by
An introduction to the background, genesis, themes and reception of the book.
Young Germany – the sixth and final volume of Main Currents – was nearly as long in the making as the first five volumes altogether, and we can well understand his sense of relief when at long last in 1890 Brandes was able to complete that work which had followed him ever since he had presented its ambitious plan in the introduction to Emigrant Literature in 1872.
Young Germany is at once the lengthiest and the least homogeneous of the six volumes. While the previous five volumes were each possessed of a delimiting theme around which the narrative was structured, there is something unfocused and disjointed about the sixth volume, as if the author had found it difficult to determine what should be included and which story he would tell. Surely some of this is due to the material, which not only proved to be more difficult to shape and to synthesize than expected, but further did not contain as many essential authorships as those which constituted the foundation of the other volumes. Part of the explanation for why the content of the final volume does not kick up more sparks, and for why Jørgen Knudsen deemed it “the dullest of the six” (Knudsen 1994:379), is presumably to be found in the nature of the subject matter.
Yet neither was the author who had initially launched such an ambitious project the same as the one who would now bring it to completion. The subject matter did not captivate him in the same manner as earlier, for other authors and projects beckoned, and the youthful faith in the political-ideological program that underpinned the formation of the original plan, if it had not entirely vanished, had at any rate been overlaid by the skepticism of middle age. If for the younger Brandes a poetic work stood or fell by virtue of its inherent political tendency, then for the elder Brandes the measure is found exclusively in the personality of the poet, regardless of the presence of correct political attitudes, indeed even regardless of whether the poet is interested in politics at all.
Ultimately, the world at the conclusion of the 1880s appeared rather distinct from that at the beginning of the 1870s, and not the least to the south of the Danish-German border. In the course of the nearly six years he had lived in Berlin, Brandes had had ample opportunity to observe up close the cultural and political development of the new German Reich, and conditions seemed to him to be far from encouraging. In Brandes’ view, the Germany that took form under the leadership of Bismarck was a military- and police-state in the image of the old Prussian kingdom, defined by subject mentality and cultural stagnation. Well enough he acknowledged the greatness of Bismarck, especially in foreign policy, but it was of concern to him that the German Chancellor, by concentrating power in his own person, kept the population in a state of political infancy and immaturity.
All these circumstances, in greater or lesser degree, were significant in the crafting of Young Germany.
Despite the eighteen years between the publication of the first and sixth volumes of Main Currents, Brandes proceeded in almost all essentials according to the plan for Young Germany he had presented in the introduction to Emigrants Literature:
”[…] the sixth and last group of writers is inspired by the ideas of the Greek war and the July revolution and, like the French writers, in Byron’s shade sees the leader of the movement for freedom. The most important of these young writers are of Jewish descent: Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Börne, and later Berthold Auerbach.” (Brandes 1872:13-14)Upon close examination of Young Germany, we discover that Berthold Auerbach is barely mentioned, and that the shadow of Byron does not loom as large as it did for the young Brandes. Yet the central idea did not change, and both Heine and Börne maintain their narrative centrality as initially planned.
“Young Germany” is a designation for a relatively small group of authors whose central core includes, in addition to the aforementioned Heinrich Heine and Ludwig Börne, Karl Gutzkow, Heinrich Laube, Theodor Mundt, and Ludolf Wienbarg. What connected them was a more or less directly expressed critique of the Metternichian system as well as corresponding agitation for political reforms, liberal conceptions of freedom, anti-clericalism, in short, an emancipatory program that broke with the abstraction and unworldliness of late idealism and the political conservatism of the Restoration (Hermand 1974:370-2). Literature should keep abreast of the age and engage with social and political questions instead of seeking refuge in a lofty kingdom of allegedly eternal values. For the same reason the poets of Young Germany had little time for the national treasure that was Goethe, who was viewed as the chief representative of the political impotency of the Restoration – a “fool for stability” and a “servant of the princes,” who handed over an unfree people to the pleasure of the prince (Hermand 1974:372). Not all were equally thorough in their critique, and on the whole the authors of Young Germany had a wide scope when it came to the national and political implementation of their liberal ideas. Some sought a republic, though in the case of Börne with a cosmopolitan bent: “I hate every society that is less than the whole of human society” (Börne 1964a:625) [Ich hasse jede Gesellschaft, die kleiner ist als die menschliche]. Others in contrast contented themselves with a constitutional monarchy within the national boundaries. And while all were capable of intervening on behalf of the cause of political liberty and especially freedom of expression, only Börne and Georg Büchner were seriously preoccupied with questions of a social nature (Hermand 1974:384-5).
This broad scope is in part explained by the fact that the above mentioned authors really did not have all that much to do with one another (Hohendahl 2004:568-9). Strictly speaking, they first became a distinct group when the Federal Diet in Frankfurt – after a previous smear campaign against especially Gutzkow, led by Wolfgang Menzel, a litigious and at the time influential newspaper publisher with whom Gitzkow had earlier collaborated – instituted a total ban on the writings of Heine, Mundt, Gutzkow, Laube, and Wienberg across the German Confederation. Menzel’s group charged the authors “under the name ‘Young Germany’ or ‘Young Literature’” with “openly . . . attacking the Christian religion in the most brazen manner, disparaging existing social conditions, and undermining all discipline and decency” (Verbot der Schriften des ‘Jungen Deutschland’ vom 10. Dezember 1835) [unter der Bennenung “das junge Deutschland” oder “die junge Literatur” . . . unverholen . . . die christliche Religion auf die frecheste Weise anzugreifen, die bestehenden sozialen Verhältnisse herabzuwürdigen und alle Zucht und Sittlichkeit zu verstören].
It is thus this little and relatively heterogeneous group of authors who make up the nucleus of Young Germany, although Brandes must widen the perspective in order to make it work and even more so to have something to write about. Aside from the fact that the central figures of Young Germany can be counted on one hand, it is also the case that the peak period of this brief era in German literature did not encompass much more than the five years or so between the July Revolution in France and the ban of 1835. Brandes resolves this problem in a most obvious manner, namely by allowing the bond between the authors to continue up to the revolutions of 1848, which in this way comes to serve as the vanishing point not only of Young Germany but the entirety of Main Currents. In addition, the work contains a series of perspectival chapters on among other things the philosophy of the period (G.W.F. Hegel, Ludwig Feuerbach) and its most prominent female figures (Bettina von Arnhim, Rahel Varnhagen, Charlotte Stieglitz), none of which is necessary for the volume to cohere. Ultimately he includes as well the ubiquitous Goethe, who serves Brandes as a continual point of connection and comparison to the majority of the main figures of Young Germany and alongside Heine is the single most important person in the volume.
The main problem for Brandes was however that neither the authors of Young Germany nor the political literature of the period up to 1848 is from the artistic point of view particularly interesting. And even though Brandes is undoubtedly correct in his assertion that Heine’s declining popularity after the unification of Germany in 1871 was predominately due to political concerns, the same does not apply to the rest of the Young Germany authors, none of which figure prominently in German literary history, not excepting the prominent accounts in Brandes’ own time. And he was not successful in finding a satisfying solution to this problem, even though numerous possibilities were available. The most natural solution would have been to offer Biedermeier literature as a contrast to the political literature. But Brandes lays this to rest with a short and idiosyncratic chapter on “Neutral Literature,” which is limited to the authors in which the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm IV was interested and with whom he associated during his rule (Alexander von Humboldt, Ludwig Tieck, Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, Friedrich Rückert, Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, and Ferdinand Freiligrath). He does not, however, seem to be aware of the most important German language poets of the period, the Biedermeier figures Eduard Mörike and Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, and two of the periods great dramatists, Friedrich Hebbel and Franz Grillparzer, are mentioned only in passing.
Even stranger still is that Brandes fails to pluck two particularly low hanging fruits who were additionally closely associated with Young Germany – Georg Büchner and Christian Dietrich Grabbe. The canonization of Büchner – along with Heine the only one of the period’s political poets who is still read outside German Studies – first begins to gather steam in the course of the 20th century, but his name was known in the relevant literary circles long before then. This was due in large part to Karl Gutzkow, who saw him as a political ally and among other things published his revolutionary drama Dantons Tod in his journal Phönix already in 1835, albeit in a more palatable version for fear of the censors (Borgards 2009:318-19). That Büchner is already included as an independent entry in the 1838 Conversations-Lexikon der Gegenwart can thus be attributed to the legwork of Gutzkow in the preceeding years. That Brandes was aware of him is almost undeniable, presuming he had in fact read Dantons Tod (Knudsen 1994:380). Why he does not mention him remains thus a bit of a mystery. Even in Johannes Prölß’s more orthodox contemporary account of the movement,Das junge Deutschland, Büchner is discussed in detail in numerous places (Prölß 1892:34, 585-7). Compared to Büchner, Grabbe is a significantly more peripheral figure, yet it is in the least conspicuous that Brandes also fails to mention one of the period’s great renewers of the historical drama.
That the discussion of Heine consumes nearly a quarter of Young Germany thus has its reasons. With respect to quality, one can do no better than Heine, particularly if Büchner, Grabbe and the Biedermeier poets are passed over. Brandes himself addresses this problem in the prelude to his commentary on Heine: “this literary group includes no poetic spirit of the very first order and only a single one of a quite elevated rank: Heine. It has not left us with much in the way of the positive, as it functions mostly through negativity, through its capacity to release tension and to clear the air. It is strong in its skepticism and in its hatred of servitude, and in its individualism” (Brandes 1890a:51). But Heine’s central placement in Young Germany also has an autobiographical component, for few poets have played such an important role for the young Brandes. From his first acquaintance with Reisebilder (1826-1830)as a fourteen-year-old in 1856 until he began his Main Currents lectures at the University of Copenhagen, Heine functioned again and again as Brandes’ literary guide and companion (Dahl 1985:92-3). It was Heine who introduced him to Hegelianism, and who just as importantly acquainted him with the Hellenistic cult of beauty as an opposing pole to the asceticism of Christianity. Through Hippolyte Taine, who considered Heine to be among the greatest of poets, his enthusiasm was later strengthened (Dahl 1985:94). In May of 1871, during his grand tour of Europe, he wrote home to his parents from Napoli: “I came home from the theater and read through the night a part of Heine’s ’Reisebilder’in French. Décidement, Heine is one of the greatest writers the world has produced. The older one gets the more one admires him as a writer. As I have said and thought for more than two years, he is the only one of Germany’s authors who will endure after Goethe. He is the only one of all of them who in certain respects has approached him. I want to reread him methodically” (Brandes 1978:285-6). The thorough treatment of Heine in Young Germany may thus be understood as the fulfillment of a promise to reread Heine “properly”.
Work on Young Germany stretched over the majority of a decade, with long interruptions along the way. Already in 1882, when the fifth volume on French Romanticism was completed with “passionate fervor,” Brandes resolutely embarked on “the reading of the innumerable books” that had to be studied before the concluding volume could be written (Brandes 1908:46). At this point he had been living in Berlin for more than five years, and thus he found himself not only temporally but also geographically closer to the sources than he had been in producing the previous volumes. How much of this material he had already digested before he began his preliminary studies for the sixth volume is evident from the notes and travel letters from Berlin which were later collected in Berlin as the German Capital (1885). When Karl Gutzkow died in 1878, for example, Brandes used the occasion to draw a portrait of the author who “felt himself alienated from the era of Bismarck, unappreciated and forgotten” (Brandes 1885:249-50). And in an 1881 note on “The Movement Against the Jews in Germany,” Brandes provides perspective by pointing to Börne and Heine, whose critique of Prussia and “bloody satirical verses about Frederick the Great,” according to Brandes, had fueled the fires of anti-Semitism (Brandes 1885:372-4). Still other notes contain more or less detailed remarks on Feuerbach (p. 108), Auerbach (p. 131-2, 262), Gottfried Keller (p. 258-60), Rahel Varnhagen (p. 289-90) and many of the other personalities who appear in Young Germany.
Beyond functioning as a kind of unintentional preliminary to preliminary study, the Berlin years undeniably provided a more objective and, so to speak, disillusioned view of the immense distance between the consciousness of the 1848 revolutions and the new German Reich. In the same note memorialized Gutzkow, we thus find a fierce critique of the liberal bourgeoisie, which according to Brandes not only have forgotten everything about their own part in the 1848 revolutions, but moreover no longer even understand it. In contemporary literature, Brandes asserts, a 48er appears as either a naïve idealist “or as a giddy rebel, a traitor against fatherland and king.” And for the few remaining from that era, matters are not more favorable: if they are not in exile, they have “either denied their past or remain silent or have gone back to the feckless opposition of old” (Brandes 1885:253).
That Brandes judges the liberals so severely is naturally also a reflection of how high he has set the ideals now being betrayed – and perhaps also indirectly a kind of admission that he had been rather naïve to see in contemporary liberals the inheritors of the generation of 1848. His verdict on the occasion of the thirty years anniversary of the revolution – delivered in March 1878, a few months after his arrival in Berlin – attests to this: “What a vigorous and enthusiastic generation it was, how not vainly it risked blood and life for its hopes, its delusions, its designs. The newly created German Reich owes everything it has in freethinking and faith in ideas to it” (Brandes 1885:107). Only half a year later Brandes no longer maintained any delusions that the German Reich was in any manner indebted to the freethinking of the 48ers. It was now on the contrary clear to him that modern Germany was patterned on Prussian militarism, and that the lack of freedom in Bismarck’s military state was a reflection of “the German people’s political immaturity” (Brandes 1885:168).
Back in Copenhagen Brandes continued work on Young Germany, and as usual this took place in close engagement with the capital’s literary minded citizenry. Hardly had he returned home from Berlin before Dags-Avisen noted that “yesterday evening Dr. Georg Brandes gave his first public lectures on ‘Young Germany’” before an enthusiastic audience “of five hundred” (Dags-Avisen Feb 27, 1883). A few days later this success was repeated with an equally large turnout, again remarked upon by Dags-Avisen (Mar 2, 1883). The next lectures followed in April, and the quick tempo was continued through the year with addresses in October and December. Thereafter he apparently ran out of steam, occupying himself with other more pressing projects. As can be gathered from his library records, which function like a barometer of his shifting interests, in 1884 he was particularly occupied with Holberg, while his borrowings in 1885 were dominated by literature on Poland (Nolin 1965:116). In 1886 he borrowed a series of titles by Schlegel, Novalis, Brentano, Hölderlin, and Chamisso for use in revising the German edition of volume two of Main Currents, Die romantische Schule in Deutschland (Nolin 1965:116-17). Only in 1887 was study for Young Germany resumed, and this time it continued consistently until the completion of the manuscript, with parallel lectures on Heine and his contemporaries from the beginning of November through mid-December of 1887. A longer preliminary study on Börne and Goethe was published in the journal Tilskueren ( I, 1884: 1-19), a shorter piece on Heine and Rembrandt in Jule-Kalender (III, 1887:21-6), and still another on Heine in Peter Nansens journal Af Dagens Krønike (I, 1889:50-63), for which Brandes served as collaborator during a brief interlude.
In October of 1890, after ten years of labor, he was at long last at the end of the road. Just how unbearable the last few months in particular had been is clearly evident in his memoirs: “I was immeasurably burned out and exhausted with the last part of Main Gurrents. I had dragged it along with me since the beginning of 1883, gasping, cursing it, suffering through the execution of an old plan devised by the person I had been in 1871. I recalled the words: An Arbeit klebt Blut (work costs blood). I had as mentioned allowed eleven of its sheets to be printed. Now it was impossible for me to remain occupied with it. I felt like a clipped wild goose” (Brandes 1908:273). Thus all the greater was his relief at having crossed the finish line, completing not only this volume but the entire work. His joy at seeing the last printed sheet of Young Germany laid out before him resulted in a poetic look back at the entire work in the form of a distich for each of the six volumes: “I / A war of all wars it was, meant to arouse, to call to arms –/ It awakened hatred, that became my fate. // II / A time for spears – and while all around me they rained/ to the wall my old specter was nailed. / / III / A time for swords – I did not feel myself hard pressed, / I lived young and strong and despised and suffered and longed. / / IV / In faith and blood red zeal it was written. / Shelley! Its spirit belongs to you. You I have lived. / / V / See how fate turns! Hear its clear tones / A time of triumph! a long, rich, melodious fanfare. / / Out of steady defiance and bitter life experience / the final volume of the work is a revelation” (Brandes 1908:284).
Brandes continued to make more or less sweeping changes to the individual parts of Main Currents long after 1890. Already in 1877 the second, completely rewritten edition of Emigrant Literature had come out, which was followed in 1891 by a rewritten second edition of The Romantic School in Germany. Immediately after the completion of Young Germany it was time for a re-inspection of volume five, after which “a fundamental reworking of the third part” (Brandes 1908:352) was expected, and further a re-visitation of volume four, which was to be “revised” and furnished with “individual additions” and so on. It is, explains Brandes, like the “fortifications surrounding a city. As soon as the work is completed, it must be taken up again and spread outward” (Ibid).
In light of the considerable extent of this mania for revision, it is striking how few changes were made to later editions of volume six, and this despite the fact that its first edition is more than double the length of the first edition of volume one. There are hardly any changes in the second edition of volume six in 1898, in the third they are limited to seven in total, and in the following editions there are none at all. Because we are aware of just how difficult the last volume was for Brandes, it is reasonable to presume that the explanation for this is found in his lack of desire to engage further with the material. That this played a role cannot be denied. But presumably more important is that Young Germany as the final volume to be written was significantly closer in form to that for which the author had initially aimed in the first volume. Characteristically enough, the changes to the third edition do not at all seem to be segments of a larger reappraisal. For the most part they consist of the additions he made to his separate monograph on Heine from 1897, on the occasion of the centennial of the poet’s birth.. Compared to the substantial reworking of the other volumes, this relative lack of revision could indicate that there were no weighty political or aesthetic concerns behind the changes to Young Germany.
The most substantial additions to the Heine material include a brief digression on the affection of German composers for him as well as a fuller portrait of the woman with whom Heine lived during his final years (Brandes 1900:372-3, 500-1). The most interesting addition is however a new summary and evaluation of the poet, which after a lyrical ode to the cosmopolitan Heine uniting “Germanic emotional romanticism with French esprit and Jewish inwardness” delivers a kick in the teeth to both the German and French negligence of Heine: “the new German Reich has refused to raise the monument to Heinrich Heine his admirers have sought and which he himself could well do without . . . Even in the little provincial city in which he was born, no statue of him has dared to be erected. And opposite the attitude of the German Reich, the Frenchmen of our time have not at all had the thought or the courage to raise a monument to him in the Paris he loved so dearly and in which he lived the second half of his life” (Brandes 1900:503-4). If German narrow-mindedness and chauvinism on the one side and French cowardice on the other has meant that Heine has not been honored for his services to German or to his second fatherland of France, he is on the other hand more popular outside of Germany today than any other German language author, indeed even “Byron himself has hardly impacted the nineteenth century as profoundly as him” (Brandes 1900:504). Given the central place occupied by Byron in the overall architecture of Main Currents, this must be said to be a noteworthy addition. As if to emphasize this point Brandes concludes the new section by reeling off a list of Heine-inspired poets in other parts of Europe, especially in the Nordic countries.
Finally, Brandes has made a small but not uninteresting change to the final lines of the third edition, which in the first edition is directed at the voices who over the years have criticized him for being too selective in his choices and compared him to Procrustes. “Herein lies the answer,” says Brandes with a certain pride in 1890, “namely that the true Procrustes,” who had selected and grouped, “is nothing other than the power we are otherwise in the habit of calling art” (Brandes 1890a:572-3). Polemical to the last, sharply and tersely formulated and as such wholly commensurate with the original sting of the work, and yet upon closer reflection perhaps after all not an entirely worthy conclusion to ten years of labor. At any rate both the polemical tone and the reference to Procrustes were removed from the third edition.
Main Currents is in all respects a work that is marked by its long period of genesis, and it could hardly be otherwise, Procrustes or not. On the one hand Brandes naturally did not remain the hothead he had been when as twenty-nine-year-old he had so forcefully introduced his plan for the work, and on the other the world was not the same in 1890 as it had been in 1871. There was obviously no one more aware of this than Brandes himself, who not only rewrote and reworked the early volumes beyond recognition, but further at various opportunities let it be clearly known how his aesthetic and political views had changed in the intervening years. Not everyone understood or accepted this, which irritated Brandes, who often felt that his opponents lumped the older hommes de lettres in with the young radical when they criticized points of view that did not seem to him to accord with his actual position. In a characteristic passage from his memoirs, Brandes explains how his radicalism over time slowly came to find a natural counterweight in “a strong historical sense of the connection between the times and a consciousness of the impossibility of working from scratch. From the end of the 1870s onward, my writings and opinions came more and more to be defined by a certain equilibrium of rationality” (Brandes 1908:384). But this flew right over the heads of his opponents, who continued to portray him as a “blind, fanatical partisan” (Ibid).
Sympathetic readers, then, had a more acute understanding of the development of and the internal tensions within the work. Brandes refers to a letter he received after Young Germany had been published, in which the anonymous correspondent expresses his indignation at the role Goethe is assigned in the final volume: “thus, the letter bitterly laments, the whole spiritual revolution runs its course in the deification of Goethe!” (Ibid). Brandes categorically denies that his enthusiasm for Goethe is of a more recent vintage and points to his unrestrained praise in Goethe and Denmark (1881). Yet since Brandes’ citation of the letter draws attention to the correspondent’s acumen in contrast to the lack thereof in his other opponents, and since it otherwise does not refute that the critic’s interest in Goethe steadily increased, this is also a kind of confession.
Meanwhile Brandes had provided the clearest description of his understanding of the development of Main Currents already long before the completion of the final volume and in a different context. In a letter to his German publisher that he had published in Politiken in July 1887, he briefly described the development the second volume had undergone between the first edition in 1873 and the second in 1887. Although this account only concerns The Romantic School in Germany, at the very least it is just as relevant to Main Currents as a complete composition and work. Brandes begins by stating that the first edition of The Romantic School in Germany was a “polemical exercise” that “attacked the dead German Romantics in order to locate behind them the living Danish Romantics.” Next he asserts that his present foundational aesthetic understanding is quite different from what it was in 1871. Whereas then he judged individual works according to the “religious and political attitudes” of their authors, he now, in 1887, understands the art of poetry as the mirroring of “the whole and full life of a people and age.” Finally there is the question of style and method: “when I began work on Main Currents in 1871,” Brandes explains, “I was still not metaphysically minded in my intellectual orientation. I overlooked the personalities; they were for me only the organs for expressing ideas . . . The individual personalities were held aloft by the currents, split apart by them; they were mouthpieces for the ideas. Their personalities were not of interest to the author.” In the first edition of the second volume the biographical portraits are included as brief and incomplete supplements following after the review of the individual works, as a kind of “necessary evil.” Only much later, after he no longer presumed there to be to “an abstract world spirit” that had produced the works, did he begin to immerse himself in “the historical personalities, demonstrating how their production emerged out of their lives.” In summary, the 1873 and 1887 editions of The Romantic School in Germany are significantly distinguished from one another in at least three respects: “while the original task of the work was to agitate, in the second edition it became purely scientific; it was thus conceived as national and Danish and then became universal. In the beginning my understanding of poetry and art was conditioned by tendentiousness; it is now otherwise. Ultimately my understanding of the relation between ideas and personalities was turned on its head, resulting in a correspondingly different conception of the composition of the work” (Brandes 1887).
Now in fairness it should be noted that Brandes’ account is in fact a brief in a pending German court case. Because Denmark was not a signatory to the Berne Convention on literary copyright, and thus Brandes could not claim copyright abroad, his German publisher, after the publication of the second edition of The Romantic School in Germany, stood accused for technical and juridical reasons of having unlawfully republished a partially existing work (Bjerring-Hansen 2016:127-34). In other words, Brandes had an obvious interest in getting the first and second editions to be viewed as two different books. That said, it is still difficult to disagree with the characterization that precisely summarizes the most important differences between the two editions, and in this context more importantly points at a more general tendency across the entire work. The latter point is most easily illustrated by comparing the volumes furthest apart from one another in time, that is the first editions of Emigrant Literature and Young Germany. While the former – as Brandes points out – emphasizes currents and ideas and is strong in its faith in enlightenment and progress in history (“Faith in the right of free inquiry and the final triumph of free thinking”) [Brandes 1872:7], the latter is significantly more concerned in the biographical material of “the great personalities” and correspondingly less occupied with the “emancipatory struggle of humanity” (Brandes 1890a:38), which characteristically is wholly eclipsed when he turns his gaze on the present age and the contemporary generation (“what we call progress is a sickly snail”) [Brandes 1890a:536]. But also within the individual sections of Main Currents, this tension is repeatedly found in greater and lesser degrees. Even in the original introduction to Emigrant Literature, by far and away the most agitational and programmatic passages in the entire work, it is far from the case that everything is dominated by currents and ideas. Already here we can without great difficulty locate traces that anticipate or in any case hint at the “hero worship” (Brandes 1908:151) of the later authorship, such as for example when Brandes – in a formulation that could be inspired by John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (see for example Mill 2003: 76-7, 128-38) – points to the conflict between “the personalities” and to the tyranny of public opinion.
Young Germany contains many of the same tensions and ambivalences as the other volumes, but the manner in which they are managed is to a certain extent distinguished from the rest of the work. This is due first and foremost to the nature of the material, which as mentioned no longer emitted the same transfiguring glow it once had for the young Brandes, and neither was it commensurable with his later understanding of literary art. What had seemed to him to be a definitive conclusion to the work, as long as he still thought in terms of abstract philosophy of history, was less so after he had moved on from the Hegelian world spirit in favor of an experiential and biographical aesthetics, according to which art was conceived as “the expression of mental perturbations” with “the aim of calling forth mental perturbations” (Brandes 1890a:50). Young Germany as a political movement was perhaps a necessary enough current within “the great rhythmic ebb and flow of history” (Brandes 1890a:571), yet parceled out into individual artistic biographies, the group was inconsequential and uninteresting from the literary perspective and could not form the foundation of the final volume of Main Currents. Equally as important, it was too artistically insignificant to maintain the author’s interest.
As indicated, Brandes attempted to resolve the problem by providing much more space for Heine, by lengthening the period under study, and by incorporating a series of figures whose alleged connection to Young Germany perhaps does not always seem convincing. Among these figures the most important is without a doubt Goethe, whose place in German literary history of the first half of the nineteenth century surely enough is incontestable. Yet he plays such a prominent role in the end of volume six that we can well understand the aforementioned correspondent’s astonishment: how in the world can Brandes assign to Goethe – the geheimrat who not only found himself on the wrong side of the barricades in the “emancipatory struggle of humanity” but also was not particularly interested in politics – such a place of honor in a narrative account of the movements and currents that came to a head in the 1848 revolutions? The answer is of course already provided by the critic’s shift in interest from currents toward great individuals, and as is well known, none of the figures of Young Germany were greater than the universal spirit that was Goethe.
The most remarkable aspect of Goethe’s role in the sixth volume of Main Currents is however not that he is placed at center stage every time Brandes sees a chance to do so. On the contrary, it is that throughout the immense amount of material treated in Young Germany, he functions as a kind of measuring stick for Brandes’ evaluation of the other authors and their placement within the volume; indeed, in some passages he almost seems to be the main objective of the narrative. This is perhaps most apparent in the long chapters on the three female figures, Rahel Varnhagen, Bettina von Arnim, and Charlotte Stieglitz, who are evaluated according to their views of Goethe. Of Varnhagen Brandes notes that “her critical literary significance” is due to the fact “it was her who first in Berlin sensed and expressed the worth of Goethe” (Brandes 1890a:396). And her inclusion in the narrative is justified by reference to Goethe’s significance: “through studying the most remarkable female figures of the time, we discover that between 1810 and 1835, the most deeply penetrating event, the subtlest and deepest secret of the time, was that the worldview of Goethe, point by point, had displaced the Church and had conquered all the great instincts and authentic movements of the era” (Brandes 1890a:384). In short, the three women have earned a place in the narrative because they have distinguished themselves by being especially sensitive seismographs, measuring the depths and the impact of Goetheism. Here it is almost as if Goethe has become the overriding concern, and that anything that can contribute to a clearer illustration of the status of this universal spirit within German intellectual life is justified out of hand.
Less extensive on the other hand is the employment of Goethe in the discussion of the relation between art and politics, which runs like an undercurrent through Young Germany and is among the clearest indications of how far Brandes has come since he began the work. First on the witness stand is Börne, and Brandes immediately confronts him by pointing to his uncompromising attitude toward Goethe: “perhaps nothing has more damaged Börne’s present reputation than his vehement denunciation of Goethe” (Brandes 1890a:54). Brandes goes to great lengths to understand the origins of this uncompromising hatred. A considerable measure of explanation is found in their biographies: both Goethe and Börne are from Frankfort, yet they might as well have come from different worlds. Goethe was born into the upper bourgeoisie, Börne grew up in the city’s Jewish quarter. Whereas Goethe came into the world with proverbial silver spoon in mouth, Börne as a Jew was a pariah without civil rights, subject to derision and confined to the inhumane ghetto of cramped, dark alleyways he dare not leave during the daytime. Brandes concludes that “it is clear that such conditions must have exerted an influence on an impressionable young mind” (Brandes 1890a:58). Wisely enough, Brandes is hesitant to draw overly broad conclusions from these conditions; his point is narrower, that Börne’s political views are intimately bound up with these childhood experiences, which at once laid the ground for his sense of justice and provided particularly fertile ground for his contempt of Goethe, that servant of the princes. And even though Brandes does not agree with Börne’s sense that Goethe’s work as a minister of state should be understood as political betrayal, he is faithful in reproducing this critique and must concede that Börne “has pointed out weak points in Goethe’s greatness and the limits of his being,” even if much of this solicitude immediately withers on the vine, when shortly thereafter he adds that “certain merits of Goethe could only be purchased in exchange for these lackings, and that in order not to splinter his many-sided genius he had been compelled to set firm limits for himself” (Brandes 1890a:105).
Whatever the degree of understanding and insight Brandes brings to his treatment of Börne, we are however at no point in doubt about the outcome of this initial boasting match. In comparison to the ocean that is Goethe, Börne is and remains a pond, and even when he is at his strongest, he is at once too uncompromising, indeed almost Manichean in his vision of right and wrong, and too hot-tempered and naïve. In this respect his political analysis of the French July Revolution of 1830 is significant, for in Brandes’ view it had seemed hopelessly naive, and by the measure of “the contrast between that which was expected and that which happened, it’s impact was conspicuously comical” (Brandes 1890a:129). Börne’s letters from Paris bear witness to his honor and passion – and especially to his ravings. But the problem is first and foremost of an aesthetic nature. Positively formulated: “it can hardly surprise us, that he in whose spiritual makeup a sense of justice had developed so sharply and so finely that it formally served as a substitute for an actual aesthetic sensibility, must see such as lacking in Goethe, whose desire for justice was relatively undeveloped” (Brandes 1890a:129). Negatively formulated: “Börne did not possess an artistic sensibility in the strong sense of the word . . . that domain of Bildung, which considers art as art, was closed to him” (Brandes 1890a:91-2) This can of course be well understood as a kind of explanation of the relation between art and politics: in Börne’s eyes, an artistic sensibility is uninteresting or even a (moral) impediment for true political engagement; literature and politics belong to two different spheres and never the twain shall meet. Yet this solution is hardly satisfying – especially for Brandes, who long before had outgrown such stereotypical binaries. Fortunately there is much more meat on Heine’s bones, the next witness to take the stand, and here Goethe truly comes into his own.
Heine’s privileged position in Young Germany can as already mentioned be explained both biographically and literary historically. That Brandes makes him the star witness in his discussion between the relationship between literature and politics is however first and foremost due to other circumstances. Like the majority of the authors of his generation, Heine had a strained relationship to Goethe, whose being and work consumed so much that it could be difficult for younger poets to find a place at the table. Some reacted with an almost instinctual rejection, such as Börne, who did not conceal the fact that his political critique of the servant of the princes had deep roots: “As long as I have been able to feel, I have hated Goethe, as long as I have been able to think, I have known why” (Börne 1964b:71) [Seit ich fühle, habe ich Goethe gehaßt, seit ich denke, weiß ich warum]. Heine’s critique of Goethe is more ambivalent, but also much more principled. In contrast to Börne and others, Heine has much good to say about Goethe, both as poet and as critic of the reactionary and catholicizing tendencies of German Late Romanticism (Häntzschel 2001:63-7). Yet Goethe’s virtues at the same time point to his problems. Rightly enough, Goethe drove the brothers Schlegel out of the temple, and for this he deserves gratitude, but in so doing he also established himself as the sole overlord of German literature, and for Heine that is a problem. Correspondingly his immortal works “adorn our fatherland like pleasing statues adorn a garden, but they are statues. One can fall in love with them, but they are infertile” (Die Romantische Schule, 1836; Heine 1979, 8:155) [Sie zieren unser theures Vaterland, wie schöne Statuen einen Garten zieren, aber es sind Statuen. Man kann sich darin verlieben, aber sie sind unfruchtbar]. Ultimately Heine acknowledges that while Goethe’s lack of interest in politics can possibly be justified by the nature of the age in which lived, it is no longer appropriate to the era and thus morally irresponsible. Literature should – and on this point he is in agreement with Börne – seek to make a political impact, and the poet ought to be conscious of his social responsibility.
The reason that Brandes makes Heine the test case for his discussion of the relationship of literature to politics is not just that he is the only poet of the age who in an artistic sense can measure up to Goethe, but also that in his ambivalence he is closer to Brandes’ own position than the other Young Germany authors. And just as importantly, Heine’s ambivalence is by no means limited to Goethe, it is in fact a part of his constitution. For Brandes this is clearly evident in Heine’s political views, which at first glance come across as less than thought out or as without principals. On the one hand he represents “an outburst of the most extreme radicalism” that emerges from “the most strident revolutionary attitude” (Brandes 1890a:160), while on the other Heine reassures us again and again that he is no Jacobin, indeed even that he does not at all see himself as a republican. How to explain this extraordinary duality? Previously, notes Brandes, it has either not been explained at all or has been seen as evidence of his characterlessness. But Heine, asserts Brandes, was far from characterless, for on the contrary he was “from to first to last a faithful soul to his principles” (Ibid). According to Brandes the explanation is this that Heine was at the same time “a profound lover of freedom and a marked aristocrat,” at once a fiery opponent of every form of the denial freedom and a great admirer of “human greatness.” In other words, “there was not a drop of conservative blood in his Heine’s soul. His blood was revolutionary. Yet neither was there in his soul a drop of democratic blood. His blood was aristocratic, he would see genius acknowledged as leader and lord” (Brandes 1890a:165).
Brandes would hardly have formulated it as such in the 1870s, and even less with so much sympathy. It is conspicuous to say the least that Brandes repeatedly employs the word “aristocrat” as an ostensibly positive designation for a certain spiritual disposition, coupling it with the concepts of “radicalism” and “revolutionary.” This tendency becomes still clearer in the following pages, in which Brandes’ characterization of Heine’s position threatens to detach itself from its object, becoming the point of departure for a more general critique of culture. Among other things Heine does not believe that “the philistine ideals of average Bildung” can lead to freedom, and he therefore rejects all forms of mediocrity, “including the liberal and republican forms, as the enemy of the great personality and of freedom” (Brandes 1890a:163-4). For Heine feared nothing other than “a life without beauty and especially a life without greatness, with equality of mediocrity as a religion, with hatred of genius and of the seekers and of those who openly reject the belief that Nazarene asceticism is the only actual form of morality. What he equally rejected was the society he knew, governed by a clergy devoid of spirit and an aristocracy devoid of refinement, and thus the society he had foreseen, consisting of emancipated slave souls who had only revolted against the obsequiousness that was their nature, in order to give reign to the enviousness that remains at the core of all their decency” (Brandes 1890a:165).
As has been indicated, it is possible to locate tendencies pointing in this direction already in Emigrant Literature, the Mill-inspired remark on the tension between the great personality and the tyranny of public opinion serving as an example. What clearly distinguishes the later formulation from similar sentiments expressed in the first volume is that the emancipatory program of enlightenment of 1871 has faded entirely into the background in favor of an unconcealed fascination with the great personality. Whereas freedom in Emigrant Literature was first and foremost tied to liberal ideas and civil rights, there is now more obscure talk of “the greater freedom” that is plainly threatened by the lesser liberal freedom. Taken as a more general determination of the relationship between political and “intellectual” freedom, Brandes openly seems to prefer the latter at the expense of the former, in so far as it can be measured in the degree of freedom for the individual: the authentic, true freedom is aristocratic freedom, which must necessarily be reserved for the few. In the course of the civilizing process the average person has however raised himself up over his natural instincts (“obsequiousness”) and through resentment and envy of the great personalities imposed a political-liberal understanding of freedom, which views the greater freedom as illegitimate and propagates the equality of all people.
Ultimately, passages such as this, right down to the level of the wording, bear the mark of the fact that the work on Heine occurred at the same time that Brandes was reading and beginning to correspond with Nietzsche (Brandes 1966:439-79). What particularly drew Brandes to Nietzsche was precisely the idea that the welfare of the majority – the utilitarian credo of “the greatest happiness for the greatest number” – could not be the purpose of history, which on the contrary could only consist of bringing forth “individual great men” (Brandes 1889:574). Not only had such ideas strengthened Brandes in the reflections he himself had worked out on this question, they also – as not the least is evident in the introductory chapter on Heine in Young Germany – provided him with a conceptual unity and a speculative historical-philosophical framework that went far beyond the well-known Hegelian construct. “Slave morality,” ressentiment as the driving force of history, Caesarism, the cultivated ruling caste, the “cultural philistine,” and the last man – all this and more Brandes found in Nietzsche, and it was put to use in the characterization of Heine, who in the effective merging of radicalism and aristocracy is presented as the forerunner of Nietzsche’s aristocratic radicalism.
This is not to say that there is no evidence in support of Brandes’ reading of Heine, and even less that it is the views of Nietzsche or for that matter Brandes that function as the point of reference in this account of Heine’s political views. Yet if we look at some of the passages in Heine that presumably form the basis for Brandes’ paraphrase, it nevertheless becomes clear that Heine’s undeniable distinction between “intellect” and politics is of a quite different nature than that presented by Brandes. Among other places this illustrated by the foreword to the French edition of Lutetia from 1855, a collection of articles and reportage Heine write for the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung Here he explains among other things that when he in these articles “in the most anguished and concerned tone” foresaw a golden future for the socialists or – “to call the horror by its proper name” (Heine 1988,8:166) [pour nommer le monstre par son vrai nom, les communists] – the communists, he was in no manner playing to the gallery. A longer citation is required to understand Heine’s argumentation: “in reality I look only with fear and horror at the time when these obscure iconoclasts will come to power: with their bare fists they will smash all the marble images of my beloved world of art, they destroy all the fantastical curiosities the poet admires so dearly; they fell my laurel groves and make them into potato fields . . . the roses, the useless nightingale couple they do no better; the nightingales, those useless singers, are driven away, and woe! my Buch der Lieder will be used by the merchant as a cornet to be filled with coffee or snuff for the old ladies of the future. – Woe! All this I foresee, and I am seized with an unspeakable sorrow at the thought of the defeat with which communism threatens my poems and the entire old world order along with them – And still I frankly confess this thought . . . a supernatural power over my mind against which I cannot defend myself . . . a dreadful syllogism plagues me, and I cannot deny its premise: ‘that all human beings have the right to eat,’ such that I must also accept all its consequences . . . and in the end I am seized a desperate magnanimity and cry out . . . blessed be the grocer who one day makes my poems into cornets and fills them with coffee and snuff for the poor old grandmas, who in the unjust world of today must do without such refreshments – fiat justitia, pereat mundus! [Let justice be done, though the world will perish] (Heine 1988:167) [[En effet, ce n'est qu'avec horreur et effroi que je pense à l'époque où ces sombres iconoclastes parviendront à la domination: de leurs mains calleuses ils briseront sans merci toutes les statues de marbre si chères á mon coeur; ils fracasseront toutes ces babioles et fanfreluches fantastiques de l'art, qu'aimait tant le poëte; ils détruiront mes bois de lauriers et y planteront des pommes de terre; [...] les roses, ces oisives fiancées des rossignols, auront le même sort; les rossignols, ces chanteurs inutiles, seront chassés, et hélas! mon Livre des Chants servira à l'épicier pour en faire des cornets où il versera du café ou du tabac à priser pour les vieilles femmes de l'avenir. Hélas! je prévois tout cela, et je suis saisi d'une indicible tristesse en pensant à la ruine dont menace mes vers, qui périront avec tout l'ancien. Et pourtant, je l'avoue avec franchise, ce même communisme, exerce sur mon âme un charme dont je ne puis me défendre; [...] Un terrible syllogisme me tient ensorcelé, et si je ne puis réfuter cette prémisse: "que les hommes ont tous le droit de manger", je suis forcé de me soumettre aussi à toutes ses conséquences [...] et à la fin un désespoir généreux s'empare de mon coeur et je m'écrie: [...] Et béni soit l'épicier qui un jour confectionnera avec mes poésies des cornets où il versera du café et du tabac pour les pauvres 18 bonnes vieilles qui, dans notre monde actuel de l'injustice, ont peut-être dû se passer d'un pareil agrément – fiat justitia, pereat mundus!"]
As always with Heine, it is easy to overlook the balance in the subtle tripwires of the irony, yet the point of view is without a doubt sincerely meant. Presented with the choice between art for the privileged few and welfare for the many one must be incredibly hard-hearted to feel the smallest measure of moral compulsion to choose the former. The content of the discord expressed by Heine here thus may be likened to the contradiction Brandes poses between the liberal-political and aristocratic conceptions of freedom, yet the particular weight placed on each side is an entirely different matter. Heine’s discussion of the problem transposes classical theodicy from theology to art: how can art be justified in a world in which hunger and need are the norm for the majority of people? His answer is precisely that it cannot, if a moral measuring stick is employed. Nietzsche’s answer to the same question is as is well-known” “only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified (Nietzsche 1972:148) [dass nur al sein aesthetisches Phänomen das Dasein und die Welt gerechfertigt erscheint]. Whereas Heine allows himself to be swayed by the “slave army of the starving,” Nietzsche views its existence as perhaps tragic, although just as much an inescapable condition of existence, on which art alone can impart meaning.
Brandes’ own leanings on this issue at this time is clear, for in his reckoning there are few traces of Heine’s scruples. The social question is more or less written out of the authorship and replaced with a Nietzschean philosophy of art, contemptuous of the base, ressentiment-fueled slave morality that stands in the way of great art and its deliverers. The Danish philosopher Harald Høffding, interestingly enough, reached a similar conclusion, when in 1889 he registered a protest against Brandes’ portrait of Nietzsche in the famous essay on Aristocratic Radicalism. Høffding argued that Brandes’ presentation of the philosopher was rather too sympathetic, and that the critic’s “purely aesthetic tendency” led to “an overestimation of the great men” at the expense of the democratic welfare principal, which “prohibits the forgetting of the suffering of the many in favor of the enjoyment of the few” (Høffding 1889:864).
Close examination of the central commentaries on Börne and Heine in Young Germany reveals that the tendency is thus a clear upgrading of the apolitical “spirit” and the great personalities at the expense of the political engagement that otherwise must be said to be characteristic of the movement. When Brandes weighs Börne and finds him wanting, the measuring stick is the “artistic sensibility,” for which Börne had no greater respect than he did for Goethe as an authority. Heine, in contrast, quite graciously escapes being judged against “the great style of the past,” even though he hardly warrants comparison to Goethe in all respects: “in the comparison we frequently see him come up short, though not all too rarely rising up to an almost equivalent status. It is honor enough for him that it is possible and occasionally necessary to compare him to Goethe” (Brandes 1890a:237). With respect to Heine in and of himself, it is in the meantime conspicuous how little his political engagement figures in Brandes’ evaluation of the authorship. Now and then it almost seems as if he is more concerned with defending the antidemocratic and intellectual aristocratic version of Heine than presenting him as a part of the Young Germany movement.
Yet what blinds him in one eye sharpens the other. While his contemporaries found it difficult to see in Heine other than his critique of Prussia and his ironic and risqué poetry, Brandes exhibits a penetrating gaze for other sides of the authorship that not infrequently point to literary historical connections that previously had been neglected. This is perhaps best expressed in the brilliant excursus on the image of Napoleon in German literature, in which Brandes, precisely because of his strong focus on “the great personality in general,” is able to show that Heine’s admiration for Napoleon is far from being the “isolated event in the German literature of the century” his contemporaries had made it into, but on the contrary was part of a long tradition stretching from the Weimar Classicist author Christoph Martin Wieland through Goethe, Schiller, Hegel, and the Dane Jens Baggesen.
Chapters like this one, which both break with customary understandings of and clichés about Heine and place him in a novel literary historical context, demonstrate what the unbiased comparatist can accomplish, when he was at his best.
“The Danish edition fell to the earth like a stain. Throughout the year hardly a paper mentioned it” (Brandes 1908:285). The disappointment is still palpable when Brandes mentions the paltry discussion provoked by Young Germany in his memoirs, and the author was not alone in resenting the dearth of reviews. When Brandes’ faithful squire Sophus Schandorph discussed the volume in June 1891 in the journal Tilskueren, he began by lamenting the newspapers’ neglect of Brandes: “rarely do we see Dr. Brandes’ great books reviewed. If his many enemies had been able to do him harm, they would hardly have denied themselves the joy in doing so, and if his friends had been able to say something of significance on the occasion of his masterwork, they would surely also have done so (Schandorph 1891:420). The explanation for the fact that neither friend nor enemy had taken up the pen, according to Schandorph, must be that he is too much to handle for them. Friends remained silent out of self-consciousness and awe, enemies because they could not find anything to criticize. Brandes “towers so far above everyone here in this country” that only the “poor devils” who basely occupied themselves with fact checking or pettily latched onto the fact that “Brandes has not used quotation marks to a significant degree” dared to write about his masterwork (Ibid).
Schandorph’s explanation must naturally be taken with a grain of salt, for in his own words he is “an affectionate admirer and faithful friend of the author” (Ibid), as is attested to excess in the twenty-five pages of his uncritical and admiring summary of Young Germany. On the other hand it illustrates quite clearly how polarized the reception of Brandes was, and why critics of a bourgeois persuasion in some instances would rather refrain from saying something about Brandes in general other than either reviewing his books favorably or with nuance. In spite of everything it demanded courage to break with consensus in the ideological conflict between Brandes’ allies and opponents. A prominent example of one who lacked such courage was Fr. Winkel Horn, reviewer at Berlingske Tidende, who at the request of Schandorph wrote to Brandes, indicating that while he admired his greatness, circumstances prevented him from expressing it publicly (Knudsen 1994:388). This is doubtless also the reason why a part of the contemporary criticism comes across as polarized and stereotypical. One was either on team Brandes and followed him through thick and thin like his friends Schandorph and Oscar Levertin, each of whom shared virtually all of Brandes’ political views and aesthetic idiosyncrasies, or, on the opposing side, categorically dismissed the work for political, religious or other reasons. An example of the latter is the review in the Swedish newspaper Post- och Inrikes Tidningar; Young Germany only seems to strengthen the deeply hostile reviewer’s sense that Brandes agitates for a through and through negative “work of destruction directed at the family, religion and thus the entirety of the orderly life of the state.”
More interesting are the reviews that at least attempt to take the critical task seriously. This is partially the case in the review published in the Norwegian paper Morgenbladet, whose anonymous author bravely tries to find a balance between criticism and praise, and who is alone among Scandinavian reviewers in recognizing that Nietzsche can play a role in the “characterization of Heine that is in many respects highly interesting . . . it is as if Brandes here tests out the correctness of the Nietzschean theory of the overman.” A tad more critical is the acronym H-n L in his review in Swedish Aftonbladet, which begins with an acute, yet not hostile characterization of Brandes, who is said to be just as all-encompassing in his presentation of the material as he is one-sided in his evaluation and judgement of it. This is followed be a severe critique of Brandes’ treatment of especially Heine and Börne, while other (and more peripheral) sections of the volume are deemed successful. This har undoubtedly been painful for Brandes to read. Finally, there are discussions that first and foremost serve to use the publication as an occasion to cast a glance back over the entirety of Main Currents and to incorporate the final volume into the whole composition. This is the case with Johannes Jørgensen’s commentary on the front page of Kjøbenhavns Børs-Tidende, which prefaces its discussion of Young Germany with a lengthy chronological review of the first five volumes. The tone is strikingly respectful, yet not actually evaluative. It is moreover conspicuous that the political-ideological tendentiousness of Main Currents is not so much as mentioned, and that it is actually not certain whether it is Brandes or Jørgensen himself who has been bewitched by “the wondrous fairytale night of German Romanticism.”
If there was not much encouragement in the reviews of the daily papers, Brandes could find compensation in the private letters he received. Already in December of 1890, Jonas Lie wrote from Paris: “for more than a month now, I have had for my refreshment your latest splendid work, Young Germany, – it has been my only reading material while I, finished with my book, exhausted, have waged my hopeless struggle to sweep away all the various projects I have promised to complete” (Brandes 1939:448). Lie remembers to emphasize Heine and Börne, thanking the author for “this superb crowning touch on a grandly and gloriously executed work of intellect.” No less enthusiastic was the reaction from Alexander Kielland in Norway, who bemoans that he has only now (August 1891) read the book, yet on the other hand can play a trump card: “it is with sorrow that one closes such a book, that it did not last longer, – that one does not always have such a work before himself. I do not think you have ever written anything better . . .” (Brandes 1939:365). He also emphasizes the portrait of Heine: “what you write about Heine in your book is manna for my soul . . you manage to say about Heine what should be said by someone who has correctly understood and evaluated him” (Brandes 1939:366). As his response to Kielland divulges, these words were cold comfort to Brandes: “many thanks to you for your heartening words on my old book, which otherwise has not been blessed with a strong reception and has sold perhaps five hundred copies, about which I am hardly giddy” (Brandes 1939:367).
While the majority of the Scandinavian critics often directly acknowledged that they did not know much about the authors of Young Germany and thus concentrated on the sections of the volume about which they knew something beforehand (Heine, Goethe), and otherwise had to trust in Brandes’ review of the material, the German criticism unsurprisingly is distinguished by a greater knowledge of the both the period and the common literary historical treatments of it. In the longer reviews of the volume critics often reference other narrative accounts, just as they comment on Brandes’ weighing of the material and his grasp of it. Minority views and idiosyncrasies are not at all a rarity in the German criticism, but rarely do they revolve around Brandes’ person or political-ideological questions. What actually plays a significant role is Brandes’ relation to contemporary positivistic literary historical writing. A majority of the reviewers discuss the remarkable fact that Brandes seems to have a much wider appeal than contemporary German literary historical writing, and most explain this by noting that he is a literary critic and aestheticist rather than a literary historian and philologist. Some see this as a problem and criticize the looser form and “salon style” (S. Lublinski), the missing references and the careless citation practice, which in certain instances are accompanied by more or less well-founded accusations of plagiarism (A. Gerhard). Others see the fact that Brandes writes in a manner accessible to non-specialists as itself a great service: “it feels like a refreshing bath when one comes from the swamp official literary history” [Sie wirkt wie ein erfrischendes Bad, wenn man aus den Sümpfen der offiziellen Literaturhistore herkommt], writes Franz Mehring in Die neue Zeit, while Moritz Necker asserts in Neue Freie Presse that Brandes is “the only literary critic who enjoys a measure of authority and popularity among the more educated German public” [der einzige literarische Kritiker ist, der sich bei dem großeren Publicum der Gebildeten Deutschland seiner gewissen Autorität und Beliebtheit erfreut].
Interestingly enough, we sense behind such evaluations the contours of a conflict over values that was marked in German intellectual circles from the beginning of the 1890s all the way through to the interwar years. The conflict was fueled by the challenge of lebensphilosophie to the established scientific culture, which in the wake of Nietzsche’s critique of historicism was charged with being unproductive and barren, lost in irrelevant questions of details, and against its intentions leading to the collapse of values in favor of creating healthy human beings and contributing to a genuine form of education. Brandes was naturally familiar with this discussion from both Nietzsche and his vulgar epigone Julius Langbehn, whose immensely influential Rembrandt als Erzieher (1890), published anonymously under the name of “a German,” had been reviewed by Brandes in the first volume of Freie Bühne (Brandes 1890b) – and astoundingly favorably at that, in light of is national chauvinistic tendencies and its anti-academic radicalism (“the professor is the German national disease”) (Langbehn 1890:94) [Der Professor ist die Deutsche Nationalkrankheit]. Yet with respect to the critique of institutions and of science formulated by lebensphilosophie, Brandes did not have a dog in the fight. As in the Scandinavian reception, he functioned more as a catalyst in an already ongoing Weltanschauung debate, if indeed the content of such in Germany was something else and further less tied to his own person.
Despite these differences between the Scandinavian and German receptions of Young Germany, interest was however concentrated chiefly on Börne and Heine. For Ludwig Geiger, who reviewed the final volume of Main Currents over many pages in the weekly Die Nation, the portrait of Heine is especially successful. According to the reviewer, Brandes with great virtuosity succeeds in saying something new about an authorship believed to have been exhaustively described. He is however less enthusiastic for the rest of the book. Some of this can surely be explained or excused by the lack of homogeneity and the thrown together nature of the material, yet Brandes has clearly also had problems in illuminating and arranging it, says Geiger. On the other hand he does not see it as a problem that the other Young Germany authors (Gutzkow, Laube, Mundt, Wienbarg) are treated relatively quickly: “the works of these men . . . are entirely passé for us, and even a master like Brandes cannot manage to bring these colorless figures to life” (Geiger 1890-1:633) [Die Werke jener Männer . . . sind für uns völlig abgethan und selbst ein Meister wie Brandes vermag aus diesen Schemen kein Leben zu erwecken]. For Geiger the problem is rather in the exclusions (for example, Grillparzer) and moreover the more or less peripheral material included (for example the chapter on neutral literature). That the review is so positive is therefore due wholly to the chapters on Heine and Börne, which – as Geiger point out – take up half the book. In line with Geiger, yet still more effusive, is Wilhelm Bölsche, who in his review, published in the same volume of Freie Bühne as Brandes’ aforementioned review of Rembrandt als Erzieher, likewise asserts that “this is a book about Heine” (Bölsche 1890:1179) [das ist eine Buch über Heine], and for the same reason does not find it necessary to comment on the other sections. Bölsche begins with general observations on the status of Heine in Imperial Germany, declaring his agreement with Brandes’ explanation of the contemporary marginalization of Heine and expressing only words of praise for his rehabilitation, which is described as a salutatory act of the politics of memory in an age incapable of erecting a monument to the poet in the city of his birth. Interestingly enough, Bölsche further identifies Brandes’ analysis of Heine’s aristocratic radicalism as particularly successful – “the real key” to unlocking the political Heine – and points out that Nietzsche presumably has been a determining factor in this interpretation (Bölsche 1890:1180).
In the German criticism Brandes could not entirely escape being reminded of his Scandinavian detractors and enemies. Among the reviewers of Young Germany we thus also encounter Laura Marholm, Brandes’ earlier translator and confidant who had married Ola Hansson and now from the artist colony of Friedrichshagen outside Berlin took part in her husband’s effort to contend with Brandes as the foremost mediator of Scandinavian literature in Germany. Marholm begins her text – more essay than review – with a longer recollection of her childhood reading of Gutzkow’s novels that leads into an interesting diagnosis of the present era (the “age of nervousness”), before at last discussing two new books about Young Germany, one of which is Brandes’. And as expected she has little favorable to say about the author or the actual book, which is viciously characterized as a book for Danes and other foreigners who have no knowledge of German literature and culture, written by a “the demagogue among the literary historians” (Marholm 1893:205) [der Demagog unter den Literaturhistorikern], who perhaps once had firsthand knowledge of the material, but after moving back to Denmark no longer has his finger on the pulse. Thereafter is passed the merciless verdict: “Perhaps an acute and profound psychological divination like that known to us from Frenchman such as Taine and Bourget could have remedied these necessary deficiencies, but Brandes proceeds all too anecdotally all too superficially” (Marholm 1893:207) [Ueber diese nothgedrungenen Mängel hätteeine sehr feine und tiefe psychologische Divination hinweghelfen können, wie die Franzosen, wie Taine und Bourget sie haben, aber auf diesem Gebiet arbeitet Brandes allzusehr anekdotisch und auf der Oberfläche]. As if to add insult to injury there follows an especially laudatory discussion of Johannes Prölß’s Young Germany from 1892, which according to Marholm distinguishes itself by being everything Brandes’ book is not: “this is not a book that is a reflection of its author, but a book that wholly strives to make its contents comprehensible . . . It is a very German book in technique and presentation, and thereby it stands in the greatest imaginable contrast to Brandes’ French schooling” (Marholm 1893:207) [Es ist kein Buch, das seinen Verfasser spiegelt, sondern ein Buch, das ganz von dem Bestreben ausgeht, seinen Inhalt durchsichtig zu ansehen . . . Es ist ein sehr deutsches Buch in Technik und Darstellung, und daruch steht es im starken Gegensatz zu Brandes’ französicher Schulung]. Incidentally the laurel-wreathed Prölß was naturally aware of Brandes’ narrative, which is quite briefly discussed in the introduction to his book, but does not seem to have played any role in his own presentation.
Not much indicates that later literary historians should have been more influenced by Brandes’ presentation of Young Germany than that of Prölß. Many explanations can be provided for this, but presumably most important is the already noted circumstance that literary criticism and, according to its own understanding, strictly scientific literary history, did not have much to do with each other in Germany at this time, and that Brandes was always placed within the former group. Even though Brandes and Wilhelm Scherer, professor at the University of Berlin and possibly the highest profile positivistic literary historian of the era, held each other in high esteem, shared a passionate interest in Goethe and further associated with one another while Brandes lived in Berlin, they were far apart in their activities as representatives of on the one hand philologically- and positivistically-oriented literary history and on the other aesthetic literary criticism – even if the distance between them was understand to be much shorter in Danish rather than German eyes. On this point Prölß is aligned with Scherer, when despite complementing Brandes on his “brilliantly written character analyses” [geistvoll geschriebene Charakteranalysen] he makes short work of Brandes’ book, dismissing it as insufficiently based in source material (lacking in “scrupulous knowledge of the sources and the records”) [die genaue Kenntnis der Quellen und Akten] and moreover as subordinated to a political-ideological tendentiousness [“the aggregate purpose of the whole”] (Prölß 1892:4-5) [Totalzweck des Ganzen]. Thus Brandes was so to speak set aside and no further discussion was required.
Nonetheless it is also necessary here to distinguish between volume six as a unified historiographic presentation of Young Germany and its individual sections, especially the chapters on Heine. While Brandes’ literary historiographic scheme does not seem to have made an impact on literary history, his portrait of Heine has fared better in more recent scholarship on the German reception of the poet. This is due on the one hand to his more nuanced presentation of the conflict between Börne and Heine as well as his defense of Heine in that conflict, which is described as “unusual” and “diverging from German criticism” (Hohendahl 2008:139-40) [ungewöhnlich . . . von der deutschen Kritik abweichend], and on the other for his refusal to take part in the almost unanimous branding of Heine as a “traitor” after 1848, instead insisting that Heine was no less patriotic than his enemies. It is not surprising that Brandes, who himself was often attacked for being unpatriotic, had a sharp eye for it.
Finally, the same author points out that Brandes’ portrait of Heine by all accounts resonated immensely with Heinrich Mann, who in reference to Young Germany in 1892 noted that Heine’s modernity first and foremost consisted of his “psychological complexity” (Hohendahl 2008:203) [psychologische Komplexität]. As an admirer of the French Enlightenment tradition and republicanism, neither was it probably difficult for him to affirm Brandes’ presentation of the world citizen Heine, his critique of German Romanticism, his anticlericalism and his proud individualism – all of which were later incorporated into Heinrich Mann’s own portrait of Heine in Geist und Tat (1910). Because he does not actually refer to Brandes in this work, it remains difficult to determine how much Heinrich Mann is in debt to Brandes’ understanding of Heine. On the other hand there is no doubt that Heine came to play an important role in the determination of the aesthetic and political views of both Heinrich and Thomas Mann, just as he became a central historical and political point of contention in the famous fratricidal conflict between German culture and French civilization that manifested itself in the First World War, and which found concentrated expression in the question of the character of Heine’s patriotism and modernity. But that is another story, in which Brandes is only indirectly involved.
© Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab med støtte fra Carlsbergfondet • Privatlivspolitik
