What a shame that we Germans have disowned the flower of the century, with its noblest names, that we have not only attacked and buried the vanquished and the perished, but have also sought to deliver them over to laughter and contempt. We, who began with the year 1870, called the great thoughts of freedom and brotherhood either ridiculous or criminal, and while we excited ourselves over success or money, or—if idealistic—over some literary movement, we derided or flew into a passion at those who had bled on the barricades. We once were the possessor of a heroic youth, which was prepared to die for its gods, and did indeed die. And our generation not only imprisoned, martyrized, and killed them, we dishonored their memory, and dragged their shades in the mire. In our minds, there existed no virtue but to secure our possessions and do homage to the powers that be.
—Ricarda Huch, Bakunin, 1923
Courage yet, my brother or my sister!
Keep on—Liberty is to be subserv’d whatever occurs;
There is nothing that is quell’d by one or two failures, or
any number of failures,
Or by the indifference or ingratitude of the people, or
by any unfaithfulness,
Or the show of the tushes of power, soldiers, cannon,
penal statutes.
What we believe in waits latent forever through all the
continents,
Invites no one, promises nothing, sits in calmness and
light, is positive and composed, knows no discouragement,
Waiting patiently, waiting its time….
—Walt Whitman, “To a Foil’d European Revolutionnaire”
Rarely had the Zeitgeist—the Spirit of the Age—revealed such coherence of feeling and thought, such a sense of participation in momentous historical experiences. That the events of 1848 and 1849 formed a sharp dividing line between past, present, and future seemed apparent to all, whether they shared exultations, fears, hopes, or despairs. Posterity, with the pages of subsequent history clearly before it, can, of course, trace many of the historical phenomena of the post-Revolutionary era to roots embedded in 1848 and 1849. Yet even to contemporaries came intimations of the future. They could not, of course, anticipate it in all its dire harshness. How could the Germans have foreseen that in the defeat of the democratic ideals—or rather in the way they had sacrificed them in the name of German unity—they were watering the roots of the tree that was to become Bismarckian Germany? Nor could many Frenchmen have previsioned that out of the ruins of Revolution would arise a quasi-Napoleonic empire that would find its less heroic Waterloo at Sedan! The bourgeoisie was triumphant: henceforth, in alliance with the still powerful landed aristocracy and the monarchial elements, it was to dominate the century and to a great extent determine its course. Its principal enemy, the proletariat and its allies, though defeated, still presented a menacing possibility. To a few it was given to foresee that out of these defeats, and out of the bitter experiences of the two fateful years which had placed it on the stage of world history as an independent force, a new gathering of resurgent blood and nerve would soon make for a resurrection of a terrifying sort—a specter again come to life!
For literature and the other arts no less than for society, the two years of revolution represented an immense watershed. In her eloquent and angry apostrophe, Ricarda Huch sets forth, from the vantage ground of the following century, the meaning and the consequences for Germany and Austria, and tangentially, by implication, for the rest of the world.* At stake would be not only art, but the very structure and content of a society in all its aspects. The barricades, its defenders and victims, were to impress themselves unforgettably on the consciousness and conscience of the age— whether in horror, joy, or sorrow.
With 1848, Romanticism comes to an end. Not merely that Romanticism which is bound up with letters and the arts, but Romanticism as a way of life, of thought, of action or inaction. In a brilliant prevision, Hegel spoke of the new age approaching as “the prose of the world.” He was speaking of the coming fragmentation, of the monadic isolation of the individual, destructive of “that appearance of autonomous and complete vitality and freedom which is the very foundation of the notion of beauty.” In another sense, however, which he would not have accepted, the “prose” of this world also produced the “world of prose”—in both a literal and figurative sense. If the “prose of the world” was embodied by the triumphant new order of society— the bourgeoisie—the “world of prose” was to be the dominant expression of its greatest and most perceptive critics, drawing upon the new vistas opened to them by portentous historic events. Glorified by a Macaulay, execrated by a Flaubert, this new “specter” would be as obsessive to them and to others as that other “specter,” evoked by Karl Marx, was to be and to remain for the bourgeoisie. The bourgeois specter was also to haunt the epigonal Romantics of the century—for Romanticism in other forms and disguises still stalked the world—a disembodied ghost with its own graveyard claims, bearing the same relation to the Romanticism of its forebears as petrified lava to the brilliant original volcanic flames.
Realism is the watchword of the new era, a Realism that transcends the purely artistic manifestations and extends into all realms of life’s experiences. It is the stamp of the age, utilizing the age’s multiform discoveries and movements, itself an instrument for penetrating into the nature of the world, and for interpreting it. It is a portion and an heir of the age’s extraordinary productions, as remarkable as those of any other time. Realism is the child of the Revolutions of 1848 and 1849.
The intellectual, moral and political future of the German lands was sealed with the defeat of the democratic ideals of the two decades preceding 1848. The abandonment of those ideals by the bourgeoisie in the name of German unity, and the harnessing of its most productive forces to the interests of absolutism and despotism, the alliance, in the case of Germany, of bourgeois, Junker, and autocracy in opposition to the betrayed working classes, was, it is true, to produce a truly astonishing phenomenon in modern Europe: the emergence of the nation within a brief period as one of the most highly developed technological and industrial societies, an imperial challenger to other imperial states for world dominance. The fruits of such challenges and counter-challenges were to be harvested eventually in two world wars.
It is in this light that one may examine the great contrasts offered by the intellectual life of the German lands in the pre-March period and thereafter.
Some time before 1848 that philosopher of anarchy, Max Stirner, wrote: “Over the gateway of our times is inscribed not that Apollonian saying, ‘Know Thyself,’ but the words, ‘Realize and utilize yourself!’” It is this adjuration and its attempted effectuation that made those years so significant for German history, a chapter that was to have no subsequent equivalent. First came the years of profound frustration immediately following the debacle of the hopes engendered by the July Revolution in the early thirties. An icy helplessness and isolation beset the fragmented country. A land that had invented the term Weltschmerz was only too prone to relapse into that state when the occasion arose. Literature spoke of such hopelessness as the sense of being “epigonal.” For example the novelist Karl Immermann, in 1836:
Alas! poor things that we are! Prematurely ripened, we no longer have either buds or blossoms. For we were born with snow on our brows.1
Along with those feelings came a profound self-contempt, as well as contempt for one’s fellow Germans. Of the latter attitude, Heinrich Heine is, of course, the prime exemplar. But others were no less vehement. Jakob Venedey spoke the feelings of many other exiles and self-exiles when he wrote in the Parisian journal Der Geächtete—The Outlawed:
I want to speak of Germany! Be still, my beating heart; restrain those tears of rage, those tears of heart-rending woe! … There was a time once, when one could be proud of being a German, when the name of Germany was pronounced with reverence. Boys read about it in the histories of Rome. But we must not think about it without shame and without anger and anguish …2
Such, indeed, was the Zerrissenheit—the self-diremption and self-division that afflicted the generation of the 1830s, and of which it was only too conscious. Poets echoed these sentiments, none more powerfully than August von Platen, Heine’s lifelong bête noire and satirical target. Platen was a passionate admirer of the Polish heroes of the 1830s, and composed a series of poems (like so many other German poets) on the subject. In an epilogue he bids farewell to Germany (he was to die of the cholera in Italy), excoriating his fellow countrymen for their apathy, their indifference to poetry and poets, and bewailing the impossibility, in view of the strict censorship, of writing honestly. He concludes,
Doch gib, o Dichter, dich zufrieden,
Es büsst die Welt nur wenig ein;
Du weisst es längst, man kann hienieden
Nichts schlechteres als ein Deutscher sein.
Come, poet, take heart and comfort,
The world your loss will scarcely mourn,
Know that on earth there’s nothing meaner
Than to be a German born.3
This is one side of the picture. On the other are still audible the voices that despite censorship, imprisonment, and exile dared to speak defiance, courage, hope, and dignity. Succeeding generations aglow with the triumphs and victories of a unified Germany might wish to forget or even bury such spokesmen as un-German enemies. But their memories persisted; and in due time a resurrection would even reveal the presence of true, if forgotten, creative genius.
One such was to be rediscovered in the decade of Germany’s greatest military triumph—Sedan—in 1870, more than thirty years after his death, to grow in stature and influence with the succeeding years as a literary pioneer and, even more, as the personification of the heroic tragedy of the 1830s. This was Georg Büchner.
Mein Büchner tot! Ihr habt mein Herz begraben!
Mein Büchner tot, als seine Hand schon offen,
Und als ein Volk schon harrte der Gaben …
My Büchner’s dead! My heart lies buried with him,
My Büchner’s dead—just when from his open hand
A people waited for his generous bounty,
A Prince struck down by Death’s malicious stroke,
A Leader lost to youth’s embattled cause,
And Time bereft of yet another Spring!….
The poet Georg Herwegh read this elegy on Georg Büchner in 1841, four years after the latter’s death. The full sense of their loss could not have been known to his audience in Zurich, though the young man who had died in 1837 at the age of twenty-three was already known as a brilliant young university lecturer on anatomy, and as the author of one published drama, Danton’s Death. They were not aware of how much more there was of him, not to be rediscovered until some forty years later; nor how much of his literary work had been destroyed at the time of his death. Nor could they have foreseen that it would take almost a century before Büchner would emerge at his true worth as a literary pioneer of great genius, and as a profoundly significant influence on the course of both drama and music.
What the poet Herwegh had sensed, however, and perhaps conveyed to his hearers and readers, was that Büchner, tragic figure that he was, was a maverick in his own decade of the 1830s and actually belonged to the generation of the 1840s. It was in that decade that he might have found those congenial stimuli and associations, intellectual, political and moral, that would have made for the recognition of an equal partnership and a favorable atmosphere for the fuller development of his genius.
Georg Büchner was one of those precocious wonder-children who mature with meteoric speed and develop multiform talents. He possessed that rare combination of creative genius: an equal measure of scientific and poetic gifts. In his rapid flight, this Icarus marks the trajectory of the buoyant hopes and despairs of the 1830s, and as a revolutionary, he previsions many of the ideas and actualities of later periods. In him there is something of that unpolluted clarity of spirit that Keats possessed; the social dedication and scientific insights of a Shelley; and an incessant turmoil within that is Byronic.
He was born in 1813 in the small town of Goddelau, near Darmstadt in Hessen, the son of a successful government physician who, not long thereafter, became medical councillor in Darmstadt. His was a family of unusual endowments—the father had served with Napoleon and was all his life a Bonapartist and Francophile, though politically conservative. Thus, the spirit of France was omnipresent in the household. A brother, Ludwig, was later to become celebrated as a philosophical materialist, author of Kraft und Stoff—Matter and Energy—and for a time far outshone his sibling. There was also a sister with pronounced literary talent. Young Georg Büchner was destined for a medical career, and after attending the Gymnasium in Darmstadt, left for the University of Strasbourg.
This city was a part of France, and though the population was in great part German, the spirit was French, and for the young student, dangerously French. Here he was able to assimilate and fuse the best of two cultures: the German classical tradition and France’s social philosophies, and in addition, obtain an excellent scientific training. After the restricted atmosphere of Hessen, this was a liberation of the spirit. For a time he was free of the oppressive thought of Hessen’s Grand Duke Ludwig II and his abhorrent minister Du Thil, and the censorship and political pettiness of all the little Metternichs.
Here, the two sides of France stood revealed. On the one hand the radical and utopian socialist ideals, and in practical life, the societies, such as that of “The Friends of the People,” or “The Rights of Man,” and the still-staunch republicanism; on the other, the full evidences of the juste milieu of Louis-Philippe. On the one hand, the feverish reception by the city of the self-exiled Poles, on the other, the echoes of the brutal repression of the Lyons silk workers in 1831. Such education as young Büchner was receiving both inside and outside the university was to be decisive for his life; though his extracurricular activities and interests would scarcely have been approved of at home. In Strasbourg, he also became secretly betrothed to Minna Jaeglé, daughter of a Protestant pastor. Their love, unforgettably revealed in whatever remains of their letters, was unfortunately never to be fulfilled in marriage. On her part, it was to survive long after his death.
When Büchner returned to Hessen to continue his studies at the University of Giessen, he was already a convinced revolutionary. Residence at this ducal university was a prerequisite for medical practice in the state. Here desolation overcame him as he contemplated the low intellectual calibre of his professors. But his political views now found a fertile field for practical expression. The Grand Duchy was in the midst of a seething conflict between the ruler and the more liberal members of the Diet over constitutional matters. Secret societies were springing up, and Giessen was not far behind. “The Rights of Man” would of course find Büchner at its center.
He was not one to remain aloof from such a world of passionate possibilities. The extent of his political involvement was not known at home, though the rumors that reached Darmstadt were sufficiently disquieting, particularly to his father, to elicit questions about Büchner’s alleged behavior and from him a fervent self-defence and a kind of confessio fidei, which while not fully explicit, gave them sufficient indication of the sort of person he was. In a letter written in February 1834 is contained, in ovo, a good portion of the later man. He is proud, independent, self-respectful, and decisive. It is a personal manifesto; the socialist manifesto was soon to follow.
Already he is a philosophical determinist of a fixed kind. In defending his views, he insists that it is Circumstances that rule all of us, and that there is nothing one can do about them.
I despise no one [he writes to his family], least of all because of his understanding or education, for it is in no man’s power to be neither a blockhead nor a criminal, for like circumstances would make us all alike. Circumstances lie outside our power … Hate is as permissible as love, and I harbor it to its fullest extent toward those who practise contempt. There are many such, who, because they possess a ridiculous exterior, or the dead trumpery they call learning, sacrifice the great mass of their brothers to their own egoism. Aristocratism is the ignominious contempt of the Holy Ghost in Man; against it I turn its own weapons: Pride against Pride; Scorn against Scorn …4
In the spring of 1834 he met the remarkable pastor of the town of Butzbach, Friedrich Ludwig Weidig. Twenty-odd years older than Büchner, Weidig had undergone an extraordinary intellectual and moral transformation that turned him from monarchist to republican and, after 1832, into an active organizer of secret societies and author and distributor of leaflets and pamphlets, mostly moderate in their expression. Weidig took to Büchner immediately, though he had a hard time attuning fully to the latter’s fieriness and radical ardor. The constitutionalist and the revolutionary joined hands and hearts. Out of that association was born Büchner’s masterly political and social manifesto Der Hessische Landbote—The Hessian Courier, of 1834. What serious consequences this was to have for all who were concerned in it, no one was of course aware at that moment. In his efforts at moderating the tone of this publication, Weidig garbled it, obtruding upon it hortatory preachments and biblical adjuration. But even in its published form, it spoke with the voices of the French Revolution, like Babeuf resurrected. Printed secretly in June 1834, its distribution was seen to by a number of associates. It addressed itself principally to what Büchner and Weidig felt to be the most oppressed of the Hessian population—the farmers and the peasants. They were the hungry of the land, and without idealizing them, Büchner felt hunger would drive them to revolutionary action. He understood well that they had little political interest in parliament or franchise, freedom of the press, and the “rights of man,” but that they knew what it was to starve. He felt that they would understand, if it was clearly set forth for them, who it was that was draining their life’s blood, parasitically living from their labor. One of the most startling portions of the pamphlet consists of a statistical presentation of the way in which court and state, ruler and bureaucrat, the rich and well-to-do, absorbed the bulk of the financial tribute exacted from the population. Citing the disastrous succession of the French July Revolution, he pours scorn upon mere parliamentarianism and electoral promises. He would have nothing to do with an alliance with liberals, constitutionalists, etc. The peasantry was for him the center of any potential uprising or revolt, with hunger their prime incentive.
Büchner’s indignation scorches:
The Prince is the head of the leech that creeps over you, the Ministers are its teeth, and the officials its tail. The hungry bellies of all the aristocratic gentlemen to whom he has distributed the high places, are the cupping-glasses which he has set on the land…. The royal robe is the carpet on which the lords and ladies wallow in their lechery. They hide their running sores with orders and ribbons, and their scabby bodies they cover with precious garments. The daughters of the people are their serving-maids and whores, the sons of the people their lackeys and soldiers. Go to Darmstadt and see for yourselves what good times these gentlemen have on your money….
The peasant follows his plow, while the aristocrat drives him along with the oxen at the plow; he takes his grain, and leaves the peasant the stubble. The life of the peasant is one long workday. Strangers devour his fields before his very eyes; his body is a welt, and his sweat is the salt on the tables of the aristocrat.5
And at the head of the pamphlet were set the French Revolutionary words:
“Freedom for the Huts! War on the Palaces!”
Such inflammatory appeals would have been enough to alert the authorities to the seriousness of the menace in their midst. There had been a few bloody incidents between Hessian farmers and the soldiery in the past. There were fears of others to come.
The work was itself an unusual combination of clearsightedness and political naiveté born of inexperience. The statistical evidence was compelling and irrefutable; the appeal was to a section that was the most exploited in the Grand Duchy. The excusable error lay in Büchner’s belief that he could apply the experiences of the first French Revolution, with its already fairly advanced working-class population and its more sophisticated peasantry, to the politically immature farmers of Hessen. Whether, if time had allowed, he could have offered a serious program of action is doubtful. The blow fell before there was time for that or for anything else.
An informer named Kuhl, one of the members of the group, had apprised the authorities concerning the printing and proposed distribution of The Hessian Courier. A number of copies had already found their way into various hands, and a number of farmers turned them over to the police. Minnigerode, one member of the society, was apprehended before he could distribute his quota. An investigation was set afoot, headed by a notoriously sadistic High Court Justice, Konrad Georgi. In the course of time, a number of the other participants were implicated and imprisoned. Among them were August Becker and Gustav Klemm, The latter was eventually to point the finger at Büchner; and Kuhl was some time later to implicate Weidig.
So far as Büchner was concerned, it seemed only a matter of days before he too would be apprehended, as soon as it was discovered that he was the principal author of the pamphlet. Time and again he was summoned for interrogation. He retired to his father’s house in Darmstadt, where, kept close, he was to prepare himself for further medical studies. But he knew that he must escape as soon as possible.
It is an extraordinary mark of Büchner’s capacity for concentration, that while still on tenterhooks, and preparing for flight, he could command sufficient presence of mind and creative energy not only to pore over medical texts, but also to set down a drama and bring it to completion. It was under such stresses that the play Danton’s Death was born. Being in need of funds for his departure (his father would never have supplied them!), he sent the play to Karl Gutzkow, the noted leader of the Young Germany school of writers. Gutzkow, who seems at once to have recognized the talents of the correspondent, obtained a publisher for the play and even helped him financially. On March 1, 1835, Büchner left Darmstadt; ten days later he was in Strasbourg again. In April 1835, Becker and Klemm were arrested.
The shock of defeat, bound up also with concern over the fate that awaited his associates, was to unsettle him for a long time. The failure of what he considered a revolutionary action found its profoundest and saddest expression in Danton’s Death. Here he was translating a recent episode in the light of French experiences of 1794. Yet, despite his troubled state, nothing could paralyze the creative urge and verve within him. He set to work and completed the delightful dramatic fantasy of Leonce and Lena, and the brilliant novelette Lenz. He also translated two of Victor Hugo’s tragedies, and began his own tragedy, Woyzeck. Nor were his scientific studies intermitted. On June 13, 1835 a warrant for his arrest was issued in Darmstadt.
The hereinafter named Georg Büchner, medical student of Darmstadt, has removed himself from the juridical investigation into his proved participation in treasonable activities against the State by leaving the Fatherland. It is therefore requested that the public authorities of the Interior and Exterior apprehend him upon his appearance, and deliver him under guard at the place indicated below.
(Signed): Georgi. Investigating Justice of Upper-Hessen, appointed by the Grand Ducal Court of Justice.
This was followed by a description of the escaped.
In 1836 he completed his doctoral dissertation on the nervous system of the barbel, which he submitted to the University of Zurich, and in September he received his degree. He was fortunate in that the Rector of that university, the celebrated scientist and philosopher Lorenz Oken, himself a refugee from Germany, had taken note of the talented younger man, and invited him to deliver a trial lecture on the subject of cranial nerves. Büchner was in Zurich by the middle of October, delivered his lecture on November 5, and won unanimous approval. He was appointed Privatdozent at the university. As was to be expected, he divided his time between science and literature. “During the day,” he wrote, “I sit with the scalpel and at night with my books.” He now had the prospect of an extablished career, and could indulge in the expectation of marriage.
He had practically completed the play, Woyzeck. Another play, Pietro Aretino, was in its finished state. In December an epidemic of typhus struck Zurich. Büchner succumbed to it. His highly nervous organism, strained by intellectual and emotional tensions, his physique that had been subject to such incessant and excessive labor, could not hold out against the disease. On February 2, 1837 he fell ill, and on February 19 he died. Minna Jaeglé rushed to his bedside, and had the consolation of loving recognition from the delirious betrothed. In his last days, he was surrounded by devoted friends.
Minna remained faithful to his memory for the rest of her life. She never married. She destroyed a great many letters among Büchner’s remains, as well as, among other manuscripts, the play of Pietro Aretino, her devout religious sense undoubtedly outraged by that work’s atheism.
In his own lifetime, Büchner was destined to see only one of his works, Danton’s Death, published. Leonce and Lena appeared in 1841. The rest was to wait for some forty years before being printed.
As Büchner lay on his deathbed he could not have known that his old associate, Pastor Weidig, was also nearing his end in prison. Arrested in 1836, he had been subjected to torture and humiliations at the hands of Georgi; his mind and body debilitated, he took his own life on February 23, 1837. A surviving letter to his wife, withheld from her by the authorities, reveals his continued firmness in the face of sadistic pressures, despite physical and mental suffering. “I am unchanged,” he wrote, “and I reiterate the promises I gave you on leaving Friedberg; I can and do repeat them so long as the breath remains in my body. I … repeat the request . . that you, as my proxy, will contradict anything that may be said to my disparagement and believe no one but myself and your own heart, for people are fond of lying about others and especially about those who are buried alive …”6 This moving document was suppressed for many years for “police reasons of state.”
* * *
Büchner’s social and philosophical outlook was shaped early, and received its final and permanent stamp after his experiences with the Hessische Bote. From beginning to end, he never ceased to be outraged by hunger, poverty, and political oppression. What he wrote in a letter of 1833 as a young man of twenty,
Political conditions would make me raving mad. The poor people patiently drag their chariot on which Princes and Liberals enact their shameful tomfooleries. Every evening I pray for the hempen rope and the lantern …7
was to remain with him when he came to write Woyzeck. He was disgusted with the idle talk of liberals and intellectuals for their failure to understand the true source of discontents and to discover that the root of revolution and change lay in the relations of rich and poor. He mocked their dream of reforming society through the agency of the educated. To Karl Gutzkow he wrote:
The relation of rich and poor is the only revolutionary element in the world. Only Hunger can be the Goddess of Freedom, and only a Moses who would send us the seven Egyptian plagues, could become a Messiah …8
He was no friend of those who harked back to the Middle Ages, whether in their political or their poetical ventures. His eye was fixed on the present. And in this very present he saw clearly what was obscured for others. For example, he understood the true nature of “violence.”
They reproach the younger generation for their use of violence. But isn’t it true that we live in an eternal condition of violence? Because we were born in prison, and brought up there, we no longer see that we are stuck in a hole, our hands and feet in chains, and our mouths gagged. What is it that you call a legal situation? A law that makes the great mass of citizens drudging chattel, in order to satisfy the unnatural needs of an insignificant and corrupt minority? And this law, propped by brutal military force and the stupid cunning of its agents—this law is eternal, raw violence, committed against Right and sound Reason, and I will fight against it with word and hand, wherever I can.9
If he saw clearly, and even defended the use of violence it was not from hardheartedness. Never for a moment does he lose sight of the poverty that surrounds him.
I have just come from the Christmas market. Everywhere swarms of ragged, freezing children, standing with eyes agape and sad faces before the splendors made of water and flour, muck and gilded paper. The thought that for most people even the most wretched pleasures and joys are unattainable treasures fills me with bitterness.10
His metaphysical system was also formed very early. A student in the Gymnasium, he discussed the problem of suicide and its relation to the question of Freedom versus Determinism. Life, he said, was its own justification; and he scorned the religious notion that it was merely a “proving ground” for an eternal hereafter.
I believe that Life is its own goal, and that development is the goal of Life. Life is itself an unfolding …11
In the same spirit he was later to speak of Nature, in opposition to those who attributed a teleology to it.
Nature does not act in accordance with purposes. She does not wear herself out in an infinite series of purposes, in which one is conditioned by the other. But in all her expressions she is directly self-sufficient. All that is, is there for her own sake …12
Like his brother Ludwig, he was a materialist. The basis of his philosophy was a static determinism. In the agonized words he writes to his betrothed early in 1834 is contained his tortured wrestling with a cosmic problem, which is soon to find its expression in Danton’s Death.
I studied the history of the [French] Revolution. I felt as if I were shattered underneath the monstrous fatality of History. I find in human nature a horrifying sameness, in human relations an inevitable violence vouchsafed to all and none. The individual is only a foam on the wave, greatness merely an accident, the preeminence of genius a puppet play, a laughable contest with an iron law, which it is the highest achievement to recognize, but an impossibility to master … The “Must” is one of the words of damnation with which humanity is baptized …13
Such, in fact, was the program for Danton’s Death, a work composed in fever heat, under the oppression of imminent arrest, and under the still greater burdens of political disaster. Begun early in 1835, it was completed by February of the same year, as if he himself were being spurred by that “Must” he was now to illuminate.
Danton’s Death is a dramatic elegy—an elegy on the revolutions of the 1830s and Büchner’s personal elegy on his own and his associates’ debacle of 1834. Sentiments and events are transposed to the crucial months beginning March 24, 1794 and ending (by intimation, in Büchner’s play), with Thermidor, Robespierre’s execution, and the victory of reaction on July 27 of the same year. The true protagonists of the tragedy are not the ostensible principals, Danton and Robespierre. The true protagonists are Fatality, garbed as Revolution; and Hunger, in the figures of the nameless masses. Almost unwittingly, Büchner had translated the Hegelian “cunning of Reason” into the fateful cunning of Fatality—not as some force that achieves and realizes itself through an ever-ascendant development, but as something fixed, static, that acting blindly and inexorably makes of human beings and of history what they are— altogether beyond their willing or not willing …
Revolution, as Büchner apprehends it, is Fatality—it is the Maker of events and men’s actions. Not the human individual, no matter how great we deem him, determines the course of events, and in this case, the Revolution; it is Revolution that determines it. The Revolution is already in the process of decay as the play opens, and Danton is himself the physical and moral embodiment of that disintegration. The “lava of Revolution” is about to bury him, as it will Robespierre, so different from Danton, so intent on acting and forwarding it. Neither Danton nor Robespierre realizes the direction toward which the Revolution is moving. Not Danton, the once radical firebrand, now the cynical, despairing voluptuary, who has already given up the Revolution and previsions Thermidor; not Robespierre, the ascetic, the puritanical Aristides. For neither can exorcise the specter that stalks outside their quarters—the specter of Hunger. Danton is an apostate from the Revolution, for whom “life is a whore,” and “the world is chaos.” He is, as he confesses, a “relic.” The figurative images that surround him, and the very physical presences, are those of whoredom, decay, decadence; his passivity is an acceptance of Fatality; the sense of the “Must” obsesses him, as also, to use a more modern term, does the “Death-wish.” For him all human beings are “epicureans,” whether they are the self-denying Robespierres or the self-indulgent Dantons. Significantly, he dallies with the ladies of pleasure while the common people cry for bread. And not far away, another more ominous figure stands and waits and secretly conspires—the bourgeois Mammon, who after defeating the Revolution will give the populace the bread it is crying for.
There are no heroes; there are no villains. The sybaritic pessimist Danton and the puritanical Robespierre are both “lonely” actors in a cosmic drama. “Wir sind sehr einsam,” Danton says. And Robespierre to Camille Desmoulins, (whom he will soon send to the scaffold, although he is his dearest friend):
Truly the Son of Man is crucified in all of us. We all wrestle in bloody agony in Gardens of Gethsemane, but no one redeems the other with his wounds. Oh Camille! They are all leaving me. The world is void and empty. I am alone.14
All of hopelessness is visible in Danton’s acceptance of Fatality—almost a heroism of passivity. The Committee of Public Safety had just ordered his arrest. Flight is still possible, or some counter-action against Robespierre. To the urgings of Camille Desmoulins, Danton replies:
I’m tired; even the soles of my feet burn.
Camille: Where will you go…. I’m asking seriously: where?
Danton: For a walk, my friend, for a walk. (He goes out.)15
Thus Büchner mirrors the doom that befell France, not so much in 1794 as after 1830 in the triumph of Louis-Philippe and the bankocracy of the juste milieu. Thus he mirrors the defeat of Büchner, and his friends Becker, Minnigerode, and Weidig, in 1834. (Weidig was to die; the other two were to face prison and, still unbroken, would find their way to America, where they would participate in the Civil War in the cause of anti-slavery….)
Ninety years after its composition, a defeated, truncated Germany, devoid of empire and emperor, would rediscover this tragedy, and in the magnificent productions of Max Reinhardt would once more live through dramas of despairs and hopes; would understand the vividness of its kaleidoscopic movement like the rapid progression of history, and perceive in the play the great forerunner of its own “epic” theatre; it would relish the language, with its obscenities, its colloquialisms, and its beauty—a language even Gutzkow was compelled to bowdlerize for his own day. It would also understand the meaning of those masses of people who move through it, its significant actors; and above all, it would comprehend, perhaps as no previous German generation had, the meaning of one of its principal protagonists, Hunger…. It would also grasp the meaning of that which one of its imprisoned characters utters anent another of its central themes—the misery of the world—as the “bed-rock of atheism.” It is Thomas Paine speaking:
First do away with the imperfect, and then you can demonstrate God. Spinoza tried it. One can deny evil, but not pain. Only Reason can prove God, feeling rebels against it…. Why do I suffer? That is the bed-rock of atheism. The slightest quiver of pain, if only in an atom, makes a rent in the Creation from top to bottom.16
That this theme was a persistent one with Büchner is shown once more in the short novelette Lenz, where the latter says, “But I, were I almighty, almighty, you see, if I were that, I could not tolerate all this suffering. I would help, I would help …”17
* * *
If Danton’s Death is Büchner’s elegy on a dying revolution, Woyzeck is the elegiac drama of the “little man.” Danton is caught up in the fatality of history and Woyzeck in the fatality of society. Both tragedies are studies of “victims”—in one case of historic figures of great magnitude, in the other, of a “nobody.” The play of Woyzeck has had its own history, too, and a peculiar one. Rediscovered in a manuscript in 1879, and with difficulty deciphered, it was finally published in a mangled form, and only very recently restored in what might seem an authentic text. It exists in a number of variants and fragments. The plot is based on an actual historic occurrence, the murder in 1821 by a barber of his mistress, in Leipzig, and his eventual beheading in 1824. Woyzeck’s became a cause célèbre, for it entailed the question of mental sanity, much debated pro and con.
Büchner’s Woyzeck is a military barber. He kills Marie, his sweetheart and the mother of his illegitimate child, after he discovers that she has been unfaithful to him with the highly imposing drum major. The bare story gave Büchner the occasion of writing one of the most impressive dramatic works of the nineteenth century, and one having a major influence in the twentieth.
At the head of Woyzeck, Büchner might well have set the words he put into Danton’s mouth:
Who will curse the hand which has been cursed by “Must”? Who has spoken that “Must”? Who? What is it in us that lies, whores, murders?18
That question the military barber Woyzeck can neither ask nor answer. He is an alienated nullity: the butt of the entire world, the subject of experiments on the part of the Doctor, the object of derision on the part of the Captain, the lover whose sweetheart is seduced by a drum major. He is less than the animals that are publicly exhibited. Yet, he stands forth as the ultimate critic of the world, of God, and of mankind, no less than of society and Fate. His simplicity speaks forth flames of condemnation.
The Captain whom he is shaving reproves him for not being “moral” in having fathered a child “without the blessings of the Church.” To which Woyzeck replies:
Sir, the good Lord is not going to look at the poor worm to see if someone said “Amen” over it before we began making it. The Lord said, “Suffer little children to come unto me.”
And as for “virtue,” Woyzeck continues,
Virtue—I haven’t got much of that. You see, we common sort we haven’t got virtue. All that happens to us is nature. But if I could be a gentleman, and had a hat and a watch and a monocle and could talk refined, I’d want to be virtuous, I would. There must be something very fine about virtue, Sir, but I’m such a poor, common fellow!
The Doctor, on his part, is conducting his scientific experiment on him, and is reproving him for pissing in the street when he was being paid three groschen per diem for supplying urine. Woyzeck pleads Nature as his excuse.
The Doctor shouts back at him,
Nature, Nature! Haven’t I proved to you that the musculus constrictor vesicae is subject to the will? Nature! Woyzeck, Man is free; in Man Individuality transfigures itself into Freedom….
What of Marie? Is she to be blamed for succumbing to the magnificent physique and uniform of the drum major? He gives her such a good time, and such lovely earrings! Would she understand the meaning of “Freedom”?
Woyzeck has visions—hallucinations. To the Doctor his is a wonderful case of aberratio mentalis partialis of a secondary sort. What a beautiful instance of the idée fixe to observe and study! And he raises Woyzeck’s wages … Poor Woyzeck becomes more obsessed than ever. He hears voices calling on him to stab, stab … And he kills Marie with a knife …
Like Danton and Robespierre, Woyzeck is a “lonely” man. People in the play speak not so much with or to each other, but past each other, “aneinander vorbei”, as the Germans put it. Each expresses his social status, the morality of his class: the Captain, the pedantic Doctor, Woyzeck. But Woyzeck is spiritually and economically naked. He is the “little man” on whom everyone else tramples. He is the nobody who is constantly preached to and lectured at by “moralists,” who would have him be virtuous, have him recognize that he is a “morally free” individual. But Woyzeck knows better. Has he not seen that virtue and freedom mean money? Has he not seen the only truly deep relationship he has developed with a woman destroyed by the superior allurements his rival can offer? On every side he is badgered, used, and so he becomes a driven man, maddened to the point of murder. A free man? A virtuous man? A man at all?
The swiftly moving scenes are the hammer beats of an inexorable Fate. The racy, often obscene speech is colloquial and local; the discourses are often disconnected and wild; all of this has the quality of something inevitable, of a nightmare too deeply rooted in reality to be mere fantasy. The post-World-War I era would assimilate this play too into what was to be called “Expressionist” doctrine. It would serve as the text for one of the most impressive musical works of the twentieth century, Alban Berg’s Wozzeck. Across the hundred or so years, Büchner could look upon a rich posterity, not the least of his heirs being Bertolt Brecht. Thus, by a strange historic paradox, Büchner would join the great company of the theatre’s renovators, from Ibsen and Strindberg, to Wedekind, down to the present.
Though deeply in the grip of a “static determinism,” which he certainly would have modified had he lived into the exciting philosophical revolution of the following decade, and which would have basically altered his interpretation of the force of Circumstance, inflexible and unalterable, in the life of individuals and society; and though touched with a profound, humane pessimism; he never lapsed into that hapless and hopeless cynicism that is the death-rattle of frustrated Romanticism. He was saved by a pervasive sense of confraternity with human beings, especially with the least of them—the atomized nullities, if one may excuse this paradox—and a compassion that was neither factitious nor fictitious. He was not of those pessimists who, like the greatest of them, Arthur Schopenhauer, could urge cosmic compassion for the victims of the transcendental Will, while at the same time watch with the sang-froid of a Metternich, and even with some glee, the shooting down of Frankfurt revolutionaries by the soldiery, even lending them his spyglass for greater accuracy. Büchner had failed to understand a great many things, true; but he never abandoned one principle in life, which he embodied in an immortal sentence:
Weisst du auch, Valerio, dass selbst der Geringste unter den Menschen so gross ist, dass das Leben noch viel zu kurz ist, um ihn lieben zu kennen?
It is one of his characters, Leonce, speaking:
Do you know, Valerio, that the least among human beings is yet so great, that life is too short for us adequately to love him?19
It is such a testament a twenty-three year old young man left to posterity for eternal remembrance.
And through his character, Lenz, he enunciates his theory of art, his conception of a true realism:
I demand in all things that it be Life, and the possibility that it exist; that’s the thing. We then have no need to ask whether it is beautiful or ugly…. Idealism is the most shameful of insults to human nature. Let them try just once to immerse themselves in the life of the most humble and reproduce it again in all its palpitations, intimations, in the whole of its subtle, scarcely perceptible play of expression … The organs of feeling are the same in almost all human beings, only the crust is more or less thick through which it must break…. One must love mankind in order to penetrate into the peculiar essence of each; no one must be too common, too ugly. Only then can they be understood …20
The icy crust of defeatism and lethargy that marked German intellectual life in the 1830s shivered and cracked in the following decade. The “lightning of ideas” that was bringing philosophy down from the skyey heights of Hegelianism into the arena of quotidian battles, struck poetry too, and in turn made it the companion of both the new philosophy and the immediate political and social problems of the day. In an unprecedented brotherhood, poets and philosophers joined hands to associate themselves with others of like mind in the common battle against absolutism, and in demanding radical changes. Such a sense of marching with the forward movement of history would not be characteristic of philosophy and letters in the German lands for many years to come.
It was heralded by Georg Herwegh, the poet who had recognized Büchner’s place among the advance-guard, and whose volume of poems, Gedichte eines Lebendigen— Poems of One Alive—which appeared in 1841, broke the ten years’ sleep. The near hysterical reception of these poems and their author, and the book’s astonishing sales, reveal the hunger that had prevailed and which now promised to be stilled. The very title of the volume was a call to resurrection. It was to be but the first of many such counterparts as succeeding years in ever fuller measure spoke of this new sense of revival.
“One morning, as I lay in bed, I opened and read the first volume of Herwegh’s poems … The new ringing tones gripped me like a trumpet-blast that suddenly rouses a vast camp of nations to arms.” Thus Gottfried Keller, a young Swiss poet and painter, destined to become one of the greatest of novelists of German-speaking lands, pays his tribute and follows with a fiery sonnet:
Schäum brausend auf!—Wir haben lang gedürstet,
Du Goldpokal, nach einem jungen Wein….
O foaming draught! Long have we thirsted sore,
Thou cup of gold, to taste a strong, new wine;
In thy red heart we saw a vintage shine.
Oh how we drank, and, drinking, called for more!….
Our age is dead, for dead men’s bones a shrine;
The sleepers bide the last dread trumpet’s sign;
But thou, to wake us, prince-like come’st before….21
He was only one of thousands to hail the appearance of Herwegh’s poems. Franz Liszt was taken with them, and set a number of them. The book was issued in Zurich, for Herwegh too was a refugee, having escaped military service, to which he had been sentenced for having insulted an officer in Stuttgart, his native town. He had early become inspired by the Zeitgeist—which he was to call the “Madonna of poets”—the spirit of a time that called writers to arms. “Literature is politics,” he asserted, and it is “the Muse of History that composed the first pages of our new literature.” “The Principle of the new literature is … that of Democracy.” Among his guiding stars were Börne and Heine as well as Robert Burns and Shelley. The Frenchman Béranger he lauded as the “nightingale with the eagle’s claws.”22
His was to be a tempestuous career, initially marked by triumphs reserved for few poets, then checkered with dramatic alternations including both serious and comic elements, pathos, heroism and unheroics, a military engagement, meetings with Karl Marx and King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, and association with such other diverse figures as Wilhelm Weitling the “communist,” Richard Wagner, and Alexander Herzen— sometimes with very significant consequences.
For the time being there was triumph. There was fire in those poems of “one who was alive,” meant to inflame others to action. There was bombast, but also inspired invocation. There were calls to freedom, and also a nationalistic note on keeping the Rhine “German.” Here one found Poland’s battles of liberation once more celebrated, and the German censor excoriated. He offers Béranger a “sword decked with roses” as a tribute to the warrior-poet, for steel and flowers are conjoined in these new German poets of liberation. In a moving sonnet he offers a memorable tribute to Shelley.
These were clarion calls to which readers responded, sometimes shrill, sometimes truly inspired. The lark that Shelley had sung becomes in Herwegh’s transfiguration the augur of freedom.
Die Lerche war’s, nicht die Nachtigall,
Die eben am Himmel geschlagen:
Schon schwingt er sich auf, der Sonnenball,
Vom Winde des Morgens getragen.
Der Tag, der Tag ist erwacht!….
Heraus wer ans ewige Licht noch glaubt!
Ihr Schläfer, die Rosen der Liebe vom Haupt,
Und ein flammendes Schwert um die Lenden!
It was the lark, not the nightingale,
Has poured her song from the skies,
And the sun’s burning orb in a crimson veil
On the wind of the morning lies.
The day, the day is bright! …..
Up! up! whosoever in Light puts his trust,
Sleepers awake! tread love’s roses in dust,
And gird flaming swords on your thighs! …23
This is Herwegh, “the iron lark,” as Heinrich Heine called him in a celebrated poem. Iron and steel are more apparent in another poem, “Aufruf”—“The Summons.”
Reisst die Kreuze aus der Erden!
Alle sollen Schwerter werden …
Cross from tomb and temple tear!
Beat to blades that men may bear!
God in Heaven will allow.
Truce to song! Let all the singing
Iron be on anvil ringing!
Steel be your Redeemer now! …24
This was daring speech, and it thrilled. The poems circulated in the German states, even in Prussia, where the honeymoon of pious expectation of more liberal days was still in full flower following the accession of the new king. Herwegh too imagined that new times were coming, and he addressed a poetic appeal to Friedrich Willhelm IV, inviting him to become a true “shepherd” of his people and to heed the call of the young for leadership in deeds of heroism, even war!
Herwegh’s successes went to his head. Particularly so when on returning to Germany and embarking on a triumphal tour, he was everywhere hailed as the poet-prophet. He now imagined himself to be another Marquis Posa, who like the hero of Schiller’s tragedy Don Carlos, could plead a people’s cause of freedom before a monarch. Alas! the King was gracious enough to receive Herwegh in audience and exchange a few kindly words as an honest antagonist, and—if we are to trust Herwegh’s version—to wish the poet a speedy reformation, à la Damascus. Here, in the palace, was at least one person who had not been converted by the Poems of One Alive!
But if the king did not swoon over these poems, there was a woman who did. This was Emma Siegmund, the daughter of a wealthy businessman of Berlin. She fell in love with the poet and they became engaged. The occasion was marred by a slight indiscretion on Herwegh’s part, a letter addressed to the King of Prussia anent the suppression in the kingdom of something he had written in Switzerland. The procession of triumph was cut short, for Herwegh was ordered to leave the country. He returned to Switzerland, where he was to celebrate his nuptials. Among those who witnessed the ceremony was Mikhail Bakunin. But the political atmosphere in Switzerland in the year 1843 was no less sultry than that of Prussia, and Herwegh was invited to leave. Husband and wife departed for Paris.
Herwegh’s political education was being rounded out. Already in 1842 he had met Marx in Cologne, where the latter was editing the Rheinische Zeitung. Arnold Ruge and Bruno Bauer drew him into their liberal circle, Die Freien. His own personal experiences had added materially to his development. In Paris he was to meet old acquaintances, also exiles, and to make new ones, in an atmosphere that was charged with political dynamite. And what a company of men and women! Herwegh, an attractive man and celebrated poet, was welcomed. Soon he met them all: George Sand, the Comtesse d’Agoult, Béranger, Victor Hugo; Heinrich Heine, Marx, Ruge, and Bakunin; the scientist Karl Vogt also, in whose company and that of Bakunin he undertook the study of “nature” at St.-Malô. In Paris he prepared the second volume of his poems, and voiced his resentment of the King of Prussia with full-throated violence….
He wrote:
Forbidden books fly through the air and what the people wants to read it will read despite all government decrees. Your Majesty’s ministers forbade my poems fifteen months ago, and I am now in the happy position of seeing a fifth edition of them through the press. Your Majesty’s ministers have ordered the confiscation of books that appeared dangerous, and on my journey through Germany I have been able to see for myself that they are in everybody’s hands.25
In a long, mordant verse-diatribe against the King, which he launched from Paris, Herwegh mingled reprobation with prophecy; sounded a note of sorrow that the King had not hearkened to the Poet. But what could one expect of this royal master who behaves like another Saul facing a David? (Herwegh was never too modest in his selection of archetypes!) Wait, he concluded, wait and see—but take warning. For a day is coming,
When the ship with all its inept crew,
And you, and your hapless throne,
Will be shivered against a mighty rock!
For know—The Sphinx of Revolution lives! …26
Well, that day did dawn. February 1848 of Paris had its March in Berlin and Vienna. Karl Marx hastened back from Brussels, and the poet Ferdinand Freiligrath from his exile in London. German hearts in Paris rejoiced as, in Herwegh’s words, they gloried in the “three days that sufficed the children of Paris to bury the old, rotting world with all its prejudices, and privileges … and to forge the blessed bond uniting all nations.”27
Thousands of them hastened to make their protestations of fraternity to the Provisional Government, in processions marked by songs and headed by a poet—Herwegh. What a joy to present two intertwined banners, that of France and Germany, and to hear heartwarming words of one of the members of the provisional government, Crémieux, declare that Germany, “the seat of philosophy and science … knew well the meaning of freedom, and would know how to win it without outside help …”28
In the wake of such enthusiasm arose the idea of organizing a German legion to abet the revolutionary movement, particularly in Baden and Württemberg. With Herwegh in the lead, some five hundred Germans were gathered together. Enthusiasm outran wisdom. The forces gathered in Paris were eventually to join those being gathered in the south by Struve and Hecker. There were voices that warned against so hurried a project, with all its fanfare. Karl Marx was opposed to a venture intended to revolutionize a country from the outside, especially by a hastily organized, poorly directed and inexperienced army. Against the disciplined military of Baden and Württemberg such campaigns were doomed. Emma, Herwegh’s wife, a brave if somewhat romantic person, stood by her husband’s side throughout the battles; whatever was left of the routed forces fled across the border into Switzerland. Thus April 1848 proved a disaster. Though badly scarred by the defeat of his dreams, and never destined to equal the success of his early verses, Herwegh in Switzerland remained unshaken as the poet of the opposition to the reaction that was soon to triumph in Germany.
He saw what he called “the old night” settling once more over all of Europe—Austria the “spider” spinning her web of despotism ever more tightly as the “barbarians enter the Milan Cathedral”—and heard the cries of mortal agony of the Czechs, the Poles, and the Italians.29
He followed the course of Germany’s history, and particularly the rise of a new working-class movement, with deep interest. For Ferdinand Lassalle’s Workingmen’s Association he adapted Shelley’s “Song to the Men of England” as a “Song of Confederation”—the Bundeslied. He dedicated verses to the International Working Men’s Association led by Marx and Engels. He watched Germany’s rise to world power under Bismarck and Wilhelm I with trepidation; he spoke of Prussian and German “arrogant striving for world domination.” In the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 he was one of a few Germans to excoriate that spirit; and to those intoxicated with the victories he called out: “Unity is a vain thing, unless it is unity with the Good; yours is not the Unity baptized in Freedom, but by the Devil!”30 He prophesied the resurrection of Garibaldi’s Italy; he reprehended the German annexation of Alsace-Lorraine. And two years before his death in 1875, he recalled with fervor the glories of 1848 and the “Eighteenth of March”:
Achtzenhundert vierzig und acht,
Als im Lenze der Eis gekracht….
Achtzehnhundert siebzig und drei,
Reich der Reichen, da stehtst du, juchhei! …
and the great contrast between 1873 and 1848, when the workers of Berlin forced the “German Caesar” to do homage to them. But now,
Eighteen hundred and seventy-three!
Land of the Rich, there you stand, Hurrah!
But we the Poor, the sold and betrayed,
Remember the deeds of our brothers that day,
No! Not all the March days are gone away,
Eighteen hundred and seventy-three!31
And to Count Zeppelin he wrote:
I will never set foot in Alsace, now that it has become German. But let my son go there in my stead. He will see what a Germany drunk with blood and glory is capable of and may he remember it for ever.32
Awareness of change within oneself is perhaps one of the outstanding characteristics of the writers of the forties. It is but another of those links that brought them closer to one another in Germany and Austria, and beyond these countries, to writers in more distant lands. In the poet Ferdinand Freiligrath, seven years Herwegh’s senior, the stages of radical change are even more clearly demarcated.
In 1844 he published a collection of poems (not his first) that created something of a sensation. It was called Glaubensbekenntnis—Confession of Faith—and contained a preface with the following words, intended to explain to his readers why the contents of that volume differed so radically from those he had previously published:
All the schooling which I as an individual have acquired in full view of the nation is, after all, the same which the nation, in striving for a political consciousness and political education, has collectively acquired and is still acquiring. The worst that I can be charged with, in the final analysis, is that I have descended from the “higher watchtower” to the “ramparts of a Party.” This I admit is true. Firm and unshakable, I join the side of those who set their hearts and souls against Reaction. Not for me a life without Freedom! Whatever lot be in store for me or my book, so long as the oppression under which I see my Fatherland groaning exists, my heart will bleed and rebel. May my tongue and my arms never weary in doing all in my power to help bring about better times. May the Lord God and the confidence of my people abet me in this task. I turn my face toward the Future.33
This from a poet whose earlier works, beginning with 1838, had won him the favor of the King of Prussia and a sizable annual stipend that relieved him of onerous commercial occupations, was enough to startle the world—and in fact constituted a challenge and a personal declaration of political independence.
Freiligrath was already an acknowledged poet when Friedrich Engels, ten years his junior, saw him in Barmen in 1838. Freiligrath, too, like the more affluent Engels but for much more pressing and immediate reasons, was forced into accepting a post in a commercial establishment. The pressure came not only from an insistent parent, but also from need. Thus both men were brought into contact with the world of commerce and industry. And both faced their clerical occupations with reluctance, more inclined to adore the poetic Muse than a prosaic Mammon. Neither could have foreseen how close would be their dedication in friendship and collaboration in years to come, nor on what common political roads they were to travel for a long time …
For Freiligrath’s early poetry scarcely suggests the fervent involvements in which he was soon to engage. All the cliché themes of a belated romanticism are here: America of the vast plains, the mysterious East, Greece, the wild ocean, the Negro as alien abroad, brigands, pirates. Byron is there, and even more forcefully Victor Hugo of the Orientales. But the German generation of the 1830s still relished such post-romantic fare, delighting to wander afield in imagination when it could not move in fact. Young Engels, too, commenced his poetic career with exotic dreams …
Politically conservative Freiligrath regarded the poet as standing “above the battle.” Impartial and Olympian, he is as just to the heroic Napoleon as he is to the latter’s murdered victim, the Duke d’Enghien. So he affirmed even in 1841, the year in which Herwegh produced his Poems of One Alive.
In a poem dedicated to the memory of the arch-conservative Spanish General Diego de León, whose unsuccessful conspiracy to restore the Regent Queen Maria Cristina to the throne of Spain ended in his execution at the hands of the liberal leader Espartero, Freiligrath had written,
The Poet stands upon a loftier tower
Than a Party’s ramparts and battlements.
He bends the knee before the hero Bonaparte,
And outraged hears d’Enghien’s mortal cry …
Der Dichter steht auf einer höhern Warte,
Als auf den Zinnen der Partei….
—lines which were to be carried from lip to lip.34
In 1842 he received the royal stipend that was intended to enable him to devote himself to poetry. In the same year, Herwegh addressed a reply to Freiligrath à propos of those verses.
Party! who is there who can stand aloof?
Party is Mother of all victories.
How can the poet scorn this mighty word?….
Have not the gods themselves descended from Olympus
To do battle in an earth-born Cause?35
Freiligrath, bridling at this challenge, took his revenge a year later in a brightly satirical though malicious “Letter” in verse, making sport of Herwegh’s tour through Germany, his interview with the King, and his ultimate fiasco. In more brilliant fashion, Heinrich Heine too was to pour his wit over poor Herwegh. How could Freiligrath himself have foreseen that before long he himself would hasten to descend from Olympus, hearken to the call of “Party,” and then rival Herwegh in his political and social commitment?
Yet by 1844 he was a changed man. In that year he published a collection of poems, Ein Glaubensbekenntnis—A Confession of Faith, the same year in which Heinrich Heine issued his Neue Gedichte. Freiligrath’s volume sold over eight thousand copies in its first year. Once more, Zeitgeist, the Spirit of the Age, was speaking out directly, unequivocally—and finding response. Here was another challenge to Prussian authority. For the poet had already had several severe brushes with the censor. A number of the poems he was now giving the public had in fact been barred from publication in one or the other of the journals. None of the poems now appearing were revolutionary. But they were liberal enough to warrant, in the eyes of the authorities, prohibition, and for the author, worse. Freiligrath was venturing his pension; he was venturing his personal freedom. Like his hero Ulrich von Hutten, he was saying, “Ich hab’s gewagt. Jacta est aulea!” “I have dared it! The die is cast!” He was affirming what liberalism in the German states was expressing more and more articulately. Freedom and Right are twin sisters! Freedom through Right! He was lauding those who had suffered and were suffering persecution, and asserting, Freedom is not dead!36 Like so many other poets, Heine not least, he was expressing outrage at the oppression and starvation of the Silesian weavers. He was celebrating the “Tree of Humanity” in its constant cycles of renewal that nothing can stop; the everlasting blooming and rebirth that brings life from death, and will do the same for Poland and Spain. “Immer Frühling, immer Freiheit träumend,” “Always dreaming Spring, always dreaming Freedom.”37
He was inviting the poet Hoffmann von Fallersleben, who had been deprived of his Breslau professorship, to leave the sultry climate of Prussia and enjoy the freer atmosphere of the Rhine, to hurry before the “sword of his own poetry” had driven Freiligrath “westward.” He was offering translations of the radical English Corn Law Rhymer Ebenezer Elliot, of Robert Burns’s “For A’ That.” And not least, that challenge to Germany that was to become his most celebrated poem—“Hamlet.”
Deutschland ist Hamlet! Ernst und stumm
In seinen Toren jede Nacht
Geht die begrabne Freiheit um …
“Germany is Hamlet,” and buried freedom, solemn and mute, haunts her gates, upbraiding the dilatory Prince for delaying his vengeance. But Hamlet is not stirring!
He sits too much beside the fire,
He lies and reads too long in bed,
His sluggish blood is thick with mire.
He’s scant of breath and too well fed.
’Tis learned oakum all he picks
With little work and too much thinking,
Too long in Wittenberg he sticks,
Frequenting lecture-halls, and drinking …
Such is our German Hamlet. Four acts have gone, now for the fifth; let it not follow Shakespeare’s scheme! “Now is the moment … There still is time …” The way is free!
Think of thy oath and play thy part,
Revenge our buried freedom’s wrong.
Yet the dear dreamer shall I blame,
Because he waits and shilly-shallies:
In my heart am I not the same?
A creature that delays and dallies?38
No, Freiligrath was no such German Hamlet. He did not hesitate. He renounced his royal pension, and in anticipation of prosecution, he left Germany and made his way to Brussels. There he met other refugees, among them Karl Marx, “a nice fellow,” as Freiligrath described him, “interesting and modest in his attitude.”39
Brussels could not hold him, and he soon went to Switzerland. But his head and heart were afire with new poems that far outdistanced those he had written before, and soon in 1846 he published a small volume of them with the title taken from the French revolutionary chant, Ça ira! Here in Switzerland the atmosphere was freer and more receptive. Here he found German refugees like himself, many of them more or less radical socialists. Here he met Franz Liszt and Gottfried Keller. Here too a struggle between the old and the new, the Liberals and the Catholics, was taking place, soon to erupt in a civil war. Freiligrath moved quickly, for the Ça ira was his own “Marseillaise.”
It is hard to specify the influences that had played upon him, or were playing upon him—the atmosphere around him was thick with social doctrines of varying kinds and forcefulness. Freiligrath was a wide reader; he knew English and French perfectly, and he was to become a consummate translator from both languages. He was deep in the poets of the times, and no doubt drew inspiration also from the more theoretical writings of the day. His was not a philosophical mind. What he read and thought through, he converted to deeply felt sentiment.
The first poem of the little collection is in fact set to the music of the “Marseillaise.” It is an invitation to a voyage, toward a discovery of a new America. For the name of the ship is “Revolution”!
Oh black fire-ship! Hurl your rockets
Into the canting churches’ yachts,
Against the silver fleets of masters,
Bravely point the cannons’ mouth.
In the deep sea’s teeming bottom,
Let Greed’s rich treasures rot!
Ahoy then! Ahoy! the vessel well-manned!
Set sail! Set sail! Beyond is new land!40
This was incendiary enough. But even more so was the poem “Freie Presse”—“A Free Press”—in which the master and his printing mates are turning type into an “arrogant morning paper”—that is, bullets. Thereafter will the bullets once more be recast into type…. “Von unten oben,”—“Up from Below,” is the most daring of these poems. It casts defiance at the King of Prussia. The King and the Queen, visiting their castle on the Rhine, are aboard the Rhine steamer. The trip is delightful, the company gay; King and Queen are pleased up on deck! But down below in the boiler room, amid the grime and the heat, there is one who makes the boat move. For a moment he comes up on deck and views the joyful gathering from his opened hatch. In his hand a glowing iron, his face and arms reddened, he reflects: How like a state is this ship! You, King, in the light up above; you in the light; I, down below, in the darkness— stoking, and stirring the volcanic fires. It is in my hands that I hold both your fate and the fate of the ship, and were I so minded I could blow you both up in the air. Not yet! But the time will come—the ground will burst, the fires will rise from the depths; and we, those below, we will ascend from the pits of fire into the light.
For we are Power! With youthful strength
We shatter the rotting state!
We, who work below, we are God’s rage!41
Such is Freiligrath’s first forthright proletarian poem. At the same time he wrote:
I am no communist, at least not a fanatical one, but I believe that this new dogma, even if regarded merely as a form of transition, is yet an essential step forward, and that because of its humanitarian basis it can do more to inspire, promote, and effect a decisive change than can any one-sided political doctrine. Surely we have passed beyond the illusions of German constitutionalism—petty or large! Communism will have a future! All its dreams will not be realized, but if like Columbus it fail to land in India, it will yet discover an America.42
His life, as he put it in one of his poems, was like a chessboard, and he like a knight, ready to jump, though he was not as yet sure where. He was not afraid of the future. He could not hope to survive by poetry alone. He would have to reconcile himself once more to some commercial or banking post. Would it be in America? He decided for England, and in July 1846, left for London—an emigrant once more, with family responsibilities, embarking on a peripatetic existence—something taken for granted by his generation.
In London Freiligrath found a commercial position through friends and settled down to a modest if still precarious life. Longfellow, whom he had met some years before, was urging him to be his guest in America. But he hesitated. He had gotten to know a number of congenial people; among British men of letters he became acquainted with Tennyson, Barry Cornwall, Monckton-Milnes, and Bulwer. He was busy translating English poetry, especially that of Thomas Hood. He was renewing relations with Karl Marx, and soon would meet Engels on a firmer footing. The inclusive influence of these men was to widen his political and social horizon and sharpen his political verse as well as his thinking.
And then one day in February 1848, when he had finally made up his mind to cross the Atlantic, startling news arrived from across the Channel. Gone was the thought of emigration. Here, here was his America; here that battleship of Revolution which he had sung, and here its booming salvoes!
How could one record the feelings of those hours—his own and those of his friends? On February 25, Freiligrath composed a poem, “Im Hochland fiel der erste Schuss”—“In the Highlands the first shot rang,” celebrating the Swiss triumph over the Sonderbund; the events in Italy, and France.
My eyes are dimmed with tears,
My heart is forever singing:
“Mourir pour la Patrie!”
Blessings, blessing glorious year,
Blessings happy month!
“Allons enfants! Mourir, mourir,
Mourir pour la Patrie!”
What about the Rhine and the Elbe? he was asking himself. March came, and with it the days of Berlin and Vienna. For the Berliners he composed a strong poem, warning them not relax from the battle, to remain true to the fallen revolutionaries. It was, he said, “People or Crown!” “Volk heisst es oder Krone!” Do not, he begged, let the dead heroes stem the floods of Freedom, let them be the stepping stones toward a new future! Be on your guard lest you exchange the struggle for Freedom solely for that of German unity.
For we too have been thirsting long,
For a nation One and Free:
One—only when she’s free,
And free without her lords.
And now our bags our fully packed,
And we are on our way!
Now, holy Freedom, comfort bring
To Mother, Bride, and Child
Of him who fell. And to our own
If steel should mow us down.43
Freiligrath was as good as his word. In May he was back in Düsseldorf. He took part in the meetings of the Frankfurt Assembly. His association with Karl Marx, who was now in Cologne, deepened into friendship and close cooperation. Aghast, they watched the ring of reaction closing tightly around the country, while the German Hamlet scarcely moved. Freiligrath’s poems now took on a sharper edge. He turned Burns’s “For A’ That” into a scorching arraignment of the Germans’ acquiescence in their own disarming. “So fill the mortar’s maw,” he wrote, “with iron, lead, and a’ that, and we’ll hold our ground for a’ that.” This poem was circulated in thousands as a leaflet, as was the even more searing, “Die Toten an die Lebenden”—“The Dead to the Living,” of which nine thousand copies were sold. In the latter, he was once more reminding his fellow-countrymen of the hundred and eighty-seven victims of the Berlin barricades of March 18. Such reminders were badly needed. Freiligrath is speaking with the voices of the perished:
Die Kugel mitten in der Brust, die Stirne breit gespalten,
So habt ihr uns auf blut’gem Brett hoch in die Luft gehalten!
Hoch in die Luft mit wildem Schrei, dass unsre Schmerzgebärde
Dem, der zu töten uns befahl, ein Fluch auf ewig werden!
Each with a bullet in his heart, and forehead gaping wide,
You raised us on our blood-stained boards above the human tide,
High in the air with wild uproar, that each set face of pain
Might prove an everlasting curse to him that had us slain!….
We thought high was the price, but good the cause for which we bled
And stretched us quietly to rest, each on his narrow bed.
Out on you! Were we not deceived? Four moons their course scarce run,
Your coward hands have fooled away what was so stoutly won….
We, who humbled the King, and forced him to come “reeling to our bed” and doff his royal hat, were made to watch the subsequent shaming of our ideal, the betrayal of Poland, the return of the cowardly Prussian Prince …44
In Cologne, Karl Marx was reconstituting his former newspaper into the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Once again it became a formidable and fearless organ of the opposition, and a sharp thorn in the flesh of Prussian reaction. Freiligrath joined its editorial staff in the fall of 1848. Soon he was to join the League of Communists. Yet even before these associations took place, he felt the oppressive weight of the government. Amid popular outrage, he was brought to trial for the poem, “The Dead to the Living,” but was ultimately exonerated. Far from being deterred, he now began to appear in the pages of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, where his poetry contributed the crystallized emotional and aesthetic impact, a coadjutor of the other editors’ polemical articles, a brilliant flame that illumined a significant moment of history. Here, in November 1848, he published his lines on “Vienna” with their desperate plea to Germans to come to that city’s help. Here, too, he dedicated a moving hymn to the memory of the executed Robert Blum, when his native city, Cologne, paid him a memorial honor. Here Freiligrath celebrated the signal resistance of the Hungarians.
In 1849 only Hungary was still holding out. Barricade after barricade had fallen. The Prussian king was in the saddle once more. Prussian troops acted as the vanguard executioners of revolution all over the land. And now Louis-Napoleon was elected President of the French Republic. In the Rhineland the harassment suffered by the Rheinische Zeitung and its principal editor became more blatant and overt. On March 11, 1849, Marx was ordered expelled from Prussian territory. The fate of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was sealed. Its last number appeared on May 19, 1849, and carried a “Farewell” to its readers from the hand of Freiligrath. “Though a stricken corpse,” the poem said, “I remaind undaunted, and with my last breath I cry defiance and call to arms.” And it promised to return:
Wenn die letzte Krone wie Glas zerbricht
In des Kampfes Wettern und Flammen …
When the last royal diadem has splintered like glass,
In battles’ fierce turmoil and roar,
When the People has thundered its last “Guilty!” doom,
I will stand by your side once more.
With word and with deed, by Danube and Rhine,
Amid gunsmoke and shattering alarms,
When the last of thrones has crashed to the dust,
I’ll be there—your comrade-at-arms!45
Karl Marx had gone to Paris, where the French government made it known that he was unwelcome. So once more he took his Wanderstab—and in September 1849 he arrived in London, where he was soon joined by his wife. Impecunious and troubled, he began, upon arrival, to plan publication of a Neue Rheinische Revue. In the Rhineland he had left, the full force of repression was soon to fall on many of his political associates. Eventually it culminated in the notorious Cologne anti-Communist trial, which in 1852 resulted in severe prison sentences for seven of those tried. Freiligrath, who was not implicated, remained in the field to settle the affairs of the defunct journal, and to raise funds for the relief of the accused and their families. His devotion, his loyalty, and his courage knew no compromises. Wherever he was needed, there he was. He himself did not know how long he would be free, or how long he would remain….
In 1851 appeared the second volume of his Neuere politische und soziale Gedichte, which with the previously published first part contained the fulminant poems of the preceding years. Freiligrath was still hopeful of a resurgence of revolution. But now prosecution threatened him. In May 1851 he left for London. Here he was to live for sixteen years. Once again he returned to the counting-house …
His poetic career was practically over. He needed the intense situation of battle to fire him to his most eloquent utterances. Not that emigrant elements in London — French, German, Italian, Hungarian, Polish, Russian—lacked matter over which to quarrel. In many of their hearts still lurked a vision of another imminent revolution on the Continent, decried as vain illusion by the more hard-headed. For a number of years Freiligrath remained a devoted friend of Marx and Engels, always ready to assist Marx when the latter needed him. In time he drifted away from political activity, devoting himself to his commercial duties, and to translations and journalism. He became a notable intermediary connecting French, British and American letters with Germany; and, in the London Athenaeum, a significant interpreter of German literature to England. He was among the first to make Walt Whitman known in Germany; he translated the poetry of William Cullen Bryant and Longfellow. He composed consummate versions of Hugo’s poetry. But the spark that had fired the verses of his “Confession of Faith” and his “New Political and Social Poems” was out. In 1858 he became a naturalized British citizen, and three years later he rejected the political amnesty extended by Wilhelm I. With age, the longing to return to Germany became irresistible, and when, in the economic crisis of 1866, the Swiss banking firm in whose London branch he had been employed for years suffered reverses, he found himself unemployed and in straits. In Germany a movement to raise a national subscription on his behalf found many supporters, and he received the sum of 60,000 Thalers. On June 24, 1868, he returned to Germany, where he would die in 1874. Unlike Georg Herwegh, he became a fervent supporter of his country in the Franco-German War, and composed a number of patriotic lyrics. His revolutionary poetry was practically forgotten in the Bismarckian and Wilhelminian era, until it was momentarily and paradoxically revived with the collapse of Germany in the First World War. On June 24, 1923, in one of the darkest moments of German history, on the anniversary of the assassination of Walther Rathenau, Hugo Preuss rose in the Reichstag and recited Freiligrath’s revolutionary verses, “Trotz alledem,” “For A’ That!” In one of those macabre and anomalous transpositions of meaning, he turned Freiligrath’s fiery words of defiance against the oppressors of German humanity, the monarchs, the Junkers, the bourgeois, into a defiance of the victors, of the world! Freiligrath had cried, “Wir sind das Volk, die Menschheit wir” …
We are the people, humanity we,
For a’ that and for a’ that!
We dare you come! for a’ that!
You can constrain—but not compel—
Ours is the world, for a’ that!46
O, ominous and prophetic realm of ambiguities!
Brussels, July 19, 1845
Dear Mother,
… For the rest, it is likely that in the future I shall be doing many things which will be contrary to your wishes and ideas. I must ask you, once and for all, to let me go my own way. You may be certain that everything I do will be with the purest of motives. I belong to the “Rag-Tag Communists,” who are now being pelted with mud, and whose sole crime has been to fight for the poor and oppressed in a life and death struggle. Let the gentlemen of property beware; the mighty arms of the people are on our side, and the best minds of all nations will come over by and by. There is my dearest friend from Barmen, Friedrich Engels, who has written a book in favor of the English workers, and has lashed out furiously at the manufacturers, and with perfect justice. His own father has factories in England and Germany.
Now he’s had a terrible quarrel with his family, who think him godless and wicked, and his rich father does not give him a penny for his support. I, however, know the son to be a supremely good human being, of extraordinary intelligence and vision, who fights for the good of the working classes with all his might, night and day ….47
So the twenty-three year old Georg Weerth to his mother, widow of a very substantial clergyman, senior minister in Detmold, whose house adjoined that of the Freiligrath family.
The mother had reason to be disturbed. Her son was embarked, it seemed, on a successful commercial career, an important agent for a cotton concern in Bradford, to which town he had moved in 1843 after an apprenticeship in Elberfeld and Cologne. The year following his arrival there he had begun cultivating the friendship of Friedrich Engels, who was employed in nearby Manchester. The following year he had gone to Brussels on business, where he had met Marx and was drawn into the latter’s political circle. The fact that young Georg Weerth was giving undue attention to poetry and journalism, and was contributing political articles to newspapers in Cologne, must have been equally disturbing.
What could not have been clear to his mother and the rest of his family, however, was the rapidity with which Weerth had been assimilating new knowledge and ideas. Like Engels, like Freiligrath, Weerth too had looked out the windows of a commercial or manufacturing establishment in the industrial section of the Wupperthal and seen startling things, men and machines, machines and men, women and children. In each of them the sight had awakened a strange and new sensation. Education had begun … books and friends and additional personal experiences rounded out such studies as no university could have offered at that time.
It was a small world still upon which they had looked. Barmen, Elberfeld, the Cologne region, throbbing and thriving as they seemed, were but small particles in the larger, pulsating world of Industry. To go to England was to transfer from a small parochial school to a cosmic university. Here Industry was the world.
Young Georg Weerth was appalled, amazed, excited and outraged by what he saw in England. Nowhere in the world was there a city like London for imposing beauty and horrifying drabness, for bustle and trade, for multitudes ever filling the streets, for the turmoil of the dockyards and the innumerable ships that daily plied between the city and all parts of the world—contrasting so violently with the provincialism of what he had hitherto known.
Here was the heartbeat, the pulse, the nerve center of the present and the future. Combined with the industrial north, with Manchester, Liverpool, Bradford—here was England! He loved London, as he detested Bradford—one represented a buoyant life; the other work, work, and more work. No amusements, no libraries, no social distractions. Like Heine, he felt this was no land for a poet, yet the country stimulated him, as nothing had done before, to his best poetic creations.
Du Mann im schlechten blauen Kittel,
Arbeite! Schaffe Salz und Brot!
Arbeit! Arbeit ist ein Mittel,
Probat für Pestilenz und Not.
You, Man in your shabby blue smock,
Work! Work for your salt and bread!
Work, for Work is the steel that will arm you
Agains the Plague, against Need!48
He did not require many masters to shape him and direct him. In poetry, he took Heinrich Heine—for simplicity, directness, humor, and controversy. His philosophy was shaped by Feuerbach, Engels and Marx. To these he added his life’s experiences, and his contacts with the working population around him, German, English, Irish. He felt not only for them; he spoke as one who was of them. He translated Engels into poetry, over which the genius of Heine also presided. But he had an advantage over other German revolutionary poets that could be obtained only through a close association with the workers he was describing and for whom he was writing.
Like so many other seekers of that and succeeding generations throughout Europe, Weerth found in Ludwig Feuerbach the key to some problems of existence. Feuerbach brought him back to earth from his wide-ranging romantic flights, from that Schmerz that wished, as he put it, to “outrace” the stars, and pile Ossa on Pelion. Feuerbach saved him from religious supersititions and returned to him the gift of life and of the senses.
One day, your words, great Feuerbach,
From my inmost heart wrested my last doubts,
And I plucked the fairest flowers of Knowledge,
And was free of gods and devils.49
His other good masters completed his “education”—not least among them England herself:
This cradle of trade and politics, this England, has quickly given me such opportunities to accumulate knowledge and make observations which I would have sought in vain elsewhere. I believe that at this moment England is the true school for a young person: for this cold, canting people, from the Prime Minister down to the common tradesman, commits all possible vileness under the mask of religion; yet, at the same time, stands at the head of all beneficent world movements, and at one stroke opens the prospect of abysmal infamy and magnificent, purely human activity. In addition, England appears to be the terrain of the next Revolution—for nowhere else are poverty and discontent so rife as here. The leaders of the popular opposition make good use of this … for they direct the full fury of their attack on the very nerve of contemporary society, that is, Money and Property …50
He confessed that, despite Bradford, he had come to “love England.” England, he added, because life there, being “more serious,” had made him more serious too.51
Brussels, Marx, and the Communist League completed Weerth’s education. He admired Marx greatly, and could not get over the man’s inexhaustible energy. “Marx is working at his History of National Economy like one possessed. This man has for some years now been sleeping no more than four hours the night.” He marveled at his “truly Jovian head, his marble brow, and wild black hair.”52
His wide travels on business, his range of acquaintanceship, his own experiences, enabled him to become an international spokesman for the working-class movements. He knew the foremost Chartist leaders, Irish and English, wrote and spoke both about them and in their name. In 1847, in Brussels, he could stand up before an international congress called to consider Free Trade, which, he saw, had failed to raise the question of the working classes, and in a fiery address delivered in French, expose the emptiness of the pretensions that Free Trade worked in the cause of the laboring classes. “The workers,” he said, “are tired of being repaid for their suffering with drafts not accepted even by the celestial bank of the good Lord … When, in 1830, they fought for you in the streets of Paris or of Brussels, they were hailed, fêted, embraced; but when, a little later, they were dying of hunger and were begging for bread—they were shot down! …” Free trade would not do them any good, and, speaking in the name of the British, the working people there knew this very well.53
As was to be expected, February 1848 found Weerth in Paris. He wrote to his mother:
I cannot describe what I have seen and heard in the last two weeks. Such thing cannot be retold; one must have been there to understand how a person can weep in the streets without shame. One of the most beautiful nations in the world in three days has reconquered her freedom … From morning till night I took part in everything … We issued a call to all Germans living in Paris to gather for a great demonstration in favor of the republic … Herwegh, the poet, was elected President, others of us to a Committee … Wednesday we gathered along with all German democrats at the Place Caroussel—seven thousand of us—and four by four we marched with the black-red-gold flag and the tricolor to the Hôtel de Ville to transmit an address to the Provisional Government. Five hundred members of a chorus at the head of our procession sang French and German songs … Herwegh read our address, and Crémieux responded … Read the newspapers carefully … This Revolution will change the face of the world, and this is as it should be! Vive la République!54
When he visited the Tuileries and, in the royal chambers, surrounded by paintings of kings and nobles, saw the many cots with the wounded upon them, “the heroes of February 24,” he was overcome.55
It was time to return to Germany. Here, like Freiligrath somewhat later, Weerth joined Marx and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, a steady source of literary and political articles and satires. Here he published, using the brilliant vein of Heine, his devastating satire on Prince Lichnowsky, The Life and Deeds of the Renowned Knight Schnapphahnski—the name roughly translated and de-Polonized would be “Highway Robber”—actually a searing portrait of the whole tribe of feudal Junkers. Weerth was somewhat later to pay for this daring act, after the actual prototype for the book was killed during a brief Frankfurt uprising.
Like the others, Weerth watched the vicissitudes of the revolutionary movements with exultation, then with trepidation, and finally with despair. Not the least shattering blow was the collapse of the Chartist movement, of which he was a witness in London. Against the advice of his friends, he returned to Germany and, in order to preserve his citizenship, accepted three months’ imprisonment on charges of libelling the late Prince Lichnowsky. With the fading of the Revolution, his own spirits fell, but not his sharpness of observation. He returned to his commercial occupations, wandering far and wide, particularly to the New World of the Caribbean and of South America and Mexico. He had become Europa-müde—weary of Europe—but he did not recover his creative talents abroad. He died of a tropical fever in Havana in July 1856.
Weerth’s disgust at the way the Chartist leadership, particularly Feargus O’Connor, had first disarmed, castrated, and then betrayed the English working classes, knew no bounds. From Hamburg, in one of his last letter to Marx, he said farewell to his literary career:
During the last day I have written all sorts of things, but finished none, for I see no purpose or goal in literary work. When you write about national economy, there is some sense or reason in it. But for me? … My literary activity came to an end with the Neue Rheinische Zeitung … I must admit I am sorry to have lost the last three years for nothing; as sorry, as I am happy when I think of our association in Cologne. We have not compromised ourselves. That is the principal thing. Since the days of Frederick the Great no one has scourged our German riffraff like the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. I will not say that this was my merit; but I was there …56
He had little to reproach himself with. He departed with clean hands and a clear heart, leaving behind him a small body of precious poetry, a brilliant satirical work, an unfinished novel, and a number of keen, incisive articles on social and political conditions. A profound analyst of the current historical scene, also gifted with fine foresight, he estimated with accuracy the nature of the post-1848 prosperity, that, for a time at least, meant the quietus of revolution.
The English are at work again in all the mines, smithies, spinning industries, harbors, not because a Prince Windischgrätz is having Viennese shot summarily—no, they are working because the markets of Canton, of New York, and St. Petersburg must be provided with manufactured goods, because in California a seemingly inexhaustible field for speculation has been opened, because the poor harvests of 1845 and 1846 were followed by two good harvests in 1847 and 1848, because they have shelved railway speculation, and because moneys are now returning to their regular channels. And they will work until a new economic crisis arises.57
For him, Germany was a doomed land, altogether incapable of taking part in the new competitive economic wars which were emerging. (His foresight failed him here!) To Heinrich Heine he wrote:
Yes, while we Germans are moving towards the graveyard, the great nations around us are engaged in ever new enterprises, in ever greater achievements. While we bring to our markets the dead and the crazy, in London the whole world lies open, with the most magnificent of its products. Across the Atlantic, the British and the Americans are racing to see who can reach New York or Liverpool in ten days, or nine days and so many hours. In California a new empire has risen within two years. The products of the Australian coast have risen so greatly within the last few years that the wool of the Antipodes threatens to drive the production of our noble Saxon and Silesian sheep breeders to the ground…. Then begins the great war—not the war between Christianity and Paganism, of the Guelfs against the Ghibellines, the Whigs against the Tories—no! It will be the war between the gold of the Urals and the gold of California; the wheat of America, of Russia; Australia’s wool against Germany’s; cotton versus flax; West Indian colonies against the German beet-root. In this concussion, this great migration, not of Cimbri, or Goths, or Huns, no—of sacks of corn, coffee and wool, yes—in this hitherto unheard-of competition between the products of the virgin lands—the ancient empires of the Franks and the Germans will be sucked dry down to the very dregs, made debtors head over ears, and struggle in vain to assert themselves through their lands, their science and new institutions … Then we shall surely be defeated and destroyed in this great war of competition, so that for years perhaps nothing will remain of Germany but the Hegelian philosophy and a volume of your poems. This is the sole comfort I can extend to you….58
His most genuine feelings came to the fore in his poems, Songs from Lancashire and Workmen’s Songs—Lieder aus Lancashire and Handwerkburschenlieder. In these poems he joined in close handshakes the workers of Germany, of England, and of Ireland. Their masterly sparseness reminds one of Heine, but their sentiments touch more closely on the personal as well as the social. The Lancashire operatives hear of the brave though hopeless resistance of their Silesian weaver-brothers, and they join in their fate.
They clenched their fists, they swung their caps,
They stormed a fierce “Hurrah!”
So that wood and field sent echoes back,
“Hats off! Hail brave Silesia!”59
Once more, as he along with other Germans is crossing the Irish Sea on the way to Ireland, all of them recall their homeland with yearning; but also their Silesian brethren:
And all fell silent; the sea sounded hollow and dull,
Their German hearts filled with sadness,
But came the morrow—and the darkness sped,
As jubilant shouts joined in gladness!
For there—as the morning rose over the sea,
On the waves—lo!—an emerald green!
Like Hope’s own unfading, luminous image,
O’Connell’s sweet island—green Erin!60
In a more savage mood, the poem “Gericht”—“Court”—calls for a second trial of those imprisoned: the criminal, the thief, the prostitute, the political prisoner, and also those already dead, calling for a day and a generation that will at least redeem for their progeny the debt owed.
Amid other glistening flags and other liveries,
Rage, dauntless racer, stamps impatient for the fray;
And before the gaping portals of the Future,
The thund’ring Present stands in battle-array.
Und vor der Zukunft weit erschlossnen Pforten
Lärmt kampfgerüstet schon die Gegenwart.
Once more, as in the case of Büchner, it took many generations to rediscover their first great proletarian poet, and to utilize the great traditions of 1848. Bertolt Brecht was one such in whom the poetry of Weerth and Büchner found a responsive ear of genius. For a few of Weerth’s poems might well have come out of the 1920s and the later 1930s. Such as the song about the cannon founder, for example, who had toiled all his life long, and in old age had been cast adrift:
He went—his breast full of anguished wrath,
His wrath he could barely hold,
It thundered like all the mortars he’d
From the roaring furnace rolled!
Accursed wretch! You just wait!
Thus spoke the poor, old founder,
Soon we’ll be pouring for our own sport,
A four-and-twenty-pounder!61
Or the “Song of the Poor Tailor,”
There was once a poor tailor,
His needles he would ply,
He’d sewed for well nigh thirty years,
Although he knew not why.
And when a Saturday came round again,
And another week flew by,
The tailor began to weep,
Although he knew not why.
And then he took the shining needle,
And the scissors he had plied,
He broke the needle, the scissors too,
Although he knew not why.
He fastened many a strong thread,
To the ceiling’s beam on high,
And twisted them around his neck,
Although he knew not why.
He knew not why—the evening bells,
Sent forth their hum and sigh.
The tailor died at half past seven,
And no one could tell why.62
He was of Heine’s tribe. For that poet Weerth’s admiration never waned. He corresponded with the sick poet, conveying to him his pleasure, when, visiting Hamburg and the bookstore of Heine’s publisher Campe, he noted the excitement created by the appearance of Heine’s Romanzero.
Other poets, Weerth wrote, age. You grow younger with the days. Yes, I understand the secret of your illness. Already years ago, Death wished to get hold of you, but in the fateful moment, he shrank back in fright at seeing such youthfulness. His sickle froze in the air as he raised it, and you live on….63
Both poets died in 1856.
* * *
Revolution had its pungent humor too. There was Weerth’s Schnapphahnski; there was Heinrich Heine, of course preeminent. Theirs was highly sophisticated humor, addressed to the politically instructed, the culturally advanced. But the sharp, bitter, lusty humor that could speak to the populace at large in their own idiom found its most brilliant expression in the Berlin writer Adolf Glassbrenner, initiator of a long line of homely, acidulous, and popular humorous journals in Germany and Austria. A Berlin lover through and through, he was a master of its dialect, capable of translating sophisticated political and social ideas into racy popular idiom. His vignettes of the city paralleled those of Dickens in his Sketches by Boz.
Forthright in character and thought, he did not conceal his contempt for the gemütliche German bourgeois and philistine. He addressed himself directly to the populace—the people of the workshops, of the streets, to the ordinary citizen. He was a gadfly, but an irrepressible and indestructible one. He stung hard at the subservient German Bürger, at the aristocracy, at the bureaucracy. Before the outbreak of the March Revolution he had lashed out at their indecisiveness in verses that for their skilful alliteration defy translation:
Die Zwitter und die Zitterer,
Die zischelten zusammen,
Ob’s an der Zeit, die Despotie
Aus Deutschland zu verbannen.
Der Erste sagte: es müsse gehn;
Der Zweite sprach: es macht sich;
Der Dritte setzt die Brille auf
Und hat er noch bedacht sich;
Der Fünfte sprach: ’s noch nicht Zeit,
Die Fürsten sind dagegen!….
The twitterers and the quiverers,
Were whispering man to man,
If it really weren’t time
Despotism to ban.
The first one said: “It must go!”
The second: “It’ll go by and by!”
The third one put on spectacles,
In thought he seemed engrossed—
The fifth one said: “It’s not yet time!
The Princes are opposed!”
He thus defined a whole era of irresolution, and the illusion of “revolution from above.” He propounded his conception of the writer’s function in a serio-comic dedication to Apollo with which he prefaced his collection of local sketches, Berliner Volksleben, with its “live figures of the people.”
We are separated [he wrote] from the people by everything; by distorted custom and education, by money, by our speech, by our clothes and by that phantom of “honor” which leads the elect by the nose. Till we writers join hands with the people and come to an understanding with them no true freedom is possible … Not the despot and reactionary alone are to blame for the people’s ignorance. No, those also are to blame who think that literature is for a caste, who seek the fulness of life in scrutinizing a worn-out copper coin for an obliterated date, while a wealth of uncoined gold is lying at their feet; who live and move and have their being in the mouldy atmosphere of the past, and turn their backs on the present and the future.64
His literary career was a constant clash with censor and police. He was irrefragable. No sooner was one of his humorous journals suppressed than he commenced another. He never intermitted his criticism of despotism and injustice, continuing right up to his death in 1876. He hated war, and in the Franco-German collision of 1870 he wrote: “Our good angels show sympathy neither for Germany nor France. It’s for the wary they weep.” “This is a glorious one for us, but—a war! While one is proud to be a German, one is ashamed to be a Man.”65
His supreme achievement in satire was the creation of the Guckkästner—the “Peepshow Man,” Glassbrenner’s spokesman. He used him with delicious and superb success in 1848. One of his dramatic sketches is entitled “The New Europe.” It was written on the morrow of the Berlin March Revolution. We are in the streets of Berlin, more specifically Unter den Linden, and it is nine o’clock in the evening. The Peepshow Man is singing:
I am a German. Do you know my colors?
Black, red and gold—here, see, they’re displayed;
Witnesses bold, these colors wave before me,
Of German Freedom, for which my brothers died.
Now I proclaim, and proudly do I shout it,
Proud am I to take my stand:
The night is gone, and the sun of Freedom,
Has risen over all our German land.
He looks around him. Can this be the same Berlin I used to know? Come one, come all, he cries out. “It’s all in my peep-show! See the great battles for Europe’s freedom!” Customers come, they pay and peep. First pictures: Paris, France, Lamartine! Not that that drama is over yet. He sings them a song about Louis-Philippe, the Revolution and Lamartine. Whom, he asks, did the French people choose to represent them? A numbskull? A dolt? No! A Poet! Lamartine! Hail that man who chanted Freedom, Equality, Brotherhood, Work for All, Joy and Peace! but
On these heaps of sinfulness,
As Lamartine seeks,
To build a Kingdom of the Just
Takes more than a couple of weeks!
The Peepshow Man proceeds to unroll the full drama of the Revolutions—even of those still to come. There are Ludwig of Bavaria and Lola Montez. “Poor fellow,” the tailor who is peeping whispers; to which the Peepshow Man replies, “Yes, we Germans are very kindhearted, even when we’re treated like dogs.” He shows the Spanish Revolution “which hasn’t taken place yet,” and then Vienna and Metternich. And in the Berlin dialect he sings:
Aufjing die Sonne der Freiheit
Durch Oesterreichs lange Nacht;
Die licht, joldene Neiheit,
Hat Wien confus jemacht …
Bald tobt’s mit wildem Schalle,
Bald herzen, küssen sie Alle:
Durchlaucht von Metternich!
Up rose the sun of Freedom,
And scattered Austria’s night,
So new, so free this Freedom—
For Vienna quite a sight!
Your Highness, Mr. Metternich,
How quickly you’ve disappeared,
For you—there are only curses!
For you—there are no tears!….
Again, a tailor-spectator commiserates with Metternich—after all, he had great sympathy with us Germans! But the Peepshow Man replies:
Sympathy? Yes, indeed. Censorship, tortures, prisons,
darkness, treason—that’s the kind of sympathy he had!
He invites the audience to view the Berlin scenes of the March days, and sings them a song adjuring them to remember, always remember:
Das ist das Lied vom Monat März!
Vergiss es nicht Berliner Herz!
Sing’s alle Dage wieder,
Denn sonst—ju’n Nacht, ihr Brüder!
No other pictures? someone asks. Not yet—they’re not ready. “I’m working on an Italian Republic. Come tomorrow and you’ll see the new German Emperor. Six groschen entrance.” “Too dear,” a young man says, and “anyway, if you hear that I’ve been elected Emperor, tell them I decline. My father says the main thing is to secure a piece of bread and earn an honest living. Learn a trade.”
The tailor reproves the Peepshow Man for his bold speech. Peepshow Man yawns, closes the show and goes off, while the young man is heard singing an ironic song:
Forgive us, Policeman and Soldier,
Forgive us our Revolutions,
We promise never, never again,
To trouble prince or lordling.
Oh, we’ll be just, we’ll be devout—
If not, send us Russian Nich’las with his knout!
Beat the drum, and do not fear,
Kiss the lovely sutler dame,
That is all you need to know,
That is wisdom’s highest aim.
Drum the sleepers from their sleep,
Drum Reveille with youthful glow,
Forward, forward! Drum ahead!
That is all you need to know.
That’s the sum of Hegel’s teaching,
All the wisdom books can spell,
I have grasped it, for I am clever,
And a lusty drummer as well!
—Heinrich Heine, “Doktrin”
The master of them all for satire, irony, wit and insight—Heinrich Heine—whom Théophile Gautier had once called the German Apollo—marked the Revolution of 1848 by walking through the streets of Paris for the last time in May 1848.66 Thereafter, for eight long years, on his “mattress grave”—his sickbed in the rue d’Amsterdam, and later in the avenue Matignon—he lay, immobilized. But he remained no less alert, no less the inquisitive and eager spectator of portentous historic events. He had been sick a long time now, his eyes were going, as was his body—gradually dissolving from the ravages of the disease he had contracted as a very young man. His faithful wife Mathilde would from now on carry him, shrunk almost to a boy’s size, in her arms, to the balcony overlooking the city he loved, the Paris he had made his home. A world-famous poet now, he had many visitors. Friends brought him news of the outside world—not least, of the unsuccessful June uprising of 1848; later, of the election of Louis-Napoleon to the Presidency of France, and thereafter, of his assumption of the crown of Emperor by a coup d’état.
Yet his mind’s brilliance never faded, nor his inspiration or creativeness. As a matter of fact, the more Heine’s body decayed, the more, luminous and glowing became his poetic art. His thoughts deepened, and his wit remained, as ever, incandescent.
For him, too, the year 1848 marked a sharp division between past and future. For him, too, the forties had initiated a new stage of thinking and creation. He could look back to 1844 and the publication of his Neue Gedichte, to the year before, when he completed that scintillating beast-satire Atta Troll, and not long thereafter to that remarkable commentary on Germany in brilliant quatrains, the long poem Deutschland: Ein Wintermärchen—Germany: A Winter’s Tale. After thirteen years’ absence he had once more gone back to Hamburg, to revisit the city, his country, and, not least, to see his mother. He had come back quickened to that new creation, which along with other, shorter poems of the same period, made a significant contribution to the literature on the political and social problems of the day. He had before that already established himself, in prose and verse, as a spokesman of the future. He had weighed and absorbed the various social theories afloat in Paris and elsewhere. But now, toward the end of 1843, he came into contact with the radical wing of the Young Hegelians, and particularly with Karl Marx and Arnold Ruge. The latter two were editing the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. And Marx was one of the more significant contributors to the journal Vorwärts, the socialist publication also appearing in Paris.
At this moment, Heine could turn from a passionate and profound seriousness to fireworks of wit and scathing satire. Like other German writers he was roused by the revolt of the Silesian textile workers; but the lyric he wrote for the Vorwärts is the most inspired of all—fury and prophecy mastered by his poetic genius and controlled in a scorching incandescent flame. He fuses the outraged words he puts into the mouths of the weavers with a searing requiem for Germany; that is, to the accompanying refrain of “We weave, we weave!” Cursing the God that had betrayed them, the King—“King of the rich”—cursing the fatherland, worm-eaten and rotten, they conclude their anathemas:
Das Schifflein fliegt, der Webstuhl kracht,
Wir weben emsig Tag und Nacht—
Altdeutschland, wir weben dein Leichentuch,
Wir weben heinein den dreifachen Fluch,
Wir weben, wir weben!
The loom is creaking, the shuttle flies;
Nor night nor day do we close our eyes.
Old Germany, your shroud’s on our loom,
And in it we weave the threefold doom;
We weave; we weave!67
Great-hearted William Blake, who died in 1827, had he been alive, would have approved these prophecies. For had he himself not written in his “Auguries of Innocence”:
One Mite wrung from the Lab’rer’s hands
Shall buy and sell the Miser’s Lands
Or if protected from on high
Does that whole Nation sell and buy …
The Harlot’s cry from Street to Street
Shall weave Old England’s winding Sheet …?
At kings and other oppressors Heine aimed his lightning shafts of venom and scorn— at the tippling, muddle-brained King of Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, whose self-portrait he drew: “I’m not bad; and I’m not good,” not “dumb” and not “too bright,” “today I move a few steps forward; tomorrow backwards”—a King who reconciled Bacchus with Jesus—“both divine extremes.” Now he is celebrated as the “Emperor of China,” now as the “new Alexander.”68
Poor Ludwig I of Bavaria fared no better in the devastating “Hymns of Praise.”69
Nor did he spare his fellow Germans, those “bearskin sluggards.” It was no accident that around 1841, when he had gone to the Pyrenees for a cure, he came upon the idea of making a bear the hero of a tragicomic epic. From times past animals had been made spokesmen for or against Man, against injustice, against oppression. Heine’s bear is a philosophical animal, and a rebel, who is made to pay for his temporary freedom. In the legendary region of the Pyrenees, redolent of the deeds of Roland, the land of Ronceval, there it is that the poet encounters the bear, Atta Troll, and his bear-wife, Mumma—both dancing bears—and their master, Laskaro. Against the romantic background of the rugged, forbidding mountains and crags (and how could Heine, that old Romantic, fail to respond?) is performed the realistic drama of a bear hunt. For Atta Troll escapes, leaving his wife behind; and Laskaro, his keeper, accompanied by the poet, enters upon a pursuit.
Back in his lair, alongside his brood but bereft of wife, Atta Troll reflects aloud on the nature of the world and of Man, as well as of animals. For, mind you, Atta Troll is no common bear. He may not have read Hegel and the Young Hegelians, but he knew his Proudhon very well indeed. He expatiates on the brutalities of human beings: how once upon a time they sacrificed human life to their gods, but alas! in these more enlightened times they shed blood only out of greed, everyone robbing for his own good. “Property is theft!”
Yes, our common heritage,
Inheritance of all of us,
Become the booty of one man,
Who boldly claims “possessor’s rights!”
Property! Possessors’ rights!
O such thievery—saucy lies!
Mingling such of cunning, nonsense,
As only Man could have invented.
Nature never made possessions,
All of us are naked born,
When we come into the world,
There are no pockets in our skins.
Only man, that smooth-skinned being.
Dressed in garments not his own,
Only man with dreadful cunning
Knew to make himself these pockets …70
And he vows death and destruction to these “pickpockets.” But alas! philosophical reflections are no armor against man’s wiles. Laskaro obtains the aid of his mother, a witch, who with her arts imitates the call of Mumma. Poor Atta Troll is lured from his hiding place and shot. In due time his skin is converted into a bear rug for the dainty feet of the poet’s Juliette…. Was this poem, as Heine wrote, “perhaps Romanticism’s last woodland song, lost in today’s warring noises …”?
He now turned to “trumpets stern.”
He needed the sharp fillip that his visit to Germany and his return had given him, to set about the most ambitious of his poems to date, Germany: A Winter’s Tale. He loved and hated the country at the same time; and to see once again those sites and sights that had in the past given him so much joy and pain, to witness its present malaise, had awakened within him all those ambivalences that demanded resolution. He felt himself indeed the “son” of Aristophanes as his wit played with a juggler’s supreme skill, as he tossed and caught the flaming torches of wit and seriousness. He will sing, he says, “a new song,” not one of transterrestrial joys, of renunciation, but a “marriage hymnal.”
A new song, and a better song,
Oh friends, I’ll sing for you.
Here on earth we mean to make
Our Paradise come true….
Young Europe’s betrothed to Liberty,
That genius of beauty and grace,
They lie in each other’s passionate arms,
They feast on their first embrace.71
And thus he revisits many towns: Aachen, the burial place of Charlemagne, a town of obscurantists, where the peaked helmets of the soldiery fill him with horror and indignation; and Cologne, with its imposing unfinished cathedral, for whose restoration moneys are being collected, and where Franz Liszt is performing on the piano. And here in Cologne he becomes aware of an uneasy feeling—the presence near him of a “familiar spirit.” He turns out to be someone who has been following the poet for a long time. It is an executioner with an axe! Challenged by the poet, the dire companion explains himself:
“Ich bin die Tat von deinen Gedanken.” “I am the deed of your thoughts.”
And even though the years go by,
I find no satisfaction
Till thought becomes reality;
You think, and I take action.
You are the judge; the headsman am I,
Who stands and awaits your will;
And whether your judgment be right or wrong,
Obediently I kill …72
He falls asleep and dreams—German featherbeds are particularly conducive to dreams—and who loves to dream more than the German?
The French and the Russians rule the land;
The British rule the sea;
But in the realms of dream we own,
Unchallenged mastery.
Here we become one mighty state,
Here, in dreams we are crowned—
While other peoples build their realms,
Upon the level ground …73
At the Kyffhäuser, Emperor Frederick Barbarossa is sleeping, along with his mighty retinue, waiting for the call to awaken and redeem the land. Just as Richard Wagner was dreaming. In a nocturnal vision, Heine sees this Kaiser waiting and waiting … How long? Frederick, in a colloquy with the poet, inquires about past figures, and learns with horror that an instrument recently invented was used to cut off the heads that once wore crowns. He is outraged. So is the poet outraged and disgusted with Redbeard. Stay where you are, he cries in anger—which he soon regrets. Very well, come back, and use whatever instrument of execution you wish; bring back your medievalism, but save us from that hybrid monster which our contemporaries are dishing up as the true Middle Ages, and which they wish to restore!
And at last, Hamburg, and his overjoyed mother, plying him with delicacies and ticklish questions; his publisher Campe, also a genial host; and finally, a crucial meeting with the imposing divinity of Hamburg—the city’s tutelary goddess—Hammonia. The poet and the goddess engage in an intimate conversation; she invites him to her chambers, generously serving tea and rum. He is overcome with a German Heimweh. “Germany is really not so bad,” she assures him. “Come, and I will show you something of her future.” She takes him toward a close-stool and begs him to bend over for a Sybilline communication. Alas! the smells that rise from that region rob the poet of his senses…. What sights! What mephitic fumes!
The scatological and scurrilous ending, funny as it may be, robs the poem of a satisfactory conclusion. It is not redeemed by the epilogue in which Heine adjures the German monarch to beware of the ire of poets; for it is in their power to consign him and his ilk to an eternal, unredeemable hell. Vide Dante.
Do not offend the living bards;
They’ve weapons and conflagrations
More dreadful than all the lightnings of Jove
—Which were only a poet’s creations …
Have you not heard of Dante’s Hell,
The tercets that flamed from his pen?
He whom the poet imprisons there
Can never go free again—
No God, no Saviour, can free him from
This conflagration of rhyme!
Beware, lest we hold you in such a Hell
Until the end of time!74
Dear, dear Heine! Did he really believe that poets had such power? Perhaps he thought that other poets too had their familiar spirit—an executioner with an axe?
He knew that the poem would arouse furious indignation among most Germans. For this work, as he said in a letter, is “not merely radical, revolutionary, but also anti-national, and I’ll have the whole pack of journalists on my back.”75
He would be regarded as the enemy of his country, a traitorous Francophile. In the Preface to the published poem he defended himself vigorously and eloquently. Addressing himself to Germans, he wrote:
I will regard and respect your colors when they deserve it, when they are no longer merely an idle and servile pastime. Plant the black, red, and gold banner on the heights of German thought, and I will offer my dearest heart’s blood for it. Do not fear. I love the Fatherland as deeply as you … When we complete what the French have begun, when we outstrip them in action, as we already have in thought; when we ascend to the very ultimate consequences of such thought, and destroy servitude everywhere, even in its last stronghold, Heaven; when we redeem the God who dwells on earth in man from debasement; when we become the saviours of God, restore the poor, a people disinherited of happiness, to dignity; and scorned and derided genius, and outraged beauty—as our great masters have said and sung, and as we, their disciples, wish it—yes, then not only Alsace and Lorraine, but all of France, all of Europe, the whole world will become ours—the whole world will become German! It is of this mission and universal sovereignty of Germany that I often dream as I wander under oak-trees. That is my patriotism.76
This was a kind of “Pan-Germanism” few could understand or appreciate. For it implied a universalism that would eventually dissolve all nationalisms in a cosmic world community.
As the revolutionary wave in Europe waned, then ended with the defeat of the Hungarians, Heine wrote its requiem, and forever thereafter bade farewell to politics. Germany, he wrote in the poem “October 1849,” has settled back and is preparing for Christmas festivities, while Hungarians are bleeding to death.
When someone speaks of Hungary
My German vest becomes too small;
A mighty tide swells up in me—
I hear the challenge of the bugle-call.
The myth of heroes, hushed so long,
Once more goes crashing through my soul:
The iron-savage hero-song
That tells us of the Nibelungen’s fall …
The bestial forces have won; the heroes have perished…. The pain, especially when he thinks of Germany’s fate, is too great to bear.
Poet be still; your anguish grows—
You are so sick, ’twere wiser not to speak.
There is a howling, a grunting, a barking of the victors …
Doch still, Poet, das greift dich an—
Du bist so krank, und schweigen wäre klüger.77
He wrote of himself as the “enfant perdu” of the battles for Freedom, having fallen on the field of battle, unvanquished, weapons not broken. “Nur mein Herz zerbrach.” “Only my heart was broken.”78
His body might be shrunk, his eyesight gone, the pain almost incessant—but, miracle of miracles, his imagination, his fantasy, his inventive powers if anything grew in scope and depth. His wit was no less scintillating, though not without a certain poignancy. Between those years, 1850 and 1856, he produced many of his most memorable and moving poems. With the publication in 1851 of the collection, Romanzero, truly the crown of crowns of his poetic career, he proved that his creative vein had never been so rich, so various—so original. For any other poet it would have counted as a masterpiece; for the prisoner on his “mattress grave,” it was an incomparable triumph of spirit over body. At night he composed, and in the morning his secretary set down his nocturnal creations. His virtuosity as poetic craftsman and master was equalled only by the new range of subjects out of which his poems were distilled. Here in the Romanzero he wandered far and wide, into many, for him hitherto undiscovered, regions. Here were new ballads about historical figures such as Charles I of England, Marie Antoinette, King David, the Persian poet Firdusi, the troubadour Geoffrey Rudel, Cortez the Conquistador, subtly modern in their psychology, rendered with the simplicity of supreme sophistication.
He had been Apollo. And now he was Job. For here too are those poems, entitled “Lazarus” in which the sick man speaks his personal laments, his litany of sorrows. Was he not like Lazarus, “a certain beggar … which was laid at the gate of a rich man, full of sores, and desiring to be fed with the crumbs that fell from the rich man’s table. Moreoever, the dogs came and licked his wounds”? He was Lazarus-Poet, and had he not been contemned for it by his rich uncle Solomon Heine in Hamburg, scorned and rejected? He was Job too, but a jesting Job, reproving God for the seven years’ slow death. He chides the Lord for his illogic in creating the “merriest of poets” and depriving him of his good humor!
The pain it dampens my happy mood,
And makes me melancholy,
If this merry jest is not soon done,
I may even turn Catholic.
And then I’ll howl into your ears,
Like other pious Christians,
O Miserere! And you will have lost,
The best of humorists!79
He had climbed Mount Olympus once and had communed with and embraced gods and goddesses; like his own Tannhäuser he had sported with Dame Venus in her luxuriant mountain. He had hobnobbed with Hegel and Hegelian philosophy, soared with Hegelian ungodly Reason.
Now he climbed Mount Horeb, Israel’s holy heights, to commune with Moses and his posterity, and rediscovered himself. Born a Jew, he had found Protestantism—like so many of his coevals—a handy “passport into society.” And now he again conned the Holy Book, history, the poets of Israel—and found in them unexpected treasures. And he reshaped what he now knew into those incomparable “Hebrew Melodies”— poems like “Princess Sabbath” and the even nobler one about “Jehuda Halevi,” greatest of medieval Hebrew poets. But he was no fanatic, as he revealed in the highly satirical “Disputation” between the Spanish Capucin and the Jewish Rabbi on the subject, “Which is the true God?” All these and more are to be found in the Romanzero of 1851….
How slowly Time, the frightful snail,
Crawls to the corner that I lie in;
While I, who cannot move at all,
Watch from the place that I must die in.
Here in my darkened cell no hope
Enters and breaks the gloom asunder;
I know I shall not leave this room
Except for one that’s six feet under.
Perhaps I have been dead some time;
Perhaps my bright and whirling fancies
Are only ghosts that, in my head,
Keep up their wild, nocturnal dances.
They well might be a pack of ghosts,
Some sort of pagan gods or devils;
And a dead poet’s skull is just
The place they’d choose to have their revels!
Those orgies, furious and sweet,
Come suddenly, without a warning …
And then the poet’s cold, dead hand
Attempts to write them down next morning.80
Into that “cell,” as to some shrine, came many visitors from near and afar; his cousin Therese, whom he had been in love with, as he had been with her older sister Amalie Heine; new women to love; people of name and fame, and some without either. But they found no heavy solemnity there, though the figure of the shrunken poet would have been enough to break any heart. They found here all the wit for which he was famed, as sprightly as ever; they found the same live curiosity….
And the ever-present ambiguity. For he was many things at once—brilliantly, but often unreconciled. He was a Romantic, and an anti-Romantic; in the great tradition of German classical poetry, and a rebel against it; pagan and believer; Hellenic and Hebraic; ironic and sentimental. Politically he was radical, revolutionary even, and also monarchist. He feared and yet also welcomed revolution. He feared and loved the people; yet he trembled at what would happen to art and the artist should the people triumph.
He had lightning flashes of prevision, which amaze us today even more than they could have his contemporaries. He foresaw a good portion of Germany’s future. He marks the end of a literary era, and was its last giant.
Torn as he was, his aristocratic mind did not in the end keep him from accepting the consequences of that “terrible syllogism,” as he looked forth upon a world that was still ripe for revolution, and particularly a revolution of the masses: What would happen to the artist and his art?
A terrible syllogism holds me in its grasp, and if I am unable to refute the premise, “that every man has the right to eat,” then I am forced to submit to all its consequences. From much thinking about it I am on the verge of losing my reason. I see all the demons of truth dancing triumphantly around me, and at length the generosity of despair takes possession of my heart and I cry: “For long this old society has been judged and condemned. Let justice be done! Let this old world be smashed, in which innocence is long since dead, where egoism prospers, and man battens on man! Let these whited sepulchres be destroyed from top to bottom, these caverns of falsehood and iniquity. And blessed be the grocer who shall one day use the pages of my poems as paper bags for the coffee and snuff of poor old women, who in this present world of injustice often have to go without that solace. Fiat justitia, pereat mundus.”81
He died on February 17, 1856.