Introduction: Reawakening German Realism

Summary

German realism of the nineteenth century has a bad reputation. Contemporary literature about the aftermath of German Reunification captures headlines; modern classics by Kafka, Brecht, and Mann remain in print and on class syllabi; and the “Age of Goethe,” whether revered or reviled, retains its prominent place in German culture. While a handful of late nineteenth-century novel-las still attract critical attention, most works of the period seem minor embarrassments best left to specialists. It does not help matters that German writers of the period identified themselves as latecomers on the literary scene in the wake of Goethe's death: Heinrich Heine declared the end of the “Goethean period of art” in Die romantische Schule (The Romantic School, 1833); Karl Leberecht Immermann titled his 1836 novel Die Epigonen, “those born after” greater men; and in 1842 Georg Gottfried Gervinus concluded his epoch-making Geschichte der poetischen National-Literatur der Deutschen (History of the Poetic National Literature of the Germans) by declaring that his generation could not hope to improve on the works of Goethe and Schiller; the time had come for politics rather than art. In the highly charged political climate of the years prior to the revolution of 1848 known as the Vormärz radical critics rejected Goethe for his conservatism, but after the failed 1848 revolution Goethe's stock began to rise until he became a cultural icon of monumental proportions. German literary historians celebrated his life as an inspiring example of individual harmony in an increasingly disjointed modern world and viewed the eternally striving protagonist of his Faust as the embodiment of imperial Germany's reckless and ruthless struggle for power. Against such standards the “mild and timid liberals” of the later nineteenth century could offer only the cozy comforts of an anti-modern Heimatliteratur, so the charge goes, or an elitist cult of genius that ignored questions of modern urbanization and the workers’ movement.

German realism fares no better from a comparativist perspective. Erich Auerbach's damning verdict in Mimesis (1946) set the tone for much postwar criticism of nineteenth-century German literature. Auerbach argues that Schiller's tragedy Kabale und Liebe (Intrigue and Love, 1784) seemed to promise a new kind of German drama that was contemporary, tragic, and realistic but was, in fact, only “a melodramatic hit written by a man of genius.”