The German Genius

Woyzecjk, who had killed his lover in a fit of jealousy in Leipzig in 1821 and was subsequently beheaded in public. A soldier and barber, Woyzecjk had fallen on hard times, sliding into unemployment, beginning to hallucinate, and then showing signs of paranoia. Despite all this, the King’s Counselor, who had examined Woyzecjk twice, found him “depraved but not insane.” According to the counselor’s moral standard, derived from Kant, Woyzecjk had deviated from society’s norms and had to be punished as a deterrent to others. In the course of the play, Woyzecjk kills his lover and then himself. 29
    The play is a savage indictment of the social conditions then existing in Germany, the new forms of poverty caused by industrialization, the “atomization” that drives all individuals against each other in a society which ostensibly values individuality, and the fundamental ignorance of most people about the psychological pressures that can exist in simply getting through the day. Guilt is to be found neither in the murderer nor in his victim—nor in his tormentors, who are themselves tormented. In a letter to his parents, written in 1834, Büchner said: “…it lies in no one’s power to avoid becoming a fool or a criminal.” The jagged nature of the scenes, the way they do and do not follow each other, the use of working-class dialogue and accents, was all new on stage and meant that the play would eventually have an enormous impact—on Expressionism, for example, and on many modern and even postmodern authors.
    Büchner was appalled and defeated by the fatalism of the poor. One of the poor characters in Woyzeck says: “I think that if we went to heaven, we’d have to help make the thunder.”
    T HE E ND OF THE G OETHEAN A GE
     
    From 1829 onward, Heine had on several occasions addressed the significance for him of the forthcoming “end of the cultural age” that had “begun at Goethe’s cradle and will end at his [Heine’s] coffin.” Despite his very real admiration for Goethe, he bemoaned the “quietism” that he felt characterized the bulk of the writing of the period, particularly since the turn of the century. Great periods of art in the past, he claimed, were never divorced from the great issues of the day, pointing to Phidias and Michelangelo as two great artists whose work exemplified this premise. In fact, Goethe’s death in 1832 came to mark a watershed in German literature of the nineteenth century, as we have seen. A clinging to the values of the Goethean legacy—his inwardness and a turning away from the world of industrial change—characterized the writing of Grillparzer, Stifter, and Keller (all, significantly, living outside Germany proper), as well as the novellas of the Biedermeier period around the middle of the century.
    But there were also a number of authors who looked up to Heine, despite the fact that he spent most of his mature years in exile in Paris. The writers of Junges Deutschland (Young Germany)—Christian Dietrich Grabbe, Karl Gutzkow, Heinrich Laube, Theodor Mundt, Rudolf Wienberg, and Ludwig Börne are the major names—were most active in the 1830s, addressing various social issues in their novels and dramas. All these writers have in common that they were writing in an age marked by strict literary censorship that was designed to quell any form of public dissent. For this reason the ascent to the Prussian throne of Friedrich Wilhelm IV in 1840 was seen as a key turning point, as he announced his intention to liberalize the constraints on writers. Although the monarch soon found himself forced to backtrack, the brief period of liberalization was a catalyst to a veritable torrent of political—at times intensely nationalistic, at times more or less Marxist—writing that marked the Vormärz . This period saw the emergence of the hugely popular sociocritical novels of Ernst Willkomm, who was influenced by Eugène Sue and Charles Dickens, as well as a host of other novels based on The Pickwick Papers . Georg Weerth was important too—he, like Friedrich Engels, drew on his personal knowledge of the conditions of the working class in England in his writing.
    But the most notable writing of the time, undoubtedly influenced by the important peripheral presence of Heine (and despite his scorn for the genre), was the realm of political poetry, already alluded to, with Georg Herwegh, Ferdinand Freiligrath, and Hoffmann von Fallersleben producing sociocritical verse