"Die Kunst der Vater todtet das Leben der Enkel": Decadence and Crisis in Fin-de-Siecle German and Austrian Discourse

Theodor Fontane (1819-1898), on being approached by French publishers about translations of his novels, referred these requests to his son Friedrich. He himself, a septuagenarian by then, claimed to have lost all strength for such negotiations. And then he continued, in a letter dated 11 August 1892, "Und sie werden auch wohl nicht wiederkommen. Die Decadence ist da."¹ (And most probably my strengths won't return either. Decadence has arrived.) In the year 1892, the word "decadence" had become a fashionable term in cultural criticism and public discourse, and it is easy to detect the irony in Fontane's letter when he responds to a French request with a French term. One wonders today how the Germans of the late nineteenth century would have pronounced the word: the use of an accent in many written sources suggests a French pronunciation and would thus point to the French origins of modern decadence as a cultural phenomenon; the substitution of a z for the ce at the end, and the spelling with a k rather than c in the middle (Dekadenz), on the other hand, would indicate a certain domestication of the term and its pronunciation. That Fontane in his letter imagined décadence to be pronounced in the French way—even though he did not use an accent—seems clear to me: otherwise the irony would only be half as poignant.

The term, it seems, could be employed in a way that simply denoted physical decline, the lack of energy and the desire to be left alone that may come with old age. However, through the very use of a word that had only recently been introduced into the German lexicon, Fontane somehow engages with the connotations that the use of the term "decadence" started to evoke at that very time. The latter part of Fontane's productive period overlapped with the era generally associated with cultural decadence in German-speaking central Europe; and several of his works have been studied as discourses on decadence, most notably L'Adultera, Schach von Wuthenow, and Der Stechlin.² Only a few years ago, Theodor Fontane, the paragon of German Realism, would have been the most unlikely person to associate with literary decadence. His example, however, highlights three dimensions of the debate on decadence in German-speaking central Europe: (a) that the use of the term "decadence" as an analytical concept and a label for a certain period in cultural history has become inflationary and has thus, probably, lost some of its force; (b) that the contemporary use of the term, ironic or otherwise, must have been quite widespread, as there must have been in the period under discussion, the last decade of the nineteenth century, some shared perception that their own time was one of stagnation or even decline, or whatever else the word was seen as denoting; (c) that since it is so firmly associated with French cultural influences, "decadence" could never be used entirely neutrally in the German discourse: in Fontane's letter the irony conveys an implicit polemicism.

Fontane's incidental use of the term highlights some of the difficulties in dealing with the subject matter in the German context. A contested, polemical, imprecise concept has been adapted as an analytical tool in scholarly discourse: we still describe as decadent those texts labelled as such by contemporary proponents of this movement, and their enemies. This amounts to an almost tautological situation and has generated the following lament by a recent commentator: "Mit dem Begriff 'Décadence' ließ und läßt sich . . . vieles verbinden. Bis heute harrt der Terminus einer präzisen Definition."³ (Many things could be and can be understood by decadence. Until today the term still awaits a precise definition.) Since the culture and discourse of German decadence have not received widespread attention in the English-speaking world,⁴ it might be appropriate to highlight some of the more interesting positions from recent German cultural and literary historiography before illustrating how the term and concept were used...