The German Genius

tragedies were found among his papers and one of them, Die Jüdin von Toledo , an adaptation from the Spanish, is now accepted as a German classic. After his death he sank into obscurity and not until the centenary of 1891 did the German-speaking world acknowledge his genius. 12 The “inner” stories have worn better than the political dramas.
    T HE L AWS OF G ENTLENESS AND THE A VOIDANCE OF L OCOMOTIVES AND F ACTORIES
     
    Adalbert Stifter (1805–68), as well as being a writer and a poet, was an accomplished painter (his works sold well enough) and a pedagogue. He studied law at the University of Vienna, but had an unhappy family life, being prevented by his parents from marrying the woman he loved, then contracting an unhappy union with another woman who was unable to conceive. Suffering from cirrhosis of the liver and in deep depression, he slashed his throat with a razor.
    Stifter wrote many long stories and short novels, the greatest of which was Der Nachsommer ( Indian Summer ; 1857), now counted a seminal Bildungsroman in the German canon. It describes the self-cultivation of Heinrich Drendorf, a German merchant’s son and shows how he gradually acquired all the necessary characteristics to look upon himself—and to behave—with dignity. Stifter himself lived through the violence and chaos of the 1848 failed revolution in Vienna and subsequently went to live a much quieter life in Linz. His book describes how Drendorf pursues his private fulfillment through a range of humanistic endeavors—science, art, history, pedagogy, but all at a distance from contemporary issues, avoiding, as Stifter puts it (and as he did in his own life), “locomotives and factories.” 13 Although a merchant’s son, Drendorf is conspicuously uninterested in the practical world of trade and commerce. When he is out for a walk on a mountainside, a storm is brewing and he seeks shelter at the estate of an old man. Once on the estate, the Rosenhaus, Drendorf cannot help but notice that the old man, Freiherr von Risach (an important figure politically, though we are never told why), orders his life punctiliously around art, antiques, and gardening (books are always replaced on their shelves immediately after use), and that he is just one of several characters who enjoy this idyllic existence, controlling their passions rather than giving way to them. Nietzsche found Stifter’s Nachsommer a “distant celestial world,” with a “milky-way brightness” and, along with Gottfried Keller’s Green Henry (see Chapter 14), one of the two best German books of the nineteenth century. 14
    Stifter’s point is that pleasure is derived from “the laws of gentleness,” that “evolution anticipated revolution,” that most of the lasting beneficial changes in the world are slow to emerge and silent in their effects—this is nature’s way. Friedrich Hebbel, another writer, offered the crown of Poland to anyone who could finish reading Der Nachsommer , but W. H. Auden, Marianne Moore, and W. G. Sebald all stressed their debt to him, while Thomas Mann said he was “one of the most extraordinary, the most enigmatic, the most secretly daring and the most strangely gripping narrators in world literature.”
    T HE A LTERNATIVE B OURGEOIS
     
    Like Stifter, Gottfried Keller (1819–90) enjoyed painting. He studied in Munich for two years before deciding he would never be good enough and then turned to writing. His book Der grüne Heinrich ( Green Henry ) is regarded by some critics as the greatest Swiss novel, and was recently admitted into The Western Canon by Harold Bloom, the American critic. It was this book that, together with Indian Summer , Nietzsche described as one of the two greatest German-language novels of the nineteenth century.
    Born in Zurich, Keller was the son of a lathe operator who died when Gottfried was just five. He attended a variety of schools, including an Industrieschule until he was fifteen, when he was expelled for a misdemeanor. Forced to seek employment, he apprenticed himself to Peter Steiger and Rudolf Meyer, landscape painters in Munich. After two years, however, he abandoned art, returned to Zurich, and took up writing. He studied at Heidelberg, where he attended the lectures of Ludwig Feuerbach. Feuerbach was a great influence on Keller, who was much concerned with what Daniel Bell would call, more than a hundred years later, the cultural contradictions of capitalism, in particular how the individual could