In the graveyard of Sankt Peter, on the outskirts of Straubing, the stones scattered around the church, as in a garden, bear witness to tranquil lives now resting in peace in their pride of class: here lies Adam Mohr, brewer, alderman and lieutenant in the Bavarian National Guard, †1826. Class pride sets its seal on a pious harmony between the individual and the community, but it turns to savagery the moment other laws or other counsels of the heart throw the individual into conflict with the social order and induce him, even without wishing it, to disrupt this order. In one of the three chapels is the tomb of Agnes Bernauer, the lovely daughter of an Augsburg barber; on October the 12th 1435 Duke Ernest of Bavaria gave orders for her to be drowned in the Danube, on a charge of witchcraft, because she had married his son Albert and with this misalliance threatened the policies of the dynasty and even the law and order of the state.
The tomb shows Agnes Bernauer with a rosary in her hands and two little dogs at her feet, a symbol of the conjugal fidelity which united this young woman of the people to her princely spouse. It was erected by Duke Ernest, her killer. The tradition, taken up by Hebbel in his play on the subject, is a fable of the Reason of State. Duke Ernest profoundly admired the virtue and personality of Agnes and the pure love which bound her to his son; but he decided, firmly though unwillingly, to eliminate her in a brutal manner in view of the political consequences provoked by the marriage and later complications stemming from it – disorders, wars, uprisings, the division and collapse of the state, fratricidal strife and general suffering. Having performed this sacrifice, or committed this crime, in the name of the state, the duke paid homage to the victim’s moral constancy and innocence, now that she was no longer a danger, by building her a sepulchre to keep her memory alive through the centuries, and by himself retiring to a monastery. His son Albert, who had taken up arms against him, first to defend and then to avenge his wife, soon fell into line for political and dynastic purposes, and became reconciled for reasons of state with the father who had made him a widower. He assumed the ducal sceptre, and later went on to contract a second marriage more appropriate to his position.
Agnes was drowned in the Danube, refusing to the last to save her life by renouncing her husband. Because she floated on the surface, the duke’s hired thugs were forced to bind her legendary tresses round a long pole and hold her head under water until she was dead. The formal charge was witchcraft. In mentioning the episode the Antiquarius, writing at the end of the century of the Enlightenment, can no longer consider her a witch, but like a good middle-class citizen he drags the superstition onto secular ground and scoffs about her “shameful” seduction of Duke Albert; he, however, was no babe in arms, but a knight in the prime of life who had met her and courted her during a tournament in Augsburg. There is a thread connecting Emmeram Rusperger, the jurist who formulated the charge of witchcraft against Agnes, the Antiquarius, who considers her a brazen hussy, and the opinion still very commonly held today, according to which if the father of a family abandons wife and children for a twenty-year-old, then only the girl is a guilty party and he an innocent victim.
What a pity it is that Marieluise Fleisser didn’t write the drama about Agnes Bernauer, because she would have written it from Agnes Bernauer’s point of view. The tragedy was in fact written in 1851 by Friedrich Hebbel, admittedly with considerable poetic force. Hebbel is full of admiration for this limpid, lovely woman, who knew the articles of the Christian faith like Margaret in Faust, and in whose throat, when she drank, the wine glowed through as though in a crystal vessel. Agnes has to die “solely because she is beautiful and virtuous”, and because when the order of the world is disrupted and the Lord intervenes not with a little hoe but with a scythe, which mows down the just and the unjust without distinction, then “it is no longer a question of guilt or innocence, but only of cause and effect”: that is, it is purely a matter of eliminating the cause of the disruption. Hebbel goes into raptures about this passion for the reason of state: the nobility and purity of the individual serve only to augment the solemn holiness of those, like Duke Ernest and the poet himself, who place themselves on the side of the whole. The whole is invariably in the right, and the more subjectively innocent and admirable is the individual who is sacrificed to it, the more righteous it appears.
Poetry is called upon to celebrate this sacrifice, which is also a self-immolation, because it is the repression of that loving sympathy which poetry, by its very nature, feels for the individual, for the victim, for Agnes Bernauer. “The great wheel has passed over her,” says Duke Ernest after he has had her killed. “Now she is by the side of him who turns it.” Like all concern with the object, which exults in the annihilation and self-annihilation of the subject, this too is suspect, for every example of the magniloquence of the whole is also raising the philistine vulgarity of the Antiquarius into something sublime. There is a rhetoric of objectivity which in its ranting brutality seems to parody the relationship between a society’s collective needs and the personal needs of its components. The exultant tone in which so many uninvited advocates of the All repeat Hegel’s saying “When you plane wood, shavings fall” is a caricature of Hegel’s thought, and indeed of any view that takes account of social and political facts responsibly but without over-emphasis.
Hebbel is sure that such “violence” is “lawful violence”. The advocate of the Whole is indeed always sure of something that in fact remains to be proved: that he represents history and the general interest. The very opposite might be true: it is stated in the tragedy that the marriage of Albert and Agnes threatens to undermine the Duchy of Bavaria, and it is added that this undermining might assist the Emperor in his efforts to reimpose the power of the central authority over the princes, like the eagle who seizes the prey while the bears are fighting over it. But history and the Whole might desire such a victory of the Empire over the particularism of the princes, in which case Duke Ernest would be the representative of a subjective ambition, and the marriage of Agnes Bernauer would be not the infraction, but the expression of the will of the Whole. It might have been Agnes who at that moment embodied the Weltgeist, the world-spirit.
There exists no register of the Weltgeist’s attorneys-at-law, and the indecent hubbub of those who lay claim to the title is interminable. The desire to march with the times, to be swept along in their procession, is the regressive yearning to rid oneself of all choice and all conflict, in short of freedom, and to find innocence in the conviction that it is impossible to be guilty because it is impossible to choose and act independently. In Hebbel’s tragedy poetry is the Siren of this illusion, this abdication: not only is Agnes innocent in the play, but above all so is her murderer. “There are things”, says Duke Ernest of the crime, “which have to be done in a dream: this, for example.”
Grillparzer is also the author of a play about Reasons of State, The Jewess of Toledo, in which the Grandees of Spain resolve to kill Rahel, the lovely, daemonic mistress of the King of Castile, who keeps the latter in a state of inert amorous bondage, paralysing the kingdom, which is thus exposed to enemy aggression, war, massacre and ruin. But (to apply Max Weber’s distinction) Grillparzer contrasts the ethics of conviction with those of responsibility, showing the reasons of both and not sacrificing the one to the other, though at the same time avoiding any reconciliation of their conflict, which is shown as irremediable, and therefore tragic. The Grandees of Spain who have killed Rahel have pursued “good, but not justice”; they think they have done their duty towards the state, but do not imagine that this outcome renders their action less criminal and justifies their violation of a universal commandment. They admit to being guilty murderers, and only ask pardon from a God who is distant and mysterious.
The necessity of an event – for such they consider their action to be – does not imply its justification or its innocence; universal history for the Austrian Grillparzer is not the same as universal judgment, as it is for the German Hebbel. Moral judgment of the world is not to be identified with the mere happening of the world; facts do not coincide with values, or what is with what ought to be. Against Hegel’s identification of reality with rationality Austrian culture proposes a deviation, things that might always take a different turn, history conjugated in the subjunctive, an ironic absence. In Grillparzer’s plays the sovereign is always either absent or inadequate; strictly speaking he is not there, and can only be represented, and that imperfectly.
This is a typically Austrian interpretation. Straubing was the birth-place of Schikaneder, librettist of The Magic Flute, poet of the fairy-tale folk-drama of Vienna, which capriciously does away with all reality in order to invent another possible, ulterior one, in order to oppose the great wheel which passes over Agnes Bernauer, with the frills and trills of Papageno and Papagena, whom not even Sarastro could ask to relinquish their inner selves, their love and their capers.