Black devil and iron angel: the railway in nineteenth-century German realism

1. Introduction

[] INTRODUCTION The emblem above the entrance gate of science reminds all of its mission —namely, to make existence appear comprehensible and thus justified; and if reasons do not suffice, myth has to come to their aid in the end—myth which I have just called the necessary consequence , indeed the purpose of science. Friedrich Nietzsche,The Birth ofTragedy () In , when Berthold Auerbach published Sträflinge (Convicts), part of his popular Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten (Black ForestVillageTales ), the entire German railway system was eleven years old and consisted of a mere , kilometers. By the time Max Eyth published his technological novella Berufstragik (Occupational Tragedy) (), the system consisted of an iron net that encompassed more than fifty thousand kilometers in the German territory —a more than fifteen-fold increase.1 Given this explosive growth rate, it is hardly surprising that the train and its associated technologies became a focus of study in German society, particularly in the realm of literature. With Sträflinge and Berufstragik serving as beginning and end points, respectively, I propose to  . Rainer Fremdling, “Industrialisierung und Eisenbahn,” in Zug der Zeit—Zeit der Züge: Deutsche Eisenbahn, 1835–1985, ed. Manfred Jehle and Franz Sonnenberger (Berlin: Siedler, ), :. analyze the treatment of the railway in a variety of nineteenthcentury literary texts that reflect a wide spectrum of perspectives on the development and impact of the railway on German society. Through an analysis of the fiction and nonfiction of Berthold Auerbach, Theodor Fontane, Gerhart Hauptmann, Peter Rosegger, and Max Eyth, I will demonstrate that despite the intellectual movement in Germany and Austria toward a scientific and technologically oriented worldview, toward a hegemonic scientific narrative, neither poetry nor its associated mythological narratives were in danger of being extinguished, as many thinkers of the time feared. We need at the outset to clarify the meaning of myth or mythological narrative. Expanding on a definition proffered by Glen Guidry, I contend that myths are narratives composed of basic patterns of images, events, or situations already known to us in our cultural tradition that provide a nonscientific explanation of the natural world. Myth recurs in various formulations, literary and otherwise.2 This work shows that these nonscientific mythological narratives and scientific, technological narratives cannot be separated and, as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer hypothesize in Dialectic of Enlightenment (), that they paradoxically tend to (re)create one another. The close relationship between myth and technology is not simply a nineteenth- or mid-twentieth-century idea. It is a conundrum that we still face today. In The Modern Mind (), Peter Watson argues that science and the arts are parts of one story humans use to attempt to understand themselves and their surroundings. He emphasizes the importance of comprehending this larger narrative and its evolution, which naturally involves an understanding of science, history, and the patterns that underlie both.At the same time, the narrative is also shaped by religion and the arts.They too have assisted humankind in its “at-  Introduction . Glen A. Guidry,“Myth and Ritual in Fontane’s Effi Briest,” Germanic Review , no.  (): –. tempts to come to terms with both the natural and the supernatural world, to create beauty, produce knowledge, and get at the truth.”3 In our emphasis on the legitimacy of both approaches to understanding, Watson and I follow the lead of Charles Percy Snow, who in the mid-twentieth century identified what he considered a dangerous rift between literary intellectuals on the one hand and scientists on the other. In order to prevent the establishment of two distinct cultures incapable of communicating with each other, he admonished intellectuals to establish a “third culture,” one that would bridge the gap between the technoscienti fic realm and the mytho-literary realm.4 My project is intended as a contribution to what has become known as “thirdculture studies.” In an effort to make the discussion of such a broad concern more manageable, I have focused my analysis on one innovation, the train, in the context of the latter half of the nineteenth century, and on the authors of its dominant literary movement—realism—many of whom were espousing thirdculture views before the term was even coined. Realism marks the beginning of a literary coming-to-terms with an era that is increasingly interested in science and technology , the former as a means of ascertaining a stable, knowable reality, the latter...