contain thrusts at Young Germany; that in which it is satirised most
directly is _Der Wassermensch_; but the caricature is so overdone that
it loses all effect.
Florheim, the representative of Young Germany, is half crazy with
enthusiasm for Frenchmen and Jews. He poses as the democrat and
friend of freedom in a manner which we should consider foolish in an
ordinary schoolboy. He maintains that in every concert programme the
Marseillaise ought to have a place, to keep people from forgetting
what is the one thing above all others. He would have portraits of the
great heroes of liberty, Mirabeau, Washington, Franklin, Kosciuszko,
&c, inserted in every printed book, even in cookery books. In every
almanac, if he could have his will, July should be printed in red
letters, to keep the glorious Revolution of July in ever fresh
remembrance. And he hopes that all the truly noble will unite in
insisting that the nouns, prince, lord, king, count, squire, &c, shall
be written without capital letters, in order to show contempt for their
signification.
When the Privy Councillor (Geheimrath), the representative of
intelligent Conservatism, asks Florheim how he and his ("Sie, die Sie
sich das junge Deutschland nennen"--you who call yourselves Young
Germany) hope to carry out their plans and plots against the existing
order of things, he answers naïvely: "By perpetual abuse of all that
stands in our way." And he goes on to show how it was thus they treated
Goethe in the last years of his age--an assertion which is quite
contrary to fact--and how, now that they are the "party of movement"
and already in possession of the most important newspapers, they are
in a position to form an invisible and yet open league spread over the
whole of Germany, which shall ruin every author who is not of their
way of thinking, and make the reputation of its own members by means
of unscrupulous mutual laudations.[6]
The reality was very different from this. The caricature has the double
fault of not being like and not being amusing. Mundt took an ingenious
revenge some years later by suggesting the performance of Tieck's
fairy-tale comedies in Berlin.
[1] A. Strodtmann: H. Heine's _Leben und Werke_, 1874, ii. 174, &c.
[2] Cursed be the friend who is faithful to thee in trouble! Never
shall a woman's loving heart cherish thee.
[3] He _is_ beloved! Trust better prophets!
[4] Th. Mundt: _Madonna_, pp. 142, 274, 326, 374, 406.
[5] Mundt: _Litteratur der Gegenwart_, p. 353.
[6] L. Tieck: _Gesammelte Novellen_, Breslau, 1855, i. 38, 79.
XXXIII
RAHEL, BETTINA, CHARLOTTE STIEGLITZ
The representation of the relation between literature and politics, the
history of literary events, and the delineation of the characters and
work of the most eminent of the men who constituted Young Germany, do
not sufficiently reveal to us the spirit, the psychical condition of
the time.
What is done, and what happens, is its outward manifestation. In books,
effect is a first consideration; what is represented in them must
be to a certain extent exaggerated, thrown into relief, if only for
the sake of distinctness. To find the clue to the intellectual life
_lived_ at any given period, we must get as close as possible to the
living, feeling, individual, and we must not neglect to supplement the
impression received from an observation of the leading men of the time
by a study of its typical women.
It is where there is more feeling than action, where, in spite of great
originality, the formative, the fashioning power is too slight entirely
to separate the production from the personality, that the student comes
into closest contact with the life-springs of a period. A letter from
a highly gifted woman tells us more of the living human being and its
real emotions than a political speech or a tragedy.
Not one of the few great women who ruled men's minds during the period
under consideration produced a work of art; not one of them even
attempted to. They neither wrote novels nor essays. Their literary
influence was a directly personal influence, and their power of
stirring men's minds was evidently due to the fact that something of
the inmost essence of the period was expressed in their personalities.
Their natures are unplastic, evasive; the contours of their spiritual
lives are blurred and indistinct; this makes it difficult to delineate
their characters, but makes it all the easier to feel the pulse of the
time in their utterances.
They help us to arrive at the result that the idea which shapes the
lives of the most noble characters of this period, and which makes
itself felt in the resistance they offered to the worship of rule and
the tyranny of custom, is the idea that the one course worthy of a
thinking, feeling, human being is independently and unconventionally
to interpret human life, human relations, for himself, and to base
his conduct on his own interpretation. This is not a new idea; it
originated in Germany with Herder, descended from him to all the
preachers of the gospel of Nature, including that Heinse who had such
a strong influence upon some of the leaders of Young Germany, but was
more especially developed and applied in all the relations of life
by Goethe. A careful study of the characters of the most remarkable
women of the time shows that the subterranean, hidden secret of the
period between 1810 and 1838, what had happened deepest down, was that
Goethe's theory of life had, point by point, displaced the Church
theory and taken possession of all the men of great instincts, of all
the really gifted minds of the day.
Rahel Varnhagen von Ense is, beyond all comparison, the greatest of
the women who occupied the attention of intellectual Germany in the
Thirties and Forties. She died in March 1833, and in 1835 her husband
published the three volumes of selections from her letters and journals
which revealed to the great reading public what manner of woman she had
been. This publication was followed by many others, of which she was
the main theme.
A less innately great, but much more talented woman than Rahel was
Bettina von Arnim, who, in 1835, published _Goethe's Briefwechsel mit
einem Kinde_ (Goethe's Correspondence with a Child), a work which
created a great sensation and was most favourably received.
Rahel's name is remembered by the quiet, powerful influence she
steadily exercised for so many years; Bettina's shines with the lustre
of her brilliant talent and sparkling wit; the third woman who made
a deep impression on the men and women of that day is remembered by
one action, her suicide. This was Charlotte Stieglitz, who committed
suicide in December 1834, and whose biography, diaries, and letters
were published by Theodor Mundt in 1835. She was at once made the
subject of studies and panegyrics by the new school. Gustav Kühne, in
particular, wrote an admirable notice of her. It was her death which,
as has been already mentioned, suggested Gutzkows _Wally_.
Rahel Antonie Friederike Varnhagen (family name originally Levin,
afterwards Robert) was born in Berlin in 1771. She would thus seem to
belong to quite another epoch than that of the Revolution of July; but
it was not until after her death that she became a public personage,
and entered, by means of her written words, into relations with the
literary public. She was one of those rare beings whose inexhaustible
vigour and freshness of mind enable them to understand everything and
every one, to sympathise with the most dissimilar individuals and
tendencies, to penetrate to the core of things; and whose wide and
untiring sympathy wins for them all their life long the affection and
admiration of the élite of their time, young and old. Rahel received
the same homage from Karl Gutzkow that she had received from Schelling
and Friedrich Schlegel, from Schleiermacher and Wilhelm von Humboldt.
She had shown herself a fervid patriot during the war of liberation,
superintending hospitals in Berlin and Prague; and she was admired
by Heinrich Heine, who dedicated the Lyric Intermezzo in the _Buch
der Lieder_ to her when she was fifty. She, who had been the intimate
of the famous men of the beginning of the century, the Prince de
Ligne, Fichte, Prince Louis Ferdinand, Fouqué, and many others,
surprised every one by her enthusiastic appreciation of Victor Hugo's
_Les Orientales_, and the writings of the Saint-Simonists. There is
something great about such a life, undramatic though it be.
It gives us a feeling of the many-sidedness of her character to
remember the long list of persons, differing from each other in
every possible way, with whom she was on intimate terms. There are
depths in her nature which still surprise us, and vaguenesses quite
incomprehensible to the modern mind. The magic of her nature lay in
the spoken word, the momentary impression, the opportune utterance: so
it is not easy to reconstruct. A strong influence emanated from her,
yet her real life was introspective; she was a woman of distinctly
aristocratic instincts and sentiments, and yet so tender hearted that
her sympathies extended far and wide.
The daughter of a rich Jewish merchant, as a girl plain-looking and
without talent of any description, she grows up in her father's house
in Berlin at a time when as yet the Jews had none of the rights
of citizens. At the age of twenty-five she has already become an
influential member of the best society of the capital, and from the
age of thirty till her death her house is the intellectual centre of
Berlin, and one of the intellectual centres of Germany. Her great
attraction was her perfect originality and unconventionality. All
human beings desire and love to see themselves mirrored in the mind
of a greater human being, all crave for sympathy, all would fain
be understood. And those who approached Rahel--princes and nobles,
diplomats and philosophers, poets and scientists--felt instinctively
that this young girl with the slight, graceful figure, the beautifully
formed limbs, the thick, waving hair surrounding a face with an
expression of suffering, but with a deep, steadfast look in its
dark eyes, was worthy of their confidence, and this for the one and
sufficient reason, that she was innocent of all prejudices.
She gladly associates with a charming hetæra like Pauline Wiese,
Prince Louis Fredinand's friend; is her and her cynical husband's
and her princely lover's confidante. She has a sincere regard for a
reactionary sensualist like Friedrich Gentz, warmly congratulates him
when he, at the age of sixty, wins the affections of Fanny Elsler, sees
in him the distinguished prose writer and the politician who had been
of national importance at a critical moment. Human beings are to her,
in Goethe's sense, natural products.
That she, with her strict personal morality and Liberal tendencies,
should have been able to rise to such a height of freedom from
prejudice and gain such a wide horizon, was primarily due to her having
been born in a sort of sanctuary outside the pale of society, that is
to say in the house of a wealthy Berlin Jew.
In intolerant, stiff old Prussia, the alien, despised, hooknosed
money-lenders had sat behind their counters for some centuries, with
no thought for anything but money--piling thaler upon thaler, buying
bills, and lending money even to princes. With all their wealth they
were ignorant, orthodox, superstitious. But during the period of
enlightenment the influence of Moses Mendelssohn thoroughly aroused
them. Their piety became a noble rationalism, and they comprehended
the meaning of knowledge and culture. By the close of the eighteenth
century they were giving their sons a perfectly new training, and
society was also beginning to look upon these sons as men to whom
reparation for a wrong was due.
It was in the generation of these sons that the Jewish houses all at
once opened their long closed doors, revealing interiors which in no
way resembled the cramped middle-class German houses--spacious rooms
with rich Oriental carpets and hangings; here and there a valuable
painting, made over to father or grandfather by some prince in
pecuniary difficulties; on the dinner tables gold and silver plate, the
finest crystal sparkling upon lace-edged linen, choice viands, and the
rarest wines. The mistress of the house and her daughters had received
a higher and more refined education than others in their rank of life;
they were deeply interested in theology, philosophy, and music; they
had developed quickly under the influence of the mixed society which
now frequented their house.[1]
For here, as upon neutral ground, met all those whom society usually
separated, members of all its different ranks and castes, and many whom
it altogether excluded; German and foreign actresses had the entrance
of no other middle-class houses in Berlin; here they were received on
the same footing as the other guests. The princes frequented no other
middle-class houses, if it were for no other reason than that the
company they met there bored them. To these houses they came, attracted
by the easy tone and by the wit of the women. It was a refined Bohemia.
It was the first development of the cosmopolitan spirit in the Berlin
of old Prussia.
It is in these circles that Rahel grows up, early distinguished by
her friendship with Prince Louis Ferdinand, the hero of the young
generation of that day, son of Frederick the Great's youngest brother.
He was about Rahel's own age, chivalrous, artistic, loose in his
morals, brave to foolhardiness, a first-rate musician, and a first-rate
cavalry general. Goethe describes him in his book on the campaign of
1793. Like all the princes of that day, he had been educated like
a Frenchman, to the extent (as we know from some of his published
letters) of not being able to spell German correctly; nevertheless
he was an ardent enemy of Napoleon, and burned to match his troops
against the great Emperor's. Like the Prince of Homburg in his day,
he disobeyed an order to retreat, and, infuriated by the defeat at
Saalfeld, refusing to flee, refusing to yield, was cut down by the
French hussars. He confided his wild love adventures to Rahel, and
found comfort, when suffering from the treachery of a faithless lady
love, in tranquil, serious conversation with his sisterly friend.
But Rahel was not always in a position to comfort others. In her young
days she stood sorely in need of comfort herself. By nature she was
of such an irritably nervous temperament that as a child she was with
difficulty kept in life: "Let the air be too dense or too rare, too
warm or too cold, and I am ill at once. And the slightest excitement
has a still worse effect. I cannot imagine any one more sensitive." In
nearly all her letters, immediately after the date, we find a detailed
description of the weather and temperature: "Friday, 14th March,
1828.--A grey day, with south-west wind, damp and yet spring-like,
though not inviting for a walk. Pigeons are flying. Every now and
then a blue window appears in the sky; at this moment sunlight is
coming through one of them." "23rd March, 1829.--The sun has broken
through the clouds and is shining brightly; a cold, sharp, unmistakable
north-east wind; impossible to go to the Thiergarten, where there is
still ice and it is as cold as in a cellar." "17th April,--Noon; spring
weather after rain; the trees turning green. To me the best time of the
whole year--no flies or mosquitoes, no heat. Spring is approaching,
wafting to us a thousand memories, and a thousand hopes which can never
be fulfilled, but which are a necessity to us."
Such natures deserve and arouse as much compassion as admiration.
Her friend, W. von Burgsdorf, writes to her: "When I saw you for the
first time, it struck me at once that you must have been educated by
long suffering." It was true; she had had an infirm body, a melancholy
youth, a severe father, and had early suffered humiliation. Her Jewish
birth was the cause of great unhappiness to her--an unhappiness almost
unworthy of her; she calls it a sword thrust into her heart by a
supernatural being at the moment of her birth. Not one fibre in her
nature attached her to the religious community to which by birth she
belonged. The memory of its fanaticism and of the fanatical enmity
displayed towards it was still fresh. As lately as 1756 the Jewish
community in Berlin had expelled a child from the town for having
carried a book for a Christian. And on the other side, even Moses
Mendelssohn could not go out with his children without having stones
thrown at them.
With all the power of his intellect and will, Rahel's father had
striven to overcome the sickly child's independence of character,
and only her unusual elasticity and strength of mind enabled her to
preserve her originality. When young she felt as if she had suffered
so much there could not possibly be anything left in her to be bent or
broken.
It was inevitable that a woman with this passionate nature should love
passionately and should suffer agony through her love. And she did not
escape her fate. Twice, when she loved most ardently, she experienced
as it were the feeling of being struck down with an assassin's knife
and of living for years with the knife in the wound.
At the age of twenty-four she formed a very strong attachment to Count
Karl von Finckenstein, the son of a Prussian minister, a man a year
younger than herself. They became engaged, and Rahel lived for some
years solely for this love. Finckenstein was good-hearted, very much
in love, and sincerely devoted to her, but his character was weak. He
told her what he had to bear from his family, whose pride revolted
against an alliance with a person of inferior position, and who
were endeavouring to make him give her up. Rahel's pride was deeply
wounded, and she gave him back his word. In character and intellect his
superior, she could easily have vanquished his scruples if she had made
up her mind to do so, but instead of this she set him free at once, and
he was weak enough, attached though he was to her, to take the liberty
she offered. She never overcame this first great humiliation.
Three years passed, and she fell in love again, this time passionately,
soul and senses, and the feeling was returned. Her second engagement
was to Don Raphael Urquijo, a particularly attractive young attaché
of the Spanish embassy in Berlin. The engagement lasted for a year.
They were passionately attached to each other, but their characters
were too unlike, he was too decidedly her inferior. He tormented and
insulted her with his jealousy to such an extent that to preserve
her self-respect she parted from him; but she did it with a feeling
of crushing, maddening grief, a feeling of loneliness, of being left
exposed to all the coldness of life without that shelter from it which
she, with her woman's heart, could so ill dispense with.
After Finckenstein's desertion, it had been proposed that she should
make a _mariage de convenance_. Her answer was: "I cannot marry, for I
cannot lie. Do not imagine that I am proud of myself for this; I cannot
do it, just as I cannot play the flute.... He must have no prejudices,
otherwise I could not stand it.... And he must not be stupid and
compel me to lie and pretend that I admire him. I must be able to say
exactly what I choose."
For long the needs of her heart were only incompletely satisfied, and
she applied herself all the more ardently to intellectual pursuits. It
was a great hindrance to her that she had acquired so little knowledge.
She herself talked about her dense ignorance. She was, of course,
very far from being ignorant, but so much is certain, that she never
acquired any real insight into what science is, and never thought a
scientific thought.
She had been taught as little Jewish dogma as history and geography.
She says that she grew up like a tree in the forest, and that it was as
impossible for her to learn religion as anything else. So she evolved
a religion of her own, which, as Karl Hillebrand correctly observes,
has something akin with Schopenhauer's doctrine; her ideas of a will in
nature, of the misery of the world, of compassion as the only source of
morality, are akin to his. She was a great admirer of Angelus Silesius
and Saint-Martin; like Goethe she was an ardent Pantheist, She copies
the German mystic's lines:
"Alle Tugenden sind eine Tugend.
Schau, alle Tugenden sind ein ohn' Unterschied.
Willst du den Namen hör'n? Sie heisst Gerechtigkeit,"[2]
and writes beneath them:
"Weil sie Wahrheit ist Einfachheit, Unparteilichkeit, Selbstlosigkeit,
Austheilung für Alle."[3]
She saw everything in its unity, its entirety. There was something
of the Delphic priestess in her nature. It is a pity that her words,
disconnected from her personality as we have them, are so often dark
oracular sayings.
She was, says Karl Hillebrand, full of leniency towards the culpable,
of sympathy with the slighted and humble, of compassion for the poor;
the one thing she despised was correct mediocrity, and her contempt for
this she displayed openly, even when by so doing she made enemies.
Time passed, and she grew into the old maid; but years made no change
in her appearance and did not diminish her wonderful power. For ten
years she carried on a tender correspondence with her future husband,
Varnhagen von Ense. He was fourteen years younger than herself, was
first a brave officer, then a clever diplomatist, and finally an
excellent, very aggressive writer; he had to distinguish himself in
both war and peace before he could appear in the character of her
fiancé without being entirely overlooked. She married him when she was
forty-two, and had a perfectly happy married life for nineteen years.
Rahel owes her literary distinction to the fact that she was the
first in the literary circles of Berlin to comprehend and to proclaim
Goethe's real greatness. Long before any decisive opinion on this vital
question in German culture had been arrived at, Rahel, fully persuaded
of Goethe's genius, completely under the spell of its power, proclaimed
to all with whom she came into contact that this man was not to be
compared with other men; that he stood alone--the loftiest intellect,
the wisest counsellor and judge in all the affairs of life. This was
at a time when Goethe as an author was only one among the crowd, and
when others were ranked high above him. Long before the criticism of
the brothers Schlegel established his position beyond dispute, Rahel
had introduced the cult of the great, uncomprehended, misjudged genius
in her circle in Berlin, had everywhere proclaimed the praises of his
illuminating word, and declared his name to be a holy, a consecrated
name.
In 1795, when she is only twenty-four, she is so fortunate as to meet
him at Teplitz. We learn from a letter from David Veit to Rahel,
what Goethe said about her: "Yes, that now is a girl of remarkable
intellect, a girl who is always thinking--and as to feeling--where is
the like of her to be found? We were constantly together, and were on
the most friendly, intimate terms." To Franz Horn, Goethe said: "She
is a girl with a loving heart; she feels everything very strongly, and
yet expresses herself very gently--we admire the originality and are
charmed by the amiability."
When Rahel is told this, she writes: "How can he know that I have
feeling? Never in my life was it so difficult for me to show myself as
I am. But why write thus? He is Goethe. And what he feels and says is
true. I believe what he says of me.... When you see him, Horn, greet
him from one who has always worshipped him, idolised him, even when no
one else praised, understood, admired him. And if he wonders at a staid
young woman sending him such a greeting, make him understand that her
excessive reverence for him prevented her telling him how she reveres
him. Tell him that this is not affectation, but true, tender feeling
(_Pflaumenweichheit_). It is not my fault that others affect what in my
case is serious earnest. Am I not right? Yes, yes! I worship him."