3 - Wilhelm Jensen and Wilhelm Raabe: Literary Value, Evolutionary Aesthetics, and Competition in the Marketplace

Summary

This Chapter Breaks A Lance for the neglected Wilhelm Jensen (1837– 1911) by remembering two forgotten works of his, and in that context of his oblivion pondering a key conflict of literary and market value.

Everyone has heard of Jensen. But few read and still fewer study him even in these postmodern, postcanonical days. He seems to be the paradigm case of the acknowledged second-rate writer, in that his work is never treated for its own sake. A brief research conspectus tells the tale. Jensen was one of the most widely read and well-esteemed authors of his day, with 150 to 160 books to his name. His fame, however, has not endured. The first scholarly monograph, by Gustav Adolf Erdmann (1909), was also the last. There is no academic literary society to cultivate and explore his legacy, as there is for his friends and rivals Theodor Storm and Wilhelm Raabe. If he is studied today, it is thanks to Freud’s memorable analysis in 1907 of his late novella Gradiva (1903). Or thanks to Storm scholars, for whom Jensen plays a loyal supporting role to their central actor. Or to committed Raabe scholars, for whom Jensen plays the less appealing part of a whipping boy, the journeyman writer whose unequivocal nonmaster-pieces serve as a counter example to demonstrate the superior literary quality of Raabe’s work. Jensen does, if rarely, feature as central object of scholarship. But even then it is precisely as exemplar of the secondary writer, interesting only insofar as he typifies the ideological and aesthetic compromises that the professional writer of the nineteenth century was forced to make if he was to survive.

Against this background I want to look not at why or how some of Jensen’s works did become bestsellers but at how or why some did not; and, at the same time, to say something about a topos of Jensen and Raabe scholarship: the fractious, friendly, and loyal but also competitive and aggressive relationship between two of the most prominent market-orientated writers of late nineteenth-century Germany. The notion of the bestseller, we know, is strictly speaking a twentieth-century concept, indeed already inadequate for our contemporary transmedial bestselling phenomena, and certainly applicable only in a mediated way to bestseller prehistory in the nineteenth.