Presidential Address (December, 2004) Schiller vs. Goethe: Revisiting the Conflicting Reception Vectors of Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Börne, and Wolfgang Menzel

JEFFREY L. SAMMONS Presidential Address (December, 2004) Schiller vs. Goethe: Revisiting the Conflicting Reception Vectors of Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Börne, and Wolfgang Menzel IN the customary overview of German literary history, the reputations of Goethe and Schiller come into a contradictory relationship around the end of Goethe's life, with Schiller for a time ranked in some quarters higher than Goethe on grounds of freedom, moral purity, and patriotism, at least up to the Schiller Centennial of 1859, after which they gradually come to be seen as complementary but with Goethe as, so to speak, the senior partner . The nonantagonistic relationship was already imaged in 1857 by Ernst Rietschel's Goethe-Schiller monument in Weimar, where Goethe not only appears as the protective older brother but also as slightly taller than Schiller, which I believe was not the case in real life. But at first, as Norbert Oellers put it: "Die Volkstümlichkeit Schillers . . . befestigte sich sogar in dem Maße, in dem das Ansehen Goethes zur gleichen Zeit sank."1 However, the initial situation at the end of Goethe's life is convoluted and, since it has not always been clearly seen, another look at the details may be appropriate as we approach yet another Schiller anniversary. In Heinrich Heine's perhaps best written and certainly most disastrously conceived book, Ludwig Börne. Eine Denkschrift of 1840, Börne, during Heine's visit to him in November 1827, is made to praise Wolfgang Menzel's Die deutsche Literatur, which had just appeared, postdated 1828, especially for its hard line against Goethe: Menzel "hat viel Courage, er ist ein grundehrlicher Mann, und ein großer Gelehrter! An dem Goethe ist gar nichts, er ist eine Memme, ein serviler Schmeichler und ein Dilettant."2 Börne is said to have urged Heine to visit Menzel in Stuttgart. But by the time Heine related this alleged encounter twelve years later, much had changed. Goethe and Börne had died. Heine and Börne had developed a hostility to one another that Heine believed harmful to his standing with the public and that his book was intended to repair, with, as it turned out, spectacular lack of success. Menzel had become an enemy of both with his attack on the younger generation of writers on the occasion of Karl Gutzkow's Wally, die Zweiflerin, with which Menzel was believed to have instigated the ban on the Young German writers of December 1835.3 Goethe Yearbook XIII (2005) 2 Jeffrey L. Sammons In 1837 Heine had written a ferocious attack on Menzel, hoping to provoke him into a duel by insulting him, partially on racial grounds,4 while Börne simultaneously aimed his last work against Menzel, a defensive self-definition as Heine's book on Börne was also to be.5 Gutzkow, too, had attempted, unsuccessfully, to draw Menzel into a duel.6 Amidst all this turmoil recent literary history was already beginning to be rewritten. To recover the circumstances, let us turn first to Menzel. His transformation from an apparent, even self-styled liberal to a crude national chauvinist with a, for his time, extreme anti-Semitic affect, has always been somewhat puzzling.7 There has been a tendency to hindsight, claiming that Menzel's radical conservatism was evident in him from the beginning. Heine, for example, knew it all the time: "Ja, er wurde nur scheinbar abtrünnig . . . nur scheinbar. . . denn er hat der Parthey der Revolution niemals mit dem Gemüthe und mit dem Gedanken angehört."8 That this, like so much in his book on Börne, is a readjustment of reality we shall see farther along. In fact, the political and ideological texture of Menzel's Die deutsche Literatur is incoherent. In many places he takes positions that would seem to ally him with the dissident "party."The very first sentence of the book reads: "Die Deutschen thun nicht viel, aber sie schreiben desto mehr,"9 just as Börne wrote at about the same time: "Wir denken gut und reden schlecht, reden viel und tun wenig, tun manches und vollbringen nichts. Aber unsere Gleichgültigkeit gegen Handlungen entspringt nicht aus unserer Vorliebe für...