The German Genius

live a fulfilled life in a society where capitalism encouraged so much individualism.
    Keller was in a way a transitional figure between those writers considered above, who primarily turned their backs on the new urban bourgeois world, and those considered next, who recognized that it should be the chief focus of their concern. Keller preferred legal change to revolution (he wasn’t quite as gentle as Stifter), but he couldn’t quite embrace that change in his work, and certainly not after 1848. He was one of those who developed the nineteenth-century novella, a particularly German form of short narrative, brief and highly symbolic, summarizing life in society by focusing on an “extraordinary, individual event.”
    Green Henry is customarily identified as a Bildungsroman, following Goethe’s model, though it is also reminiscent of Balzac’s “Le chef-d’oeuvre inconnu.” 15 There are strong autobiographical elements in the story. The protagonist, Heinrich Lee, is called green because all his youthful outfits are made from his father’s green uniforms, available because his father had died at an early age. Heinrich is expelled from school and studies painting in Munich. The other element in Heinrich’s life is his love for two women, Anna, who represents “heavenly love,” and Judith, a widow, who answers his “more earthly needs.” The plot resolves itself when Heinrich realizes he can never achieve more than modest success as an artist but is then overtaken by the death of his mother. This forces on him the realization that, in a very real sense, he was responsible for her death because of what she sacrificed for him and that he, in his self-obsession, had impoverished her. He dies of shame.
    Keller came to dislike this story—or the ending—and rewrote it years later. In the revised version, Heinrich doesn’t die, but lives on in a dispiriting bureaucratic sinecure. This seems to have struck a chord. The first version had not really caught on, but the revised version received wide acclaim. 16
    This new ending was partly autobiographical too, because in 1855 Keller returned to Zurich, later becoming cantonal secretary. From this vantage point Keller was particularly aware of the growing division between capitalism and artistic individualism, the division that Marx labeled alienation, which Keller found equally abominable. He addressed this in a series of novellas titled Die Leute von Seldwyla ( The People of Seldwyla ; 1856 and 1873–74), a distinctly odd but not necessarily disagreeable place. Here the people are no less daring and enterprising than anywhere else but, as they gain experience of the world, they change. They become “whimsical philistines” who withdraw into the security of their own city: they refuse to see work as “a process of upward mobility,” they reject speed, derive pleasure from the trivial side of life, rather than what everyone else regards as “important.” They are, in effect, exploring alternative values to those of the bourgeoisie.
    C OAL -S MOKE AND S ONG B IRDS
     
    Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) is now recognized as one of Germany’s greatest writers. Yet, like Grillparzer, like Hölderlin, recognition was delayed for decades. One factor special to him was his Jewishness: anti-Semites in early nineteenth-century Germany denied that he could be “both Jewish and German.” The fact that he lived in France from 1831 to his death and was enthusiastic about French culture didn’t help either (in his memoirs he speaks of two passions: the love of beautiful women and the French Revolution). 17 The Nazis tried to erase his memory completely.
    When Heine’s first collection of verse appeared in 1821, Weimar Classicism was long gone and Romanticism was fading too. He himself wrote: “The thousand-year empire of Romanticism is at an end, and I myself was its last and fabulous king, who abdicated the throne.” For him, Romanticism was “a desperate inward retreat from an unsatisfactory external world.” He studied under Hegel in Berlin when the philosopher was at the height of his fame and influence. And Heine agreed with him, seeing a Hegelian progression in the arts, which had begun with the most “material” art forms (for example, the Egyptian pyramids), then progressed via Greek sculpture and Renaissance painting to the least material—poetry and music. “Our present age,” he felt, “will go down in the annals of art as the age of music.”
    He