2 - Felix Dahn’s Ein Kampf um Rom: Historical Fiction as Melodrama

Summary

Felix Dahn’S Ein Kampf Um Rom (A Struggle for Rome, 1876) is one of the bestselling works of historical fiction in the German language. Dahn began work on the novel in the late 1850s, but soon grew dissatisfied with it and once even threatened to burn the manuscript. His second wife, however—who was incidentally a distant relative of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff—managed to dissuade him and, after a pause of more than a decade, Dahn brought Ein Kampf um Rom to a resounding conclusion. The book was an immediate and lasting success: Dahn claimed that 84,000 copies had already been sold by 1884; there were 110 editions by the end of the First World War, 220 by 1930, and over 600 by 1938. Ein Kampf um Rom is one of the books that Oskar Matzerath reads as a boy in Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum), and the rebellious teenagers who call themselves Die Stäuber or The Dusters borrow their nicknames from Dahn’s novel. Prominent critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki confesses in his autobiography that the novel made a vivid impression on him as a child, as it no doubt did on thousands of his contemporaries. More sensationally, an eyewitness reported in 1936 that Adolf Hitler had a copy of Ein Kampf um Rom on his bookshelf, nestled among the racist diatribes of Alfred Rosenberg and the adventure novels of Karl May.

Dahn’s novel tells the story of the Germanic tribes, more specifically, the Ostrogoths or simply Goths (die Goten), being driven out of Italy in the sixth century. Dahn was a professor who specialized in the legal history of the early Germanic period. His magnum opus was a twelve-volume history of the Germanic kings, but even this monumental work was only a fraction of an oeuvre large enough to fill a small library. It is said that he kept his office bitter cold to discourage visitors from distracting him from his work. Readers who hefted a copy of Ein Kampf um Rom could therefore be confident that the author knew his facts, and Dahn’s position as a university professor writing about the prehistory of the recently unified nation commanded his readers’ respect. Nevertheless, Dahn’s goal in the novel is hardly to present a dry summary of past events, wie es eigentlich gewesen (how it really was).