The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 11. Francke Kuno

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      In the years 1860-62 Spielhagen was editor of the literary supplement of the Zeitung für Norddeutschland, doing valuable service as a literary journalist. In this position he had opportunity to prepare himself for the wider activities as editor of the Deutsche Wochenschrift and later (1878-84) of Westermann's Monatshefte. After 1862 he was identified with the surging life of Berlin.

      In The Hohensteins (1863) the story of a declining noble family, recalling the historical novel of Scott and Hauff's Lichtenstein, the socialistic program of Lassalle begins to appear. Lassalle's doctrines find their spokesman in the hero, Bernhard Münzer, the fantastic but despotic agitator and cosmopolitan socialist; while the idealist, Baltasar, voices the reform program of the poet himself in the words: "Educate yourselves, Germans, to love and freedom."

      In the next novel, In Rank and File (1866), the program of Lassalle is reflected in Leo Gutmann, a character of the Auerbach type. The mouthpiece of the poet is really Walter Gutmann, who sums up the moral of the story in these sentences: "The heroic age is past. The battle-cry is no longer: 'one for all,' but 'all for all.' The individual is only a soldier in rank and file. As individual he is nothing; as member of the whole he is irresistible." Father Gutmann, the forester, is evidently an echo of the poet's family traditions, while Dr. Paulus is an exponent of the philosophy of Spinoza. Leo's career and fall illustrate the futility of the principle of "state aid" in the reform program. Even the seven years of residence in America were not sufficient to rescue him from his visionary schemes.

      In Hammer and Anvil (1869) the same theme is treated in a different form. The poet teaches here that the conflict between master and servant, ruler and subject, must be reinterpreted and recognized as a necessary condition of society. "The situation is not hammer or anvil, as the revolutionists would have it, but hammer and anvil; for every creature, every man, is both together, at every moment." Thus the "solidarity of interests" is the aim to be kept in view, and is shown by Georg Hartwig, who having learned his lesson in the penitentiary now appears as the owner of a factory and gives his workmen an interest in the profits.

      The most powerful of Spielhagen's novels is Storm Flood (1877), in which the inundation caused by the fearful storm on the coast of the Baltic Sea in 1874 is made a coincident parallel of the calamity brought about by the reckless speculation of the industrial promoters of the early seventies. As the catastrophe on the Baltic is the consequence of ignoring the warnings of physical phenomena in nature, so the financial crash and family distress which overwhelm the Werbens and Schmidts are the result of the violation of similar natural laws in the social and industrial world. The novelist has here reached the highest development of his art. The course of the narrative gathers in its wake all the elements of catastrophe, to let them break with the fury of the tempest over the lives of the characters, but allows the innocent children of Nature to come forth as the happy survivors of this wreck and ruin. The characters of Reinhold and Else, who find their bliss in true love, are his best creations. The poet has here proved himself a worthy disciple of Shakespeare and Walter Scott.

      After this blast of the tempest, the poet turned to the more placid scenes of his native heath in the novel entitled Flat Land (1879), in which he describes the conditions of Pomerania between 1830-1840. The wealth of description and incident, the variety of motive and situation, make this story one of the most characteristic of Pomeranian scenery and life.

      In the novel What Is to Come of It? (1887), liberalism, social democracy, nihilism, held in check by the grip of the Iron Chancellor, contend for the mastery. And what shall the result? The poet answers: "There is a bit of the Social Democrat in every one," but the result will be "a and lofty one and a new, glorious phase of an ever-striving humanity." Here are brought into play typical characters, the Bismarckian Squire, the reckless capitalist, the particularist with his feigned liberalism.

      Spielhagen's pessimism finds vent in A New Pharaoh (1889), which is a protest against the Bismarck régime. The ideals of the Forty-eighter are represented by Baron von Alden, who comes back from America to visit his old home only to find a new Pharaoh, who knows nothing of the Joseph of 1848. Finding the Germans a race of toadies and slaves, in which the noble-minded go under while the base triumph, he turns his back upon the new empire for good and all. "Nothing is accomplished by the sword which another sword cannot in turn destroy. The permanent and imperishable can be accomplished only by the silent force of reason."

      In addition to his more pretentious novels, Spielhagen wrote a large number of shorter novels and short stories. To these belong Klara Vere and On the Dunes, already mentioned, At the Twelfth Hour (1863), Rose of the Court (1864), The Fair Americans (1865), Hans and Grete, and The Village Coquette (1869), German Pioneers (1871), What the Swallow Sang (1873), Ultimo (1874), The Skeleton in the Closet (1878), Quisisana (1880), Angela (1881), Uhlenhans (1883), At the Spa (1885), Noblesse Oblige (1888). The most important of Spielhagen's latest novels are The Sunday Child (1893), Self Justice (1896), Sacrifices (1899), Born Free (1900).

      The place of Spielhagen in German literature is variously estimated. Heinrich and Julius Hart in Kritische Waffengänge (1884) contest his claim to a place among artists of the first rank and condemn his use of the novel for purposes of reform; while Gustav Karpeles in his Friedrich Spielhagen (1889) assigns him a place among the best novelists of his time. This latter position is more nearly correct. The modern disposition to cry art for art's sake, and to denounce all art which has a didactic purpose, is the offspring of ignorance of the real nature of art. In a general way all art has a didactic purpose of varying degrees of directness. It is just this didactic purpose which has entitled the novel to its place among the literary forms, and it is this purpose which made Spielhagen's novels such a potent power in the social revolution of the later nineteenth century.

      The charge has been made against Spielhagen that his characters are mechanical types used as vehicles of the author's doctrines or of the tendencies of the time. This charge is not sustained by the facts, even in the case of his first somewhat crude novel, the Problematic Characters, of which he says later: "There was not a squire in Rügen nor a townsman in Stralsund or Greifswald who did not feel himself personally offended." And the pronounced and clearly defined characters of Storm Flood, in their sharp contrasts and fierce conflicts with social tradition and natural impulse, present a vivid picture of the surging life of the New Empire.

      Spielhagen possessed an intimate knowledge of literary technique. Few if any of his contemporaries had given more careful attention to the principles of esthetics and of literary workmanship, as may be seen from his critical essays and particularly the treatises, Contributions to the Theory and Technique of the Novel, and New Contributions to the Theory and Technique of the Epic and Drama.

      It was but poetic justice that the novelist of the stormy days of the Revolution should be permitted to spend the declining years of his long life in the sunshine of the new Berlin, in whose making he had participated and whose life he had chronicled. He died February 24, 1911, having passed his fourscore years.

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