 HEATHER VALENCIA
after the murder, his development into what the professor who saves his
life calls “ein ganzer Mensch” (F, 265; a complete human being). The tri-
partite structure emphasizes the stages of this development: the first sect-
ion, “Tat” (Deed) describes the background to Joachim’s act, and the
murder itself. The second and third parts, “Flucht” (Flight) and “Sühne”
(Expiation), describe the physical and emotional hardships he suffers dur-
ing his years as a fugitive, until he achieves inner peace in a small Baltic fish-
ing village, where he lives an exemplary life and dies a hero’s death. The
questions to be considered are how Vicki Baum interprets this ambitious
and topical political theme, and indeed whether Feme can justifiably be
called a political novel.
The early Weimar period is authentically portrayed. The figure of the
minister himself is closely modeled on Rathenau: like the latter, he is a sen-
sitive, solitary figure who models his ideas on Goethe, writes books of
political philosophy, is aware of the danger from the Right, but refuses to
have a bodyguard with him on the day of his murder. Even small details,
such as the rain on the day of the murder and Burthe’s posing as a tele-
phone engineer, are based on the Rathenau case.14
Baum draws a convincing picture of the decline of the formerly afflu-
ent and noble Burthe family, which has been forced to sublet part of its
apartment to a working-class family. Their changed circumstances are
clearly conveyed through the scene of the family meal, where everything
emphasizes the contrast with their former social status: the tarnished silver
with the family crest, the patched and darned napkins, and the horrible
tinned food that his mother has to prepare on a gas burner in the only
room.
Baum integrates other common Weimar themes convincingly into the
narrative. She illustrates the economic situation by describing the poor
health of the Burthes’ tenant, Schliepke, which is due to the low wages and
bad working conditions in the gasworks, and shows the dark side of daily
life in the militia’s fatal wounding of Schliepke’s brother-in-law during a
strike. She contrasts the lives of the workers and the affluent lifestyle of the
directors of industry, exemplified by Dr. Thelmann, a company lawyer who
prudently puts his money immediately into objects and keeps a mistress.
She takes up the motif of industrial unrest again in the second part of the
novel, when the fugitive Burthe is working in a coalmine. She graphically
describes the exhausting routine of the work, the comradeship between the
“Kumpels” (the miners) and the political fervor of the revolutionary Hille,
who is later killed in a confrontation with the director.
Baum presents Joachim Burthe’s psyche and the circumstances leading
up to the murder very convincingly. The sensitive young man is deeply dis-
turbed by the degradation of his family, which they ascribe to the republi-
can regime, represented by the minister. Baum signals Joachim’s despair by
various motifs: his lying on an unmade bed without removing his boots
234 HEATHER VALENCIA
reflects the disorder in his own life, while his unfocused desire to act is
expressed by his vague utterance “Es muß etwas geschehen” (F, 9; some-
thing must happen); moreover, the print that hangs on his wall, “The
Farewell of Schill’s Officers,” is a transparent symbol of nationalistic hero-
ism.15 Joachim’s frustration is symptomatic of the malaise of the “lost gen-
eration,” which Remarque was to depict three years later in Im Westen
nichts Neues,16 and which Gregor von Askanius, Joachim’s idol and fellow
revolutionary, describes here, albeit from a different political standpoint:
“Es ist schade,” sagte Askanius, “daß du nicht an der Front warst. Es ist
überhaupt ein Jammer um euch junge Leute, die ihr den Krieg nicht
mehr richtig erlebt habt. Vorher, da wart ihr Kinder und wißt nicht mehr
viel, wie es war. Dann hat man euch hergeholt mit euren siebzehn Jahren,
unterernährt und wacklig, wie ihr wart, und hat euch gedrillt. Vielleicht
haben ein paar von euch die Nase in die Etappe gesteckt, das war alles.
Dann ist die große Schweinerei gekommen, und jetzt sitzt ihr da und
wißt nicht, wohin mit euch und eurer Jugend und eurem Drang, etwas zu
tun.” (F, 27–28)
[“It’s a shame,” said Askanius, “that you weren’t at the Front. It’s a real
pity that you young people didn’t really experience the war. Before it you
were children and didn’t really know what it was like. Then you were
called up when you were seventeen, undernourished and shaky as you
were, and were drilled. A few of you just managed to poke your noses
into the trenches, that was all. Then this whole mess started and now you
are all sitting there at a loss to know how to cope with your youth and
your need to do something.”]
gives him the chance to become purified and whole by allowing him to
escape, nursing him back to health when he is wounded, and acquainting
him with the minister’s humanity and philosophical writings. The latter’s
stoical philosophy becomes his murderer’s lodestone from now on.
The reader first hears the details of the murder in Joachim’s confession
to the professor. Joachim was unable to shoot the minister in the back, but
waited until he was face to face with him, thereby forming some kind of
relationship between them. After firing the shot, he ran to cradle the dying
man’s head on his lap. The minister himself seemed to regard the deed as a
release, saying “Danke” (thank you) to his murderer with his dying breath.
This act of confession is a further stage in Joachim’s redemption, and also
performs the function of emphasizing his innate goodness, preparing the
ground for his elevation to almost saintly status in the final section.
The third part of the novel completes the redemption of the hero, in a
timeless idyll in a North German fishing community. Joachim arrives here
after ten years in America and elsewhere. He now fearlessly uses his own
name, but the community calls him “Voss” because he takes on responsi-
bility for the farm and fishing boat of a widow whose husband of that name
had fallen into the canal while drunk. Joachim takes on this man’s lowly
life, redeeming himself through his self-sacrificing labor for the widow and
son, and through his renunciation of the young girl with whom he falls
passionately in love. Finally, the noble nature of Joachim’s drowning sym-
bolically redeems the previous Voss’s ignoble end. At the end of the novel
the estate manager writes to Professor Lenzburg that he considers Joachim
Burthe’s debt to society to have been paid in full, both by his life and his
death.
Despite its absorbing plot, authentic portrayal of early years of the
Weimar Republic, and persuasive doctrine of expiation and redemption,
the novel leaves certain political and moral issues unresolved. Though the
initial portrayal of Joachim’s malaise and his motivation for the political
murder is convincing, it does not go beyond the purely psychological. At
no point does he seem to have any concept of how the death of the minis-
ter will improve the situation in Weimar Germany. The message of the
novel is rather ambivalent: on the one hand, it is clear that the action
against the minister was to be rejected, both from a political point of view
(the point is made that after his death the situation in Germany deterio-
rates), and from a philosophical one: Joachim, our identification figure, in
his enlightened state espouses the philosophy that harm results from vio-
lence, and that only passive suffering is a valid stance. Strangely, however,
the ethical issue of murder is deliberately played down: the revelation that
the minister was grateful to be relieved of his burdensome life turns the
murder almost into an act of mercy. As Rüsing rightly points out, Vicki
Baum’s project is to concentrate not on the political issue but on the
purification and redemption of the hero, and from this perspective the
VICKI BAUM: “A FIRST-RATE SECOND-RATE WRITER”? 237
murder has a positive purpose, since it leads eventually to the whole, puri-
fied human being (NG, 148). Though Feme begins as a novel of the New
Objectivity that poses complex moral and political questions, Baum blurs
or even bypasses these, conveying a comforting message for the readership.
The novel begins in a realistic contemporary setting but floats off into
a vague, timeless idyll in a Utopian rural society. This was almost unavoid-
able for a concrete reason: the date of the murder in the novel can be taken
to approximate to the date of Rathenau’s death in 1922, and the date of
Joachim’s death can be fairly accurately pinpointed as 1939, since inform-
ation is given of time elapsed at various stages of the narrative. But Feme was
published in 1926. This means that Baum had to imagine a setting of the
future. The unreality of this “Germany” of the late thirties without Hitler,
the Nuremberg Laws, or the threat of war jars on the postwar reader and
contrasts uneasily with the authentic setting of the novel’s beginning.
Baum was probably aware of this structural problem and the other short-
comings in the novel, for it is the only one of her major works that she
does not mention in her memoirs.
Baum did discuss stud. chem. Helene Willfüer20 in her memoirs with her
customary honesty, judging it to be a work of uneven quality, which, how-
ever, in her opinion captured the sweat, smell, and feeling of the working
atmosphere of impecunious students (Alles, 340). In both parts of the judg-
ment she was accurate. The novel follows the career of Helene, a recently
orphaned and independent-minded doctoral student in chemistry in a
south German university town, who is strongly attracted to her Professor,
Valentin Ambrosius.21 He, however, is obsessed by his passion for his wife,
a violinist, who rejects him. Helene is loved by a medical student, Fritz
Rainer, a sensitive, unhappy young man, who longs to become a musician
and feels himself deeply unsuited to medicine. Helene becomes pregnant by
Fritz, and after repeated unsuccessful attempts to secure an abortion, she
makes a suicide pact with him. At the last moment, Helene’s desire to live
overwhelms her and though Fritz dies by his own hand, she escapes. After a
spell in a remand prison, and a court hearing, she is released. Meanwhile
Professor Ambrosius, whose wife has deserted him for another man, has
made an unsuccessful suicide attempt and is left almost blinded.
Helene goes to Munich to start her research again. She gives birth to
her son, whom she names Valentin, and gains her doctorate. Ambrosius
secures a research post for her in a private laboratory in an idyllic country
setting belonging to the elderly Professor Köbellin, who is researching an
anti-aging drug. Helene and her colleague, a Japanese scientist, make the
breakthrough to produce the drug. Helene secures a highly paid and inde-
pendent position with the company that is licensed to produce the drug,
“Vitalin,” commercially. The novel ends with Helene’s chance meeting
with Ambrosius when they are both on holiday in the same hotel on the
Italian Riviera. Helene decides to try the experiment of life with him.
238 HEATHER VALENCIA
not clear whether the perspective here is Helene’s or Baum’s, so the mes-
sage is ambiguous. The negative presentation of the illegal abortionists is
clear: they are stereotyped, reprehensible figures. The “good” female doc-
tor does not, though, as one might expect, reject the restrictive law that
prevents her from helping Helene. She shows sympathy, but she herself is
morally against abortion: “Ich halte es für unmoralisch, sich einer Verant-
wortung auf diese Weise zu entziehen. . . . Die Härten des Lebens sind es,
an denen man wächst und stark wird.” (HW, 136; I regard it as immoral to
withdraw from a responsibility in this way. . . . it is the difficulties of life
that help one to grow and become strong.) Despite the fact that these
words in fact mirror Helene’s own stoical philosophy of life, they do not
prevent her from desperately seeking another abortionist, and it is only the
police raid on the ex-midwife’s house following the death of her previous
client that prevents Helene from going through with the backstreet
abortion.
It is not until she is in prison after the death of Rainer that Helene
experiences a renewed passion for life, which coincides with the first move-
ments of her baby and gives her the strength to start again. After this, the
novel unequivocally reinforces the joy of motherhood, even under the
almost impossibly difficult circumstances that Helene suffers before find-
ing her secure post with Professor Köbellin. After this turning point, the
idyllic relationship between Helene and her little boy reinforces the
positive image of motherhood.
Other sexual issues are introduced but similarly blurred. For example,
the frustrated lesbian Gudula Rapp is treated ambivalently by the author:
in one of Baum’s typical addresses to her character (HW, 168) she arouses
the reader’s sympathy for this sad, unfulfilled person, who struggles with
poverty, loneliness, and an intractable research topic. Her sexual orienta-
tion is however here defined by the narrative voice as an “abseitige und
kranke Neigung” (a perverse, sick inclination) (HW, 168). She is simply
written out of the novel, leaving for Berlin where she will find anonymity.
Another problem of sexual morality, the bourgeois norms imposing
sexual abstinence on young people, is touched upon. In a short cameo, the
student Marx, frustrated by a long engagement without sexual fulfillment,
once visits a prostitute and contracts venereal disease. Friedel, his fiancée,
learns the truth in a farewell letter written by Helene and forgives him. The
problems of Gudula Rapp and Marx are, on the whole, extraneous to the
main action and no clear stance is taken on these controversial issues of
social morality.
Unclear messages are given on two further moral issues. The first is the
suicide pact. As was the case in Feme with regard to the ethical issue of
murder, so here there is no evidence that either Rainer or Helene has any
moral qualms about their planned suicide. Rainer has just learned that his
father has terminal cancer; his father charges him with carrying on his
242 HEATHER VALENCIA
studies in order to provide for the family, making it clear that he has
bravely rejected the temptation to end his own life immediately, for the
sake of his family. Rainer is very moved by this, and yet soon afterwards he
decides to escape this burden through suicide, adding, presumably, to the
anguish of his dying father and family: neither he nor Helene seems aware
of any moral dilemma here. Similarly, the only allusion to the unborn child
that is being killed is Rainer’s emotional utterance shortly before the sui-
cide attempt: “Es ist ein unbeschreiblich schöner Gedanke, daß du ein
Kind in dir trägst” (HW, 173; It is an indescribably beautiful thought that
you are carrying a child inside you). Neither these two moral issues, nor
any kind of real regret at Rainer’s death, nor doubts of her own actions in
the matter seem to enter Helene’s consciousness in the course of the novel;
this is inconsistent with the conscientious and upright character Baum
portrays.
The final debatable issue in the novel is its ending, where the New
Woman seems in the end to be just another romantic heroine who happily
gives up her hard-won independence for the man she loves. Helene has in
fact always been strongly influenced by male figures: her father, Ambro-
sius, Köbellin, even, for a short time, Rainer. After the turning point in the
prison, however, she gradually gains independence, and her great scientific
success enables her to be absolutely sovereign over her life, as is demon-
strated by her ability to insist on her own terms when negotiating with the
directors of the chemical works. Finally, however, she succumbs to the
sense of protection that Ambrosius gives her, and to his need for her: “Du
mußt alles lassen und bei mir bleiben. Keine Umwege mehr . . . Du wirst
mir helfen, man muß mir helfen. . . . Ich habe eine große Arbeit vor. Ich
kann sie ohne dich nicht machen.” (HW, 304; You must leave everything
and stay with me. No more detours . . . You will help me, I have to be
helped. . . . I have a great project before me, I can’t do it without you).
Though taken aback initially by this apparent request to be his research
assistant, Helene is won over to the “experiment” when she hears from
him that his “great project” is not in the field of chemical research but of
life.24 As in Feme, Baum attempts to fuse the treatment of serious social
issues with the conciliatory ending that her readership expected.
In Menschen im Hotel, Baum’s ability to put her finger on the pulse of
her readership combines with her literary craftsmanship to produce the
most popular of her Ullstein novels.25 The work has a fast-moving plot that
encompasses romance, intrigue, and crime, and an episodic structure remi-
niscent of the techniques of the then burgeoning film industry, which
maintains the momentum of the novel and the involvement of the reader.
The plot focuses on six main characters, who come together during six
days in an elegant hotel in Berlin. This is one of the earliest novels to use a
hotel as the impersonal setting in which a group of strangers can encounter
each other in life-changing ways.26 Some scenes take place outside in the
VICKI BAUM: “A FIRST-RATE SECOND-RATE WRITER”? 243
city of Berlin, but the majority of the action is in the hotel, which repre-
sents different things for the various people who come into contact with it.
Baum evokes the glitter and bustle of the hotel from the point of view
of its clients and staff, enabling ordinary readers to enter a world normally
closed to them. The omniscient narrator presents the events from the dif-
ferent perspectives of the characters, but in this work the author does not
intervene as obtrusively to guide the reader as in earlier novels, allowing
the characters to speak for themselves. Apart from the narrator, one of the
characters, Dr. Otternschlag, functions as a detached observer of the scene.
He is a physically and emotionally damaged First World War veteran who
sits in the hotel lobby, viewing the comings and goings with a world-weary
cynicism that, in fact, masks his loneliness.
The other characters represent various facets of Weimar society.27 Two
figures embody the decaying and slightly tawdry glamour associated with
Weimar Berlin: Baron von Gaigern, an adventurer and thief, is a dashingly
handsome and fascinating figure, attractive to almost everyone he meets,
from the page boy in the hotel to the beautiful dancer Grusinskaya, who
falls in love with him. A great artist who is past her prime, Grusinskaya is
consumed with anguish over the fading of her popularity. Baum depicts
her despair, followed by her reawakening hope when she and Gaigern —
who has come to her room to steal her world-famous pearls — unexpect-
edly experience great tenderness together.
In contrast to the fading Grusinskaya, the vibrant Flämmchen is an
engaging representative of the New Woman: she has to make her own way
in life, is honest and realistic, and views her own transactions without illu-
sions: in order to secure a little enjoyment and luxury she has to sell herself
to men like the industrialist Preysing. She does this without compromising
her own inner standards of decency and honesty, refusing to call him “du”
(the familiar form of “you”), or indulge what she considers to be his per-
verse fantasies, but conscientiously giving him value for money. She and
Gaigern are similar types, basically self-reliant and optimistic characters
who embrace the modern world (in contrast to Otternschlag, Grusinskaya,
and Preysing, for whom the challenges of modernity are essentially
negative).
Preysing is the director of a small provincial textile business. Pompous
and self-important, he is hated by Kringelein, the character with whom the
reader most closely empathizes. Preysing is essentially a man out of his
depth in the intricacies of modern business, and in the end a pathetic fail-
ure; Baum makes us experience his misery by shifting the perspective to
him before, during, and after his agonizing business meeting. Baum does
intervene to tell us that Preysing is basically “ein anständiger, gutwilliger
und unsicherer Mensch” (M, 262; a decent, well-meaning and insecure
person), and she shows him to be a victim of the changing times:
Preysing’s old-fashioned family firm, representing the solidly bourgeois
244 HEATHER VALENCIA
values of the Empire, which made its fortune in articles like tea towels and
conventional worsted suits, as well as materials for uniforms during the
war, is now being displaced by the demand for modern fashions.
The pivotal figure whose fate impinges on all these characters is the
provincial clerk Kringelein, who worked in Preysing’s firm for twenty-
seven years. Dying of cancer, he has realized all his assets in order to come
to Berlin to search for real life. Baum carefully constructs this figure and his
circumstances for maximum identification on the part of her public, large
numbers of whom were provincial white-collar workers and lower middle-
class readers. Kringelein is the archetypal little man whose colorless life has
been unremitting drudgery, and who is now making an escape from it.
This creates reader identification from the start, which is intensified when
on several occasions he stands up to Preysing, culminating in an outburst
in which he passionately decries the wrongs done to downtrodden employ-
ees such as himself by bosses like Preysing. His escape into the luxury and
excitement of the hotel and the city of Berlin vicariously satisfies the long-
ings that Ullstein stimulated in its advertising for the novel: “Wunschtraum
der meisten Menschen ist es, aus dem eigenen Leben in das eines
Reicheren, Höhergestellten zu fliehen” (Most people dream of fleeing
from their own life into the life of someone who is richer and higher in
society).28 Our knowledge of his impending death, which Baum keeps
before our eyes by several episodes of pain and other allusions, ensures our
admiration of his spirit and adds poignancy to his frenzied lust for intense
experience. Finally, the peak of the reader’s vicarious wish-fulfillment
comes at the end of the novel when Kringelein, rather than the dashing
Gaigern or the affluent Preysing, is successful in love. When Flämmchen
flees to his room after Preysing has murdered Gaigern, Kringelein protects
her and she feels for the first time that she is appreciated for herself: “In
Kringeleins Worten entdeckte sie sich zum erstenmal . . . wie einen ver-
grabenen Schatz.” (M, 292; In Kringelein’s words she discovered herself
for the first time . . . like a buried treasure.)
The main thread of the action is Kringelein’s quest; this has striking
similarities with Georg Kaiser’s 1916 play Von morgens bis mitternachts
(From Morning to Midnight), which is also the story of a “little man” in
possession of unexpected riches, on a quest for intense experience. Like
Kaiser’s bank clerk, Kringelein samples various new sensations. As Lynda
King points out “the plot is so arranged that he comes in contact with the
representatives of two sides of Berlin and two views of life in Dr. Ottern-
schlag and Baron Gaigern, and he participates in their versions of life in
order to seek fulfillment” (BSD, 162). Otternschlag’s jaded view is that
there is no such thing as real life: “Das Eigentliche geschieht immer woan-
ders” (M, 49; Real life always happens somewhere else). In the company of
Otternschlag, Kringelein sees the traditional cultural institutions — muse-
ums, ballet — but with Gaigern he experiences modern Berlin and feels
VICKI BAUM: “A FIRST-RATE SECOND-RATE WRITER”? 245
alive for the first time. His transformation is symbolized by his purchase,
under Gaigern’s influence, of a new wardrobe of expensive clothes. For
Kringelein’s experiences with Gaigern, Baum chooses events that exem-
plify the spirit of the modern age and would fascinate the broad readership:
a ride in a fast car, an airplane flight, a boxing match, the erotically charged
atmosphere of the dance. Finally, at a casino, Kringelein wins a large
amount of money that boosts his fast disappearing savings, conveniently
allowing him to plan to take Flämmchen to Paris at the end of the novel.
The new Kringelein who emerges from these experiences is able calmly to
take charge of the situation after Preysing’s murder of Gaigern, and to
experience with Flämmchen what Gaigern fleetingly had with Grusinskaya:
real affection based on tenderness and respect — which for Kringelein is
the “real life” he was seeking.
The novel has, however, another dimension, which has often been
overlooked. Baum gave the first edition of her novel the subtitle “Ein Kol-
portageroman mit Hintergründen” (a trashy novel with enigmas), and
explained in her memoirs that by this label she intended to signal the fact
that she had deliberately used the most hackneyed figures and situations,
which were supposed to be viewed ironically (Alles, 375) — but, she
implies, by means of the irony, some deeper meaning is conveyed.29 If the
“heart-warming” aspects of the novel are examined more closely, it
becomes clear that the life-changing events in the Grand Hotel are all
called into question. Gaigern pays for his great romantic love for Grusin-
skaya with his life: unable to rob his beloved, he tries to steal the money for
his reunion with her in Prague from Preysing, who kills him. Grusinskaya,
whose career has taken an upward turn after her night of love with
Gaigern, phones him; she imagines she is talking to her beloved, but in fact
is speaking passionately to a mute telephone receiver, while his dead body
lies in the hotel. Preysing’s visit to the hotel to achieve the merger that
would save his business ends with the business in ruins, while he has com-
promised his own strict moral code and is arrested for murder. The out-
come for Flämmchen seems positive, but actually Kringelein’s inevitable
death will leave her in virtually the same situation as before. Only
Kringelein has experienced a deeper reality at the end of his life, through
his love for Flämmchen; but even he is not immune from Baum’s irony.
Though he is the main identification figure, Baum distances the reader
from him: although we empathize with him, together with the hotel staff
we smile at his comic appearance. The reader is amused at the provincial
naiveté of his responses to people and events, and even his metamorphosis
into a manly hero at the end of the novel can be seen as tinged with satire.
Most crucially, at the moment of his long-awaited confrontation with
Preysing, his inability to formulate theoretical ideas makes him collapse, as
the narrator comments, into a confusion of “Wichtiges und Nebensäch-
liches, Wahrheiten und Phantasien, Erkenntnisse und Bürotratsch” (M, 266;
246 HEATHER VALENCIA
relevant and irrelevant matters, truth and fantasy, insights and office-
gossip). Here Baum avoids developing a trenchant political argument by
rendering the speaker ridiculous.
The attractions of the affluent, racy lifestyle are often shown, through
the perceptions of the characters themselves, to fall short of expectations.
Preysing finds the naked Flämmchen somehow not quite the same as in her
pinup photo. Kringelein complains to Otternschlag that the modern cock-
tail bar is not as thrilling as its popular image, familiar to him from films
and magazines. Otternschlag takes up the example Kringelein gives, that
the bar stools are not as high as he expected, to universalize this principle:
“Alles stellt man sich höher vor, bis man’s gesehen hat” (M, 49; One
always imagines everything to be higher than it is, until one has seen it).
Otternschlag is also an ambiguous figure. Both the too-obvious sym-
bolism of the damaged side of his face and glass eye and the comic rigidity
of his repeated ritual of enquiring in vain whether there is post for him
detract from his tragic status as a damaged war-victim. On the other hand,
it is his nihilistic view of life that brings the novel to a close, as he sits as
usual in the lobby of the hotel watching the revolving door of the hotel,
and of life, constantly turning. But here too Baum ironically calls his view-
point into question by commenting that he was looking at the street with
his glass eye, unable therefore to see that the sun was shining. In the end-
ing, as throughout the novel, Baum communicates with the reader on sev-
eral levels and with multiple perspectives. Menschen im Hotel is artistically
the most sophisticated of her Ullstein products.
In these three novels, we can discern certain common characteristics
that justify Baum’s inclusion in the category of popular mass literature. She
is a skilful storyteller; her characters are on the whole types, often stereo-
types, easily recognizable to the Weimar reader, but with enough individu-
ality to allow reader identification. She treats complex moral and social
issues of her time, but tends not to develop their implications fully, some-
times using an avoidance strategy, as with Kringelein’s tirade, or glossing
over some of the issues to achieve a harmonious resolution, as in Feme or
Helene Willfüer. In order to achieve her aim, Baum often too obviously
guides the reader by her authorial comments; Lynda King comments that
“telling readers what to think rather than challenging them to think for
themselves is a feature identified with . . . popular literature in general”
(BSD, 163). The nature of her characters — types of Weimar society —
also places Baum in the sphere of the New Objectivity and of the popular
literature of the day.
Ulle, der Zwerg, which appeared in 1924, forms an interesting contrast
to the three later novels.30 Though it shares some of Baum’s later hall-
marks, it is strikingly different in many respects. The main character is a
dwarf, whose appearance causes shock or distaste among most of his con-
temporaries. The novel consists of five chapters that represent different
VICKI BAUM: “A FIRST-RATE SECOND-RATE WRITER”? 247
stages in his life, beginning when he is five years old and ending when he is
about to die, in his mid-thirties. Living in a small town, neglected by his
depressed, drunken father, and his sluttish mother, the child Ulle is
shunned by almost everyone. After his father’s death, his mother sells him
to a traveling sideshow, and after years of being exhibited as a freak, he gets
a job as a clown in a circus. A writer, Johannes von Struensee, befriends
him and uses him as the inspiration for a character in his new play. To great
public and critical acclaim, Ulle plays the jester, Biribon, in the production.
Through this experience Ulle is lifted out of his loneliness and meets culti-
vated people who apparently treat him as a friend and equal. His moment
of happiness is brief: he becomes vain and affected, a grotesque parody of
the theatrical personality, and, without his realizing it, is again the butt of
mockery. At the end of the season he is left without a role or any source
of income and his new friends drop him. He goes back to his home town,
and after a fruitless attempt to gain work in his former circus, he finds a
menial job in a cheap sideshow. Promising to return to take up the job, he
goes to revisit his old street. His old house is in disrepair and the one per-
son who had befriended him has gone. At the end of the novel, Ulle,
whose physical deterioration has been advancing since he began working as
an actor, is sitting on the edge of the sidewalk with his feet in the gutter
like the five-year-old in the opening scene, inwardly reconciled to his swift-
approaching deliverance from the prison of his life.
The darkness of the theme is reflected in the book’s motto: “Das
Innerste der Welt ist Einsamkeit” (The innermost core of the world is
loneliness). Baum conveys the experience of the rejected outsider with
great insight.31 Though the overall narrative perspective is that of the
omniscient narrator, the main focus of the narration is Ulle’s experience,
and his feelings are described in detail. His sensitivity and intelligence
intensify his loneliness and frustration, as he can see through the evasive or
hypocritical strategies of those around him: when the district nurse
encourages him by saying “Waschen mußt du dich. Davon wirst du groß
und stark” (You must wash yourself. That will make you big and strong),
the child’s inner reaction is “Ihr lacht mich aus . . . Ihr macht einen Affen
aus mir” (U, 42; You’re all making fun of me . . . You’re making a fool of
me). Baum does not simplify or gloss over the issues of social rejection, but
presents them in their complexity: individuals and social institutions are
shown, not as inherently malevolent, but as confused, embarrassed, ignor-
ant, prejudiced, or fearful of the opinions of others. One encounter between
Ulle and a proto-Nazi group of Wandervögel (a German youth movement)
unequivocally points to future developments.
The influence of Thomas Mann is very evident, though not to the
detriment of the novel, for Mann’s motif of the sensitive social misfit who
at once envies and despises the unthinking “blond, blue-eyed” integrated
people in society is an appropriate expression of Ulle’s relationship to
248 HEATHER VALENCIA
Notes
1
Lynda J. King, Best-Sellers by Design: Vicki Baum and the House of Ullstein
(Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1988), 21. Subsequent references to this work are cited
in the text using the abbreviation BSD and the page number.
250 HEATHER VALENCIA
2
Hermann Kesten, preface to Vierundzwanzig neue deutsche Erzähler, ed. Her-
mann Kesten (Berlin: G. Kiepenheuer, 1929), 7, 9, quoted in BSD, 152.
3
All translations are my own, unless otherwise noted.
4
Vicki Baum, Es war alles ganz anders: Erinnerungen (Stuttgart, Munich: Lizen-
zausgabe des Deutschen Bücherbundes GmbH & Co. mit Genehmigung des Ver-
lages Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne, 1987), 89. Subsequent references to this
work are cited in the text using the abbreviation Alles and the page number.
5
Vicki Baum, Frühe Schatten: Das Ende einer Kindheit (Berlin: Erich Reiß Verlag,
1914).
6
Vicki Baum, Der Eingang zur Bühne (Berlin: Ullstein, 1920) and Die Tänze der
Ina Raffay: Ein Leben (Berlin: Ullstein, 1921).
7
Vicki Baum, Die anderen Tage (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1922); Die
Welt ohne Sünde: Der Roman einer Minute (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt,
1923); Ulle, der Zwerg (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1924); Der Weg
(Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1925).
8
“Thomas Mann, mein großer Schutzheiliger, hatte mich für würdig befunden! Er
persönlich hatte mir die Tore zur Literatur geöffnet! So wenigstens sah ich das
damals” (Alles, 337; Thomas Mann, my great guardian angel, had found me wor-
thy! He personally had opened the gates of literature for me. That, at least, is how
I saw it at that time).
9
The novel, translated by Basil Creighton, became famous throughout the
English-speaking world. Baum, Grand Hotel (London: G. Bles, 1930, and Garden
City, NY: Doubleday, 1931).
10
It has to be said, however, that neither the works that she placed with the
Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, because she saw them as being of higher literary value (see
note 7), nor the later novel The Mustard Seed (1953), which she published initially
under a pseudonym in order to prove herself and rid herself of the Menschen im
Hotel label, achieved any great success.
11
The word “Feme” is difficult to translate exactly: it can mean a secret, kangaroo
court, or, in its compound form “Fememord,” a political assassination. The associ-
ated “ein Verfemter” means an outlawed person. All these aspects of the term are
relevant to the novel’s theme. “Secret Sentence” is the title of the English-language
editions published by G. Bles, London and Doubleday, New York, both in 1932.
12
Vicki Baum, Feme (Berlin: Verlag Ullstein, 1926). References to this work are
cited in the text using the abbreviation F and the page number.
13
Hans-Peter Rüsing, Die Nationalistischen Geheimbünde in der Literatur der
Weimarer Republik (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2003) 11. Subsequent refer-
ences to this work are cited in the text using the abbreviation NG and the page
number.
14
Martin Sabrow, Die verdrängte Verschwörung: Der Rathenau-Mord und die
deutsche Gegenrevolution (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1999), 33, quoted in NG
273, n. 17.
15
It is a reference to the heroic hussars under Ferdinand von Schill, who took it
upon themselves to charge into battle against Napoleon despite the vacillation of
VICKI BAUM: “A FIRST-RATE SECOND-RATE WRITER”? 251
the Kaiser. Many of them were executed by the French, and many opponents of
Weimar saw this historical incident as inspirational. Cf. NG, 140.
16
Erich Maria Remarque, Im Westen nichts Neues (Berlin: Propyläen Verlag, 1929).
The Propyläen Press belonged to the House of Ullstein.
17
Askanius turns out to be an empty poseur who manages to escape with a few
minor charges against him, and eventually makes a fine career in government.
18
The subtitle was not used in any edition of the book.
19
The little town incorporates all the clichés of kitsch romanticism; it is medieval
and described as “enchanted” with the perfume of the linden-trees, church bells,
the smithy, the potter selling his wares on an old handcart that rattles over the
cobblestones, the old woman at the handloom, and various other attributes
(F, 174–76).
20
Vicki Baum, stud. chem. Helene Willfüer (Berlin: Ullstein Verlag, 1928). Refer-
ences to this work are cited in the text using the abbreviation HW and the page
number.
21
The name of the town is not mentioned in the novel, but Baum implies in her
memoirs that it is Heidelberg.
22
It is worth noting that whereas he succumbed to the worst of these detours, his
attempt to commit suicide, which had grievous consequences for him, Helene
drew back from this temptation in time, and also avoided the other path, abortion.
23
Nicole Nottelmann shows that various formulae are used in this novel: those of
the fairy tale, the “Entwicklungsroman” (novel of personal development), the
romance, the scientific novel, and the crime novel. See Nicole Nottelmann, Strate-
gien des Erfolgs: Narratologische Analysen exemplarischer Romane Vicki Baums
(Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2002), 89–109. Subsequent references to
this work are cited in the text using the abbreviation SE and the page number.
24
Several contemporary female readers felt that the author had in the end compro-
mised the New Woman for the sake of the romantic happy ending; see, for exam-
ple, Lucie Becher, in the Sächsische Volkszeitung, 17 February 1929, and Gabriele
Reuter in the Vossische Zeitung, 17 March 1929.
25
Vicki Baum, Menschen im Hotel (Berlin: Ullstein, 1929). The edition used here is
published by Fackelverlag, Olten, Stuttgart, Salzburg, 1963. Subsequent references
to this work are cited in the text using the abbreviation M and the page number.
For a much more detailed analysis of Menschen im Hotel than is possible here, see
BSD, 154–201 and SE, 140–95.
26
Several “hotel” novels predated Menschen im Hotel, notably Arnold Bennett’s
Grand Babylon Hotel (1902), and Joseph Roth’s Hotel Savoy (1924). Vicki Baum
used this genre in two other novels, Hotel Shanghai (Amsterdam: Querido Verlag,
1939) and Hotel Berlin ’43 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1944). The genre is of
course a variant of the many works that use the convention of a group of strangers
being thrown together in a particular setting or for a common purpose, such as
Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (1387), Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis
Rey (1927), Stefan Zweig’s Schachnovelle (1942), and, more recently, Ann Patch-
ett’s Bel Canto (2001).
252 HEATHER VALENCIA
27
Lynda J. King points out, however, that “the topical theme was not depicted in
a manner in any way especially tied to Germany in 1929” (BSD, 159). This univer-
sality contributed to the huge international success of Menschen im Hotel.
28
Advertisement for Menschen im Hotel in Vossische Zeitung, 7 April 1929.
29
Nottelmann’s analysis of the novel discusses in detail the ironical implications of
the subtitle.
30
The edition used here is published by Ullstein in Berlin, no date. References to
this work are cited in the text using the abbreviation U and the page number.
31
There is undoubtedly an autobiographical and cathartic element in her portrayal
of Ulle: Baum alludes in her memoirs to her constant feeling of being an unloved,
isolated, and ugly child, and asserts about the writing of Ulle, der Zwerg: “Wenn
ich . . . ein erwachsener Mensch geworden war, so durch dieses Buch.” (Alles,
324; If I . . . had become an adult, it was through this book).
32
The language and surrealism of this episode illustrate most clearly the influence
of Expressionism, which is still apparent in this work.
33
Cf. Thomas Mann, Der Tod in Venedig, 1912.
12: Hans Fallada’s Literary Breakthrough:
Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben and
Kleiner Mann — was nun?
Jenny Williams
He was fortunate to survive a suicide pact in October 1911 that took the
form of a duel fought over the honor of a young woman and left his close
friend, Hanns Dietrich von Necker, dead. This brought his education to an
abrupt end some eighteen months before he was due to finish secondary
school and he was admitted to Tannenfeld sanatorium in Thüringen as a
patient of Dr. Artur Tecklenburg. On his release in September 1913 he
trained as a steward on a nearby estate and spent most of the First World
War working in agriculture. The death of his younger brother on the West-
ern Front in August 1918 caused Ditzen to fall ill, and while undergoing
treatment for a stomach ulcer he became addicted to morphine.
While the 1920s saw Ditzen publish two Expressionist novels — Der
junge Goedeschal (Young Goedeschal, 1920) and Anton und Gerda
(1923)6 — he spent almost four years of the decade either in clinics being
treated for alcohol and drug addiction or in prison as a result of criminal
activities to feed his addiction. He emerged from Neumünster prison on
10 May 1928, cured of alcoholism and drug addiction, and after a difficult
period of unemployment he found work with a local newspaper. In April
1929 he married Anna Issel, who brought stability into his life and pro-
vided the support he needed to write. It was Ditzen’s experience in
Neumünster that formed the basis of Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben.
In January 1930 Ernst Rowohlt, who had published Ditzen’s first two
novels, offered him a job in his publishing house in Berlin. Rowohlt, who
knew of Ditzen’s plans for a new novel, gave him the afternoons free in
order to write. One month later Ditzen began Bauern, Bonzen und
Bomben; he submitted it in September 1930. Ditzen’s next novel, Kleiner
Mann — was nun? turned Hans Fallada into an international best-selling
author overnight. Both novels are critical responses to contemporary social
and political issues. In Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben Ditzen turns the spot-
light on the malaise at the heart of the Weimar Republic. In Kleiner Mann —
was nun? he depicts the effects of the greatest economic crisis Germany
had ever experienced on the lives of ordinary people. Critics claim with
some justification that Fallada’s novels are a rich source of information
about the attitudes, behavior, and modes of expression of individuals and
groups who otherwise escape the attention of historians.7
Ditzen’s success was due largely to the accurate, lively, and sympa-
thetic description of the fate of the “little man,” the petit-bourgeois, in a
time of great social upheaval. It was to be his great misfortune that this lit-
erary success coincided with the rise of National Socialism, which, once it
had seized power, did not countenance criticism.
In April 1933 Ditzen was arrested by the SA (storm troopers) and held
for 10 days as the result of a malicious denunciation. His realisation that
there was no redress for this injustice in the Third Reich precipitated a ner-
vous breakdown, which lasted into the summer and was compounded by
the death of one of his twin daughters shortly after her birth in July. In
HANS FALLADA’S LITERARY BREAKTHROUGH 255
October Ditzen moved with his wife, three-year-old son, and surviving
baby daughter to a smallholding in the remote hamlet of Carwitz near
Feldberg in Mecklenburg, where he hoped to weather the storm of
Nazism. While initially very happy and productive in his rural idyll, Ditzen
soon discovered that the tentacles of the Nazi party machine reached into
every corner of Germany.
His next novel, Wer einmal aus dem Blechnapf frißt (Once a Jailbird,
1934), which dealt with the rehabilitation of offenders and the problem of
recidivism was not well received by the critics. Then Wir hatten mal ein
Kind (Once We Had a Child, 1934), which drew inspiration from Wil-
helm Raabe and Jean Paul and was a lifelong favourite of the author’s, did
not meet with the approval of the authorities on account of its less than
exemplary protagonist. Ditzen’s attempt to write a veiled critique of Nazi
Germany in Altes Herz geht auf die Reise (Old Heart Goes on a Journey)
resulted in his being declared an “unerwünschter Autor” (undesirable
author) in 1935, which caused him to have another nervous breakdown.
After that he adopted a number of survival strategies: he wrote children’s
books, light, ahistorical, entertaining fiction, fictionalized memoirs, and
film scripts, as well as translations.
The one novel of merit that Ditzen wrote between 1935 and 1945 was
Wolf unter Wölfen (Wolf among the Wolves, 1937), which marked a return
to the socio-critical approach of Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben, Kleiner
Mann — was nun? and Wer einmal aus dem Blechnapf frißt. In it Ditzen
describes the effects of the economic crises of the Weimar Republic on the
lives of Germans both in the cities and on the land. The Nazi literary
authorities read this work as a critique of the Weimar Republic and were
therefore willing to tolerate it.
Ditzen’s difficulties as an author were compounded by the denuncia-
tions that became a regular feature of life in Carwitz. His alcoholism and
extra-marital affairs also contributed to the breakdown of his marriage,
which ended in divorce in July 1944. A drunken incident in August 1944
resulted in his admission to a psychiatric prison where, as so often before,
he found salvation in writing. The result, Der Trinker (1950; The Drinker,
1989), is one of the most harrowing literary depictions of alcoholism in
any language.
On his release he remarried and took up residence in nearby Feldberg.
When the Soviet army arrived there in the spring of 1945, Ditzen was
appointed mayor. After suffering a complete nervous breakdown in
August, in September he moved with his wife to Berlin. There he was
sought out by Johannes R. Becher, who provided food, clothing, and shel-
ter and encouraged Ditzen to write. Becher, whose youthful rebellion had
taken a similar course to Ditzen’s before he channelled his energies into
left-wing politics, viewed Ditzen as part of the antifascist, democratic
cultural movement he was trying to foster in the Soviet sector. Under
256 JENNY WILLIAMS
and after the event. The farmers, who have been adversely affected by the
crisis in agriculture, are unable to pay their taxes, and the authorities react
by seizing and auctioning their livestock, machinery, and property. The
farmers resist the bailiffs by embarking on a campaign of civil disobedience.
Right-wing elements, sympathetic to the farmers and/or opposed to the
Weimar Republic, plant two bombs aimed at members and employees of
the SPD administration.
One of the farmers’ leaders, Reimers, is imprisoned in Altholm, and
the farmers plan a mass demonstration in the town to celebrate his release.
The SPD regional government wants to ban the march, but the SPD
mayor of Altholm, who has expended much time and energy on cultivating
good relations with the farming community, refuses to implement a ban.
The demonstration is infiltrated by a right-wing agitator, who designs and
carries a provocative flag that attracts the attention of the police. Because
of the incompetence of the police, a melee ensues, resulting in a number of
casualties. The reinforcements sent by the regional government move in,
disperse the farmers’ gathering, and impound the flag. This incident,
which causes strong reactions across the political spectrum in both the
town and the surrounding countryside, would probably have had no fur-
ther serious consequences, had not a mischievous anonymous letter
appeared in a local newspaper, purporting to come from a local business-
man, in which the fear was expressed that the farming community might
initiate a boycott of Altholm. The leadership of the farmers’ movement
needs no further encouragement, and a boycott is introduced.
In the court case arising from the disturbances during the demonstra-
tion, the court finds the Chief of Police objectively in the wrong but sub-
jectively in the right and passes extremely lenient sentences on the leaders
of the farmers’ movement. The SPD mayor is forced by his party to resign
and is sent to be mayor of another town at some distance from Altholm. As
he leaves, the farmers are assembling for a demonstration that will culmi-
nate in their flag being returned to them. This demonstration, too, has
been banned by the regional government, and the various political factions
in Altholm are positioning themselves to exploit the farmers’ demonstra-
tion for their own electoral advantage.
Stefan Nienhaus ascribes the novel’s lack of commercial success in
1931 to the fact that the novel is based on groups of characters — the
farmers, the journalists, the various political parties — and does not have a
clearly identifiable hero.11 A possible candidate for the title of hero, the
larger-than-life SPD mayor Gareis, who has done much good in Altholm,
often stoops to less-than-honest means to achieve his (mostly) laudable
ends. He is, for example, responsible for the sacking of Max Tredup, the
first in a long line of Fallada’s “little men.”
Tredup ekes out a miserable existence selling advertising space in a
right-wing newspaper and supplements his wage by addressing envelopes
258 JENNY WILLIAMS
or taking photographs in order to feed, clothe, and house himself, his wife,
and their two children. A stroke of luck enables him to sell some politically
sensitive photographs to Gareis for 1,000 marks, which he then buries in a
remote location near the coast. Through no fault of his own, he is arrested
and held in prison on suspicion of having planted a bomb and is only
released after the intervention of the prison governor. For Tredup the only
consolation in a hostile and unpredictable environment is to be found in
the bosom of his family. As Liersch observed in his review of the first GDR
edition of the novel, the motif of individual happiness in personal relation-
ships as a response to economic and social crises, which became the hall-
mark of Fallada’s writings in the 1930s, finds its first expression in Bauern,
Bonzen und Bomben.12
Tredup does fulfill his dream to become a journalist, but his happiness
is short-lived, thanks to Gareis’s intervention. When Tredup subsequently
goes to retrieve the money he has hidden in order to start a new life for
himself and his family in a different place, he is murdered by a mentally
deranged, avaricious farmer; the farmer comments that some people have
no luck at all (363), which could stand as Tredup’s epitaph.
The owners, editors, and journalists of the four newspapers in Altholm
are portrayed in an almost entirely negative light. One owner, Gebhardt,
who owns one liberal and one right-wing newspaper, is interested only in
profit: “Wenn es Geld bringt, darfst du mir and mich verwechseln” (It
doesn’t matter how you write, as long as you make a profit), says one of his
editors (140). Stuff, editor of the Chronik, writes adverse reports on busi-
nesses that refuse to buy advertising space, and pens reviews of films he
cannot be bothered to watch. Padberg, the editor of the pro-farmer
Nachrichten, not only reports the news but also takes a leading role in
making it.
The farmers are portrayed as naïve in insisting on nonviolent protest
while admitting the agitator and bomber Georg Henning into their ranks.
They are also shown to be easily led and politically disorganized. Only two
farmers are described in any detail: Banz, a loner who hides explosives in
his barn and thinks nothing of murdering Tredup and burying his body,
and Reimers, who is identified in Tredup’s photograph as resisting the
bailiffs. Reimers refuses to go on the run, is arrested and imprisoned, and
is subsequently the focus of the farmers’ demonstration. Fallada shows him
to be an astute political thinker as well as a sly old fox who leads the police
a merry dance when they come to arrest him.
Most contemporary critics viewed Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben in a
positive light. Adjectives such as “lebenswahr/lebensnah” (true to life) and
“packend/spannend” (gripping) recur in the collection of almost four
hundred reviews in the Hans Fallada Archive. The main point of disagree-
ment among the critics lies in their assessment of the narrative perspective
in the novel. Max Krell, in his reader’s report on the manuscript, expressed
HANS FALLADA’S LITERARY BREAKTHROUGH 259
the view that despite the narrator’s attempt at objectivity his sympathies lie
with the farmers.13 Rowohlt’s pre-launch publicity described Bauern,
Bonzen und Bomben as a “portrayal of the farmers’ movement against the
state.”14 The choice of title further reinforced the view that the farmers
formed the main focus of the novel. Until recently, the received wisdom in
Fallada research has been that this title was imposed by the Kölnische Illus-
trierte, the newspaper that serialized the novel prior to publication. How-
ever, Wilkes has convincingly shown this view to be mistaken by referring
to Ditzen’s private correspondence, for Ditzen mentions the title Bauern,
Bonzen und Bomben in a letter to his sister Elisabeth on 17 July 1930 —
almost three months before Rowohlt opened negotiations with the Kölnis-
che Illustrierte.15
The critic Carl Misch, in the influential Vossische Zeitung, concluded
that Fallada was on the side of the farmers. Peter Suhrkamp, Felix
Riemkasten, and Siegfried Kracauer decided that the narrator had no clear
point of view, although Kracauer suspected that he was sympathetic to the
farmers. Kurt Tucholsky viewed the novel as a depiction of the failure of
German democracy, for which — in Tucholsky’s view — the Social
Democrats were to blame. The majority of the right-wing press praised
Fallada’s sympathetic portrayal of the farmers and, by implication, his cri-
tique of the Weimar Republic. Most left-wing publications criticized the
sympathetic portrayal of the farmers and interpreted the novel as an attack
on the SPD and the Republic; the Communist Linkskurve even went so far
as to title their review “A Fascist Farmers’ Novel.”
Heinz Dietrich Kenter, who collaborated with Fallada on a stage ver-
sion of the novel, wrote in Die Literatur in July 1931 that Bauern, Bonzen
und Bomben was primarily about the current state of democracy in Ger-
many. This was the view of Fallada himself, who wrote in a letter to his
brother-in-law, Fritz Bechert, on 26 November 1930, that his aim was to
evoke the reaction “poor Germany” and not “poor farmers.” In a letter to
his mother on 29 March 1931 he rejected the idea that he had written a
novel about farmers or that he had adopted an extremely right-wing point
of view.
The question of narrative perspective has been central to the reception
of Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben since its first publication. National Social-
ism regarded the novel as an indictment of the Weimar Republic and, in its
portrayal of the farmers’ movement, prophetic of the coming revolution.
Reviewers of the 1939 edition, published by Vier Falken Verlag, described
the novel as an important historical document from a terrible period in
German history that had been successfully overcome. Fallada’s preface to
this edition concludes with the sentence: “Wie ein Mahnmal erscheint mir heute
dieses Buch, Mahnmal und Warnung: hier sind wir hindurchgegangen —
wir dürfen es nie vergessen!” (Nowadays this book seems to me like a memo-
rial, a memorial and a warning: this is what we have been through — we
260 JENNY WILLIAMS
must never forget it.)16 This is the kind of ambiguity to which non-Nazi
writers who remained in Germany were reduced. Post-1945 this sentence
can read as a veiled attack on the Nazi regime; in the context of 1939 it
could be read as an endorsement of it.
The issue of narrative perspective surfaced in North American Fallada
scholarship in 1990, when Shookman accused Fallada not only of being on
the side of the farmers but also of being anti-Semitic and trying to under-
mine the Weimar Republic in his novel.17 These claims have subsequently
been refuted by Thomas Bredohl, who draws on Fallada’s correspondence
and other published and unpublished writings of the period, Reinhard
K. Zachau, who bases his argument on an analysis of the novel itself, and
Henry Ashby Turner, who places the novel in its contemporary context and
insists on the distinction between literature and history.18 As Bauern, Bonzen
und Bomben has not been translated into English, discussion of the novel in
the English-speaking world has been restricted to German Studies circles.
The differing interpretations of the narrative perspective in Bauern,
Bonzen und Bomben are due to a large extent to the new style of writing
that Ditzen evolved in this novel. After the intensely personal nature of his
first two novels, he was determined that “der Autor diesmal im Buch ganz
fehlen [sollte]. Mit keinem Wort sollte er andeuten, was er selbst über das
Erzählte dachte, das war Sache des Lesers” (the author should be com-
pletely absent in this book. In no way should he indicate his views on the
story: that should be left to the reader).19 An immediate result of this
approach is the preponderance of direct speech: Heidrun Bauer has calcu-
lated that direct speech accounts for some two-thirds of the novel.20 It was
a major achievement to produce credible dialogue for such a wide range of
characters: farmers, journalists, politicians, businessmen, and lawyers. Fal-
lada also succeeds in introducing variation into the speech of individual
characters. Gareis speaks differently to his friend Stein than he does to the
farmers; the businessmen express themselves differently when sober and
when drunk. Furthermore, as Gerhard Schmidt-Henkel has shown, the
rhetoric of the politicians in the novel is entirely authentic.21 Fallada later
confessed how difficult he found it to construct and sustain the dialogue.22
However, this technique attracted such critical acclaim that he continued
to use it in his next two novels, Kleiner Mann — was nun? and Wer einmal
aus dem Blechnapf frißt.
Nils Arnöman has drawn attention to the similarities between Fallada’s
narrative style and that of Ernest Hemingway.23 Fallada published an essay
on Hemingway in Die Literatur in September 1931, in which he expressed
his admiration for a narrative style in which the narrator is almost com-
pletely absent, there is no description of the emotional dimension of the
story, and the narration is reduced to a minimum. Zachau has remarked
that Fallada could be writing about his own style in this essay as well as
Hemingway’s.24
HANS FALLADA’S LITERARY BREAKTHROUGH 261
attitude is most clearly in evidence in the chapter headings, which take the
form of a commentary on the narration to come. The heading to the second
chapter provides a good example of the narrator’s approach: “Mutter
Mörschel — Herr Mörschel — Karl Mörschel. Pinneberg gerät in die
Mörschelei” (Mother Mörschel — Mr. Mörschel — Karl Mörschel.
Pinneberg enters Mörschelland). This is the chapter where the petty bour-
geois Pinneberg meets his proletarian in-laws and is shocked and
embarrassed by their working-class habits. By adding the suffix “ei” to the
surname, the narrator conjures up fairy-tale and Romantic associations that
stand in stark contrast to the reality he is about to describe.
Fallada’s use of dialogue to carry the plot, which he first demonstrated
in Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben, is further developed in Kleiner Mann —
was nun? The scene depicted in Mandel’s department store, where the
salesman Pinneberg attempts to sell an evening suit to a man accompanied
by his wife, mother, and sister marks a high point of this stylistic device.
After the four characters and Pinneberg have been introduced (95–96), the
action is carried entirely by direct speech for thirty-nine exchanges before a
short sentence informing the reader of Pinneberg’s thoughts. Another four-
teen instances of direct speech follow before a description of the customers’
attitudes marks a return to a more conventional pattern of discourse.
A major factor in the success of Kleiner Mann — was nun? was
undoubtedly Fallada’s answer to the question “what now?” in the title. In a
letter to Herr Benda on 3 November 1932 he wrote: “die Lösung, die Erlö-
sung kann nur im Privaten liegen. Im Falle Pinneberg ist es Lämmchen . . .”
(the solution, indeed salvation, can only be found in the private sphere. In
Pinneberg’s case, this means Lämmchen . . .). The highly idealized figure of
Lämmchen, whom more than one reviewer described as a Madonna, is the
real heroine of the novel. It is her patience, diligence, determination, and
devotion to her husband and son that keep the Pinneberg family together.
Looking back over the writing of this novel, Ditzen wrote: “Vielleicht wollte
ich einmal — ganz im Anfang — einen Arbeitslosenroman schreiben, aber
dann ist dies Buch ganz allmählich und unmerklich Zeugnis für eine Frau
geworden” (Perhaps in the beginning I may have intended to write a novel
about the unemployed, but gradually and imperceptibly this book became a
testament to a woman).30 The woman in question was Ditzen’s first wife,
Anna, to whom he felt a deep debt of gratitude. Indeed the author’s own
marriage, the birth of his son, and his personal experience of unemployment
played a major role in the genesis of Kleiner Mann — was nun? The happy
ending, to which the figure of Lämmchen is crucial, obviously made a major
contribution to the popularity of the novel.
The importance attached to decency in Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben is
developed further in Kleiner Mann — was nun? While Tredup gradually
abandons decency as he is overwhelmed by forces outside his control, Pin-
neberg clings to decency as a bulwark against the same forces. Even when
HANS FALLADA’S LITERARY BREAKTHROUGH 265
Notes
The author wishes to express her gratitude to Ms. Erika Becker of the Hans Fallada
Archive, Carwitz, for her assistance in the preparation of this essay.
1
Siegfried Kracauer, “Über den Schriftsteller,” Die neue Rundschau 42, no. 6
(1931): 860–62.
2
The edition cited in this essay is Hans Fallada, Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben
(Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1964). All page numbers refer to this edition.
3
Hans Fallada, Kleiner Mann — was nun? (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1932); In English,
Little Man — What Now? trans. Susan Bennett (London: Libris, 1996).
4
Günter Caspar, “Nachwort” in Hans Fallada, Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben
(Berlin: Aufbau, 1964), 619–76; here, 675.
5
The following biographical survey is based on Jenny Williams, More Lives Than
One: A Biography of Hans Fallada (London: Libris, 1998). See also Werner Liersch,
HANS FALLADA’S LITERARY BREAKTHROUGH 267
Hans Fallada: Sein großes kleines Leben (Hildesheim: Claasen, 1993); Hans Fal-
lada: Sein Leben in Bildern und Briefen, ed. Gunnar Müller-Waldeck and Roland
Ulrich, with a foreword by Uli Ditzen (Berlin: Aufbau, 1997).
6
Hans Fallada, Das Frühwerk (Berlin: Aufbau, 1993), 2 vols.; vol. 1, Die Romane.
7
See particularly Henry Ashby Turner, “Fallada for Historians,” German Studies
Review 26, no. 3 (2003): 477–92.
8
Hans Fallada, “Wie ich Schriftsteller wurde,” in Lieschens Sieg und andere Erzäh-
lungen (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1980), 189–230; here, 195.
9
Roland Ulrich, “Gefängnis als ästhetischer Erfahrungsraum bei Fallada,” in Hans
Fallada: Beiträge zu Leben und Werk, ed. Gunnar Müller-Waldeck and Roland
Ulrich (Rostock: Hinstorff, 1995), 130–40.
10
For a detailed discussion of the relationship between fact and fiction in Bauern,
Bonzen und Bomben, see Martin Sadek, “Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben: Realität und
Roman,” in Hans Fallada: Werk und Wirkung, ed. Rudolf Wolff (Bonn: Bouvier,
1983); Tom Crepon and Marianne Dwars, An der Schwale liegt (kein) Märchen
(Neumünster: Karl Wachholtz Verlag, 1993); Michelle Le Bars, “Die Landvolkbewe-
gung in Schleswig-Holstein: Geschichte und Literatur,” in Gunnar Müller-Waldeck
and Roland Ulrich, Hans Fallada: Beiträge zu Leben und Werk, 67–99.
11
Stefan Nienhaus, “Was heißt und wie wird man ein volkstümlicher Autor? Über-
legungen zur Unterhaltungsliteratur in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts am
Beispiel Hans Falladas,” Hans Fallada Jahrbuch 4, ed. Patricia Fritsch-Lange and
Erika Becker (Neubrandenburg: federchen Verlag, 2003), 155–70. In a letter to his
parents on 13 July 1930 Ditzen himself expressed the fear that the novel might
have too many characters.
12
Werner Liersch, “Die dritte Dimension: Hans Fallada: Bauern, Bonzen und
Bomben,” Neue Deutsche Literatur 7 (1965): 167–72. For a detailed discussion of
this motif, see also Geoff Wilkes, Hans Fallada’s Crisis Novels, 1931–1947 (Bern:
Peter Lang, 2002).
13
Letter from Max Krell to Ernst Rowohlt, 18 July 1930. All the letters cited in
this essay are to be found in the Hans Fallada Archive, Carwitz, Mecklenburg.
14
Letter accompanying promotional materials, 12 May 1931. This and the reviews
discussed below are all to be found in the Hans Fallada Archive.
15
Geoff Wilkes, “The Title of Hans Fallada’s Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben,” Jour-
nal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association 88
(1997): 97–99.
16
Hans Fallada, Bauern Bonzen und Bomben (Berlin: Vier Falken Verlag, 1939).
17
Ellis Shookman, “Making History in Hans Fallada’s Bauern, Bonzen und
Bomben: Schleswig-Holstein, Nazism and the Landvolkbewegung,” German Studies
Review 13, no. 3 (1990): 461–80.
18
Thomas Bredohl, “Some Thoughts on the Political Opinions of Hans Fallada: A
Response to Ellis Shookman,” German Studies Review 15, no. 3 (1992): 525–45;
Reinhard K. Zachau, “Neue Angriffe auf Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben,” in Hans
Fallada Jahrbuch 1, ed. Rainer Ortner and Gunnar Müller-Waldeck (Neubranden-
burg: federchen Verlag, 1995) 79–94; Henry Ashby Turner, “Fallada for Historians.”
268 JENNY WILLIAMS
19
Hans Fallada, Heute bei uns zu Haus (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1981), 23.
20
Heidrun Bauer, “Zur Funktion der Gespräche in den Romanen Hans Falladas,”
diss., University of Vienna, 1971.
21
Gerhard Schmidt-Henkel, “Hans Falladas Roman Bauern, Bonzen und Bomben:
Zum Genretypus und zum Erzählmodell,” in Gunnar Müller-Waldeck and Roland
Ulrich, Hans Fallada: Beiträge zu Leben und Werk, 45–66.
22
Hans Fallada, “Wie ich Schriftsteller wurde,” 208–9.
23
Nils Arnöman, “Die Funktion der Kinder in den Texten Hans Falladas,” in Gun-
nar Müller-Waldeck and Roland Ulrich, Hans Fallada: Beiträge zu Leben und Werk,
155–71.
24
Reinhard K. Zachau, “Wohnräume in A Farewell to Arms und Kleiner Mann —
was nun?” in Patricia Fritsch-Lange and Erika Becker, Hans Fallada Jahrbuch 4,
57–66; here, 59.
25
Geoff Wilkes, Hans Fallada’s Crisis Novels, 1931–1947, 36–37.
26
For an account of Geyer’s life and friendship with Ditzen, see Hannes Lamp,
Fallada unter Wölfen (Friedland: Verlag Druckerei Steffen, 2002), 18, 22–24,
26–29, 39–42, 116–17.
27
Hans Fallada, “Die große Liebe,” in Das Frühwerk (Berlin: Aufbau, 1993), 2 vols.,
2: 113–74; Hans Fallada, “Der Apparat der Liebe,” in Das Frühwerk 2:175–280.
28
Letter from Monty Jacobs to Hans Fallada, 24 June 1932.
29
The edition cited in this essay is Hans Fallada, Kleiner Mann — was nun? (Rein-
bek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1978). All page numbers refer to this edition. For a
more detailed discussion of its success, see Jenny Williams, “Some Thoughts on the
Success of Hans Fallada’s Kleiner Mann — was nun?” German Life and Letters 40,
no. 4 (1987): 306–18.
30
Letter to Herr Hünich, 17 October 1932.
31
Letter to Dr. Zellner, 27 November 1932.
32
For a detailed discussion of the role of personal values in Fallada’s work, see
Wilkes, Hans Fallada’s Crisis Novels, 1931–1947.
33
Letter to Dr. Gawronski, 6 April 1936.
34
For a more detailed discussion of the American translation, see Jenny Williams,
“Hans Fallada in englischer Übersetzung: Zu Problemen der literarischen Übertra-
gung,” in Dokumentation: Referate und Reden gehalten anläßlich der Gründung
der Hans-Fallada-Gesellschaft e.V. am 21. Juli 1991 (Feldberg: Fallada-Archiv,
1991), 38–50.
35
Reinhard K. Zachau, “Lämmchen als Vamp: Der Hollywood-Film Little Man,
What Now?” in Hans Fallada Jahrbuch 3, ed. Patricia Fritsch and Roland Ulrich
(Neubrandenburg: federchen Verlag, 2000), 247–63.
36
For an account of the novel’s reception in the United States, see Thomas Peter,
Hans Falladas Romane in den USA, 1930–1990 (Umeå: Umeå University, 2003).
37
Cited in Zachau, “Lämmchen als Vamp,” 254.
38
Letter to Ernst Rowohlt, 27 July 1934.
Contributors
which appeared in German in 2002 as Mehr Leben als eins. She also co-edited
Die Provinz im Leben und Werk von Hans Fallada (2005). In the field of
Translation Studies she co-authored The Map: A Guide to Doing Research
in Translation Studies (2002) and has translated The Fishermen Sleep by
Sabine Lange (2005).
ROGER WOODS is professor of German at the University of Nottingham
(UK). His current research interests are the conservative revolution in the
Weimar Republic, East German intellectuals before and after unification, and
autobiography in twentieth-century Germany. Recent publications include
Nation ohne Selbstbewußtsein: Von der Konservativen Revolution zur Neuen
Rechten (2001). Professor Woods has just completed a full-length study of
the German New Right: The Fractured Mind: The New Right in Germany as
Culture and Politics.
Index
Bavaria, 3, 28, 49, 70, 73, 74, 76, 82, bookclubs, 12, 16, 63, 169
170 Börne, Ludwig, 71
Bavarian Republic, 1, 3 Bornebusch, Herbert, 164
Bayerdörfer, Hans-Peter, 97 Bostock, J. Knight, 164, 165
Becher, Johannes R., 255–56 Brecht, Bertolt, 10, 12, 33, 72, 73,
Becher, Lucie, 251 78, 81, 98, 116, 183, 211, 216,
Bechert, Fritz, 259 225
Bechtolsheim, Barbara von, 164 Brecht, Bertolt, works by: Trommeln
Becker, Erika, 266, 267, 268 in der Nacht, 10, 98
Becker, Sabina, 16, 208 Bredel, Willi, 17
Beer-Hall Putsch, 7, 30, 56, 74, 105 Bredohl, Thomas, 260, 267
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 51, 235 Breloer, Heinrich, 42
Benjamin, Walter, 50, 59, 60, 103, Brenner, Michael, 66, 81
115, 123, 136–37, 140, 203, 206, Brentano, Bernard von, 106, 124
221–22, 226 Briand, Aristide, 36–37, 42
Benjamin, Walter, works by: “Krise des Brinker-Gabler, Gisela, 208
Romans,” 226; Das Kunstwerk im Broch, Hermann, 73, 82
Zeitalter seiner technischen Brockmann, Stephen, 15, 16
Reproduzierbarkeit, 203, 209; Broich, Ulrich, 159, 165, 168
“Theorien des deutschen Bronnen, Arnolt, 52
Faschismus,” 136, 140 Bronsen, David, 105, 121, 122
Benn, Gottfried, 119 Brückner, Egon, 82, 83
Bennett, Arnold, works by: Grand Brüning, Heinrich, 9, 262
Babylon Hotel, 251 Brüning, Jens, 195, 207, 208, 209
Bergengruen, Werner, 17 Buber, Martin, 82, 89
Berghahn, V. R., 208, 209 Buchholz, Horst, 174
Berlin, 2, 3, 5, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, Büchner, Georg, 112, 123
16, 17, 22, 30, 39, 47, 49, 72, 77, Buck-Morss, Susan, 60
86, 95, 101–24, 140, 168, 169, Buddha, 50, 65
193–209, 211, 212, 216, 219, 221, Buddhism, 50
222, 223, 226, 231, 241–44, 254, Bullivant, Keith, 15, 17
255, 256, 262, 265
Berndt, Wolfgang, 81 cabaret, 9, 11, 16, 52, 118, 163
Bertaux, Félix, 29, 34, 36, 39, 42 Calles, Plutarco Elías, 178, 185
Bertaux, Pierre, 42 Campbell, Ian, 168
Best, Werner, 134, 139 capitalism, 21, 29, 30, 31, 36, 40, 71,
Betz, Albrecht, 83 74, 76, 83, 191, 216, 235
Beutner, Eduard, 97 Carossa, Hans, works by: Rumänisches
Bienert, Michael, 108, 119, 121, 122 Tagebuch, 147
Binding, Rudolf, works by: Aus dem Carow, Erich, 200–201, 203
Kriege, 147 Caruso, Enrico, 121
Bismarck, Otto von, 23 Caspar, Günter, 253, 266
Boccioni, Umberto, 212 Catholic Church, 187–89
Bode, Ingrid, 225, 226 censorship, 25, 37, 68
Böhme, Jakob, 82 Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, 66
Böll, Heinrich, 161 Chambers, John Whiteclay, 167
Böll, Heinrich, works by: “Wanderer Chaucer, Geoffrey, works by: The
kommst du nach Spa . . .,” 161 Canterbury Tales, 251
INDEX 275
Hesse, Kurt, 133, 134, 136, 139, 140 Jens, Inge, 224
Hesse, Kurt, works by: Der Feldherr Jews, 4, 6, 8, 22, 23, 39, 57, 61–83,
Psychologos, 134, 139, 140 86, 88–90, 94–98, 101–7, 120,
Hessel, Franz, 204, 209 122, 194, 212, 218, 230, 256
Hey’l, Bettina, 16 Joeris, Christa, 98
Hiller, Kurt, 26 Johannsen, Ernst, 161, 168
Hindenburg, Paul von, 2, 9, 56, 104, Johannsen, Ernst, works by:
149, 166, 262 Fronterinnerungen eines Pferdes,
Hindenburg, Paul von, works by: Aus 161, 168; Vier von der Infanterie,
meinem Leben, 166 159, 160, 161, 168
Hirschmann, Elise, 194 Jones, Geraint Vaughan, 99
historical novel, 12, 16, 25, 41, journalism, 14, 15, 17, 101–24, 125,
61–83, 142, 152, 162 195–99, 200, 201, 206, 208
Hitler, Adolf, 4, 7, 8, 9, 21, 30, 32, Joyce, James, 50, 82, 224, 227
38, 39, 40, 41, 56, 57, 71, 74, 79, Joyce, James, works by: Ulysses, 223
87, 104, 105, 126, 141, 151, 156, judicial system, 23, 38, 73, 76, 82
157, 163, 199, 206, 207, 237 judiciary, 7, 196, 198, 207, 208
Hitler Youth, 157 Jung, C. G., 47, 48, 50, 52, 56, 58,
Hoffmann, Johannes, 3 59, 92
Hofmann, Michael, 119, 121, 122, Jünger, Ernst, 13, 52, 125–40, 147,
123 163, 164, 168
Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 86 Jünger, Ernst, works by: Das
Holborn, Hajo, 43 abenteuerliche Herz, 133, 139; Der
Hölderlin, Friedrich, 51 Arbeiter, 126; Auf den
Holocaust, 120 Marmorklippen, 126; Feuer und
Hsia, Adrian, 58 Blut, 126, 139; Der Friede, 126;
Huch, Ricarda, 92 Gärten und Straßen, 126; In
Huch, Rudolf, 129, 139 Stahlgewittern, 126, 127, 128, 130,
Huston, John, films by: The Treasure of 133, 138, 139, 147, 163; Der
the Sierra Madre, 169 Kampf als inneres Erlebnis, 126, 132,
Huyssen, Andreas, 227 134, 139; Krieg und Krieger, 126,
136, 139; Sturm, 126, 129–32, 139;
Ihering, Herbert, 80 Das Wäldchen 125, 126
Impressionism, 111 Jung-Neugeboren, Hilde, 59
inflation, 4–5, 6, 7, 14, 30, 31, 43, justice, 7, 19, 24, 26, 27, 30, 33, 35,
63, 73, 205 37, 38, 40, 41, 61, 76, 91, 93,
Isenberg, Noah, 81 94–96, 99, 196, 198
Issel, Anna. See Ditzen, Anna
Kaech, René, 99
Jaeger, Stefan, 81 Kaes, Anton, 15, 43, 44, 122
Jacobs, Monty, 268 Kafka, Franz, 17, 63, 200
Jacobs, Wilhelm G., 60 Kaiser, Georg, 10, 19, 219, 244
Jacobsohn, Siegfried, 62, 80 Kaiser, Georg, works by: Gas I, 10;
Jähner, Harald, 227 Gas II, 10; Die Koralle, 10; Von
Jahnn, Hans Henny, 17 morgens bis mitternachts, 244
Jay, Martin, 15, 43, 44, 122 Kagelmacher, Johannes, 261, 265
jazz, 10, 52, 54 Kapp Putsch, 5, 7, 28
Jean Paul, 255 Karlstetter, Klaus, 97
INDEX 279
Warnung,” 37, 43; Macht und modernity, 11, 15, 17, 33, 51–53, 60,
Mensch, 27–28, 43; Mutter Marie, 70–71, 74, 76, 110, 120, 201, 203,
34, 35; Der Untertan, 20–26, 27, 209, 227, 243
38, 42, 43; Die Vollendung des modernization, 70, 127, 128, 138,
Königs Henri Quatre, 41; “Voltaire- 196–200, 209
Goethe,” 20; “Wir wählen,” 38; Modick, Klaus, 82, 83
“Zola,” 20, 36 Mohler, Arnim, 139
Mann, Thomas, 10, 17, 20, 26, 42, Molo, Walter von, 168
43, 47, 49, 51, 58, 59, 68, 85, 86, Molt, Emil, 49, 57, 59
90–91, 92, 97, 136, 231, 232, 247, Monakow, Constantin von, 96
248, 250 montage, 11, 13, 73, 223–24, 227
Mann, Thomas, works by: Montgomery, Douglass, 266
Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, Mosse, George, 130, 138, 139, 140
43, 90, 98; Joseph tetralogy, 49; Der Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 52, 55,
Tod in Venedig, 252; Der 57
Zauberberg, 17, 51, 68 Muehlon, Johann Wilhelm, 49–50
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 213, Mühsam, Erich, 1, 48, 68, 80
219, 224 Muir, Edwin, 168
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, works by: Muir, Willa, 168
Mafarka, 212–13, 215 Müller, Hans-Harald, 138, 139, 159,
marriage, 13, 91–94, 96, 98, 99, 164, 166, 167
107 Müller, Harro, 225, 227
Marut, Ret. See Traven, B. Müller-Salget, Klaus, 226
Marx, Karl, 75 Müller-Waldeck, Gunnar, 267, 268
Marxism, 33, 73, 75, 76 Munich, 1, 3, 7, 26, 28, 49, 56, 62,
Masaryk, Jan, 36 68, 72, 74, 75, 80, 86, 87, 105,
mass media, 200, 202–3 107, 170, 175, 237
Matijevich, Elke, 16 Munich revolution, 3, 26–28, 49, 62,
Matthias, Josef Ben, 77 68, 170
Matthias, Josef Ben, works by: The Murdoch, Brian, 13, 164, 165, 166,
Jewish War, 77 167, 168
Mayer, Dieter, 225 Murnau, F. W., films by: Nosferatu, 10
Melis, Urban van, 16 Musil, Robert, 50, 106, 221, 226
Meskimmon, Marsha, 208 Musil, Robert, works by: Der Mann
Mexican Revolution, 177 ohne Eigenschaften, 106
Michels, Volker, 58, 59, 60 Mussolini, Benito, 135
Mickey Mouse, 202–3 mysticism, 48, 68, 82, 96
Midgley, David, 13, 16, 226,
227 Napoleon, 187, 250
Milestone, Lewis, films by: All Quiet National Socialism, 14, 20, 24, 30, 31,
on the Western Front, 158 36–41, 49, 56–57, 71–77, 79, 80,
Miller, Henry, 50 117, 118, 119, 206, 254, 259
Minden, Michael, 15 nationalism, 8, 21, 28, 29, 36, 39, 40,
Misch, Carl, 259 71, 78–80, 125–40
Mitchell, Breon, 227 Necker, Hanns Dietrich von, 254
Mockel, Eva-Maria, 195, 208 Nelson, Don, 59
modernism, 50, 60, 61, 81, 111, 138, Neubauer, Hendrik, 16
171, 205, 208, 211, 217, 224 Neubauer, Martin, 91, 97, 98
INDEX 281
Tucholsky, Kurt, 15, 62, 98, 103, 167, Gänsemännchen, 87; Die Geschichte
259 der jungen Renate Fuchs, 86, 97;
Turner, Henry Ashby, 43, 260, 267 Joseph Kerkhovens dritte Existenz,
85, 94, 96, 99; “Der Jude als
Uka, Walter, 16 Orientale,” 89, 98; Die Juden von
Ullstein, Hermann, 230 Zirndorf, 86, 88; Laudin und die
Ullstein, Leopold, 230 Seinen, 92–94, 95, 97, 99; Der
Ulrich, Roland, 267, 268 Literat oder Mythos und
unemployment, 8, 15, 72, 198, 207, Persönlichkeit, 89, 98; “Das Los der
254, 263–66 Juden,” 88–89, 98; Der Mann von
Unger, Thorsten, 15 vierzig Jahren, 92; Mein Weg als
United States, 7, 10, 11, 41, 50, 63, Deutscher und Jude, 88–90, 97, 98;
77, 85, 114, 158, 191, 212, 229, Melusine, 86; “Teilnahme des
231, 268 Dichters an der Politik,” 90, 98;
United States of Europe, 36, 40 Der Wendekreis, 91
USPD, 3, 5 Weber, Marianne, 57
Wedekind, Frank, 80
Valentin, Karl, 72 Wege, Carl, 118, 124
Vienna, 36, 70, 86, 103, 104, 107, Wegener, Franz, 60
109, 122, 229, 230 Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, 42
Vogt, Karl, 194 Weigand, Heinrich, 51
Vollmer, Hartmut, 16 Weimar constitution, 13, 28, 29, 30,
Vring, Georg von der, 159 43
Vring, Georg von der, works by: Soldat Weimar culture, 9–12, 14, 15, 16, 209
Suhren, 159, 168 Weiß, Christoph, 16, 208
Weiss, Donald, 163
Wagener, Hans, 164, 165, 166, 168 Weiss, Walter, 97
Wagner, Richard, 68 Welti, Helene, 59
Walberer, Ulrich, 17, 167 Wenger, Ruth, 51
Walden, Herwarth, 212 Westermann, Klaus, 108, 121, 122
Wall Street collapse, 8 Westfalen, Tilman, 163
Wallace, Edgar, 35 Wette, Wolfram, 138, 140
Wandervögel, 157, 247 Wetzel, Heinz, 164, 167
Ward, Mark, 165, 166 Wheeler-Bennett, John, 166
Wassermann, Jakob, 1, 9, 10, 13, 14, Wheen, A. W., 163, 164, 168
62, 63, 85–99 White, Alfred D., 14
Wassermann, Jakob, works by: White, Iain Boyd, 122
Andergast trilogy, 85, 94, 96, 99; White, Owen, 191
“Bürgerliche Ehe: Offener Brief an Wichert, Adalbert, 225
den Grafen Keyserling,” 99; Caspar Widdig, Bernd, 14
Hauser oder Die Trägheit des Wiechert, Ernst, works by: Jedermann:
Herzens, 86, 88, 94, 95; Christian Geschichte eines Namenlosen, 167
Wahnschaffe, 87, 97; Engelhart oder Wiene, Robert, films by: Das Cabinet
Die zwei Welten, 97; Etzel des Dr. Caligari, 10
Andergast, 85, 94, 96; Faber oder Wieser, Max, 166
Die verlorenen Jahre, 91–92; Der Wilder, Thornton, works by: The
Fall Maurizius, 66, 85, 87, 91, Bridge of San Luis Rey, 251
94–96, 98, 99; Das
286 INDEX
Wilhelm II, Kaiser, 2, 19, 21, 22, 24, Zapfel, Peter, 208
25, 48, 150, 205 Zaratin, Italo, 59, 60
Wilhelmine Empire, 36, 40, 61, 71, Zeller, Bernhard, 59
196 Zeltner, Hermann, 60
Wilhelmine Germany, 7, 47, 253 Ziegler, Theobald, 50, 59
Wilkes, Geoff, 259, 262, 267, 268 Ziemann, Benjamin, 166
Willett, John, 11, 15 Zille, Heinrich, 203, 209
Williams, Jenny, 6, 266, 268 Zimmerman, Michael E., 60
Wilson, Colin, 51, 59 Zimmermann, Manfred, 64, 81
Wilson, Woodrow, 27 Zingler, Peter, 265
Wirtz, Irmgard, 121, 122 Ziolkowski, Theodore, 59
Witkop, Philipp, 165 Zionism, 79, 89, 119
Wohl, Robert, 166 Zipes, Jack, 81
ˆ ˆ
Wolff, Rudolf, 97, 98, 267 Zmegac, Viktor, 225
Woltereck, Richard, 50 Zogbaum, Heidi, 190, 191
Wolzogen, Ernst von, 86 Zola, Emile, 20, 34–35, 36
Wundberg, Gotthart, 43 Zola, Emile, works by: “J’accuse,” 40
Würzbach, Eugen, 58 Zuckmayer, Carl, 263
Zweig, Arnold, 63, 66, 80, 159, 161,
youth, 8–9, 34–37, 47, 85, 97, 136, 168
143–48, 155, 157, 160–62, 167, Zweig, Arnold, works by: Erziehung
198, 207, 234–35, 241, 247 vor Verdun, 159; Das ostjüdische
Antlitz, 66; Der Streit um den
Zachau, Reinhard, K., 260, 265–66, Sergeanten Grischa, 159
267, 268 Zweig, Stefan, works by: Schachnovelle,
Zagratzki, Uwe, 165 251