"Heiliger Goethe, bitt' für mich": Friedrich Spielhagen and the Anxiety of Influence

JEFFREY L. SAMMONS "Heiliger Goethe, bitt' für mich": Friedrich Spielhagen and the Anxiety of Influence1 Whatever one may think of Harold Bloom's agonistic account of the history of EngUsh poetry2—as a nonspecialist observer I regard it with considerable skepticism—there are doubtless Uterary-historical situations Ui which the anxiety of influence is a concept of some utility, and none more so than Ui the two or three generations of German writers following upon the Goethezeit. How pervasive the anxiety remained appears Ui the variety of devices appUed to cope with it. Heinrich Heine struggled to maintain a stance of disrespectful awe and assertive competitiveness; nevertheless, when he came to consider the history of Faust treatments, he found himself obUged to yield to Goethe's preeminence Ui the sequence : "Abraham zeugte den Isaak, Isaak zeugte den Jakob, Jakob aber zeugte den Juda, Ui dessen Händen das Zepter ewig bleiben wftd. "3 Novelists from the Romantics to Gottfried KeUer modeUed themselves on Wilhelm Meister with a series of demonstrations that Bildung as conceived by Goethe was not feasible. Parody proliferated, such as Friedrich Theodor Vischer's Faust. Dritter Theil. Sometimes the anxiety paralyzed the imaginative vision Ui stasis, as Ui the case of Adalbert Stifter. Few seem to have been able to escape from the charmed circle. Among the German realists, none suffered more cripplingly and more garrulously from the malady than Friedrich Spielhagen. Born in 1829, he ought, by the time he had reached maturity, to have been able to regard the "Classical" epoch as definitively Ui the past (not the "ClassicalRomantic " epoch, incidentaUy; Spielhagen only sporadicaUy indicates even an awareness of the Romantics, unless we count Heme among them). But escape was not possible for him. A fundamental explanation for his search for precision and reliabUity in tradition might be that it was a symptom of the insecurity of his generation between the Nachmärz and national unification, effectively defined Ui his breakthrough novel, Problematische Naturen (1861-63), the title of which was drawn from one of Goethe's Maximen und Reflexionen (BA 18:496).4 That for the motto of the first version of the novel Spielhagen misattributed the passage to Dichtung und WahrheitIndicates not that he was imperÃ-ectly goethefest but that he had internalized texts to the point where he thought he no longer needed to look them up.5 The prestige of the Uterary past exercized a tyranny over him with which he contended almost unremittingly, Goethe Yearbook XII (2004) 228 Jeffrey L. Sammons sometimes Ui bizarre ways. He asked plaintively: "wie steht der epische Kunst von heute zur goethischen? Ist sie ihr noch und wie weit tributar? Oder aber: wie weit hat sie sich losgelöst wülkürlich und zu ihrem Schaden ? oder notgedrungen zu ihrem VorteU?"6 The last possibUity does not sound very promising. The anxiety handcuffed him as a noveUst, a theorist , and a critic. StUl, he produced a large and imposing lifetime oeuvre, which, in view of the powers with which he beUeved he was wrestling, might seem virtuaUy Promethean. In the long run, however, the structure buUt under such stressful circumstances could not endure; his great national and not inconsiderable international standing as a major noveUst began to be abraded m bis own lifetime until it a reached a point where Uterary historians could hardly bear to mention his name. Franz Mehring was to remark that one seemed Uke a boor when one spoke of him at aU.7 In 1926, Bert Brecht, with a perfect instinct for what would cause Thomas Mann pain, declared him a successor to Spielhagen. The stung patrician repUed haughtily that he was unable to read Spielhagen and, Ui fact, never had read a Une.8 Spielhagen's problem was the more acute because, Ui his mind, art and especiaUy poesy had displaced reUgion as a moral authority and guide to right Uvmg. When Oswald Stein, Ui a particularly hapless moment Ui Problematische Naturen, sighs: "HeUiger Goethe, bitt' für mich!" (AR 1.1:237), it is more than an ironic turn of phrase. It was common for nineteenthcentury German liberals in their presumed descent from the Enlightenment to be...