Der Herr Etatsrat: Theodor Storm’s Critical Reflection on Ersatzreligion

Scholarship on the role that Theodor Storm’s personal history plays in his literary work has frequently addressed the matter of his religious beliefs. David A. Jackson traces both Storm’s “Feuerbachian atheism” (Theodor Storm 106) and his resultant “concern with alternative values” (19). The ultimate “alternative value” for Storm, Jackson argues, is “die Liebe zwischen Mann und Frau,” which Storm characterizes in his correspondence with his then fiancée, Constanze, as “eine göttliche Offenbarung” and “unmittelbare Gottheit,” indeed to such an extent that “ja Liebe ist schon Religion” (qtd. in Jackson, “Storms Stellung” 46). Barbara Burns’s work on Storm represents a variation on – though certainly not a departure from – Jackson’s in two related ways. First, she qualifies Storm’s atheism as a “gradual movement away from religious faith towards secular humanism” (10), and the latter principle is certainly one foundation of Storm’s oeuvre. Second, she focusses the “Liebe” of the correspondence specifically on “[d]evotion to spouse and family,” which, she argues, “virtually constituted a replacement religion for Storm,” with “the idea of the family unit not only as the source of solace, but even of salvation and a degree of immortality.” This understanding of Storm’s religious views shapes Burns’s reading both of his early novellas, in which “the idyll of stable and peaceful relationships” is “removed from the evil and distress of the outside world,” and of his later works, with families that today would be called dysfunctional facing “the invasion of negative forces into what ought to be a sanctuary and an impenetrable stronghold” (19).

Certainly, the replacement religion identified in Storm scholarship is reflected in his work in ways that have yet to be explored. This paper will analyze some of these, but is concerned primarily with Storm’s self-critical and socio-critical engagement with the very phenomenon of Ersatzreligion.¹ While one typically – and rightly – associates this theme in Storm’s work with Der Schimmelreiter (1888), it is even more prevalent in the earlier and less familiar novella Der Herr Etatsrat (1881). In keeping with the darker nature of Storm’s later work, this novella portrays the decline of the Sternow family, consisting of the title character, his son Archimedes, and his daughter Sophie, or “Phia.” Accordingly, it is the shadowy side of replacement religion that is examined here. The phenomenon is both less idyllic than in Storm’s understanding of the family as sacred and less progressive than in the familiar nineteenth-century context of secularization (although, as this article will show, Storm is often critical of such “progressiveness”). In this novella, the sanctity of the family does not, as it did for Storm, serve as a replacement religion, nor in a strict sense do any of the numerous scientific or intellectual ideals that were hailed by Storm’s contemporaries as replacement religions in a secularist society, such as Kunst/Ästhetik, Bildung, Medizin, Philosophie, Nationalismus, Technik, Natur, Marxismus. Instead, the surrogates for religious experience in Der Herr Etatsrat are represented by three distinct yet intertwined elements that serve to alienate and destroy the Sternows: alcohol, scholarliness, and death. By tracing how these three elements – more or less abstractions – become almost tangible objects of quasireligious (or more exactly, ersatz-religious) ritualistic devotion for the title character and for his children, this article will analyze Storm’s conscious engagement with replacement religion and use it to situate both the family and religion, as well as their relationship to each other, in the societal world view of his later work.

No reader of the novella could dispute the importance in it of the three elements posited here as religious surrogates. The Etatsrat drinks alcohol whenever he is in the action of the tale, and this becomes increasingly true of his son as the story progresses. Scholarliness (or the lack thereof) plays an important role in the identity construction of all three main characters. And by the end of the novella, every member of this family will have been profoundly affected, even defined, by a series of highly unusual deaths, resulting in attitudes towards death...