"You tell the mob: Be your own Savior; seek inspiration in your own work. The people like to be told of their majesty. Keep on bravely lying, sweetly flattering, and the prophet is complete."
Merlin retorts:
"You describe yourself, not me. Men have a deep sense of truth, and pay in false coin only him that offers them false gifts." He then continues, lashing the transcendent egotism of the Romantic conception of man in the universe: "To you the earth, the ocean, the firmament, are nothing but a ladder for your own elevation, and you must absolutely reject the thing called humility. In order to maintain yourself strong and whole you have to find men weak and only partial beings," etc. Later, in lines 1637ff., he proceeds, in what are probably the finest and richest passages in the work, to state his own purpose of combining all that is great, true, beautiful, human, and noble, into one comprehensive and rational faith of humanity.
Merlin tries to teach his faith to King Artus and his circle, who embody the frivolous, irresponsible, though refined, conduct of the nobility, essentially the same nobility whom von Stein accused of injuring the nation and Immermann satirized and exposed in Münchhausen. They decide to seek salvation in the primitive idealism of India, appointing Merlin their guide. Merlin, however, succumbs to the silly Niniana, the personification of wanton desire. She makes him tell her a fated word, after promising not to repeat it. She thoughtlessly repeats it. He now loses his superhuman power, i. e., the power of absolute spiritual integrity, and becomes subject to the limitations of earth, like a common man. He can no longer lead Artus and his court, who perish of their own spiritual vacuity.
The end of the play is unsatisfactory. The hero's surrender to the lust of the flesh, undoubtedly suggested by Goethe's Faust and consistent in Goethe's poem, is foreign to the conflict of this play, which, not being human, as is that of Faust, but an abstract antagonism of general historic principles, should have been solved without the interference of the mere creature weaknesses of the hero and the mere creature sympathies of the reader. Immermann planned to untie the knot in a second part, which was to treat of the salvation of Merlin; but he never carried his purpose beyond a few slight introductory passages.
IMMERMANN'S "MÜNCHHAUSEN"
BY ALLEN WILSON PORTERFIELD, PH.D. Instructor in German, Columbia
University
Immermann first thought of writing a new Münchhausen in 1821, the year of his satirical comedy, The Princes of Syracuse, which contains the embryonic idea of this "history in arabesques." Conscientious performance of his duties as a judge and incessant activity as a writer along other lines forced the idea into the background until 1830, the year of his satirical epic, Tulifäntchen, in which the theme again received attention. In 1835 he finished Die Epigonen, a novel portraying the social and political conditions in Germany from 1815 to 1830, and in 1837 he began systematic work on Münchhausen, continuing, from a different point of view and in a different mood, his delineation of the civic and intellectual status of Germany of his own time. The last part of the entire work was published in 1839, having occupied, intermittently, eighteen of his twenty years of literary productivity. The first edition was exhausted one year after publication, a second appeared in 1841, a third in 1854, and since 1857 there have been many of all kinds, ranging from the popular "Reclam" to critical editions with all the helps and devices known to modern scholarship.
In so far as the just appreciation of a literary production is dependent upon a study of its genesis, the reading of Die Epigonen is necessary to a complete understanding of Münchhausen, for through these two works runs a strong thread of unbroken development. Hermann, the immature hero of the former, and his associates, bequeath a number of characteristics to the title-hero and his associates of the latter; but where the earlier work is predominantly sarcastic, political, and pessimistic, the later one is humorous, intellectual, and optimistic. It would seem, therefore, that, in view of its bright outlook, mature view, and sympathetic treatment, Immermann's greatest epic in prose was destined to be read in its entirety, frequently, and with pleasure.
This is, however, not the case. Starting from a long line of models, Sterne's Tristram Shandy among others, Münchhausen resembles the diffusive works of similar title by Raspe (1785) and Bürger (1787). It takes its name from Hieronymus Karl Friedrich, Baron of Münchhausen (1720-1797), and satirizes many of the whimsicalities of Herman Ludwig Heinrich, Prince of Pückler-Muskau (1785-1871). And it flagellates again and again such bizarre literary and intellectual phenomena of the time as Raupach's Hohenstaufen dramas, Görres' mysticism, Menzel's calumniations, Eduard Gans' liberalism, Bettina's pretensions, Young Germany's reaction, even the Indian studies of the Schlegels and Alexander von Humboldt's substantial scholarship, so that, for the general reader, the larger part of the work is a sealed book. Its references are obscure, its satire abstruse, its humor vague. Even Ferdinand Freiligrath, Immermann's contemporary and friend, declined, on the ground of lack of familiarity with the allusions, to write a commentary to it.