The German Novel

554 REVIEWS past and the cultural heritage. It is a community which, being oriented to the material, has relegated religion to the sidelines; the churches and syna~ gogues are on the geographic and figurative periphery. Finally it is a community which is oriented to achievement rather than to self-development; if it is not anti-intellectual, it is in a state of neutrality. Miss Neatby's specific charges against the progressive education which dominated our classrooms were that it was anti-cultural, amoral, and anti-intellectual. ROBIN S. HARRIS The German Novel With The German Novel (University of Toronto Press, 1956, pp. x, 334, $4.50) Professor Roy Pascal is filling a long-felt gap in English criticism of German literature, as he did only recently with his study of The German Sturm und Drang (1953). Fortunately he has not aimed this time at a comprehensive survey of the field, but has concentrated on those novels which he holds to be of the highest value. Few, if any, would disagree with his choice of novelists in the nineteenth century-Goethe, Keller, Gotthelf, Stifter, Raabe, and Fontane-while for the twentieth century he has chosen Thomas Mann and Kafka, who can reasonably be held to have found the widest international acclaim. Any critic who is bent on acquainting a foreign public with the German novel, and especially with the German novel of the nineteenth century, bas the major task of introducing bis audience to a type of novel which grew under specific conditions and developed characteristics which, in a large perspective, distinguished it from the French, English, or Russian novel. Technically, the German novelist was for one reason or another little troubled about the demands of plot, which was a major concern of his English and French colleagues. More important still, and again unlike the others, he dwells very Uttle on the social scene, and impresses us as being strangely indifferent to it. There was an excellent reason for this. For the greater part of the nineteenth century there was no public life in Germany to compare with that of England, France, or even Russia. It was not until 1870, when the former thirty-six states were united into one state with a single capital city, that there came into being for th_ e German writer a centre comparable with Paris, London, Petrograd, r Moscow, in which many currents crossed, many roads ended, and which to some extent was representative of the whole country. It took exactly one generation before this new opportunity began to be fully used, by writers like Heinrich Mann, Wassermann , Doblin, Plievier, Fallada, Brehm, Musil, Arnold Zweig, and others. Mr. Pascal refers to some of these in his Foreword. If, as Balzac maintained, the portrayal of contemporary society is the stuff of which novels are made, it wiII be agreed that the German novelist of the nineteenth century found himself at a.disadvantage. Yet he was able to turn this disadvantage to account by .developing a type of novel, the Bildungsroman , which concentrated on the development and character of an indi- REVIEWS 555 vidual, a theme which in a stable society would almost invariably turn into a theme of rebellion, but which the German novelist reconciled with a full acceptance of society-the society, that is to say, which, for lack of a real one, he sometimes invented in terms of his own philosophy. This concentration on the problems and experiments, struggles and experiences of an individual in his quest for the most fruitful development of his personality has instilled into the best German novels of the last century a wisdom the equal of which is not easily found elsewhere in fiction. Yet for Mr. Pascal it is the problem of the individual's interrelation with society that looms large, especially in his analytical synopses. This involves him in a criterion that is fully justified and indeed appropriate to German novels of the twentieth century but, except perhaps for the Swiss novelists, seems out of place in a discussion of many of the earlier German novels. Out of place because in default of a modern, that is a unified society, it has no real meaning inside the...