“Heiliger Goethe, bitt' für mich”: Friedrich Spielhagen and the Anxiety of Influence

Summary

WHATEVER ONE MAY THINK OF HAROLD BLOOM'S agonistic account of the history of English poetry—as a nonspecialist observer I regard it with considerable skepticism—there are doubtless literary-historical situations in which the anxiety of influence is a concept of some utility, and none more so than in the two or three generations of German writers following upon the Goethezeit. How pervasive the anxiety remained appears in the variety of devices applied to cope with it. Heinrich Heine struggled to maintain a stance of disrespectful awe and assertive competitiveness; nevertheless, when he came to consider the history of Faust treatments, he found himself obliged to yield to Goethe's preeminence in the sequence: “Abraham zeugte den Isaak, Isaak zeugte den Jakob, Jakob aber zeugte den Juda, in dessen Händen das Zepter ewig bleiben wird.” Novelists from the Romantics to Gottfried Keller modelled themselves on Wilhelm Meister with a series of demonstrations that Bildung as conceived by Goethe was not feasible. Parody proliferated, such as Friedrich Theodor Vischer's Faust. Dritter Theil. Sometimes the anxiety paralyzed the imaginative vision in stasis, as in the case of Adalbert Stifter. Few seem to have been able to escape from the charmed circle.

Among the German realists, none suffered more cripplingly and more garrulously from the malady than Friedrich Spielhagen. Born in 1829, he ought, by the time he had reached maturity, to have been able to regard the “Classical” epoch as definitively in the past (not the “Classical-Romantic” epoch, incidentally; Spielhagen only sporadically indicates even an awareness of the Romantics, unless we count Heine among them).