The humour of Germany

by Unknown

INTRODUCTION.

In endeavouring to bring together examples of so significant and at the same time elusive a phase of national character—literary as well as psychological—as a nation’s humour, it were of course vain to seek to make each selection typical in itself—typical, that is, in the sense of referring to the broad basis of a nation’s individuality in respect of its humour as distinguished from other nations.

A general idea can only be obtained by scanning a broad field; here, as elsewhere, details have little meaning unless considered in their relation to the broader outlook. A constant interplay of varied influences has to be taken into account. The purely national aspect is obtruded upon by the individuality of each author, which nowhere expresses with such effect as in the literature of humour. The time of writing, considered historically, with its political tendencies, has also to be considered; its church dependence perhaps, and the peculiar trend of its social interests. It is intruded upon also by the time considered in its relation to literature as a whole, to the tendencies of form and style predominant at given periods.

Furthermore, there are strictly local peculiarities, subdividing Germany itself. It is more especially these that the student of literature, unless he be also a student of ethnological influences, is likely to wrongly estimate, while it is of the utmost importance that they be borne in mind to arrive at a just view of qualities that oversway minor differences, which are often the first to catch the eye. The more the Comic Muse is bound within the narrow limits of place, time, and personality, the more is she in her element. She of all muses is a painter of detail, versed in the art of reproducing punctiliously those petty traits which disengage her subject from all broader problems, and make it effective in proportion to its unimportance to the world’s general affairs.

Writers upon the theory of humour are apt to deplore the absence of just such local land-marks in Germany as are strongly characteristic and still recognisable to the foreigner. It would appear to me that they have done so with some injustice. The Volkscharacter of southern and northern Germany, of the lowlands, and the Franco-Bavarian and Suabian districts, even of the various centres of civilisation, the large towns, is abundant in those differentiating qualities which go to make up originality of manner. The modes of thought and feeling characterising the population of different districts bear a stamp so distinct that one is inclined to consider them more strongly marked by provincial locality than by nationality.

In these days dialect proper, having gained the prestige of comparative rarity, like a peasant’s national costume, or a bit of bric-à-brac, has been favoured by the humorist, although its reproduction in our literature has well-nigh insurmountable difficulties to cope with. The Low German, one of the most interesting of German dialects, because, historically, the most intact, and the most incapable of amalgamation with the language that has superseded it, had been left to grow rusty so far as literature was concerned, until Fritz Reuter rescued it from threatening oblivion, and made it the vehicle of a naïve and spontaneous genre of humour, to which it lent itself with singular charm and appropriateness.

The cause of the former neglect of Low German as a means of literary expression was very obvious, and there was no gainsaying the justice of it—viz., that it is used to-day only by the lower classes of Northern Germany, and that among readers there is but a very limited number to whom it is more comprehensible than a foreign language would be. It is this fact also which explains why Fritz Reuter, the most intimate and sympathetic of German humorists, although extensively read, has never attained the widest popularity.

Fundamentally, the German character appears to be averse to humour. Its mirth does not come to it spontaneously, a gift of the gods, arising out of the mere exuberance of being. This nation shares the temperament of all northern races, it moves more to the minor strains of feeling, to the Adagio which Richard Wagner found so aptly expressive of its character. It is quick to respond to things mystic, and yearns over the vague grace of twilight moods. It worships at the shrine of the hapless Prince of Denmark.—I say fundamentally, for, looking at the life of the nation as it appears to-day, in those pleasures of the lower and middle classes which have their scene of action in the out-of-door world, there would appear to be in plenty a spirit of merry-making and pleasure-seeking inherent in the German character. The mere primitive love of a good time, however, is inseparably connected with those classes representing, in a manner, a child-like stage of intellectual development the world over, and is not characteristic in any special sense of the German people.

It is safe to admit that a certain lightness of disposition, which seems indispensable to the humorous attitude, is absent among those race-qualities which go to make up the German nature pure and simple. If the nation has developed within itself those germs which have blossomed into a sense of the humorous; if it has passed through all those early stages of perception and expression which have culminated in a humorous literature of sturdy strength; if it has found at length a humorous literature (with Gottfried Keller for its prophet, and F. T. Vischer for its critic and exponent), it is due probably to a complexity of influences somewhat difficult to determine.

However free in its purely literary aspect humour may be from all ulterior purpose and aim, the tale of its growth with us is largely interwoven with impulses received from outside sources and sources didactic and philosophical. Outwitting the devil, the theme that recurs again and again as the oldest form of farcical expression in mediæval Germany, meant dealing with the stresses of adverse circumstance. This was the first step taken on the road to humour in Germany. The Powers of Evil had all the brute force upon their side; there was no coping with them, except by sharpening one’s wits and irritating them by practical jokes until they might yield. The laugh that followed had all the hard ring of the victor’s triumphant scorn. Early satirical writings were imbued with a like spirit. There was the lash to be swung at some enemy, and derision at his downfall was tempered by no kindlier emotion. There was a grim attitude of self-defence throughout it all. Indeed, it is only in going back painfully step by step that one is enabled to discern in this early literature the germs of humour at all.

The farces and puppet-shows at country fairs and the burlesques at the early theatre began to make room for the idea of retaliation. It became a question of clown against clown. The supremacy was never yielded long to one side. Laying aside all personal interest in the matter for the time being, there was an impartial shout of laughter at him who got the most kicks and cuffs. The popular mind began to rise above the situation, to put itself in the position of an unbiassed spectator, and to take delight in merely putting down whatever asserted itself. As an instance of this may be counted the practice of granting the devil, or a person disguised as such, a hearing in church on certain days of the year instead of the parish priest.

Then the sense of discrepancy between things great and small, things important and unimportant, the world of the senses and the world of the spirit, began to enter the popular perception, the impossibility of reconciliation, and, as a consequence, the pleasure of turning this world topsy-turvy, and so demonstrating the supremacy of the individual.

Side by side with this development, or partly perhaps based upon it, went the philosophic development. Thinkers, dreamers, and philosophers went on constructing a universe according to the laws of their individual minds, a universe containing nothing at all to be laughed at, and for many decades scholars were deeply buried in obstruse problems and finely-spun theories and systems, the lighter muse of poetry and art for the most part following but humbly and timorously from afar. But when philosophy and theology had spoken at large, and the mystery and fatal contradiction at the heart of things had not been unravelled, the pale brooding of some turned to melancholy, with others it turned to boisterous living and philosophic indifferentism.

Then it was that irony, directed upon the inordinate intellectual ambitions of man, removed him half imperceptibly into the sphere of the ludicrous. Self-irony may be the result of misanthropy, but it is certainly the beginning of a cure. One finds oneself to be made up of two absurdly contradicting hemispheres, as well as the rest of the world; the sense of the universal incongruity seems to make the case less tragic. To pass through this stage into the clearer atmosphere of conscious reconciliation with the actuality of things, of placid acceptance of the ups and downs, the shortcomings inherent in things, and in human nature withal,—into the atmosphere of pure humour, unperturbed by the possibility of personal disappointment, is a long step, easy to some, to others impossible. And it would seem that German Humour—taking the term in its widest sense as signifying subjective apprehension on the one hand and artistic expression on the other—is less the result of a temperamental predisposition than the culmination of a development. With a turn for flaccid sentimentalism, and by nature inclined to take themselves very seriously, it was a reaction, a bankruptcy in metaphysical methods that inaugurated and established something of a humorous Weltanschauung. The often oppressively heavy Zeitgeist has borne along its own corrective in the literature of two centuries as on an ever-strengthening under-current. There have been silent forces at play working imperceptibly through the innate robustness of the national character. It was this undeniable robustness which could not for long brook the extravagancies of weak emotionalism. Revolt was opened upon it on the one hand by the spirit of exact science, on the other by the need of æsthetic equilibrium. These two tendencies, the æsthetic and the scientific, are still contending for the field with much ado and bustle in some quarters.

Though a nation counting Heine and Lichtenberg among its own, it is not in the spielende Urtheil, as Jean Paul has called inspired sallies of wit, that German humour specially distinguishes itself; now and again there it has its moods of riotous absurdity; but where it is most characteristic is in the telling of the humorous tale, lovingly handled in its details, the pathetic verging very near upon the comic, finally succumbing in a ripple of good-natured laughter at somebody or other who is really not so very bad, but only very human, and for whose misfortunes—poor devil!—we may have a kindly feeling. Then we have a mastership in spectral stories, uncanny and imaginative, leaving the reader’s mind in a delightful condition of doubt as to their actual meaning and significance; and we have also the expression of the spirit of poetic adventure,—a determination to have fun at all hazards, either with the public or else at the public, if perchance it should prove too dull to be taken into partnership. There is much of this in Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl, which, in the face of many dizzy structures of elucidation that have been based upon it, remains so truly humorous and so profoundly touching.

It is by no means always the funny element that predominates in German writings of a humorous tendency. Their office seems to be more to suggest the effect which these lighter moods of fancy have upon the serious affairs of life, and in studying the humour of Germany in a spirit of literary criticism it is indispensable to take these two aspects in their action and reaction upon each other. There is a psychical development of the individual which runs parallel to that of the nation. In confirmation of the theory of humorous development here faintly outlined, it may be said that in Germany, humorous perception is for the most part not the possession of youth. It is not until the need of a corrective to a habit of speculative brooding has been felt that imperceptibly and unconsciously healthful minds rise to those dispassionate heights whence the Occidental Brahmin gazes upon a motley world.

HANS MÜLLER-CASENOV.

[For Acknowledgments to Authors and Publishers, see page [430].]

THE HUMOUR OF GERMANY.

MASTER FOX, THE CONFESSOR.

THEY overtook the Ass, and so

All three to Rome together go.

And when they saw the city near,

The Wolf said to his cousin dear:

“Reynard, my plan I’ll name to you:—

The Pope, we know, has much to do;

I doubt if he can spend his time

To hear our catalogues of crime.

’Twill spare some trouble for the Pope

(And also for ourselves, I hope,

As we may ’scape with penance less),

If to each other we confess.

Let each describe his greatest sin,

So, without preface, I’ll begin.

To notice trifles I disdain;

But one fact gives my conscience pain.

’Tis this—there dwelt beside the Rhine

A man who lived by feeding swine.

He had a sow who rambled wide

While all her pigs with hunger cried.

I punished her in such a way

That never more she went astray.

Her little ones, deserted now,

Oft moved my pity, I’ll avow;

I ended all their woes one night—

Now let my punishment be light!”

“Well,” said the Fox, “your sin was small,

And hardly can for penance call;

For such a venial transgression

You’ve made amends by this confession.

And now I’ll do as you have done—

Of all my sins I’ll name but one:

A man such noisy fowls would keep,

That no one near his house could sleep;

The crowings of his chanticleer

Disturbed the country far and near.

Distracted by the noise, one night

I went and stopped his crowing quite.

But this feat ended not the matter—

The hens began to crow and chatter;

And so (the deed I slightly rue)

I killed them and their chickens too.”

“Well,” said the Wolf, “to hush that din

Was surely no alarming sin;

Abstain from poultry for three days,

And, if you like, amend your ways.

But now the Ass must be confessed.

Donkey! how far have you transgressed?”

“Ah!” said the Ass, with dismal bray,

“You know I have not much to say;

For I have toiled from day to day,

And done for master service good,

In carrying water, corn, and wood.

But once, in winter time, ’tis true,

I did what I perhaps must rue:

A countryman, to keep him warm

(We had just then a snowy storm),

Had put some straw into his shoes;

To bite it I could not refuse;

And so (for hunger was my law)

I took, or stole, a single straw.”

“There! say no more!” the Fox exclaimed;

“For want of straw that man was lamed;

His feet were bitten by the frost;

’Tis probable his life was lost.

’Twas theft and murder.—No reply!

Your penance is, that you must die.”

Hugo von Trimberg (1260-1309).

“BUT NOW THE ASS MUST BE CONFESSED.”

“THE GOAT RUNS ON AND NEVER TIRES.”

ST. PETER’S LESSON.

THE young goat had a playful mind,

And never liked to be confined;

The apostle, at a killing pace,

Followed the goat, in a desperate chase;

Over the hills and among the briers

The goat runs on and never tires,

While Peter, behind, on the grassy plain,

Runs on, panting and sighing, in vain.

All day, beneath a scorching sun,

The good apostle had to run

Till evening came; the goat was caught,

And safely to the Master brought.

Then, with a smile, to Peter said

The Lord: “Well, friend, how have you sped;

If such a task your powers has tried,

How could you keep the world, so wide?”

Then Peter, with his toil distressed,

His folly, with a sigh, confessed.

“No, Master! ’tis for me no play

To rule one goat for one short day;

It must be infinitely worse

To regulate the universe.”

Hans Sachs (1494-1576).