Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 2. The Romantic School in Germany

by Georg Brandes

Romanticism having thus dissolved the Ego, proceeds to form fantastic Egos, adding here, taking away there.

Take, for an example, Hoffmann's Klein Zaches, the little monster who has been endowed by a fairy with the peculiarity "that everything good that others think, say, or do in his presence is attributed to him; the result being that in the society of handsome, refined, intelligent persons he also is taken to be handsome, refined, and cultured—is taken, in short, for a model of every species of perfection with which he comes in contact." When the student reads aloud his charming poems, it is Zaches who is credited with them; when the musician plays or the professor performs his experiments, it is Zaches who gets the honour and the praise. He grows in greatness, becomes an important man, is made Prime Minister, but ends his days by drowning in a toilet-basin. Without overlooking the satiric symbolism of the story, I draw attention to the fact that the author has here amused himself by endowing one personality with qualities properly belonging to others, in other words, by dissolving individuality and disregarding its limits. With the same satirical intention, the same idea is worked out more ingeniously, though more roughly, by Hostrup, the Dane, in his comedy, En Spurv i Tranedans ("A Sparrow among the Cranes" = a dwarf among the giants), in which each one of the other characters attributes to the comical young journeyman tailor the qualities which he himself values most.

Here we have Romanticism amusing itself by adding qualities to human nature; but it found subtracting them an equally attractive amusement. It deprives the individual of attributes which would seem to form an organic part of it; and by taking these away it divides the human being as lower organisms, worms, for example, are divided into greater and smaller parts, both of which live. It deprives the individual, for instance, of his shadow. In Chamisso's Peter Schlemihl, the man in the grey coat kneels down before Peter, and, with admirable dexterity, strips the shadow off him and off the grass, rolls it up and pockets it—and the story shows us the misfortunes which are certain to befall the man who has lost his shadow.

This same tale of Peter Schlemihl shows how Romanticism, as a spiritual force, succeeded in impressing a uniform stamp on the most heterogeneous talents. It would be difficult to imagine two natures more unlike than Chamisso's and Hoffmann's; hence the plot of Chamisso's tale is as simple and readily comprehensible as the plots of Hoffmann's are morbidly extraordinary.

Adalbert von Chamisso was a Frenchman born, who acquired the German character remarkably quickly and completely, to the extent even of developing more than one quality which we are accustomed to consider essentially German. The son of a French nobleman, he was born in 1781 in the castle of Boncourt, in Champagne. Driven from France as a boy during the Reign of Terror, he became one of Queen Louisa of Prussia's pages, and later, at the age of twenty, a lieutenant in the Prussian army. He was a serious, almost painfully earnest, but absolutely healthy-minded man of sterling worth, brave and honourable, with a little of the heaviness of the German about him and much of the liveliness of the Frenchman.

The reverse of Hoffmann, he was no lover of social pleasures, but all the more ardent a lover of nature. He longed on hot summer days to be able to go about naked in his garden with his pipe in his mouth. Modern dress, modern domestic life and social formalities he regarded in the light of burdensome fetters. His love of nature led him to circumnavigate the globe, enamoured him of the South Sea Islands, and is expressed in much of his poetry.

Nevertheless, the imperceptible intellectual compulsion exercised by the age caused him, as author, to adopt Romantic theories and write in the Romantic style. It is characteristic, however, that when in such a poem as Erscheinung ("The Apparition") he treats the Romantic idea of the "Doppelgänger," he does it with a certain moral force which leaves on the reader's mind the impression of genuine despair. The narrator comes home at night and sees himself sitting at his desk. "Who are you?" he asks. "Who disturbs me thus?" returns the "Doppelgänger":—

"Und er: 'So lass uns, wer du seist, erfahren!'
Und ich: 'Ein solcher bin ich, der getrachtet
Nur einzig nach dem Schönen, Guten, Wahren;
Der Opfer nie dem Götzendienst geschlachtet,
Und nie gefröhnt dein weltlich-eitlen Brauch,
Verkannt, verhöhnt, der Schmerzen nie geachtet:
Der irrend zwar und träumend oft den Rauch
Für Flamme hielt, doch mutig beim Erwachen
Das Rechte nur verfocht:—bist du das auch?'
Und er mit wildem kreischend-lautem Lachen:
'Der du dich rühmst zu sein, der bin ich nicht.
Gar anders ist's bestellt um meine Sachen.
Ich bin ein feiger, lügenhafter Wicht,
Ein Heuchler mir und ändern, tief im Herzen
Nur Eigennutz, und Trug im Angesicht.
Verkannter Edler du mit deinen Schmerzen,
Wer kennt sich nun? wer gab das rechte Zeichen?
Wer soll, ich oder du, sein Selbst verscherzen?
Tritt her, so du es wagst, ich will dir weichen!'
Drauf mit Entsetzen ich zu jenem Graus:
'Du bist es, bleib und lass hinweg mich schleichen!'
Und schlich zu weinen, in die Nacht hinaus."[4]

The painful moral self-recognition endows the ghost story with marvellous significance.

Chamisso's double nationality was a source of much unhappiness to him in his younger days, when there was violent enmity between the land of his birth and his adopted country. In one of his letters to Varnhagen (December 1805) he writes: "'No country, no people—each man for himself!' These words of yours seemed to come straight from my own heart. They almost startled me; I had to wipe away the tears that rolled down my cheeks. Oh! the same sentiment must have made itself felt in all my letters, every one!"