The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective

The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective

165

Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft

Begründet von Alberto Martino und in Verbindung mit Francis Claudon (Université Paris-Est Créteil Val de Marne) – Rüdiger Görner (Queen Mary, University of London) – Achim Hölter (Universität Wien) – Klaus Ley (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz) – John A. McCarthy (Vanderbilt University) – Alfred Noe (Universität Wien) – Manfred Pfister (Freie Universität Berlin) – Sven H. Rossel (Universität Wien)

herausgegeben von

Norbert Bachleitner (Universität Wien)

Redaktion: Paul Ferstl und Rudolf Pölzer Anschrift der Redaktion: Institut für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, Sensengasse 3A , A-1090 Wien

The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective

Patrick Bridgwater

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2013

Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions de “ISO 9706:1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents Prescriptions pour la permanence”. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. Die Reihe “Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft” wird ab dem Jahr 2005 gemeinsam von Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam – New York und dem Weidler Buchverlag, Berlin herausgegeben. Die Veröffentlichungen in deutscher Sprache erscheinen im Weidler Buchverlag, alle anderen bei Editions Rodopi. From 2005 onward, the series “Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft” will appear as a joint publication by Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam – New York and Weidler Buchverlag, Berlin. The German editions will be published by Weidler Buchverlag, all other publications by Editions Rodopi. ISBN: 978-90-420-3741-0 E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-0992-2 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2013 Printed in The Netherlands

Table of Contents Preface Acknowledgements Chronology Introduction

7 9 11 21

Part I 1 Goethe 2 Veit Weber 3 Benedicte Naubert 4 Schiller 5 Grosse and Tieck 6 Heinrich von Kleist 7 Bonaventura 8 E.T.A. Hoffmann 9 Alexis and Meinhold

49 83 115 147 191 243 275 309 339

Part II 10 The Vehmgericht or Secret Tribunal 11 Hues of Villainy 12 Anglo-German Interactions 13 A Gothic Iconography 14 Gothic and Märchen

381 411 439 501 541

Bibliography Index

591 597

PREFACE Gothic fiction being a European phenomenon that is best read in a supranational way, this book was initially conceived as a study of Anglo-German interactions in the sphere of Gothic fiction. However, it soon became clear that there was a prior and more fundamental need for a work that would identify the main German Gothic novelists and assess their contribution to the Gothic canon. Research into German-language Gothic has long been hindered by the fact that there is no agreement among German critics as to what, if anything, constitutes the German Gothic novel, for which their language has no clear name, let alone a bibliography. When to this is added the German disdain for the popular novel, the need to start from scratch is obvious. My subject is therefore the German Gothic novel and its major subsets and practitioners, together with a number of associated subjects, which include Anglo-German interactions in the field, but also the Vehmgericht or ‘secret tribunal’, Frà Diavolo, the Nachtwachen of Bonaventura, Gothic iconography, and the interrelationship of Gothic and Märchen. The emphasis is on the real Gothic novelists, more than half of whom are not the pop novelists of the day but major writers of the Romantic generation whose Gothic alter egos have been swept under the carpet of history as being somehow disreputable. The German contribution to the Gothic novel has gone unrecognized for so long not least because its authors are for the most part not the forgotten foot-soldiers, who deserve to remain forgotten, but major writers who had all along been standing in the foreground wearing canonical hats that - like the proverbial Tarnkappe (cap of invisibility) - rendered them invisible. The main German novelists discussed here are Bonaventura, J. W. v. Goethe, C. Grosse, W. Häring [ps. Willibald Alexis]. E. T. A. Hoffmann, K. F. Kahlert [ps. Lorenz Flammenberg], H. v. Kleist, W. Meinhold, C. B. E. Naubert, J. C. F. Schiller, L. Tieck, C. Tschink, C. A. Vulpius, G. P. L. L. Wächter [ps. Veit Weber], and H. Zschokke. When these novelists and the various types of novel with which they are associated are studied together for the first time, the magnitude of the German conribution to European Gothic is revealed. For two hundred years and more German Gothic has been said to be influenced by English, and vice versa, but since many English scholars ignore German literature, and most German scholars ignore Gothic, the real state of affairs has largely gone unexplored. The idea that the main kinds of German Gothic novel were fundamentally indebted to elements that had been supplied by the English Gothicists is shown to be

8

The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective

unsustainable. In major aspects of Gothic fiction it was German writers who made the running. The first full-length study of the outstanding German contributors to the Gothic canon, this is an original historical and comparative study that goes well beyond the necessary review of the evidence to include much new material, many new insights and pieces of analysis, and some fundamental changes of perspective. It also shows how close Anglo-German literary relations were for a decade and a half (1794-1806) when both language areas were busy producing their own and translating the other’s Gothic novels. Intended to put the record straight in bibliographical and literary historical terms, and to act as a reference guide to facilitate future research (hence the lengthy critical apparatus), the book is addressed to scholars and students of German, so that German quotations are given in German, but English translations are added for the convenience of English and American scholars and students of Gothic, who represent another important section of the books’s target audience. Part of the material on De Quincey and Alexis first appeared, in a different form, in my De Quincey’s Gothic Masquerade (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2004). Part of the material on Wilhelm Meinhold first appeared in a wider context in my Anglo-German Interactions in the Literature of the 1890s (Oxford: Legenda, 1999), to which this is in part a prequel. Part of the material on Friedrich first appeared in an article entitled ‘Friedrichian Images in Expressionist Art’ in Oxford German Studies (31: 2002). An early version of the essay on Kleist and Gothic appeared in Oxford German Studies (38: 2010).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am indebted to Professor Jim Reed for casting a wise critical eye over my Goethe and Schiller chapters, and to the many colleagues, past and present, whose work is acknowledged in the footnotes, not least among them the late Professor Alan Menhennet, whose inaugural lecture first alerted me to German Gothic, and to all the librarians (in Oxford, Göttingen and Hamburg) who have been unfailingly helpful. In particular I thank Jill Hughes and colleagues of the Taylor Institution Library, Oxford, which has been my spiritual home for more years than I care to remember.

CHRONOLOGY The English and German Gothic Novel and their Translations together with other key dates 1704-17 Les mille et une nuits, tr. Antoine Galland(6 vols) 1730 Die Tausend und Eine Nacht, tr. from Galland by August Bohse [Ps. Talander] (6 vols) 1742-5 Young, Night Thoughts 1743 Blair, The Grave 1746-7 Hervey, Meditations among the Tombs; Contemplations on the Night 1750 Walpole begins to gothicize his villa at Strawberry Hill 1753 Smollett, Ferdinand Count Fathom Bond, An Essay on the Incubus, or Nightmare 1754 Gleichmann, Bewundernswürdige Begebenheiten des Europäischen Herkuliskus 1757 Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful 1760 Mid-eighteenth century Gothic design in England (Chippendale) and France 1760-71 Young, tr. Ebert, Klagen oder Nachtgedanken über Leben, Tod und Unsterblichkeit 1762 Leland, Thomas Longsword, Earl of Salisbury

12 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective 1764 Kant, Betrachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen 1765 Saalfeld, A Philosophical Discourse on the Nature of Dreams Walpole, The Castle of Otranto 1768 Gerstenberg, Ugolino Walpole, Seltsame Begebenheiten im Schloße Otranto, eine gotische Geschichte 1770 Smollett, Begebenheiten des Grafen Ferdinand von Fathom (Copenhagen) 1772 Hutchinson, The Hermitage Smollett, Ferdinand Graf Fathom Goethe, Von deutscher Baukunst 1773 Goethe, Götz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand Bürger, Lenore Burke, tr. Garve, Über das Erhabene Aikin, On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror 1774 Goethe, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers 1775 Leland, Longsword, Graf von Salisbury 1777 Reeve, The Champion of Virtue 1778 Reeve, The Old English Baron (the second edition of The Champion of Virtue) 1779 Goethe, tr. Malthus, The Sorrows of Werter

Chronology 13

1780 Gordon Riots 1781 Schiller, Die Räuber Fuseli, The Nightmare 1782-7 Musäus, Volksmärchen der Deutschen (5 vols) 1783-5 Sophia Lee, The Recess 1786 Raspe/Bürger, Wunderbare Reisen Beckford, Vathek (Ger. tr.: 1921) Lee, tr. Naubert, Die Ruinen [The Recess] 1787-98 Veit Weber, Sagen der Vorzeit (7 or 8 vols, according to edition) 1788 Naubert, Hermann von Unna Clara Reeve, The Exiles 1788-91 Lucian, tr. Wieland, Sämtliche Werke (6 vols) 1789 French Revolution; storming and demolition of the Bastille Schiller, Der Geisterseher Naubert, Elisabeth Erbin von Toggenburg Naubert, Neue Volksmärchen der Deutschen (5 vols) Tschink, Wundergeschichten sammt dem Schlüssel zu ihrer Erklärung Reeve, tr. Steuber, Der altenglische Baron White, Earl Strongbow 1790 Kahlert (as Flammenberg), Der Geisterbanner Engelmann, Ruinen der Vorzeit Raspe, Königsmark der Räuber

14 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Radcliffe, A Sicilian Romance White, Graf Strongbow 1790-3 Tschink, Geschichte eines Geistersehers 1790-7 Bertuch, Blaue Bibliothek aller Nationen (11 vols) 1791 Naubert, Alf von Dülmen Spieß, Das Petermännchen (tr. 1827) Veit Weber, Die Teufelsbeschwörung Tieck, Ryno Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest Moore, Zeluko oder Schilderungen der menschlichen Natur Walpole, The Mysterious Mother (written 1768) 1791-4 Grosse, Der Genius [The Genius] 1791-5 Zschokke, Die schwarzen Brüder (3 vols) 1792 Cramer, Haspar a Spada Spieß, Der Alte Überall und Nirgends Rambach, Die eiserne Maske Schiller, tr. Tytler, The Robbers (2nd edn, 1795; 3rd, 1797; 4th, 1800) Radcliffe, tr. Liebeskind, Die nächtliche Erscheinung im Schloße Mazzini 1792-5 Grosse, Memoiren des Marquis von G***[Horrid Mysteries] 1792-8 Vulpius, Geschichten der Vorzeit (10 vols) 1793 Zschokke, Abällino der große Bandit Bibliothek der grauen Vorzeit Durach, Die Adelritter, ein Gräuelgemälde aus den Zeiten der Vehmgerichte

Chronology 15

Parsons, The Castle of Wolfenbach: A German Story Radcliffe, tr. Liebeskind, Adeline oder das Abenteuer im Walde 1793-4 The Reign of Terror 1794 Naubert, Herman of Unna Naubert, tr. Booth, Alf von Deulmen Kahlert (as Flammenberg), tr. Teuthold, The Necromancer C. R., Castle Zittaw. A German Tale Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho Walpole, tr. Meyer, Die Burg von Otranto 1794-5 Grosse, Der Dolch 1795 Tieck, Abdallah Tieck, William Lovell Laun, Die grauen Brüder; oder, Der Bund der Schrecklichen anon., Der Richterbund der Verborgenen. Eine Geistergeschichte Schiller, tr. Boileau, The Ghost-Seer; or, Apparitionist Tschink, tr. Will, The Victim of Magical Delusion Grosse, The Dagger Radcliffe, tr. Liebeskind, Udolphos Geheimnisse Mercier de Compiègne, Les nuits de la conciergerie 1796 Veit Weber, Die heilige Vehme (tr.publ.1830) Follenius, Friedrich Schillers Geisterseher. Aus den Memoires des Grafen von O**, von X*Y*Z Lewis, The Monk. A Romance Parsons, The Mysterious Warning: A German Tale Grosse, tr, Will, Horrid Mysteries Grosse, tr. Trapp, The Genius Six different versions of Bürger, Lenore 1796-1815 Napoleonic Wars

16 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective 1796-1817 Fonthill Abbey 1797 anon., Die blutende Gestalt mit Dolch und Lampe Radcliffe, The Italian Lee, Canterbury Tales Lewis, tr. Oertel, Der Mönch 1797-8 Goya, El sueño de la razon produce monstruos 1797-9 Radcliffe, tr. Liebeskind, Die Italiänerin 1798 Vulpius, Rinaldo Rinaldini, der Räuberhauptmann Cramer, Der kluge Mann Lathom, Midnight Bell: A German Story Roche, Clermont Sleath, The Orphan of the Rhine Brockden Brown, Wieland 1798-9 Goethe, tr. Scott, Goetz of Berlichingen with the Iron Hand Schiller, tr, Render, The Robbers Schiller, tr. Lady Craven, The Robbers. A Tragedy Laukhard, Franz Wolfstein Gleich, Udo der Stählerne Ireland, The Abbess 1798 (Paris) -1801 (London) Robertson, Fantasmagoriana or Gothic extravaganzas 1800 Vulpius, tr. Hinckley, The History of Rinaldo Rinaldini, Captain of Banditti Vulpius, Ferrandino Schiller, tr. Render, The Armenian, or The Ghost -Seer anon., Wolfstein; or, The Mysterious Bandit (bluebook)

Chronology 17

1801 Ignaz Arnold, Der Vampir 1801-3 At least 9 German novels falsely ascribed to Ann Radcliffe 1802 Ignaz Arnold, Die Grafen von Moor 1803 Lyttleton, The German Sorceress anon., The Secret Tribunal anon., The Black Valley; or, The Castle of Rosenberg 1805 Zschokke, tr. Lewis, The Bravo of Venice 1806 Dacre, Zofloya [Weber, tr.] Powell, Wolf; or, The Tribunal of Blood [Naubert, tr.] Lewis, Feudal Tyrants 1807 Curties, The Monk of Udolpho. A Romance 1808 Lewis, Romantic Tales 1809 Schiller’s The Robbers was available in 14 English editions by 1809 1810 Shelley, Zastrozzi Shelley, St Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian 1812 Soane, Knight, Daemon and Robber Chief 1812-15 J. & W. Grimm, Kinder- und Hausmärchen

18 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective 1815-16 Hoffmann, Die Elixiere des Teufels 1817 Hoffmann, ‘Rolandsitten’ (from Das Majorat) 1818 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein 1819 Polidori, The Vampyre (tr. Der Vampir, 1819) Ball, The Black Robber. A Romance 1820 Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer 1820-30 Regency Gothic 1821 German translation of Maturin, Melmoth 1821-23 A. C. Pugin, Specimens of Gothic Architecture 1822 H. Lee, Kruitzner; or, The German’s Tale (as separate book) 1823 Grimm, tr. Taylor, German Popular Stories 1824 Alexis, Walladmor Hoffmann, tr. Gillies, The Devil’s Elixir (sic) Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner Ireland, Die Priorin (attributed to ‘Anna Radcliffe’) 1826 Hoffmann, tr. Gillies, ‘Rolandsitten; or, The Deed of Entail’

Chronology 19

1827 Spieß, The Dwarf of Westerbourg (tr. of Das Petermännchen) 1830 Weber, tr. Scott, The House of Aspen (rifacimento of Die heilige Vehme) 1832 De Quincey, Klosterheim 1833 Ritchie, Schinderhannes, the Robber of the Rhine 1836 A. W. N. Pugin, Contrasts 1840s Minor literary Gothic Revival, especially in Britain 1842 Beginning of the completion of Cologne Cathedral 1843 A. W. N. Pugin, An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England 1847 Meinhold, Sidonia von Bork die Klosterhexe Zschokke, Drakomira mit dem Schlangenringe James, Castle Ehrenstein Prest, Varney the Vampire Bronte, Jane Eyre 1890s Major literary Gothic Revival in Britain

INTRODUCTION Gothic, a term more than ever subject to slippage, has many meanings and many connotations. A dark or shadow Romanticism, the night-side of Romanticism (hence schwarze Romantik in German, le genre noir in French), literary Gothic started as a cluster of motifs, mostly borrowed from fairytale, that quickly turned into a formula as rigid as that of fairytale itself, and has since spread to the point where it threatens to engulf its parent, Romanticism, its indeterminacy increasing exponentially as it does so. I say ‘parent’, but one question for the future is whether Gothic is part of Romanticism or vice versa, for there is a prima facie case for identifying literary Gothic with Mannerism as the anti-classical constant.1 Richard Hurd, of course, in his Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762)2 contrasted ‘gothic’ and ‘classical’, but by ‘Gothic’ he meant medieval. Gothic is by definition cross-generic, the site of multiple meanings, which means that in Schiller’s definition, according to which modern [Romantic] literature is ‘absolute in content’, it represents Romanticism par excellence. Gothic is more than one of the expressions of the late 18th-century Zeitgeist, for it is now Gothic, rather than Romanticism, that seems so modern in its broken forms and flip (subversive, self-subverting) nature. Subversion, including self-subversion, is as basic to Gothic as it is to the fairytale and to fantasy and the fantastic generally.3 The very plagiarism that long seemed Gothic’s most deplorable feature, reason in itself to blackball it, shrinks into insignificance when viewed against the background of today’s essentially plagiaristic online age.

I Starting, like the Gothic of mid-eighteenth-century architecture and furniture design, as a pastiche of medieval Gothic, late eighteenth-century Gothic swiftly turned into a caricature of itself. Modern Gothic romances are, typically, set amid ruinous, haunted medieval castles complete with dungeons and subterranean vaults and passages, convents with sadistic abbesses, and wild, existentially challenging picturesque landscapes, ‘sublime’ because potentially hair-raising. Johann Zacharias Gleichmann’s tales in his 1 2 3

Cf. the history of art and furniture history. Richard Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762), ed. Edith J. Morley (London: Frowde, 1911), 36. See Jack Zipes, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion (New York & London: Routledge, 1983.

22 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Variamando (1737) feature subterranean caves and passageways in a way that makes them of interest to the historian of Gothic, it being no chance that he is also the anonymous author of a Ritterroman, Bewundernswürdige Begebenheiten des Europäischen Herkuliskus (1754), that Heinrich Reichard subsequently abridged as Die Geschichte des Herkules und Herkuliskus (1778). As the genre was internalized in the course of the nineteenth century, the ‘chivalric’ or fancy-dress medieval element was increasingly dropped, for, despite early Gothic medievalism, it was always the most dispensable element of Gothic, which, typically, features behaviour that is far from chivalrous. Late eighteenth-century Gothic looks back not to the middle ages with their Peasants’ Revolt (England, 1381) and Peasants’ War (Germany, 1524-26), but to the French Revolution that was on everyone’s mind. Alfred Longueil noted, back in 1923, that the term ‘Gothic’ [...] gradually lost all connotation of the medieval, and became at last [...] a literary term [denoting the ‘spectral’ or supernatural] postdating the chief Gothic romancers, Walpole, Reeve, Lewis and Radcliffe, who never used the adjective except with medieval connotation.4

Gothic is, of course, only partly a matter of the imagery, machinery and motifs that were originally deemed to constitute the genre, although the key component is still the edifice, whether this comprises mental architecture à la Piranesi with its aerial abyss (mirrored in the prison at the top of a tower that looms so large in Mme d’Aulnoy’s fairytales), a crumbling Gothic pile, some kind of unstable ‘subterraneous chamber’ or system of passages, or their metaphorical, textual and hermeneutic equivalents. To count as fully Gothic, a text must have a sustained atmosphere of terror or dread, for the engine of Gothic is fear: The principal aim of [early Gothic] novels was to evoke chilling terror by exploiting mystery and a variety of horrors [...] The term ‘Gothic’ has [...] been extended to a type of fiction which lacks the exotic setting of the earlier romances, but develops a brooding atmosphere of gloom and terror, represents events that are uncanny or macabre or melodramatically violent, and often deals with aberrant psychological states.5

The idea of the sublime, from which that of fear is inseparable, looms every bit as large in German aesthetics (Schiller) as in British (Burke).

4 5

Alfred Longueil, ‘The Word “Gothic” in Eighteenth-Century Criticism’, Modern Language Notes, 38 (1923), 459-61. M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 7th edn (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt, Brace: 1999), 111.

Introduction 23

Marked by inherent instability and the destabilizing role of the dream (nightmare) or subconscious in the generation of text, Gothic is both historically and formally subversive, and as the conventions of early Gothic are progressively internalized from Maturin onwards, the emphasis comes to be on uncanny dream-experience and therefore on the instability of the inner world and its constructs, so that Gothic becomes a code for the exploration of the fragmented subject, the deep structures of the self and its anxieties.6 Having to do with interior space and more especially with haunted consciousness, it comes to be about invasive, entrapping interiority and the nature and contradictions of subjectivity. Terry Castle’s analysis of the ‘uncanny Radcliffean metaphor of haunted consciousness’,7 and with it the spectral nature of Gothic, is applicable to much Gothic fiction, in which the dead haunt the minds of the living, turning them into living spectres, hence the dread of nonentity. Nor should we forget that the aftermath of the French Revolution, the Terror, crossed the channel in the form of the fear of revolution that underlay the frantic preparations to repulse invasion by Napoleon and the witchhunt against Tom Paine and other perceived ‘democrats’8 at a time when members of bodies like the Corresponding Society, Society for Constitutional Information, Society of the Friends of the People, and the Revolution Society were thought to be fomenting sedition. Although it predated the French Revolution, the Gothic novel came to represent the opportunity to live out the manifold terrors of invasion on the intellectual-emotional level. Gothic are above all the characteristic peripeteia, the sudden turn for the worse, the loss of control that this involves, and the uncertainty, destabilization and anxiety that ensue from the sudden irruption of chaos into an existence previously ordered.9 Gothic are the uncanny, the monstrous, the threatening, the unsettling, and the grotesque or macabre, especially in combination. Gothic is a sense of blocked entrances and exits (the locus classicus is in Hoffmann’s Das Majorat [The Entail]), of broken connexions and lost or eroded meaning(s), a lost past and the threat of a lost future. There are many recipes for a Gothic novel,10 many mostly satirical 6 7

8 9 10

Robert Miles, Gothic Writing 1750-1820. A Genealogy, 2nd edn (Manchester & New York: Manchester University Press, 2002), 3, 21. Terry Castle, ‘The Spectralization of the Other in The Mysteries of Udolpho’, in The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature, ed. Laura Brown and Felicity Nussbaum (London & New York: Methuen, 1987), 250. See Patrick Bridgwater, Arthur Schopenhauer’s English Schooling (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), 186-200. Chaos theory is fundamental to Gothic. See Maurice Lévy, Le roman ‹gothique› anglais 1764-1824 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995), vi, for a stimulatingly eclectic list.

24 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective lists of the parts that originally went to make up a Gothic whole. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s list is pretty inclusive: the Gothic novel [is] pervasively conventional [...] its mise-en-scène: an oppressive ruin, a wild landscape, a [...] feudal society [...] the novel’s form [...] is likely to be discontinuous and involuted, perhaps incorporating tales within tales, changes of narrators, and such framing devices as found manuscripts or interpolated histories [...] characteristic preoccupations [...] include [...] sleeplike and deathlike states; subterranean spaces and live burial; doubles; the discovery of obscured family ties; [...] unnatural echoes or silences, unintelligible writings, and the unspeakable; [...] the poisonous effects of guilt and shame; nocturnal landscapes and dreams; apparitions from the past; Faust- and Wandering-Jew-like figures; [...] the charnel house and the madhouse.11

She concludes that the self is ‘massively blocked off from something to which it ought normally to have access’, which has very wide applicability, and adds that ‘Of all the Gothic conventions dealing with the sudden, mysterious, seemingly arbitrary, but massive inaccessibility of those things that should normally be accessible, the difficulty the story has in getting itself told is of the most obvious structural significance.’12 The earliest instance of such difficulty is arguably Smollett’s Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753), which is discussed in Chapter 10, while the best is perhaps De Quincey’s Confessions, which I have discussed elsewhere.13 Basic to Gothic are abjection (the Cain-figure, the outcast14 or pariah) and power abused by one person leading to another’s (or others’) disempowerment, although, as Gothic is internalized, the adversary is increasingly likely to be the abuser’s Other or inner devil. Gothic involves a sense, and the reality, of disempowerment, privation, helplessness, abandonment and alienation, and therefore the sense of a ‘malign agency’ at work (De Quincey’s term, applicable to his work, helps to define its gothicity). In other words, it involves a sense that the whims, whams and vagaries of the life-force are indifferent to the individual, and with this a sense of claustrophobically contracting space and of being caught in a labyrinth without an exit. The classical instance of this is Kafka’s K, who is 11 12 13 14

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New York & London: Methuen, 1986), 9f. Sedgwick, 12, 13. Patrick Bridgwater, De Quincey’s Gothic Masquerade (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2004), 85-89. Cf. Charlotte Smith, The Banished Man (1794); Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, The Outcasts (1824, translation of Die Verfolgten, 1821); Willibald Alexis, Die Geächteten (1825); Wilhelm Hauff, The Banished (1839, translation of Lichtenstein, 1826).

Introduction 25

metaphorically trapped within a castle that represents his obsession with the idea of being unable to enter it. The castle is a mental construct, as illusory as the sorcerer’s castle in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1516), a labyrinth whose coils entrap the minds of its victims. The Gothic tradition, it has been said, ‘replays with almost infinite variations the myths both of the temptation and fall in Eden and of the perilous experience of the post-lapsarian wilderness’.15 Gothic involves’the fear of a [guilty] secret hidden at the core of something’,16 the knowledge of a secret by or within which the protagonist is effectively trapped.Entrapment, incarceration, immurement, live burial, and interment generally are all Gothic tropes, a feature of Gothic being the idea of primordial dissolution (that favourite Gothic word), ‘decomposition’ in both the psychological and the physical sense. The underlying preoccupation of Gothic, as of the graveyard poetry that was another of its starting points, is the naked human condition of mortality: the ultimate Gothic locus is the oubliette or grave. In terms of Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, the ‘frightful fiend’ that treads close behind us is the dead self we all carry within us: ‘la précarité, l’abîme et le manque, cette réalité gothique est la vie’ (the sense of precariousness, the pit, the shipwreck, this Gothic reality is life itself).17 Gothic texts not only emphasize the instability and impermanence of things, but tend to generate an often extreme uncertainty in the reader’s mind as to their meaning that mirrors the uncertainty generated in the protagonist’s mind regarding the significance of a life more than ever subject to violent, arbitrary change or, in an age of revolution, curtailment. In other words, they pose the questions of which the early fairytale often seems to be blissfully unaware, in texts which are frequently marked by a ‘digressive complexity of structure’18 that serves to add hermeneutic to metaphysical instability. The Gothic novel in particular comes to be marked by a multiform instability that may be authorial/narratorial (problem of identity), textual (problem of meaning), generic (problem of genre, cross-generic form: the novel becomes a mixed form, no longer predictable, no longer distinguishable from autobiography, fairy tale, myth, drama, and poetry), or moral (Sade). Gothic texts are characterized both by their psychological 15 16 17 18

Stephen C. Behrendt in his Introduction to Percy Bysshe Shelley, Zastrozzi and St Irvyne (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), xiv. Daneen Wardrop, Emily Dickinson’s Gothic (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996), xi. Maurice Lévy, Le roman ‹gothique› anglais 1764-1824 , back cover. Grevel Lindop, in the Introduction to his edition of Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), vii.

26 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective complexity and instability, and by their metafictionality and generic instability. Gothic having to do with the labyrinthine complexity of experience and the delicate balance between illusion and reality,19 the Gothic text has come to be seen as a ‘textual event in which boundaries between inside and outside, life and death, the spectral and the real, the illusory and the rational, disarmingly fade’.20 In it, as in early French fairytale, where the phantasmal looms so large, reality and unreality are liable to be deliberately conflated or confused, and the reader is confronted, and likely to be thrown, by the consequent lack of markers. Reality and fantasy become notably unstable concepts, as in Hoffmann and, later, in the novels of Kafka, which question whether what they describe is real, or fictitious and therefore spurious: in each of them Kafka hides away a metaphor implying that the whole thing is a tall story or construct. By the same token De Quincey rightly implies that he is less a creative writer than a ‘coiner’ who ‘forges’ a text. Gothic is a ‘blatantly fictional style’21 that goes out of its way to draw attention not only to its own fictionality, but to its metafictionality and thus to its unreliability, so that it involves the idea of the counterfeit or fake. The mixing of history and fancy is a feature of the Gothic early historical novel, while the blurring of the distinction between fact and fiction, real and fake or virtual reality, is a basic characteristic of the most considerable German Gothic writer, Hoffmann. Gothicism challenges rationalism and rational perceptions and valuations in much the same way that mid-twentieth-century chaos theory22 was to challenge and in part subvert Newtonian perceptions about the physical world. As a revolutionary form of the novel, the Gothic romance embodies the radical uncertainty generated by the collapse of the ancien régime and its attendant certainties and intellectual-aesthetic paradigms. At a time when contemporary notions of art were being undermined by men like Friedrich, Runge and Turner, it represented a challenge to the ancien régime of the novel. To use a metaphor that opens one of Hoffmann’s best-known tales, the Gothic romance upset the apple-cart of the Richardsonian novel. Gothicism is Dark Romanticism, ‘the drama of the mind engaged in the quest for metaphysical and moral absolutes in a world that offers shadowy semblances of an occult order but withholds final revelation and illumination’,23 and therefore involves the shocked discovery of the 19 20 21 22 23

See Snyder, Research Studies, 49 (1981), 130. Robert Miles, Gothic Writing 1750-1829, 119. Jerrold E. Hogle (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 5. See James Gleick, Chaos (New York: Penguin, 1988). G. R. Thompson (ed.), The Gothic Imagination: Essays in Dark Romanticism (Pullman:

Introduction 27

meaninglessness and lack of security at the heart of a world hitherto believed to be meaningful and secure. The reason why Illuminism is so typical of the high Gothic generation is that it embodies Gothic’s attempt to overcome its own uncertainty. The ‘timorous wee beastie’ is the human animal. The world of Gothic is an uncanny one in which sequence is replaced by consequence, and logic, which is nothing if not continuous, is replaced by the discontinuous episode. In a forced confrontation with self, the protagonist appears as pariah and prisoner, ostensibly of the super-ego, but ultimately of the self, as a result of the paradoxical combination of the flight from, and search for, the self, of which Kleist’s frantic wanderings around war-torn Europe are an obvious example. Protagonists, finding themselves trapped, are outraged, racked by insecurity. Fiedler speaks of’the tremulous anima [...] seeking to evade the shadow cast by itself ‘,24 the opposite of the Schlemihl situation, and the reader too is liable to be destabilized as a result of empathy. The reading experience, unnerving when the reader is faced with a text whose meaning is elusive, is part and parcel of the gothicism of the text, and by the time of late Romanticism the Gothic text comes to challenge and subvert not only its own meaning, but the supposed meaning of existence, the very idea that existence has an a-priori, supra-darwinistic meaning.

II The Gothic mood, as opposed to the Gothic mode for which it prepared the ground, was established in both the English- and the German-speaking parts of Europe by Young’s Night Thoughts (1742-5: tr. Ebert, Klagen oder Nachtgedanken über Leben, Tod und Unsterblichkeit, 1760-71) and Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774: The Sorrows of Werter, tr. Daniel Malthus, 1779) which, though not a Gothic novel as such, has obvious Gothic period features that are discussed in the next chapter, including the view of the universe as ‘an all-consuming, devouring monster’. The Sorrows of Werter was to prove a source of ‘extreme delight’ to Mary Shelley’s monster, who ‘learned from Werter’s imaginations despondency and gloom’; in other words, for the monster, as for so many readers of the time, ‘Werther’s personality defines [...] the Gothic psyche of despair.’25 The Gothic mode, on the other hand, goes back to Smollett’s The Adventures of Ferdinand Count

24 25

Washington State University Press, 1974), 6. Leslie A. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1997),109. See The Handbook to Gothic Literature, ed. Marie Mulvey-Roberts (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998, 71.

28 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Fathom (1753), Johann Zacharias Gleichmann’s Bewundernswürdige Begebenheiten des Europäischen Herkuliskus (1754, a notable early form of pre-Gothic novel, set in the middle ages), and Gerstenberg’s Ugolino (1768), while the sources and resources of the Gothic romance as such are largely French in the shape of the Abbé Prévost’s fiction of sensibility as developed into the lurid sensationalism of Baculard d’Arnaud,26 together with the fairytale in general and the prison-tower imagery of Mme d’Aulnoy’s fairytales in particular.27 For the reasons advanced in the Preface, the German Gothic novel remains the dark horse of European Gothic, little-known even in its own language area. A recent book, European Gothic, gave the lie to its title by including just two (quite good) pages on German Gothic, by a distinguished British Slavist. That Germany was, with France and Russia, one of the key players in the ‘spirited exchange’ in question went, literally, without saying. By the same token, a distinguished British French scholar, in his statutory two pages on German Gothic in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, did not hesitate to write of Rinaldo Rinaldini as ‘anonymous’.28 The work’s once so celebrated author, Christian Vulpius, Goethe’s brother-in-law, no less, must have turned in his grave. Once the terror and delight of English readers, paradigm of the fashionably horrid, the German Gothic novel, of which less than twenty were ever well known in this country, for most of the novels labelled ‘From the German’ were merely trying to cash in on the fashion they were hoping to prolong, has since almost disappeared from sight. Far less is known about German than about English or French or Russian Gothic, and even German scholars find it difficult to see the wood for the trees in their own Gothic forest. A recent list of ‘the most significant texts in the field of German Gothic’29 included works by I. F. Arnold, J. E. D. Bornschein, J. A. Gleich, F. E. Rambach and F. C. Schlenkert, writers who were at one time mostly popular enough, but not one of whom is of any lasting significance. The same goes for a number of other writers who were popular in their own country for a time, but failed to produce work able to survive the test of time. They include J. F. E. Albrecht, J. J. Brückner, K. A. Buchholtz, K. G. Cramer, G. H. Heinse, K. Hildebrandt, H. A.

26 27

28 29

See Ernest A. Baker, The History of the English Novel (New York: Barnes & Noble, n.d.), Vol. 5, 175fft See Amy DeGraff, The Tower and the Well; A Psychological Interpretation of the Fairy Tales of Madame d’Aulnoy (Birmingham, AL: Summa, 1984) and compare Beckford’s Vathek. Terry Hale, ‘French and German Gothic: the beginnings’, in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Hogle , 66-69, is, otherwise, an excellent summary. See Hans-Ulrich Mohr, ‘German Gothic,’ in The Handbook to Gothic Literature, 67.

Introduction 29

Kerndörffer, F. H. Kühn, C. F. G. Kühne, C. W. Meissner,30 H. A. Müller, and K. A. G. Seidel. Some of the popular novelists of the time were horribly prolific: Ignaz Arnold was the author of some forty novels, while the Viennese Josef Alois Gleich was to chalk up about a hundred, many of them Gothic in English terminology. Christian Heinrich Spieß too produced all too many similar works, which led to his being imitated by Friedrich Laun, who had a good eye for a bandwagon. The typical German novel format of the time (duodecimo or even sextodecimo) inflates such figures. By contrast, the principal German writers discussed hereare for the most part those who became best known, and therefore most influential, in translation. Goethe, though not a Goth, is often linked with Gothic, so it is with him that my chapters on individual writers begin. The outstanding German contributors to the Gothic canon are Veit Weber, Benedicte Naubert, Friedrich Schiller, Carl Grosse, Ludwig Tieck, Heinrich von Kleist and E. T. A. Hoffmann, together with the mysterious but indubitably Gothic ‘Bonaventura’ (now thought to be August Klingemann) and two dark horses whose late contributions to Gothic are for various reasons better known in Britain than in Germany, Willibald Alexis and Wilhelm Meinhold. A few other novelists including Spieß and Zschokke, minor celebrities in their day whose work has proved to have little historical significance, are discussedmore briefly. Even Heinrich Spieß appears in retrospect to have been massively overrated. In German, as in English, there are, or were, large numbers of long since forgotten Gothic titles, of broadly similar kinds, many of them deserving to remain forgotten. Some of the novels in question no longer survive, having ended their life on the Trödlerkarren (junk-dealer’s cart) prior to being recycled, a not inappropriate end for works in which thematic recycling loomed so large. Some were read to pieces: the copy of Otranto that Goethe borrowed from the Schlegels had to be rebound to stop it from falling to pieces, although the fact is not reflected in the work’s minimal impact on his oeuvre. Wilhelm Hauff, masquerading as Satan, recalled borrowing the most battered and grubby volumes when combing the local reading society for hot titles. The German Lesegesellschaften of the time fulfilled the same function as the British circulating libraries, and were similarly affected by the Gothic tide. One of the few major differences between these two related branches of Gothic is the fact that many of the English Gothic writers were women, whereas in the history of German Gothic there appears, as yet, to be only one woman writer of consequence, Benedicte Naubert. This difference is explicable in 30

August Gottlieb Meissner, on the other hand, respected by Schiller, is the father both of the dialogisierter Roman and of the German Kriminalgeschichte.

30 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective terms of the respective stages of female emancipation in the two countries. Another difference is the fact that while German Gothic novels are normally set in Germany, English ones prefer a Spanish or Italian background against which to depict Catholic excesses.

III German criticism, having no clear conception of the German Gothic novel as such, has no clear name for it. German-language Gothic, like its Englishlanguage counterpart, has a number of different kinds, but while Englishlanguage criticism regards the subsets of Gothic as types of one overarching ‘Gothic novel’, German-language criticism thinks of them as different types of ‘popular’ or, worse, ‘trivial’ novel, thereby ignoring the Gothic and imagistic overlap between them. This has impeded research, for the most interesting novels by definition involve several types. ‘Trivialliteratur’, which includes Gothic, upsets conservative literary critics for various reasons, one being the fact that it is largely based not on literary models, but on ones deriving from the folk fairytale. The contrast between non-Gothic ‘literature’ and Gothic ‘trivial literature’ has, of course, proved to be a red herring: the appropriate contrasts are those between literary and sub-literary Romanticism, and between literary and sub-literary Gothic. This unfortunate state of affairs has served to obscure the magnitude of Germany’s contribution to the Gothic canon. Research into German-language Gothic has, then, been hindered, in the first place, by the fact that there is no agreement among German critics as to what, if anything, constitutes the German Gothic novel, of which there is therefore no basic bibliography equivalent to Montague Summer’s A Gothic Bibliography, which, despite including so much non-Gothic work, at least enabled the modern English-language Gothic industry to get off the ground. In the absence of any corpus of modern research into German ‘Gothic’ writing, the first and most considerable modern work in the field, Jürgen Klein’s study of the Gothic novel and the aesthetics of evil, Der Gotische Roman und die Ästhetik des Bösen (1975), was obliged to concentrate on the English Gothic novel. Research has also been hindered by the fact that the authors of the works which made the most significant early German contribution to Gothic were not ‘Gothic writers’ as such, while Gothic and all its works were frowned upon by the self-appointed guardians of the literary canon. German critics, whose view of literature has long been hierarchic, have tended to view Gothic fiction as the skeleton in the cupboard of their much-vaunted Romanticism, identifying Schauerromantik

Introduction 31

(Gothic romanticism) with Schundromantik (trashy romanticism, for which English, lacking the prejudice implied in the word, has no separate term, although the phrase ‘trash of the Minerva Press’ carries some of the same meaning). That said, contemporary critical disapproval of the genre no more prevented the appearance of large numbers of trashy Gothic novels in both languages than did strongly held reservations about the mixing of history and fancy prevent the appearance of the early historical novel. One of the keys to future research is to focus, for reasons that will shortly become clear, not on Schauerromantik but on schwarze Romantik;31 another is to concentrate on individual writers rather than on critical preconceptions. This is all the more appropriate in that German Gothic includes not only novels, stories and melodramas, but a number of texts of other kinds that are fundamental to the genre, including Bürger’s Lenore, the Wunderbare Reisen of Baron Munchausen, the Nachtwachen des Bonaventura, and Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert’s Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft.32 This study concentrates on the novelists who constitute the German Gothic canon and the real German contribution to European Gothic, but the focus is, first, on the subsets of the German Gothic novel, for the main German Gothic novelists are mostly associated with a particular kind of Gothic novel. These are: The early (Gothified) historical novel (Naubert, 1786) and Ritterroman ([Gleichmann, 1754]; Veit Weber, 1787; Hauff, 1826) Geisterseherroman or necromancer novel (Schiller, 1789) Hexenroman (Meinhold, 1843-47) Bundesroman (Naubert, 1786-88; Grosse, 1791-95) Vehmgerichtroman (Naubert, 1788) Ketzergerichtroman or Inquisition novel (Schiller, 1789;Veit Weber, 1791-95) Illuminatenroman (Schiller, 1789) Rosenkreuzerroman (Wezel, 1784) Bravoroman or assassin novel (Zschokke, 1793) Schauerroman (Tieck, 1795) Räuberroman or banditti novel (Vulpius, 1798; Kleist, 1810; Alexis, 1824 ) Doppelgängerroman ([Jean Paul, 1793]; Hoffmann, 1815-16) In English terms these are all types of Gothic novel, as can be readily confirmed by considering the motifs, imagery, structures, devices and effects 31 32

Cf. Jürgen Klein, Schwarze Romantik. Studien zur englischen Literatur im europäischen Kontext (Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 2005). Schubert’s work, published in 1808, preceded Catherine Crowe’s The Night-Side of Nature by forty years.

32 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective they have in common. What in English-language criticism is sometimes called Burgverließ Gothic (dungeon Gothic; the word ‘Burgverließ’ was coined by Veit Weber) is not a separate category; dungeons mostly feature in the Ritterroman and in early historical novels, which are often gothified, but are also a general feature of the imagery and fictional apparatus of Gothic fiction. What follows is an outline history of the various types of German Gothic fiction and the main (major and minor) novels in question in each case (critical discussion, where called-for, is included in the appropriate later context):

a. The Early (Gothified) Historical Novel (Naubert, 1786) and Ritterroman ([Gleichmann, 1754]; Veit Weber, 1787) Benedicte Naubert and Veit Weber respectively led the early historical novel and the Ritterroman in the direction of what in English is termed the Gothic novel (sub-variety gothified history). It is the early historical novel that is, in both literary and literary historical terms, the more significant form. The differences between them are simple: the early (‘transitional’) historical novel is, at least in part, historical, whereas the Ritterroman is, typically, pseudohistorical, a shilling shocker in fancy dress. The Ritterroman exemplifies the Gothic masquerade. From Veit Weber to Wilhelm Hauff knights represent either (German) virtue or vice (the robber baron corresponds to the wicked count, father or stepfather of fairytale; wild riders are the banditti of their day). Whereas Benedicte Naubert is a conscientious historian, Veit Weber is a popular writer with a love of the Middle Ages, of which he had a didactically driven idiosyncratic view, and a predilection for the Gothic. From its inception in 1785-86 the German early historical novel, which, like its English counterpart, is often gothified, is associated with Benedicte Naubert,33 who translated Sophia Lee’s The Recess (1783-5) and learnt from it how to combine fact and fiction, going on to produce a number of historical romances that belong in the context of Gothic, including Walter von Montbarry (1786), Hermann von Unna (1788), and Elisabeth Erbin von Toggenburg (1789). Her translation of The Recess, published in 1786, is the most important single event in the history of the German Gothic novel. The translation of Hermann von Unna was said, in 1794, to have brought the Ritterroman to England,34 but the statement is as problematical as the way in 33 34

See Kurt Schreinert, Benedikte Naubert. Ein Beitrag zur Entstehungsgeschichte des historischen Romans in Deutschland (Berlin: Emil Ebering, 1941). The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, xviii.

Introduction 33

which Naubert’s novel is described by English critics as a Schauerroman. Hermann von Unna is neither a Ritterroman nor aSchauerroman; it is an historical romance or early historical novel with Gothic elements, and more specifically a Bundesroman (secret-society novel). It was the Bundesroman in the form of the Vehmgerichtroman (secret-tribunal novel) that Naubert brought to England, which had long had its own Ritterroman in the form of Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron (1778). Conclusion: The Gothified early (transitional) historical novel is an English form initiated by Sophia Lee and copied by Benedicte Naubert. The Ritterroman or modern chivalric romance dates from the mid-1750s: Johann Zacharias Gleichmann’s Bewundernswürdige Begebenheiten des Europäischen Herkuliskus (1754) is a notable early form of pre-Gothic novel, set in the middle ages, with the emphasis on Catholic skulduggery, superstition, and the supernatural, but above all on feudal tyranny at a time when might was, by the mighty, deemed right.35 The Gothic Ritterroman as suchwas, however, inspired not by Gleichmann’s novel, but by Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen, a Ritterdrama featuring the Vehmgericht or Secret Tribunal, which caused a considerable stir when it appeared in 1773, not least because, in those far off days before the meteoric appearance of Die Räuber in 1781 it seemed, but was not intended to be, politically revolutionary. Most would-be Gothic novelists of the 1790s drew their initial inspiration from Götz; Hauff was still doing so, in his post-Gothic Lichtenstein, in 1826. Goethe’s startingpoints for his Ritterdrama were the Lebensbeschreibung Herrn Gözens von Berlichingen, Zugenannt mit der Eisernen Hand, Eines zu Zeiten Kaysers Maximiliani I. und Caroli V. kühnen und tapfern Reichs-Cavaliers (Nürnberg, 1731) and Justus Möser’s Von dem Faustrecht (1770, cf. F. C. Schlenkert’s Kein Faustrecht mehr [play, 1798]), which combined the history of German medieval law, which had attracted Goethe’s interest during his study of law at Leipzig University in 1765-68,36 with German patriotism. Admiring his attitude to his subject, Goethe and Herder printed an essay by Möser (‘Deutsche Geschichte’) in their Von deutscher Art und Kunst (1773). The father of the late eighteenth-century Gothic Ritterroman is Veit Weber (pseudonym used by Leonhard Wächter, 1762-1837),37 whose 35

36 37

Heinrich Reichard’s Bibliothek der Romane (21 vols, 1778-94), a Readers-Digest-style compendium of abbreviated Ritterromane that is useful as a treasury of motifs, opens with a severely pruned version of Gleichmann’s novel, followed, mostly in abbreviated form, by a range of similar works. In one way and another the Faculty of Law at Leipzig is a significant background institition in the present context. For the sake of intelligibility I follow normal practice in referring to Wächter by his

34 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective patriotic historic vision owed much to Justus Möser. He is best known as the author of the Sagen der Vorzeit (tales of yore: 7 vols, 1787-98), initially inspired by Götz, of which there are various mostly forgettable imitations by other hands, the best being Vulpius’s light-weight Romantische Geschichten der Vorzeit (10 vols, 1792-98). Another once popular early writer of Ritterromane is Friedrich Christian Schlenkert, whose best-selling Friedrich mit der gebißnen Wange (4 vols, 1785-88, discussed in Chapter 6) impressed many schoolboys of the time, among them Heinrich von Kleist. That K. G. Cramer’s early Haspar a Spada (1792) and Adolf der Kühne, Raugraf von Dassel (1792) were never translated into English casts more than a little doubt on the statement that Haspar a Spada is ‘most important for its influence upon terrifying medievalism in the English novel of horror’,38 for which one looks in vain. In reality Haspar a Spada with its ‘zum Grobian gewordene deutschtümelnde Ritter’ (loud-mouthed, jingoistic lout of a ‘knight’) is a caricature of the Ritterroman and a pastiche of Götz, ‘die größte Verballhornung eines Goetheschen Stoffes’ (the most vile perversion of material from Goethe).39 It is precisely the sort of work that gave the Ritterroman a bad name in Germany. Although the chivalric inevitably led to the Gothic, as is shown by titles like Schreckensscenen aus der Ritterzeit (1792), the Ritterroman (chivalric romance), hugely popular at the end of the eighteenth century, and for the most part not particularly Gothic in any worthwhile literary sense, eventually gave way to the gothified history and was itself subsumed into the Schauerroman, which, save in the hands of Tieck, is essentially sub-literary, although that did not prevent it from impinging on and even inspiring highbrow literature. After fighting for Germany in the Wars of Liberation (latterly as Major and Ritter des Eisernen Kreuzes) Friedrich Baron de la Motte Fouqué exchanged sword for pen and between 1816 and 1824 published a string of Ritterromane embodying the Old German virtues that were very popular until the public mood and the public’s values changed. They are not ‘Gothic’. In his Mitteilungen aus den Memoiren des Satan (182526)40 Wilhelm Hauff gave a witty account of the changing fortunes of Fouqué’s Ritterromane. The last Ritterroman is Hauff’s own Lichtenstein (1826: The Banished: A Swabian Historical Tale, 1839).

38 39 40

pseudonym, but to Kahlert by his real name. Marshall B. Tymn, Horror Literature. A Core Collection and Reference Guide (New York & London: Bowker, 1981), 58. Marion Beaujean, Der Trivialroman in der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts (Bonn: Bouvier, 1964), 120. W. Hauff, Werke, ed. B. Zeller, 2 vols (Frankfurt a. M.: Insel, 1969), II, 459-461.

Introduction 35

Conclusion: Gothification of their own medieval past is common to the English- and German-language areas. The Ritterroman looms large in German popular literature from the late seventeenth to the late eighteenth century. Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764: Seltsame Begebenheiten im Schloße Otranto, eine gotische Geschichte, 1768) attracted little attention in Germany until it was retranslated (as Die Burg von Otranto. Eine Gothische Geschichte) in 1794. This was too late for it to be influential, for by then Veit Weber (Sagen der Vorzeit, from 1787) had established the modern Gothic form of Ritterroman, which by 1791, when Weber was at the height of his short-lived popularity, was sufficiently well established to have become omnipresent and therefore controversial (see Versuch einer Beantwortung der Frage: ob die jetzige Modelektüre, die Lektüre der Ritterromane, mehr Schaden oder Nutzen nach sich ziehe? von L** C**).41

b. Geisterseherroman [Necromancer Novel] (Schiller, 1789) The Geisterseherroman (literally, ghost-seer novel), a form of Gothic novel involving the machinations of fraudsters and charlatans and the gulling of the gullible, who become the victims of ‘magical delusion’ (hence the ‘smoke and mirrors’ of modern terminology), is in effect the necromancer-novel. Moritz’s Fragmente aus dem Tagebuch eines Geistersehers came out in 1787, but the ghost-seer genre, central to which is the ‘explained supernatural’,was established by Schiller’s incomplete but distinguished and historically important novel Der Geisterseher (1789, completed’ by C. F. Follenius, in a supplement unworthy of the original, as Friedrich Schiller’s Geisterseher. Aus den Memoires des Grafen von O**, von X* Y* Z*, 1796). Der Geisterseher left an indelible imprint on the European Gothic novel, the course of which it did more than any other novel to determine.42 The Venetian setting of this thoroughly Gothic self-subverting tale was taken over by Zschokke in his Abällino, and Schiller’s Armenian incorporates elements of the Wandering Jew, the subject of Chr. D. Schubart’s lyrical rhapsody Der Ewige Jude (1783) and Heinrich Reichard’s romance of the same title (1785). Schiller 41 42

On the Ritterroman, see Carl Müller-Fraureuth, Die Ritter- und Räuberromane (Halle: Niemeyer, 1894, repr. Hildesheim: Olms, 1965). Anna M. Wittman, in European Romanticism: Crosscurrents, Modes, and Models, ed. Gerhart Hoffmeister (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990), 59-75. See Edmund Kostka, Schiller in Russian Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1965). The Russian Gothic novel was indebted to Schiller, Radcliffe, Lewis and Hoffmann. On Dostoevsky and Gothic, see Patrick Bridgwater, Kafka, Gothic and Fairytale (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2003), 8-13.

36 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective introduced both the Venetian Inquisition and the machinations of a secret society, the Bucentauro,43 setting in these and other respects a model for others to follow. He also set a stylistic example that no other writer save Kleist was able to match. Schiller’s ground-breaking work was imitated by Karl Friedrich Kahlert (ps. Lorenz Flammenberg) in his Der Geisterbanner (1790: The Necromancer; or the Tale of the Black Forest; Founded on Facts, 1794),44 a novel little-known in Germany, but influential in Britain, that was followed by Cajetan Tschink’s Geschichte eines Geistersehers (1790-93: The Victim of Magical Delusion, 1795) and Carl Grosse’s Der Genius (1791-95), and by untranslated novels such as G. Bücher’s Der Geisterseher. Eine venetianische Geschichte wundervollen Inhalts (1793) and C. A. G. Seidel’s Die Geisterseherinn (1794-5). Further imitations include the anonymous Bianca und Hieronymo (1800), the title-page of which proclaims it ‘ein interessantes Seitenstück’ (an interesting companion-piece) to Schiller’s Geisterseher, and J. E. D. Bornschein’s Moritz Graf von Protokar oder zwei Jahre aus dem Leben eines Geistersehers (1800). Hoffmann’s Die Elixiere des Teufels (1815-16, discussed in Chapter 7, is also a Geisterseherroman, but since what the ghost-seer sees is explicitly a projection of himself, is more sensibly classified as a Doppelgängerroman. In that the ghost-seer novel tends to deal with necromancers, the Hexenroman or witch tale also belongs here. The best known witches in German literature are those in Goethe’s Faust, which is neither a novel nor adequately described as Gothic. German literary treatments of the sorcerer/sorceress in the Gothic period begin with Veit Weber’s Die Teufelsbeschwörung (1791: The Sorcerer, tr. R. Huish, 1795) and Zschokke’s play Die Zauberin Sidonia (1798: Dutch translation, De toveres Sidonia, 1799). Vulpius’s Lucindora, die Zauberin (1810) is not Gothic. The best known witch novels are those of Wilhelm Meinhold, Maria Schweidler, die Bernsteinhexe (1843: Maria Schweidler, The Amber Witch, tr. Lucie Duff-Gordon, 1844) and Sidonia von Bork, die Klosterhexe (1847-8: Sidonia the Sorceress, tr. Jane Elgee, 1849), which are discussed in Chapter 8. The sorcerer novel as such, of which Die Teufels-beschwörung is a good example, is hardly to be separated from the Geisterseherroman or necromancer novel.’Mr Lyttleton’s The German Sorceress (1803) is of no interest in this or any other context. The Geisterseherroman (ghost-seer novel) and the Geisterroman (spirit novel), the latterseen at its best in C. H. Spieß’s Das Petermännchen (1791-2: The Dwarf 43 44

Named after the old Venetian state galley, the Bucentaur. Karl Friedrich Kahlert (1765-1813) , who worked as a magistrate in Glogau, was also co-author of Ruinen der Vorzeit (1793) and author of Die Brüder des Bundes für Menschenglück (1796) a dramatic adaptation of Veit Weber’s Die Brüder des Bundes für Freyheit und Recht.

Introduction 37

of Westerbourg, 1827, see Chapter 14 below), are separate genres. Hadley gives a lucid summary of the difference between them: Schiller’s work focusses on intellectual problems wherein curiosity about probabilities in the phenomenal world leads to uncertainty, insecurity, and fear, whereas Spieß’[s] feared spirits arouse edifying moral dilemmas after the pattern of the chivalric romance.45

However, more important in the present context than the Geisterroman à la Spieß is the ghost-story proper (Geistergeschiche, Gespenstergeschichte, Spukgeschichte). Whether this is a form of Gothic may be thought a matter of definition and dating, but the ghost of Alfonso in The Castle of Otranto is too large to be ignored, and the ghost-story does not escape the orbital pull of the Gothic tale until the early 1820s. The most impressive of the tales in the Gespensterbuch edited by Johann August Apel and Friedrich Laun (6 vols, Leipzig: Göschen, 1811-17, discussed in Chapter 11), known in English as Tales of the Dead (1813), are, in English terms at least, Gothic tales. Turning on anxiety and altered states of consciousness, they also involve doubles, thereby contributing to the rise of the Doppelgängerroman. Given that Laun’s contributions to the Gespensterbuch caught the attention of the Byron-Shelley party at Coligny and inspired both John Polidori’s The Vampyre and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the vampire tale also belongs here. German vampire tales include Ignaz Arnold, Der Vampir (1801); Hoffmann, Der Vampyr (or Eine Vampyrgeschichte, or Die Hyänen), embedded in Cyprians Erzählung in Die Serapionsbrüder (IV, 1821); and, most intriguingly, the anonymous tale of The Mysterious Stranger (1860, discussed in Chapter 11), which may simply be an anonymous tale claiming to be ‘From the German’, although it reads like a genuine German or Austrian tale, and 1860 is late for fake translation.46 Conclusion: Established by Schiller in 1789, the Geisterseherroman is a predominantly German form featuring the explained supernatural, whence it was copied by Ann Radcliffe and other writers.47 The earliest British contribution to the form came in 1794, when Kahlert included in The Necromancer a modified version of the famous episode in Ferdinand Count 45 46

47

Michael Hadley, The Undiscovered Genre. A Search for the German Gothic Novel (Berne: Peter Lang, 1978), 85. Stefan Hock, Die Vampyrsagen und ihre Verwertung in der deutschen Literatur (Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, 1977), useful as a survey, throws no light on the origin of The Mysterious Stranger. Devendra P. Varma’s statement in his The Gothic Flame (Metuchen, N.J. & London: The Scarecrow Press, 1987, 33) that ‘It is a factor worthy of note that the supernatural came to be explained in Germany only after 1800’ is mistaken, the result of relying on Evans and Murphy.

38 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Fathom in which Fathom, benighted in a forest, has the mortification to find the dead body of a man concealed beneath the bundles of straw on which he had been proposing to spend the night. This appears to be the earliest sign of German indebtedness to British Gothic. At much the same time Grosse showed, in Der Dolch (1794-5), that he too was indebted to Smollett.48 The explained supernatural as such also goes back to Fathom, where Schiller may have found it, although there is as yet no evidence that he did so.

c. Bundesroman (Naubert, 1786-88; Grosse, 1791-95) Vehmgerichtroman (Naubert, 1788) Ketzergerichtroman(Schiller,1789; Veit Weber, 1791-95) Illuminatenroman (Schiller, 1789; Grosse, 1791-95) Rosenkreuzerroman (Wezel, 1784) There being many kinds of ‘secret society’, the Bundesroman (modern Geheimbundroman, secret-society novel) comprises several kinds of novel, including those about the Templars and similar orders, the Bund der Freischoffen (Vehmgericht), the Inquisition or Ketzergericht, the Illuminati, and the Rosicrucians. By far the most important is the Vehmgerichtroman or novel based on the activities of the secret tribunal (Vehme, modern Feme)49 held in German, chiefly from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, but originating earlier and lingering into late eighteenth-century decadence, for the suppression of crime, including witchcraft, the proceedings of which were conducted in camera, with death the only sentence available to judges who, like those of the English Star Chamber (abolished in 1641), were liable to abuse their power. Then there are novels involving historical orders like the Templars, the Masons, the Illuminati and the Rosicrucians, but also imaginary orders including Veit Weber’s Bund für Freyheit und Recht, Jean Paul’s ‘invisible order’, and Goethe’s Turmgesellschaft. In literary terms the secret-society novel was inspired by the brief but memorable depiction of the Vehmgericht in Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen (1773), and of a quasi-Masonic/Illuminist secret society in Schiller’s Der Geisterseher. The most important, informative and historically accurate of the 48

49

On the Geisterroman, see Otto Rommel, ‘Rationalistische Dämonie. Die Geisterromane des ausgehenden 18. Jahrhunderts,’ Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift, 17 (1939), 183-220. The fact that Feme means not only Vehmgericht, but any kind of Geheimgericht (kangaroo court), while Fememord means lynching, reflects another fact, that Gothic portrayals served to vilify the Vehme.

Introduction 39

novels based on the Vehmgericht is Benedicte Naubert’s Hermann von Unna (1788: Herman of Unna, anon tr., 1794), which brought the Bundesroman and, with it, the ‘Secret Tribunal’ to England.Veit Weber’s Die heilige Vehme (1796) was for a time widely known in Germany. Naubert’s tragic history Alf von Dülmen (1791: Alf von Deulmen, tr. A. E. Booth, 1794) was another impressive early secret-tribunal novel. The Vehmgericht as such is the subject of my Chapter 9. Other early Bundesromane include Zschokke’s Die schwarzen Brüder (1791-93), Veit Weber’s Die Brüder des Bundes für Freyheit und Recht (1791-95), the anonymous Die Geweihten des furchtbaren Bundes (1793), in which Ann Radcliffe was popularly (and erroneously; in a way typical of the time the idea was a purely mercenary one) supposed to have had a hand, and J. B. Durach’s Die Adelsritter, ein Gräuelgemälde aus den Zeiten der Vehmgerichte (1793). Conclusion: The Bundesroman as such starts with Naubert’s Hermann von Unna (1788), and is a predominantly German form copied by English playwrights and novelists. The Vehmgericht or Secret Tribunal as it became following the success of Naubert’s Herman of Unna and Alf von Deulmen and James Boaden’s tragedy The Secret Tribunal (June 1795), is an early German input into English Gothic.50 In the English-speaking world the secret-society novel means, essentially, the secret-tribunal novel. The Illuminati-novel starts with Schiller’s Der Geisterseher (1789: The Ghost-Seer; or, Apparitionist, tr. Daniel Boileau, 1795) and includes Grosse’s Der Genius (1791-94: Horrid Mysteries, tr. P. Will, 1796), Veit Weber’s Die Brüder des Bundes für Freyheit und Recht (1791-95), the anonymously published Der Richterbund der Verborgenen (1795), and Ignaz Arnold’s Mirakuloso, oder der Schreckensbund der Illuminaten (1802). The very titles of such works illustrate the overlap between different types of secret society, of which most writers and readers had at best an amorphous idea. In the charlatan/necromancer novel the emphasis is on hocus-pocus and over-determined symbolism without much regard for the origins of the latter. The rather nondescript secret societies depicted in novels of this type variously reflect the late eighteenth century’s notion of a great conspiracy against civilization, in which a number of secret societies were supposedly involved. The Illuminati in particular were popularly thought to have been behind the French Revolution, in the wake of which it was feared they might be conspiring to bring about world revolution. A theosophical secret society, the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross goes back to the anonymous Fama Fraternitatis des löblichen Ordens der Rosenkreuzer 50

On the Geheimbundroman, as it is now called, see Rosemarie Nicolai-Haas, ‘Die Anfänge des deutschen Geheimbundromans’, in Geheime Gesellschaften, ed. Peter Christian Ludz (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1979).

40 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective (1614), which tells the tale of a fifteenth-century knight, Christian Rosenkreutz, who learned the wisdom of the East before founding the secret order that bears his name. Many new societies were subsequently founded under same name, the most important being the Neue Rosenkreuzer formed in southern Germany in 1765 and organized on similar lines to the Order of Jesuits. Another branch was still active in Prussia at the end of the eighteenth century. The Rosicrucian-novel is represented in German by Johann Karl Wezel, Kakerlak; oder, Die Geschichte eines Rosenkreuzers (1784), J. F. E. Albrecht, Geheime Geschichte eines Rosenkreuzers (1792), and by Friedrich von Oertel’s Spinalba oder Offenbarungen aus dem Rosenkreuzerorden (Leipzig: Beygang, 1804, a translation of Regnault-Warin’s Spinalba, ou les Révélations de la Rose-Croix, 4 vols, 1803).

d. Bravoroman [Assassin Novel] (Zschokke, 1793) Zschokke’s Abällino der große Bandit, though not a Räuberroman, has been classified as one for so long that for literary-historical reasons it is discussed in the Räuberroman context below (section f.). Abällino, as M. G. Lewis was the first to emphasize, is not a bandito, but a bravo or hired assassin; the fact that the novel also contains banditti does not alter the fact. The main English-language bravo-novels are Lewis’s adaptation from Zschokke, Aballino; or, The Bravo of Venice (1804) and James Fenimore Cooper’s The Bravo. A Venetian Story (1831) which takes Lewis’s work as its literary starting-point, and proceeds to deglamourize the bravo. The Geschichte der Assassinen (1818) by Joseph von Hammer (1774-1856, from 1835 HammerPurgstall) in its day inspired a number of fictional works, including Franziska von Stengel’s Die Assassinen, oder die Eroberung der Königsperle durch den Bund der Blutigen. Eine historisch-romantische Geschichte (Mannheim: Tobias Löffler, 1832, repr. 1835). In his history Hammer compared the Shi’ite Assassins to the Templars, the Jesuits and the regicides of the French Revolution.51 P. B. Shelley’s unfinished novella The Assassins: A Fragment of a Romance (1814), which was begun during the Shelley party’s peregrinations in postrevolutionary Europe in August/September 1814, has no connexion with Hammer.

51

Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nights A Companion (London: Allen Lane, 1994), 20.

Introduction 41

e. Schauerroman (Tieck, 1795) German has traditionally used the word Schauerrroman in both a general and a specific sense, to designate (i) the (German) Gothic novel as such, and (ii) a particular kind of implicitly second-rate Gothic novel (for Schauerroman is a derogatory term), the horror novel, which may, however, simply be a particularly horrid version of another kind of Gothic novel. This is bad enough, but to make matters worse, even when used in the restricted sense, Schauerroman is an unsatisfactory, ambiguous term, for Schauer implies terror as well as horror, so that the English-language distinction beween the Gothic of terror (at what might happen) and the Gothic of horror (at what does happen) cannot be made. The only literary novel to which the term Schauerroman is, in my opinion, applicable is Tieck’s Abdallah; otherwise, because of its inherent ambiguities it is best avoided. Schauerromantik (there is no plural) means Black (Dark, Gothic) Romanticism, but it would be better if this were known as schwarze Romantik, which lacks derogatory meaning. Gothic Romantics are Schauerromantiker. Schauermär and Schauermärchen variously denote the tale of terror with emphasis on its improbability: Kleist’s Das Bettelweib von Locarno is generally agreed to be a Schauermär, whilehis Die Familie Schroffenstein was, on publication in 1802, perceived to be a Schauerstück. Schauerdrama as such begins with Gerstenberg’s Greuelstück (horror play) Ugolino (1768), the brute power of which impressed not only Goethe and Schiller, but also Hoffmann, whose revolting story of necrophagy, Der Vampyr (or Eine Vampyrgeschichte, or Die Hyänen, 1821) unwisely carried on where even Ugolino left off. The scene in question in Ugolino has Anselmo, who is starving to death in a ruined tower to which Count Ugolino and his sons have been consigned by a corrupt bishop, wanting to gnaw at his poisoned mother’s wizened paps. It is to such barbarous scenes that German literature owes its reputation for being excessively horrid. Hoffmann should have left such things to the likes of I. F. Arnold, author of the atrocious and vilely written Der Schwarze Jonas (1805, repr. Frankfurt [a. M.]: Excentric Club, 2000) who, unlike himself, had no reputation to lose.That Hoffmann could do better is shown by his vampirefairytale Meister Floh (1822). German Gothic goes back to Gerstenberg in much the same way as English Gothic is sometimes said to go back to Webster. Hadley argues that it was only in the late 1790s, after the publication of Tieck’s Abdallah (1795) and William Lovell (1795-6) and the German translation of Lewis’s The Monk (1797), and indeed after the major English Gothic novels had appeared in German translation, and well after the originals and their translations had been reviewed in German journals, that

42 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective ‘the Schauerroman really came into being’.52 This underlines the inadvisability of using the term Schauerroman, for by 1794-7, that is, at exactly the same time as Ann Radcliffe’s novels were appearing in German, a number of what are most sensibly called German Gothic novels were the sensation of London; besides, Radcliffe was influenced by Schiller. Heiderich has common sense on his side when he writes of the early German Gothic novel: The Gothic paraphernalia are well represented: there are real and delusive spirits, secret societies, knights, bandits, and mountebanks; trap doors and dungeons, underground passages and secret tribunals, mysterious strangers, storms at midnight, and frightened heroines. However, the various elements are never effectively combined to create the kind of terror Lewis had achieved in The Monk.53

Much the same can be said of the English Gothic novel, very few of which match The Monk,54 despite their increasingly shrill and frantic attempts to do so, which for the most part now make for dreary reading.

f. Räuberroman (Vulpius, 1798; Kleist, 1810; Alexis, 1824 ) The Räuberroman (robber novel, novel of banditti),55 of which the outstanding example is Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas (1810), was powerfully influenced by Schiller’s widely imitated Die Räuber (1781),56 which had originally been planned as a novel. It would be difficult to overestimate the intrinsic importance of Die Räuber and its impact on the genesis of the Räuberroman with its serial continuations and imitations of one text by another. Schiller himself planned, but never wrote, a continuation of Die Räuber under the title Die Braut in Trauer, oder zweiter Theil der Räuber. In the event a sequel was written by Frau von Wallenrodt, Karl Moor und seine Genossen nach der Abschiedszene beim alten Thurm. Ein Gemälde erhabener Menschennatur, als Seitenstück zum Rinaldo Rinaldini (1801), which invokes Vulpius’s Rinaldo Rinaldini in order to associate Die Räuber with what had by then become its equally popular, if tamer, successor. 52 53 54 55 56

Hadley, The Undiscovered Genre, 147. Manfred W. Heiderich, The German Novel of 1800 (Berne: Peter Lang, 1982), 277. Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya is an interesting exception. See Holger Dainat, Abaellino, Rinaldini und Konsorten (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1996), 284-9, for a valuable bibliography of Räuberromane. W. Rullmann, Die Bearbeitungen, Fortsetzungen und Nachahmungen von Schillers’ Räubern’ 1782-1802 (Berlin: Ges. f. Theatergeschichte, 1911).

Introduction 43

Despite the fact that its villainous hero is not a robber, the first Räuberroman is generally considered to be Heinrich Zschokke’s Abällino der große Bandit (novel, 1793; translated and appropriated by M. G. Lewis as Aballino; or, The Bravo of Venice [Zschokke is not named on the title-page], 1804; dramatized in 1795). To dismiss Abällino as ‘a German pennydreadful’, as Hadley does,57 is to fly in the face of literary history: if it had been no more than that, it would never have been so celebrated and so influential. Lewis smartened up the German original, but it was Zschokke’s novel which inspired a new genre that quickly outdid the prototype. The development of the Räuberroman illustrates the way in which German Gothic novels, like English ones, vampirize one another. Zschokke produced another ‘Abällino’ in the form of Giulio degli Obizzi, oder Abällino unter den Calabresen (1805), which Summers, in the introduction to his 1927 edition of The Necromancer, confused with a separate work that also belongs here, J. E. D. Bornschein’s Coronato der Schreckliche, Oberhaupt der Bravo’s in Venedig (1801). Abällino, so successful in England and America thanks to M. G. Lewis,58 was, within five years, overshadowed in Germany by Christian Vulpius’s best-selling Rinaldo Rinaldini, der Räuberhauptmann (1798), which is discussed in Chapter 10. Ferrandino (1800) is a less successful continuation of Rinaldo Rinaldini, andVulpius also plagiarized his own work in Glorioso der große Teufel (1800). The prolific but currently unknown J. F. E. Albrecht, a literary jack of all trades and seemingly master of none, produced Dolko, der Bandit, Zeitgenosse von Rinaldo Rinaldini (1801); other similar works included K. A. Buchholtz, Lutardo; oder, Der Banditenhauptmann (in his Romantische Gemälde, 1804) and two works by J. J. Brückner, Angelika, Tochter des großen Banditen Odoardo (1801, subtitled ‘Seitenstück zu Schillers Geisterseher’) and Gräfin Dianora Martagno, Rinaldo Rinaldinis Geliebte, ein romantisches Gemälde (1801). Ignaz Arnold, who had, in both senses, fed off Die Räuber in the grotesquely misbegotten Die Grafen von Moor. Ein Familiengemälde (1802),59 which recast Schiller’s play into novel form with ‘copious additions in bad taste and worse sense’,60 proceeded to imitate Rinaldo Rinaldini in Der berühmte Räuberhauptmann Schinderhannes, Bückler genannt. Ein wahrhaftes Gegenstückzum Rinaldo Rinaldini (1802), which was based on the life of a real-life robber named Johann Bückler, who in reality had nothing in common with the real57 58 59

60

Hadley, 13. And, in America and to a lesser extent, William Dunlap. Arnold borrowed the title of an anonymous ‘improved’ version of Schiller’s play, Die Grafen von Moor, ein Schauspiel in fünf Aufzügen, oder Schiller’s Räuber, umgearbeitet von *** Im Monath July 1785. Die Räuber, ed. Willoughby, 61.

44 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective life robber on whom Rinaldo was modelled. Other works based on Bückler and his Buxen (Butzen, bogeymen) included the anonymous Gaunerstreiche, Grausamkeit und Mordthaten des furchtbaren Räuberhauptmanns Bückler und seiner Genossen (1831) appropriated by Leitch Ritchie as Schinderhannes, The Robber of the Rhine, 1833, repr. 1848). E. T. Jünger produced a companion piece to Rinaldo Rinaldini in the form of Carolo Carolini, der Räuberhauptmann, Seitenstück zu Rinaldo Rinaldini (1800); a further ‘Seitenstück’ was H. A. Kerndörffer’s Lorenzo der kluge Mann im Walde, oder das Banditenmädchen: Ein Seitenstück zu Rinaldi (1801-03). J. E. D. Bornschein imitated Rinaldo Rinaldini in Das Nordhäusische Wundermädchen, ein weiblicher Rinaldini (1802), and there were various other imitations and local versions of Rinaldo Rinaldini. George Soane’s Knight Daemon and Robber Chief (1812), like so many similar German works, was indebted to Rinaldo Rinaldini for its characterizations and situations. Edward Ball’s The Black Robber. A Romance (1819) was variously indebted to Schiller’s Die Räuber, Vulpius’ Rinaldo Rinaldini and Byron’s The Corsair (1814); Byron’s Conrad was the direct model for Ball’s black-clad brigand. C. R., Castle Zittaw. A German Tale (Minerva Press, 1794) is an imitation of The Necromancer (Minerva Press, 1794). Thomas De Quincey’s Klosterheim (1832) was strongly influenced by his reading of Schiller and Zschokke. The official English translation of Vulpius’s once so celebrated work, Rinaldo Rinaldini, Captain of Banditti (tr. I. Hinckley, 1800), was reprinted as late as 1840 in The Romancist and Novelist’s Library, Hazlitt’s series (4 vols, 1839-42) of mostly Gothic anthologies that ushered in a minor Gothic revival in the 1840s. This had a German counterpart in the Bibliothek von Ritter-, Räuber- und Criminal-Geschichten (10 vols, Leipzig: Schreck, 1839-40), which shows how the crime story eventually took over from the Gothic tale which from Schiller onwards had quite often been based on real-life crimes.61 This closely parallels the British development from Gothic tale foregrounding the uncanny to the Blackwood’s tale which, though still a tale of terror, is a different animal: there is, in the Blackwood’s tale, a new interest, shared by Gothic writers like Hoffmann and Hogg, in aberrant mental states, but also a greater realism and explicitness in the description of actual horrors witnessed by the narrator. Conclusion: Notwithstanding its popularity and extended half-life in nineteenth-century British Gothic writing (Ainsworth, G. P. R. James), the Räuberroman goes back to Schiller’s Die Räuber (1781: The Robbers, tr. Tytler (1792, 2nd edn, 1795; 3rd, 1797; 4th, 1800),62 which, following its meteoric 61 62

See Kriminalgeschichten aus dem 18. Jahrhundert, ed. H. Dainat (Gütersloh: Historische Buchgemeinschaft, 1990). John O’Keefe’s comic opera Banditti was put on at Covent Garden in November

Introduction 45

rise in Germany, was hugely influential in Britain. The success of Schiller’s bandit-drama was cemented by that of two bandit-novels, Vulpius’s Rinaldo Rinaldini, der Räuberhauptmann (1798: The History of Rinaldo Rinaldini, Captain of Banditti, 1800) and Zschokke’s Abällino der große Bandit (1794: The Bravo of Venice, tr./adapt. Lewis, 1805). The Räuberroman is thus a predominantly German form widely copied by English writers.63 The Räuberroman and the Geisterroman together have a slightly later maritime branch in the form of the sub-Gothic pirate (sea-bandit, rover=robber) novel and of the ghost-ship novel that goes back to the medieval legend of the Demon Frigate.64 Defoe’s Captain Singleton (1720), the first Seeräuberroman as such, is Gothic in its counterfeited realism, but otherwise has little to do with Gothic and not much more to do with piracy. Schiller’s unfinished Die Flibustiers (1798) was prompted by J. W. von Archenholz, Geschichte der Flibustier (1803). In the high Gothic and immediate post-Gothic periods the pirate and ghost-ship novel begins in German begins with two insignificant novels, Bornschein’s Antonia della Roccini, die Seeräuberkönigin (1801) and Der Seeräuberkönig (1803), and includes Alexis’s Gothic Walladmor (1824), Hauff’s Das Gespensterschiff (1826, based on ‘Vanderdecken’s Message Home’), Heine’s Aus den Memoiren des Herren von Schnabelewopski (1836), Wagner’s Der Fliegende Holländer (1839-43, after reading Heine), and two twentieth-century texts, Georg Heym’s Das Schiff (1913, after reading Poe’s The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym), and Traven’s Das Totenschiff (1926).65 In English the genre begins a little later with ‘Vanderdecken’s Message Home’ (Blackwood’s, 1821),66 and includes Scott’s The Pirate (1821), Cooper’s The Red Rover (1827), and Marryat’s The Phantom Ship (1839). Maritime Gothic in the form of the ghost-ship or ship of the dead is essentially a joint Anglo-German enterprise.

g. Doppelgängerroman ([Jean Paul, 1793]; Hoffmann, 1815-16) The phantasmagoric play with ‘smoke and mirrors’ of Schiller’s Der Geisterseher includes Doppelgänger effects. In his admirable study of the

63 64 65 66

1781. On the Räuberroman, see Dainat, passim. See Scott’s ‘Rokeby’. Although he does not include all these, see Peter Haining (ed.), The Ghost Ship (London: Kimber, 1985). The historical Vanderdecken was a Dutch sea captain who discovered the route to the East, thereby opening up the Chinese market to what became the Dutch East India Company.

46 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Doppelgänger in German literature, notably of the Romantic period, Andrew Webber writes of ‘the magic lantern as projector in the first Doppelgänger tales of the Romantic era, from [...] Der Geisterseher [...] onwards’.67 Of all the forms of Gothic fiction in German, it is the Doppelgängerroman (novel of the divided self) that most significantly bridges the gap between Romantic novel and Gothic romance. The Doppelgänger and the concomitant problems of identity and subjectivity are features of the novels of Jean Paul and Hoffmann, but with Jean Paul these elements do not combine into a Gothic whole as they do with Hoffmann. It is in Hoffmann’s Die Elixiere des Teufels (1815-16: The Devil’s Elixir [sic], tr. R. P. Gillies, 1824), a major novel about diabolical possession, that the Gothic Doppelgängerroman is epitomized. In English terms this is a ‘horror’ novel with a plot superficially resembling that of The Monk, but its real link is with Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Hoffmann’s and Hogg’s novelsare therefore discussed together in Chapter 7.

67

Andrew J. Webber, The Doppelgänger. Double Visions in German Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 43.

PART I

1 GOETHE It may seem quixotic to devote the first chapter of a book on the Gothic novel to a poet who, readers may object, has little in common with the world of Gothic and nothing in common with those generally considered its typical representatives,1 but the fact that the most distinguished creative writer of the period, and the oldest under review, Johann Wolfgang [von]2 Goethe (1749-1832) is so frequently named in modern bibliographies and studies of the Gothic shows that there are issues that need to be addressed. On the theoretical level Goethe may be thought to have sanctioned the Gothic aesthetic of terror, thereby justifying a study of his work in relationship to Gothic, when he had Mephistopheles declare that ‘Das Schaudern ist der Menschheit bester Teil’ (the best thing about human beings is their capacity for awe [or: dread]),3 and, on the practical level, the fact that his work as a whole is the opposite of Gothic does not mean that individual works, or aspects of them, may not be Gothic, for it is only when they are put together in context these can be seen for what they are. Given that Schiller looms large in the Gothic context, it would in any case not make sense to omit Goethe, who is linked to the Gothic Revival by the famous early essay on Strasbourg Cathedral, entitled Von Deutscher Baukunst and published in late 1772, in which ‘Gothic’ - the Gothic of the Middle Ages - is equated with ‘characterful’ and ‘German’ (altdeutsch). For him Strasbourg Cathedral embodied ‘the deepest feelings of truth and beauty of proportion, sprung from a plain and vigorous German soul, alive on the confined, dark, priest-ridden stage of the Middle Ages [Pfaffenschauplatz medii aevi].’4 His slim brochure, informed by the desire to see a revival of the German Renaissance of men like Götz von Berlichingen, Faust, Dürer, and Lucas Cranach the Elder, to whom he was distantly related, underpins what became the Romantic enthusiasm for Gothic, which quickly transmuted into Gothic Romanticism. He knew about Walpole’s Strawberry Hill from his visits to the Gothisches Haus at Wörlitz, and is said to have been intrigued by a copy of Fuseli’s The Nightmare, that celebrated product of the Gothic 1 2 3 4

With the exception of his brother-in-law, Christian August Vulpius, with whom he got on well and will surely have discussed the popular novel. From 1782. Faust II, Act 1, ‘Finstere Galerie’. Quoted from Hugh Honour, Romanticism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), 157; see Goethe, Kunsttheoretische Schriften und Übersetzungen (Berliner Ausgabe, XIX) (Berlin: Aufbau, 1973), 29-38.

50 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective imagination,5 inspired by Bürger’s Lenore, which he saw at the Leipziger Messe in 1783.

I Although he never had much time for popular fiction, where does he stand in relation to the proto-Gothic of the Sturm und Drang and to the Gothic convention from Walpole onwards? Details of his early reading are scarce, but his first encounter with a tale subsequently regarded as Gothic was a chapbook version of Der Ewige Jude going back to the seventeenth century. The Wandering Jew was eventually to merge into his Faust, his preoccupation with whom goes back to another chapbook read in childhood, and his life-long love of fairytales, too, goes back to yet others read in early childhhod. This applies particularly to that treasure-chest of Gothic motifs, the Arabian Nights (see Chapter 14 below). He is known to have read Les mille et une nuits, tr. Antoine Galland (6 vols 1704-17, new edn, 1747: Die Tausend und Eine Nacht, tr. from Galland by August Bohse [Ps. Talander], 6 vols, 1730) in French. Having once read Les Mille et une nuits in his childhood, he returned to them again and again, both in Galland’s French, and later in Tausend und Eine Nacht, tr. Max Habicht, F. H. von der Hagen and Karl Schall (15 vols, 1825). From the Arabian Nights he borrowed numerous stimuli, motifs, situations and outcomes,6 using them, especially, in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre and Faust II. From Galland’s tales he took motifs such as the Bote and the Wanderer (he was himself known as ‘der Wanderer’)7 He also read the 1746-67 German edition of Pitaval in his father’s library, but advised his sister not to read it. He did not share Schiller’s interest in common criminals or in the idea of criminal sublimity. In addition to Wieland’s Die Abentheuer des Don Sylvio von Rosalva (1764),8 that Summers included in his Gothic Bibliography, he knew Gerstenberg’s Ugolino (1768), which he found bizarre, and that important Gothic text, Bürger’s Lenore (1774), by which his Claudine von Villa Bella (1775) and Die Braut von Korinth (1798) were influenced. His Götz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand (1773) inspired Bürger to write the ballad Der Raubgraf (1773, first published 1776) and to add three new stanzas to Lenore. By the early 1790s he knew Schiller’s Der Geisterseher (1789) and its principal imitations in 5 6 7 8

Shelley later wanted Fuseli’s image to illustrate his lost horror-tale ‘The Nightmare’. Gero von Wilpert, Goethe-Lexikon (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1998), 1050. Goethe’s indebtedness to the Arabian Nights is discusssed in detail in Chapter 14, as is the relation between the Arabian Nights and Gothic. Opening in an old ruinous castle in Valencia, this is a fairytale novel (Märchenroman).

Goethe 51

the form of Kahlert’s Der Geisterbanner (1790) and Grosse’s Der Genius (17914), which left their mark on Wilhelm Meister. He was also familiar with a related work, the once famous Gespensterbuch (6 vols, 1811-17) edited by Johann August Apel and Friedrich Laun, both of whom he knew. The tales in the Gespensterbuch are, in English terms at least, Gothic tales, closely related to the ghost-seer or necromancer novel. Laun’s ‘Die Totenbraut’ connects with Claudine von Villa Bella, and more especially with the fragment from it, freely translated by Walter Scott as ‘Frederick and Alice’, that M. G. Lewis included in his Tales of Wonder.9 Robert Stockhammer has commented on the ‘Cagliostro-figures’ in Laun’s tale,10 a subject that may well have been discussed when Laun (Friedrich August Schulze) visited Goethe in April 1804. The French translation of the first volume, Fantasmagoriana, tr. Jean Baptiste Benoît Eyries (Paris: Lenormant & Schoell, 1812) became famous as the ‘German stories of ghosts’ that fell into the hands of the ByronShelley party one cold and rainy evening at the Villa Diodati near Geneva, and which excited in them ‘a playful desire of imitation’. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and John Polidori’s The Vampyre were, of course, the outcome. Goethe admired The Vampyre,11 but appears not to have known Frankenstein. He took a keen interest in ghosts and in the ghost-stories of the time. His main contribution to the then fashionable Gespensterliteratur took the form of ghostly ballads: ‘Der untreue Knabe’ (in Claudine von Villa Bella), Die Braut von Korinth, and Der Totentanz, but ghosts are found throughout his work, notably in Faust II. The copy of Die unsichtbare Loge (1793) that Jean Paul sent him in 1794 went unacknowledged, but not unread, judging by the parallel between its invisible lodge and a similar body, the Turmgesellschaft, in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. He may or may not have known Winckelmann’s early Ritterroman entitled Die Unsichtbaren (1794, published using the pseudonym Ernst Winter in order to keep the Gothic at arm’s length). He knew Zschokke’s Abällino, der große Bandit (1795), no less than twelve performances of which he directed in Weimar in 1795-1800, and in 1825 he even read (mirabile dictu) the first six volumes of Zschokke’s stodgy Ausgewählte Werke (1795-9). Whether he knew his early Gothic novels Die schwarzen Brüder (1791-95) and Kuno von Kyburg nahm die Silberlocke des Enthaupteten und ward Zerstörer des heimlichen Vehmgerichts (1795-99), which do not appear in the Ausgewählte Werke, is not clear. He fell foul of F. L. W. Meyer, the dramatist and distinguished 9 10 11

Tales of Terror and Wonder, collected by M. G. Lewis (London: Routledge, 1887), 222225. In his Nachwort to Apel & Laun’s Gespensterbuch (Frankfurt a.M. & Leipzig, 1992), 293. Perhaps he would have admired it less if he had known that it was the work not of Byron, but of Polidori.

52 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective translator of The Castle of Otranto (Die Burg von Otranto. Eine Gothische Geschichte, 1794) when he took exception to an article on contemporary German literature by Daniel Jenisch that appeared in the March 1795 number of the Berlinisches Archiv der Zeit und ihres Geschmacks, of which Meyer had just become the first editor. The essay Literarischer Sansculottismus of May 1795 is a riposte to this article. He knew L. F. Huber’s Das heimliche Gericht (1795; first published in 1790 in Thalia), which made such heavy weather of the Vehmgericht, and Vulpius’s Rinaldo Rinaldini (1798). He read the first draft of Rinaldo Rinaldini ‘mit Vergnügen’ and suggested improvements (letter to Vulpius of 7 Aug. 1799). In addition to Rinaldo Rinaldini he presumably knew its continuation Ferrandino (1800) and variation Orlando Orlandini (1802), and probably also knew Glorioso der große Teufel (1800), which is based on the life of Michele Pezza, alias Frà Diavolo, alias Colonel Pezza of the military wing of the ancien régime, whose story I tell in Chapter 10. Wilpert comments: ‘daß er allerdings auch alle modische literarische Tagesware seines Schwagers verschlungen hat, dafür gebricht es an Anzeichen’ (evidence is lacking to back up the idea that he was an avid reader of his brother-in-law’s fashionable wares).12 There is an apocryphal story that he wrote ‘several chapters’ of Rinaldo Rinaldini.13 The fact is that the figure of the bandito-cumLothario from his Claudine von Villa Bella influenced that of Rinaldo Rinaldini as drawn by Vulpius, who made him into a kind of Gothic Casanova: numerous amours are a feature of Crugantoni’s life in Claudine von Villa Bella (1776), but not of the life of the Italian bandito Angelo Duca, on which Rinaldo is, more generally, based. Der Zwerg (1803), Vulpius’s version of the Faust legend, in which Faust appears as Ritter Adelbert and the Devil as a dwarf (inspired by Goethe’s fairytale), has nothing to do with Die neue Melusine (in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre), unless the figure of the dwarf there goes back to Der Zwerg or, more likely, to the figure of Vulpius himself, memorably described by Schiller as ‘eine kleine dürre Figur in weißem Frack und grün-gelber Weste, krumm und sehr gebückt’ (a skinny little character in a white tail coat and a greenish-yellowish waistcoat, bandy-legged and walking with a pronounced stoop).14 If he had so wished, Goethe would have been able, via Christian Vulpius, to keep abreast of the popular literature of the day, which must have featured in some of their many affable conversations.

12 13 14

Wilpert, 1134. Montague Summers, The Gothic Quest. A History of the Gothic Novel (New York: Russsell & Russell, 1964), 142. Letter to Christian Gottfried Körner dated July 1787.

Goethe 53

I know of no evidence that he took any early interest in the groundbreaking Gothic fiction written before 1789 by Veit Weber and Benedicte Naubert, or by Horace Walpole, Clara Reeve and Sophia Lee, although Urfaust, the Urgötz, and Claudine von Villa Bella contain motifs from the popular realm. By 1795 it is a different story. Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (179596) contains a reference (Book II, ch. 10) to contemporary Gothic with its vaults and caverns, ruined castles and hollow trees, and to the Vehmgericht. The most celebrated vaults and caverns were those in The Castle of Otranto (1764: Die Burg von Otranto. Eine Gothische Geschichte, tr. F. L. W . Meyer, 1794) and in Sophia Lee’s The Recess (1783-85: Die Ruinen, eine Geschichte aus den vorigen Zeiten, tr. Benedicte Naubert, 1786). Otherwise the implication is that by 1795 Goethe knew Benedicte Naubert’s Hermann von Unna (1788) and its less celebrated successor, Alf von Dülmen (1791), in which the hero-villain takes refuge in a hollow willow of prodigious size,15 and subsequently spends thirty years incarcerated in a dark vault. I assume that he knew Veit Weber’s Die heilige Vehme (1795). Tieck he came to admire, but will not have read the early Gothic work that Friedrich Gundolf was later to dismiss as bilge (Bockmist). Abdallah in particular he would have abominated as a portrayal of the Gothic depths which he, who had a healthy dread of them, was determined not to acknowledge. A trashy, long forgotten Gothic tale by Friedrich Christian Laukhard (1758-1822), Franz Wolfstein oder Begebenheiten eines dummen Teufels (1799),16 gave Shelley the name of his Wolfstein and Mary the name of her Frankenstein. Laukhard took part in the war against France in 1792, when Veit Weber was fighting for the French. Goethe read Laukhard’s autobiography, Leben und Schicksale, von ihm selbst beschrieben (17921802). He knew Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert, but took no particular interest in his Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft (1808). Willibald Alexis, whose imitation of Scott, published under Scott’s name, Walladmor, had just appeared, visited Goethe in 1824 and again in 1829. That Goethe knew the operatic version of Spieß’s Der Alte Überall und Nirgends may be taken as implying that he had no high opinion of most of Spieß’s work. In 1825, wearing his pontifical-scientific hat, Goethe read Athanasius Kircher’s Mundus Subterraneus (1665) with its ‘Gothick’ accounts of subterraneous (interior) caverns, giants, beasts and demons; in Zahme Xenien (VI) he mocked Kircher for his unscientific approach to one of his own hobbyhorses, volcanism. I have found no evidence that he read Ludwig Holberg’s Nicolai Klimii Iter Subterraneum (1741; in making Klim set out on his 15

16

The hollow tree as a place of refuge is shared by Gothic with the fairytale, from which it derives. Vivien le Fey entraps Merlin in a hollow oak in the forest of Broceliande. Available in Göttingen University Library.

54 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective journey in 1665; Holberg was saluting Kircher’s work), although he knew Holberg’s comedies from his father’s library. He was familiar with the work of Fuseli, which is thought to have influenced the Hexenküche scene in Faust. He disapproved of the emotional approach of Piranesi, whose work he saw in Rome, but he possessed the first volume of Piranesi’s Antichità Romane, and we are told that ‘Für Goethes Raumauffassung [...] ist Piranesi von entscheidender Bedeutung gewesen’ (Goethe’s conception of space was decisively influenced by Piranesi’s Antichità Romane).17 There must, however, have been more than this to his reaction to the work of the artist who is famous for his depiction, in the Carceri d’Invenzione, of the abyss that is found in his own work. A possible literary source for this would be Holberg’s Niels Klim, in which Klim, after first making trial descents into the deepest and most hideous of caverns, enters the fatal cavern from which he is precipitated into an abyss of darkness, eventually finding himself in that favourite Gothic location, the subterranean world that by the late eighteenth century had largely supplanted Hell in the semi-literate imagination. The abyss is ultimately the abyss of death, and therefore of the obscure fears at the back of his mind that he was at such pains to keep under control. The fact that Piranesi exposes the very structures of that subterraneous world leads me to suppose that Goethe knew but chose not to dwell on the Carceri d’Invenzione. He knew Plutarch’s account of an Egyptian festival in the course of which asses and men were pushed over a cliff as a ritual quid pro quo for the murder of Osiris, which confirms that what might, in the late eighteenth century, have been thought a peculiarly Gothic piece of brutality is as old as much else in the Gothic arsenal of horrors. Of English-language writers of Gothic or Gothic-type fiction he knew something of Irving, Lewis, Maturin, Scott, Shelley, and Walpole. He knew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), and by 1798 at the latest had read Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto andThe Mysterious Mother. Indeed, in 1798 he and Schiller appear to have considered producing a joint adaptation of The Mysterious Mother; after Goethe had read the piece twice, they decided not to go ahead with the project, but for Schiller The Mysterious Mother was to be the key to Die Braut von Messina. Goethe admired Maturin’s Bertram; or, The Castle of St Aldobrand (1816, which he readin 1817, and was supposedly ‘captivated’ by his Melmoth the Wanderer (1820).18 He knew The Vampyre (1819), considering it to be Byron’s best work (in reality it was by Byron’s doctor, John Polidori). On holiday in Karlsbad in 1823 he read, ‘mit Vergnügen’, Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon Gent (1820), which 17 18

Goethes Werke, Band XI (Autobiographische Schriften III) (Munich: Beck, 1981), 688. See Devendra P. Varma, in the Introduction to his edition of Melmoth the Wanderer (London: Folio Society, 1993), xvi.

Goethe 55

includes ‘The Spectre Bridegroom’. He may conceivably have known Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, but I am aware of no evidence that he did. The Gothic novelist (The Knight Dæmon and Robber Chief, 1812) and distinguished translator, George Soane, won Goethe’s praise for his Extracts from Göthe’s tragedy of Faustus (1820). For a man with little time for the reading public at large he was, eventually, reasonably well informed about the kinds of novel it was reading, which for the most part he regarded with disdain. In the ballad ‘Ritter Kurts Brautfahrt’ (1802) he satirized the triviale Ritterromantik of the time; the previous year Kleist famously remarked that the circulating libraries of the day purveyed nothing but Ritterromane. It is true that Goethe came to outdo Schiller in his contempt for the Lesepöbel (reading rabble), the Parterre-Kloak (plebs of the [cess]pit) as he calls them.19 His later attitude towards the popular culture of the time was made abundantly clear in a letter to Kapellmeister J. F. Reichardt in 1790: Die Deutschen sind im Durchschnitt rechtliche, biedere Menschen aber von Originalität, Erfindung, Charakter, Einheit, und Aufführung eines Kunstwerks haben sie nicht den mindesten Begriff. Das heißt mit Einem Worte sie haben keinen Geschmack [...] Den rohen Teil hat man durch Abwechslung und Übertreiben, den gebildetern durch eine Art Honnetät zum besten. Ritter, Räuber, Wohltätige, Dankbare, ein redlicher biederer TiersEtat, ein infamer Adel pp. und durchaus eine wohlsoutenierte Mittelmäßigkeit, aus der man nur allenfalls abwärts ins Platte, aufwärts in den Unsinn einige Schritte wagt, das sind nun schon zehen Jahre die Ingredienzen und der Charakter unserer Romane und Schauspiele. (The Germans are on the whole decent, worthy people, but they have absolutely no idea of what constitutes originality, invention, character, unity or execution in a work of art. In a nutshell [...] they have no taste [...] The uncouth are taken in by variety and exaggeration, the more educated by a certain decorum. Knights, robbers, philanthropists and their beneficiaries, an honest and worthy Third Estate, a perfidious nobility, etc. and everywhere a carefully maintained mediocrity, from which at best a few steps are ventured downwards into bathos or upwards into gobbledygook, these have for ten years now been the ingredients and the particular character of our novels and plays.)20

Although the emphasis is on the theatre, Goethe’s view of the essentially Gothic popular novel of 1790 is clear enough.It is reasonable to surmise that the work of Cramer, say, may help to account for his very low opinion of 19 20

In the Invektiven. Goethes Briefe, ed. Mandelkow, Vol. II, (Hamburg: Wegner, 1964), 120. Similar criticism is to be found in Wilhelm Meister.

56 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective the popular novel, produced as it largely is by the literary unwashed (the term gives an accurate idea of his attitude). Notwithstanding the fact that elements of the popular (Gothic) novel are, as we shall see, to be found in his own work, he has a patrician disdain for the Trivialroman, although this did not prevent him from reading Cramer’s Leben, Thaten und Sittensprüche des lahmen Wachtel-Peters (1794-6) when on holiday in Karlsbad in 1812.

II Given that his work is essentially poetic, it may appear unlikely that elements of the literary Gothic21 are to be found there, but in the last generation of scholarship it has been shown that some of the major English Romantic poets write ‘in Gothic’, that is, in an image-rich language or shorthand in which the Gothic view of life is embedded and encoded. Does this apply to Goethe too? The idea that his legendary wisdom and calmness, his brand of classicism (or, particularly to the extra-German world, of romanticism) and, above all, his ‘avoidance of tragedy’ are anything but Gothic, and indeed that avoidance of tragedy implies an avoidance of Gothic, is specious. The early and later Goethes are, in literary terms, very different beasts. The early Goethe, with his impetuous emotions and unruly imagination, was far from calm, and was indeedknown as an ‘unbridled, immoderate man’,22 just the sort of writer, it may be thought, who might indulge in a little Gothic excess, an idea that his cult of Priapus tends to confirm. His public persona was that of a grown-up child of nature, genial, positive, well balanced and stable, but he was only human, and his persona was darker, more unstable, closer to the world of Gothic, hence his otherwise inexplicable ability to write Werther. In the mid-1770s he ‘takes account of the darker view’23 without allowing it to dominate his life or work. His mild fixation on the abyss, for instance, never became a Gothic obsession although it unquestionably had the capacity to do so. Schiller, it is true, has a wild, Gothic streak that he seeks to curb but which is, throughout his literary career, continually liable to erupt, both in major works and in a string of unfinished works with Gothic features. Goethe was the first to recognize that there was a streak of violence in 21

22 23

The article in The Times Literary Supplement (2 Dec. 1965, 1094) entitled ‘Goethe and the Gothic’ is a review of W. D. Robson-Scott’s The Literary Background of the Gothic Revival in Germany (1965). Nicholas Boyle, Goethe. The Poet and the Age, 2 vols so far (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991, 2000), I: 182. Reed, Goethe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 22.

Goethe 57

Schiller’s imagination,24 but it was his own ‘zwei Seelen’ that he depicted, in his most Gothic and Gothically most influential work, in the persons and polarities of Faust and Mephistopheles. Faustian overreachers and ‘Beelzebube’ abound in the Gothic novel, and the Doppelgänger, featured in Schiller’s Der Geisterseher, and in Goethe’s Faust, Werther, Claudine von Villa Bella, and Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, as well as in Dichtung und Wahrheit, is, of course, a feature of Gothic, albeit not exclusively so, for, as Wilhelm Meister itself shows, it is also found in the Romantic Bildungsroman, and more particularly in the hybrid Gothic-cum-Bildungsroman of Jean Paul and Hoffmann, which is paralleled in Wilhelm Meister, that Bildungsroman with an intriguing element of the Bundesroman. Poet and ‘privy councillor’, artist and scientist, ‘doctor’ and ‘devil’, lawyer and Lothario, the young Goethe was artistic, hypersensitive, always liable - like Werther - to over-react emotionally. Until he had learned to contain it, his imagination was liable to run away with him into the wilds of the macabre, hence the attraction of Bürger’s Lenore. Like Schiller, Goethe too reverted sporadically, if more playfully, from classicism to elements of Gothicism, as shown not least by the genesis of Faust and Wilhelm Meister. Urfaust and Die Braut von Korinth show that he shared with his wild young Sturm und Drang contemporaries a penchant for the macabre. This is one reason why he was altogether more tolerant than Schiller of Bürger’s ballad of the spectre-bridegroom, in which, as E. J. Clery has recently written, Form and narrative together build to a climactic marriage ceremony by the graveside, juxtaposing sex and death in a manner entirely unlike the decorous minuet of English sentimental Gothic, in which the love-plot politely gives way to the ghost-plot, and vice versa.25

Goethe was tolerant of Bürger, recognizing in him a brilliant balladeer; it was of those like Kleist and Hoffmann who represented a challenge to his equilibrium that he was less tolerant. For him the attraction of Lenore will have been twofold, a matter of those reckless, headlong, galloping rhythms, and of the heady mixture of sex and the macabre, for Lenore, as Roy Pascal once noted, is an exercise in the macabre: ‘He told his friends that it would scarify like the ghost in Hamlet, and recommended them to read it at twilight in a ghostly room, with a skull on the table.’26 This reads like the mise-en-scène 24 25 26

Jeffrey L. Sammons, in his Introduction to Schiller, The Ghost-Seer, tr. Bohn (Columbia: Camden House, 1922), ix. Walter Pater is a similar case. E. J. Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction 1762-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 141. Roy Pascal, The German Sturm und Drang (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1953), 271.

58 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective for meetings of the Vehmgericht as described by less historically minded Gothic novelists, although the skull, borrowed from Hamlet, is ahistorical in the Vehmgericht context, although it appears on the judge’s table in Johann Nepomuk Komareck’s Ida, oder das Vehmgericht ([1792]). An American English scholar, Eric Hadley Denton, recently went to the seeming heart of the matter when he wrote that ‘More than most writers, Goethe wrote in tonalities, Classicism being his major key, Gothic one of his minor ones,’27 the implication being that the early Goethe, no less than the early Schiller, had a Gothic persona or shadow or alter ego, and that it was this persona that Carlyle, in the Preface to the second edition (1839) of his translation of Wilhelm Meister, famously dubbed ‘a dealer in demonology and osteology’: Others [...], who have fallen-in with Retzsch ‘s Outlines and the extracts from Faust, consider Goethe [...] a woe-begone hypochondriac [...] a wild mystic, a dealer in demonology and osteology, who draws attention by the aid of skeletons and evil spirits [...] Faust continues to be called a monster; and Goethe is regarded as a man of ‘some genius’, which he has perverted to produce all manner of misfashioned prodigies; things false, abortive, formless, gorgons and hydras and chimeras dire.28

However, what Carlyle is describing here is not his own view of Goethe, but that of readers at the time of Goethe’s death. Whether Götz von Berlichingen (1773), Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774) Claudine von Villa Bella (1775), Wilhelm Meisters theatralische Sendung (1776-85), Der Groß-Kophta (1792), Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795-6), and the ‘vampire-poem’ Die Braut von Korinth (first published in the Musen-Almanach, 1798), all of which have Gothic links of various kinds, are eo ipso to be regarded as ‘misfashioned prodigies’, remains to be seen, but Faust (1770 onwards) with its Mephistopheles and devil’s brood of witches and lamiae (vampires, Kinderfresserinnen) points forward to Gothic titles as varied as The Monk, Melmoth the Wanderer, Sidonia the Sorceress, Frankenstein, and Dracula, may seem to be another matter. Collectively, these works include numerous ‘Gothic’ features, among them the Devil and the diabolical compact, the Wandering Jew, the Demonic (Daimon, das Dämonische), Doppelgänger, witches, vampires and other creatures of Graeco-Gothic mythology and the collective unconscious, the idea of life as a monster seeking quem devoret, the idea of transgression,disquisitions on death and suicide, the sublime of terror, the 27 28

In The Handbook to Gothic Literature, 70. Carlyle, ‘Translator’s Preface to the First Edition’. On Retzsch, see William Vaughan, German Romanticism and English Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979), 123-154.

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abyss (and, with it, the mise-en-abyme), the ruined chapel and ruined arch, banditti, the stranger, the secret society and its mysterious emissary or Genius, the secret tribunal, and so forth. Whether, individually, these amount to more than Gothic flourishes or arabesques will become clear presently, but even if it is true that Werther, Faust and Die Braut von Korinth have ‘proved critical to the gothic agenda’,29 this does not of itself mean that they are Gothic texts. Werther is Goethe’s pathological shadow,30 not his Gothic one. The fact that some of his works, great and small alike, include motifs that are also found in Gothic, may signify no more than that they were written in the modern ‘Gothic’ period. In order to assesswhether any of them can reasonably and usefully be termed Gothic, we need to consider (i) what Gothic features or motifs are to be found in individual works, (ii) how significant in structural or hermeneutic terms any such Gothic elements are, and (iii) whether any of his works can, as a whole, be considered Gothic. More specifically there is the question whether he can be said to have produced a Gothic novel as such. There are two candidates: Werther, which seems to be, and Wilhelm Meister, whichis, in some ways, the most Gothic of his works. That said, to pass as fully Gothic, a text must have a sustained atmosphere of terror or dread, for the engine of Gothic is fear: ‘The principal aim of [early Gothic] novels was to evoke chilling terror by exploiting mystery and a variety of horrors’.31 Neither Werther nor Wilhelm Meister - to both of which we are coming incorporates such an atmosphere; nor were they intended to do so.

III What Parsons calls the ‘discordant and infelicitous, though spasmodic, influence of German literature’ on Scott’s work32 begins with his early translation from Goethe, Goetz of Berlichingen with the iron hand (1799; repr. Zwickau, 1829, as Vol. 137 of The Works of Walter Scott), which, with Tytler’s translation of Die Räuber, not only introduced German Sturm und Drang drama into England, but at the same time introduced a work that was, in one important respect, influential in the development of Gothic fiction. The translation, though well received (‘No Englishman capable of understanding

29 30 31 32

Denton, in Handbook, 70. T. J. Reed, 21. M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 7th edn (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt, Brace: 1999), 111. Parsons 95.

60 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective dramatic excellence can peruse it without delight’),33 was less succesful than Scott had hoped, largely because it appeared at a time when for historical reasons German literature was under a cloud in England, which meant that Götz suffered by association with the perceived excesses of Stella and Die Räuber. In Germany, on the other hand, Götz von Berlichingen (1773) was hugely influential: it both served to introduce the Ritterstück which led to the Ritterroman of the 1780s and 1790s, and translated from history to literature the Vehmgericht that swiftly caught the European Gothic imagination once Benedicte Naubert had made it her own, revealing its Gothic potential, in Hermann von Unna (1788) and Alf von Dülmen (1791). Goethe had read law without any great enthusiasm, it has to be said, for das Ewig-Weibliche was already proving a distraction - at the University of Leipzig, which he left in 1768, before one of Benedicte Naubert’s two elder brothers, Heinrich Michael Hebenstreit (1745-1786), was appointed to a Chair in the History of Law34 there. Author of De Interrogatione Testium in Secreto (1780), Hebenstreit specialized inmedieval law (Rechtsaltertümer), a subject that left its mark on Götz. As it is, the source of Goethe’s knowledge of the Vehmgericht was Justus Möser, Osnabrückische Geschichte mit Urkunden (1768 [repr. Berlin & Stettin: Nicolai, 1780], Vol. I, 248-55), and ‘Von dem Faustrecht’ (in Die Osnabrückischen Intelligenzblätter nebst den nützlichen Beiträgen, April 1770), which was also one of Veit Weber’s sources in Die heilige Vehme (1795). Götz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand depicts the sort of community which that himmlischer Geist (sublime spirit) as Goethe calls him, Justus Möser, admired. Faustrecht, the idea of the robber barons, that might is right, is one of the things the heiligeVehme was originally designed to curb. Otherwise Goethe’s legal historical sources were Johann Philipp Datt, De pace publica (1698), which he mentions in Chapter IX of Dichtung und Wahrheit, the Corpus iuris Germanici publici ac privati (1760), and Johann Stephan Pütter, Grundriß der Staatsveränderungen des teutschen Reichs (1764). The Vehmgericht scene in Götz that impressed so many other dramatists and novelists is so short that one might suppose Goethe to be not particularly interested in the institution first mentioned in Act I (‘Im bischöflichen Palast zu Bamberg’) in the form of the ‘Schöppenstuhl’, but the supposition would be wrong, for the Freischöffenbund or heilige Vehme, of which he makes effective dramatic use, goes to the heart of sixteenthcentury German national history and therefore of German national pride. Götz inevitably has ‘Gothic’ features: it is set in the unstable Gothic world of the German Renaissance, its hero a Faustrechtsritter, and first features the 33 34

The Critical Review, 26 [1799], 429-32. Law in the sense of utriusque juris, both Roman and Canonical Law.

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most characteristic institution and secret society of the Gothic novel, the Bund der Freyschöffen (secret tribunal), but, despite the fact that the knightly ‘wild riders’ of the late Middle Agesare the medieval forerunners of the banditti of the late eighteenth century, it is Gothic in the historical rather than the literary historical sense, closer to the early folk ballad than to the Gothic fiction of, say, Veit Weber; more specifically it is reminiscent of the English tale of Robin Hood. On the other hand Adelheid von Walldorf, as ‘werewolf’,35 is both a Gothic figure and a literary ancestress of Kleist’s Penthesilea and, through her, of Hoffmann’s Aurelia. Götz von Berlichingen inspired, in descending order of literary quality, Schiller’s Die Räuber, Veit Weber’s Sagen der Vorzeit, Schlenkert’s Friedrich mit der gebißnen Wange, and Carl Gottlob Cramer’s Haspar a Spada, which is a caricature of the Ritterroman and a pastiche of Götz. It also left its mark on the work of Lewis and Radcliffe.36 Walter Scott translated two Ritterdramen, Jakob Maier’s Fust von Stromberg (1782; 4th impression, 1807) and Josef Marius von Babo’s Otto von Wittelsbach (1782), both of which remained unpublished;37 in a letter dated 13 December 1827 he described them as ‘sad trash’.38 Although he had little time for imitations of Götz, Goethe allowed Otto von Wittelsbach to be performed in Weimar in 1791-97. If Götz von Berlichingen inaugurated the Romantic cult of the late Middle Ages, it was the novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774: The sorrows of Werter, tr. Daniel Malthus, 1779, repr. Woodstock, 1991) that, with Young’s Night Thoughts (1742-45: tr. Ebert, Klagen oder Nachtgedanken über Leben, Tod und Unsterblichkeit, 1760-71), established the Gothic mood in Germany, and thus helped to prepare the ground for the Gothic mode. Goethe, who knew the Night Thoughts by 1766, did not escape the melancholia of the time.He was seventeen when he wrote to his sister ‘I make English verses [...] that a stone would weep’,39 showing that he was indulging in the popular pastime of Nachtgedankenmacherei.40 The most important European novel of the immediate pre-Gothic period, Werther is crucial at this stage of my argument 35 36

37

38 39 40

Boyle, I: 119. See Helga Hushahn, ‘Sturm und Drang in Radcliffe and Lewis’, in Exhibited by Candlelight: Sources and Developments in the Gothic Tradition, ed. V. Tinkler-Villani, P. Davidson and J. Stevenson (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995). See D. M. Mennie, ‘Sir Walter Scott’s Unpublished Translations of German Plays,’ MLR, 33 (1938), 234-9, and Otto Brahm, Das deutsche Ritterdrama des 18. Jahrhunderts (Strasbourg: Trübner, 1880). Quoted from Mennie, 236. Quoted from L. M. Price, The Reception of English Literature in Germany (New York and London: Blom, 1968), 152. Cf. Reed, 21 (‘Goethe [...] flirted with melancholy, [...] never quite persuading himself to take it seriously).

62 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective since Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809)is self-evidently not a Gothic novel, and, one major and a few minor parallels notwithstanding, neither is Wilhelm Meister. Werther, on the other hand, has significant Gothic-period features, including the way in which it is presented as the work of an ‘editor’, the leitmotif of the ruined arch that found its way into the work of Caspar David Friedrich, the graveyard atmospherics that reflect Young’s Night Thoughts and are inherent in the work of Friedrich (see Chapter 13), the idea of transgression, the abyss that confronts Werther - as it was to confront Kleist and De Quincey - and is henceforth recurrent in Goethe’s work, the view of the universe as an all-consuming, devouring monster,41 its Ossianism, its cult of death, and so on. Alhough they do not of themselves make it a Gothic novel, such features relate Werther to Gothic, and they are only a beginning. The letter of 12 October shows that Werther shares Goethe’s attachment to ‘Ossian’s’ Fingal, which overlaps with Gothic. The ‘Celtic’ melancholy of Ossian, his ‘vein of piercing regret and sadness’,42 coming, as it does, on top of the melancholia of Blair’s The Grave43 and Young’s Night Thoughts, is an important component of the Gothic mood. Nathan Drake showed in his essay ‘On Gothic Superstition’ (1798) that in terms of sublimity and imagination, and above all of supernaturalism, Ossian ‘[gave] his supernatural agents employments new to Gothic fiction’: ‘The abrupt and rapid fervour of imagination, the vivid touches of enthusiasm, mark his composition, and his spectres rush upon the eye with all the stupendous vigour of wild and momentary creation.’44 Werther’s letter of 12 October is an example of this sudden fervour of imagination. Ossianic supernaturalism has more to do with the Gothic mood than with the literary mode in which this is embedded, but the very fact that Fingal is counterfeit was to put Ossianism back at the heart of the Gothic aesthetic. The relationship between Goethe and Werther, Goethe and Jerusalem, and between Werther and Albert points forward to the play of doubles that informs Goethe’s work. Like a number of Gothic novels, including those of Grosse and Tieck, Werther is a quasi-autobiographical fantasia, an account of what, under less propitious circumstances, could have happened. Werther is not Goethe as he is or was, but he is a Goethe potenziert, the author as he could so easily have become if he had allowed his 41 42 43 44

Goethe, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (Tübingen: Wunderlich, 1976), 90 (letter of 15 August). Matthew Arnold, in the course of his lectures on Celtic literature, 1866. See C. Müller, R. Blairs « Grave» und die Grabes- und Nachtdichtung (Weimar: Wagner, 1909). Quoted from Gothic Documents. A sourcebook 1700-1820, ed. E. J. Clery and Robert Miles (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 157.

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subconscious fear of the abyss to flood into his consciousness. Why does he avoid the Alps, if not because he is afraid of them, afraid that their Abgründe could tip into negativity the joyful acceptance of life that feeds his creativity? By the same token, why does he not comment on Piranesi’s Carceri d’ Invenzione, which he clearly knew and which normally call forth voluble comment from all who see them? Goethe’s persona in Werther is in the same situation asPiranesi’s persona in the Carceri d’Invenzione of c. 1745.45 These powerful images of ‘metaphysical prisons, whose seat is within the mind, whose walls are made of nightmare and incomprehension, whose chains are anxiety and their racks a sense of personal and even generic guilt’,46 point to the heart of Gothic, for they involve space that is as awesomely vast as, there being no escape from it, it is claustrophobic: the human, reduced to puny contingency by the presence of the transcendent, which includes what German writers would call the negative transcendence of the Fall, faces an abyss in which the imagination is afraid of losing itself and which therefore represents an inner abyss or mise-en-abyme.47 These prisons of the imagination, which leave it with no way out other than the fall into death, are closely connected with Coleridge’s Gothic Cathedral of Imagination in Chapter 13 of the Biographia Literaria (1817). The letter of 18 August lists some of the sublime phenomena noted by James Beattie in a work later translated by Carl Grosse48 - stupendous mountains, precipices, mountain torrents, deserts, the immense ocean - as contributing to man’s awareness of his own puniness and contingency, and the thunderstorm earlier inthe novel is also sublimely terrifying, but the most Gothic images in the novel are those of the abyss (‘Erstarrt, ohne Sinne steht sie vor einem Abgrunde; alles ist Finsternis um sie her’ [Amazed! petrified! she stands before the abyss of misery she sees encompass her; all around is darkness] - ‘Ungeheure Berge umgaben mich, Abgründe lagen vor mir’ [Stupendous mountains emcompassed me; precipices were before my feet]). The abyss-motif recurs at the end of Faust II, when it encapsulates the death-side of Life, the entropy that underlies creation. The underlying preoccupation of Gothic is the naked human condition of mortality, the final triumph of brute matter over mind. What most saps Werther’s will to 45 46 47 48

These images can be found in Jonathan Scott, Piranesi (London: Academy/St. Martin’s, 1975). Aldous Huxley, Prisons (London: The Trianon Press, 1949), 21f., 24f. The leitmotif of the abyss entered Gothic in 1789, with Naubert’s Elisabeth, Erbin von Toggenburg. Carl Grosse’s translation of James Beattie’s Illustrations on Sublimity (1783) appeared as ‘Erläuterungen über das Erhabene’ in the Neue Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und freyen Künste (30 [1785], 5-52, 195-228.

64 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective live is what he comes to see as the omnipresence of death, that hidden destructive power that exists in everything (‘mir untergräbt das Herz die verzehrende Kraft, die in dem All der Natur verborgen liegt’)49 and which is symbolized by the abyss. His perception at such points is Gothic enough, but one perception, however Gothic, does not does not constitute a Gothic novel. Denton insists that the ‘graveyard atmospherics’ of Werther and the way in which, ‘in the course of the novel, nature becomes a destructive, lifedevouring monster’ ‘ooze Gothicness’.50 Even without the overstatement that subverts it, the argument would still rest on sand, for Gothic is only partly a matter of the imagery, machinery and motifs that were originally deemed to constitute the genre. The abyss image of Werther recurs in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. In Bk III, ch. xi, Wilhelm blesses his better Genius for having drawn him back in time from the seductive brink to which he had come so close, which is simply normal figurative usage, but in BkVII, ch. iv the Physician speaks in Gothic when he bemoans the fact that his hollow empty ‘Ich’ (self) has come to seem like an immeasurable abyss from which two Spectres have arisen to plague him. This, it seems to me, is the meaning that was inherent, if inchoate, in Werther. The abyss has now come to stand for the archaic, anarchic underworld of the self. The subconscious and the unplumbed, unfathomable depths of its fears are uttterly Gothic, a sudden glimpse into the depths of the imagination that Goethe normally kept hidden even from his own view. As the conventions of early Gothic are internalized, the emphasis comes to be onthe instability of the inner world and its constructs, so that Gothic becomes a code for the exploration of the deep structures of the self and its anxieties.51 Having to do with interior space and more especially with haunted consciousness, it comes to be about invasive, entrapping interiority and the nature and contradictions of subjectivity. As the first novel to incorporate the ‘sickening descent into disintegration’52 that is basic to Gothic, Werther almost becomes an early Gothic novel. Werther faces two kinds of abyss, the ‘Abgründe’ of the letter of 18 August and the inner one that is compounded of those originally physical precipices and a depth of the mind that opened up when the element of fear was added. The abyss that Werther faces, which may in some sense go back to Niels Klim, represents the sublime of terror, and points straight to the Pit 49 50 51 52

Translations from The sorrows of Werter, tr. Daniel Malthus (1789, repr. Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1991), 85, 90, 92. In The Handbook to Gothic Literature, 70. Miles, Gothic Writing 1750-1820, 3, 21. See Chris Baldick (ed.), Gothic Tales (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), xix.

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that Poe was to describe, the ‘cavern of death’ and ‘cavern of horror’ of the Gothic popular novel, but there is more to it than that, for Werther’s inner abyss also represents an interiorized Gothic edifice, the house of the mind that has become uninhabitable, the crumbling refuge of a disintegrating ego. The key component of Gothic is the edifice, whether this comprises mental architecture à la Piranesi with its aerial abyss,53 a crumbling Gothic pile, some kind of unstable ‘subterraneous chamber’ or system of passages, or their metaphorical, textual and hermeneutic equivalents. Werther’s own inner life or interiority constitutes just such a crumbling edifice. When he finds that he can live neither with Charlotte, nor - the compelling factor without her, he has no refuge, for without her life would be too terrible to face. Now to count as fully Gothic, a text must have a sustained atmosphere of terror or dread. The fact that it lacks such an atmosphere is the reason why Smollett’s Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753, discussed in Chapter 10) cannot be regarded as a fully fledged Gothic novel. Whether Werther has this atmosphere can perhaps be argued either way, but Werther’s horror of life is counterpointed by an equally extreme acceptance, so that his fear - and ours for him - is not sufficiently sustained to be Gothic. Highly Gothic though it is in parts, and in a number of ways, Werther still does not read like a Gothic novel. When all is said and done, it is a novel of overwrought sensibility rather than a Gothic novel as such. It is perhaps in his ballads that Goethe comes closest to the contemporary Gothic mode. Gothic phantoms of robbery, Raubmord, vampirism, necrophilia, necrophagy and lycanthropy swirl around two short texts and other texts to which they are related. Claudine von Villa Bella (1775) and Die Braut von Korinth (1798), distant in time, come together in the present context. The operetta Claudine von Villa Bella, like not a few Gothic novels, is set in an imaginary Spain54 and features the motif of the ‘two brothers’ that will produce the ‘zwei Seelen’ of Tasso and the ubiquitous Doppelgänger of Goethe’s work. Crugantoni (alias Alonzo), the elder brother of Pedro, has opted for the care-free, vagrant life of a bandit and a Don Juan; here is a part-model for Vulpius’s Rinaldo Rinaldini, whose life is far from care-free. Pedro, for his part, is a successful official.55 Together, the brothers represent Goethe, the incorrigible Don Juan (the Lothario of Wilhelm Meister) and the conscientious administrator. While it could be said that Goethe’s little 53 54

55

In Greek and Latin, ‘abyss’ denotes a world of endless depth or height, the chaos at the beginning and end of the world. It is the excesses of the Spanish Inquisition (established in 1479, abolished in 1808, reinstated in 1814, finally abolished in 1834) that account for this, and some of the best known Spanish painting is manifestly Gothic. For a fuller account of Claudine von Villa Bella, see Boyle I: 214-6.

66 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective romance is the progenitor of the Gothic robber-plays, it was Götz that gave Schiller his model for Die Räuber. Claudine von Villa Bella is, however, one of the works that led to the Räuberroman or bandito novel. The ‘Verkleidungsund Verwechslungsspiel’, the dressing up and confusion of identities, is a feature of Gothic. M. G. Lewis knew Claudine von Villa Bella:56 the Bürgerstyle ballad ‘Frederick and Alice’ in his Tales of Wonder57 is a free translation by Walter Scott of a fragment of romance from Goethe’s operetta. The young knight Frederick leaves Alice behind in France, ‘Helpless, ruined, left forlorn’, who dies of her grief. Stopping at a ruined chapel, Frederick is judged by a tribunal of the dead, found guilty of perjury, and condemned to death, where in romantic terms he rejoins his beloved. Friedrich Laun’s ‘Die Totenbraut’,58 best known from its inclusion in the Gothic Gespensterbuch, belongs to the same complex, and Goethe’s ‘Der Totentanz’ may have been Johann August Apel’s model for a tale of the same title in the Gespensterbuch. Goethe’s predilection for ghosts goes back to the swirling spectres of Fingal. Taken at face value, Goethe’s ‘große Gespensterromanze’, Die Braut von Korinth,is a Gothic vampire poem that anticipates the English-language texts of which he was to disapprove. For his biographer, who reads it biographically, it is so unsettling a poem because, beneath a heavy disguise, it is Werther again: an invitation to us to share our sympathies witha man preparing to commit emotional and marital self-destruction for the sake of his unsatisfied heart.59

Goethe’s ‘vampyrisches Gedicht’ (vampire poem),60 as he called it, is a Gothic ballad on the lines of Bürger’s better-known, arguably better, and certainly more influential Lenore (written in 1773, first published in 1774).61 Lenore is Gothic in two senses: first, in the old sense of macabre, and, second, in the modern literary sense. Die Braut von Korinth, by contrast, is merely - albeit notably - macabre. Mario Praz referred to Goethe as ‘the first [poet] to give literary form to the fearsome vampire legends which had

56 57 58 59 60 61

Cf. Guthke, ASNS, CXCIII (1956), 276. Tales of Terror and Wonder, collected by M. G. Lewis (London: Routledge, 1887), 222225. Mary Shelley’s ‘History of the Inconstant Lover’. Boyle, II: 500. See Von denen Vampiren, ed. Dieter Sturm and Klaus Völker (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1994), 15-20, 560f. Washington Irving’s Gothic tale of necrophilia,’ The Adventure of the German Student’, in Tales of a Traveller, appears to be based on Goethe’s Die Braut von Korinth. The student is named Wolfgang.

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arisen in Illyria in the eighteenth century’,62 and Christopher Frayling, in his anthology Vampyres,63 has described Die Braut von Korinth as ‘the first [text] to make the vampire respectable in literature’. It does this by playing down the vampire element. Mme de Staël wrote of the ‘mélange d’amour et d’effroi’ (mixture of love and fear), the ‘volupté funèbre’ (dark delight) in the atmosphere of the scene in which ‘l’amour fait alliance avec la tombe, la beauté même ne semble qu’une apparition effrayante (love makes common cause with death, and even beauty seems but a frightening apparition).64 Goethe’s ballad is scarcely a vampire text in the expected sense: ‘es [sind] kaum romantische Grabesschauer, die uns hier anwehen: die Ballade ist ein ganz aufklärerisches Plädoyer gegen den lebensfeindlichen, asketischen Aspekt des Christentums’ (what comes our way here is hardly the romantic horror of death: the ballad is an Enlightenment-style denunciation of the doleful, ascetic aspect of Christianity).65 While it is true that it ‘re-introduced the female vampire into modern European literature’,66 its background- and Goethe’s real concern – is ‘der alten Götter bunt Gewimmel’ (the panoply of gods [of ancient Greece]).67 This so-called vampire-poem is in reality evidence of Goethe’s Greek paganism, his central concern being the difference between Greek-pagan and Christian notions of the supernatural, which places it on a supra-Gothic level, and the ancient Greek aspect of the poem is in any case more important than the modern Gothic one. The later Goethe, who viewed the French and English vampire-texts of the time with distaste,68 would surely have regarded das Vampyrische as ‘ungesund’ (sick). In this case at least the classicist/poet won the day. Die Braut von Korinth has long occupied an early place in the lengthy succession of post-classical vampire texts, but it is Gothic neither in spirit nor in intention.69 In Goethe’s work, it leads to the Hexen-Sabbat in which Faust sees the severed head of a young Medusa, by which he is fascinated. The attraction of the Medusa for Goethe is shown by his description of Rondanini’s Medusa as ‘ein wundersames Werk, das, den Zwiespalt zwischen Tod und Leben, zwischen Schmerz und Wollust ausdrückend, einen unnennbaren Reiz [...] 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), 76. Christopher Frayling, Vampyres. Lord Byron to Count Dracula (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), 43. Mme de Staël, De L’Allemagne, Deuxième Partie, ch. XIII. Dieter Sturm and Klaus Völker (eds), Von denen Vampiren, 560f. Handbook to Gothic Literature, 70. As we have seen, the female vampire was introduced into modern Europe by Galland. Von denen Vampiren, 560. Gautier’s La Morte amoureuse was inspired by Die Braut von Korinth. An example of the German Gothic vampire-novel such is I. F. Arnold’s Der Vampir (1801).

68 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective über uns ausübt (a strange work which, in its expression of the polarity of life and death, grief and desire, wields an undefinable power over us).70 After Ludwig I of Bavaria had acquired the Medusa Rondanini in 1814, Goethe, having been immensely impressed by the original when he saw it in Rome in 1786, asked the King for a plaster copy, which was duly made for him in Rome. In the Gothic context the Medusa appears in the guise of Lewis’s Matilda and Meinhold’s Sidonia.71 Many of the fragments of one great confession, of which Goethe implied his work to consist,72 prove to be joined by a somewhat tenuous Gothic thread. Like Schiller, he was repeatedly brought back to the Gothic, in his case by his initially most nearly Gothic and eventually most anti-Gothic work, Faust,73 an early box of Gothic tricks that, once laid aside, he was for a long time loth to reopen. Spanning the whole of his creative career from 1770 to 1832, and set in Gothic sixteenth-century Germany, Faust opens with ‘Northern medieval murk [...] nordic hocus-pocus’,74 that is, with Faust (the historical Faust, astronomer and necromancer,75 died in c. 1540), in his dark, cheerless Gothic study, ready, in his quest for knowledge, to turn to magic in the form of alchemy that will be the resort of all the Cagliostrotype charlatans and scoundrels of Gothic novels of the Geisterseher or necromancer kind. For its part the Faust complex (Urfaust, Faust. Ein Fragment, Faust I, Faust II) opens in a location that is Gothic in the historical sense and touches the Gothic literary convention at a number of points (Satanism, the Gothic demonic or supernatural, the Doppelgänger, witchcraft, alchemy and the homunculus which it generates, incarceration,76 and the 70 71

72 73

74 75 76

Italienische Reise, 2. Teil, April 1788 (quoted from Praz). With Rondanini’s head of the Medusa may be compared Edward Burne-Jones’s portrait of Sidonia von Bork, heroine-villainess of Wilhelm Meinhold’s late Gothic novel Sidonia von Bork, die Klosterhexe (1847-8), which I discussed in ‘Who’s Afraid of Sidonia von Bork? In The Novel in Anglo-German Context, ed. Susanne Stark (Amsterdam & Atlanta, GA:Rodopi, 2000), 213-228. ‘Alles, was von mir bekannt geworden, sind nur Bruchstücke einer großen Konfession’ (Dichtung und Wahrheit, II,7). In an essay on ‘Faust and the Gothic Novel’ in Interpreting Goethe’s Faust Today, ed. J. K. Brown, M. Lee and T. P. Saine (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1994), 68-80., Jane K. Brown sees the ‘Gothic’ features of Faust as including supernatural figures, excessively natural figures, plot motifs, elements of setting, psychodynamics, formal characteristics, and ambivalence of tone. Her conclusion, that ‘Faust is [...] Gothic precisely because it is anti-Gothic’ sheds little light on the subject. Reed, Goethe, 66, 67. On Dr Faustus as necromancer, see William Godwin, Lives of the Necromancers (1834, repr. New York: Gordon Press, 1976), 199-216. Thanks to its context the prison scene in Faust transcends the comparable (Inquisition) scenes in Gothic novels from Lewis’s The Monk onwards.

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classical Walpurgisnacht with its pantheon of chthonic monsters, sirens, griffins, and lamiae (vampiric she-demons) among them. If it had been completed in the 1770s, Faust might well have been seen, in retrospect, as Gothic, but it was worked on, intermittently, over such a long period of time, during whichthe literary Gothic mode flowered and then faded, that it was completed by a very different Goethe, a classical poet whose philosophy of life derives from ancient Greece rather than those enticing Northern murks and quirks of his youth. That Faust is not damned, as in the legend, but is saved, arguably by sleight-of-hand, means that the ending is utterly unGothic. In literary historical terms the Gothic paraphernalia is little more than an incrustation from which Goethe finally freed his largely autobiographical hero. These points made, Faust is, in the end, saved as if by magic, in other words by means of the fairytale ending that is common in the Gothic novel of the 1790s (Benedicte Naubert, Ann Radcliffe). ‘Wer immer strebend sich bemüht, den können wir erlösen’? Tell that to the fairies. Faust’s pact with the Devil provided Lewis with a model for Ambrosio’s pact with Matilda’s satanic master in The Monk. Guthke pointed to the influence of Faust. Ein Fragment (1790) on The Monk (1796)77 in terms of the role of the Devil in both works. Essentially it is the traditional Faust legend (from which Goethe later moved away) to which Lewis reverts in his luridly Gothic tale that serves, by contrast, to illustrate the poetic, aesthetic and philosophical depths of the work that Goethe completed many years after The Monk had been forgotten. When The Monk was published, Lewis sent a copy to Karl August Böttiger, scholarly head of the local Gymnasium, with whom he had boarded in Weimar. It was subsequently lent to Goethe (who lent it to Schiller) and to the Schlegels, hence A. W. Schlegel’s largely hostile review in the Jenaische allgemeine Literaturzeitung (1798, No. 157), which described it as being ‘aus schlechten deutschen [Romanen] zusammengeborgt und nachgeahmt’ (borrowed from and written in imitation of second-rate German novels), and condemned it as a sign of ‘die tiefste Barbarei der Einbildungskraft und des Geschmacks’ (the most profound barbarism of the imagination and of taste).78 Lewis’s Matilda reappeared as a female Faust in Mathilde von Villanegas oder der weibliche Faust (1799), an anonymous rehash of Friedrich von Oertel’s translation of The Monk.

77 78

Guthke, 38f. See A. W. Schlegel, Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Eduard Böcking, 12 Vols (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1846-7), XI, 269-74, and A. W. Schlegel, Vorlesungen über schöne Literatur und Kunst, ed. J. Minor (Heilbronn: Henninger, 1884), II: 36.

70 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Goethe’s Faust was a major influence on the poet Shelley, a Gothicist whose preoccupation with the Prometheus/Faust figure led both to his Prometheus Unbound (1820) and to the flawed Satan-Prometheus or Prometheus Bound figure, but also on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), on Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), and on Byron. Peacock, in his Memoirs of Shelley (1860) wrote of the formative influence on P. B. Shelley’s mind of Faust and Die Räuber. These two influences combine in Shelley’s Zastrozzi and St Irvyne, whose protagonists are not only rebels and criminals, but Faustian over-reachers:79 Like Zastrozzi, Ginotti [in St Irvyne] faced a crucial decision: he stood at seventeen at much the same crossroads as had his Faustian predecessors, and he had to choose [...] between a bond with humanity (represented by an acceptance of natural, bodily mortality) and a breach with them in the form of the opening abyss of speculative science80

Oppel noted that Shelley was ‘von Goethe’s Faust-Fragment zutiefst beeindruckt’ (mightily impressed by Goethe’s Faust. Ein Fragment).81 Shelley discovered Faust early, read it over and over again, ‘always with sensations which no other composition excites’,82 and, inspired by Lewis, began translating some scenes from the play in 1816. In 1822 he returned to it, translating two scenes in verse shortly before his death. In a letter to John Osborn of 10 April 1822 he wrote; ‘Perhaps [...] we admirers of Faust are on the right road to Paradise.’It was with his tragic early death in mind that Goethe called Shelley an ‘armseliger Wicht’ (poor devil).83 The scenes from Faust, translated by Shelley, that appeared in Byron’s The Liberal in 1822, he only got to know in 1826. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was prompted by her determination to outdo the men in the party at the Villa Diodati in imitating the tales in the Gespensterbuch edited by Johann August Apel and Friedrich Laun (6 vols, Leipzig: Göschen, 1811-17), known in French as Fantasmagoriana (1812) and in English as Tales of the Dead (1813); the French and English versions are different selections from the German original. The name Frankenstein appears to derive from a trashy, long forgotten German Gothic tale by Friedrich Christian Laukhard (1758-1822), Franz Wolfstein oder Begebenheiten 79 80 81 82 83

See David G. Halliburton, ‘Shelley’s „Gothic“ Novels’, Keats-Shelley Journal, 16 (1967), 41. Stephen C. Behrendt, in the Introduction to P.B.Shelley, Zastrozzi and St Irvyne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), xvi. Oppel, II, 17. Shelley, Letters, ed .F .L. Jones, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), II, 406. Letter to F. von Müller of 20 Nov. 1824.

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eines dummen Teufels (1799),84 which gave Shelley the name of his Wolfstein and Mary the name of her Frankenstein (see Chapter 11). What is often missing from discussions of Mary Shelley’s sources of inspiration is Goethe’s Faust, to which she had easy access, and which features a manmade homunculus generated alchemically in accordance with Paracelsus’s De generatione rerum naturalium. The idea had been at the back of Shelley’s mind ever since his Eton days, only to rise to the surface in the course of those famous conversations at the Villa Diodati. M. G. Lewis, who stayed with the Byron-Shelley party in August 1816, translated ‘much of Faust’ for Byron viva voce. That Byron was, in his own words,85 ‘much struck’ with Faust is confirmed by the marks it left on Manfred, which was also much indebted to the Gothic mode. It has repeatedly been shown that Goethe’s Faust was a model for the character of Maturin’s Melmoth.86 Melmoth is Faust, Mephistopheles and the Wandering Jew rolled into one, while Immalee is modelled on Goethe’s Gretchen, whose fate is hers. Oppel has shown that the parallels between Gretchen and Immalee can be pursued in detail.87 Notwithstanding the fact that Maturin’s ‘Faust’ is claimed by the Devil, many parallels show Melmoth to be closer to Goethe’s Faust than to the Faust Volksbuch or to Marlowe’s Dr Faustus. Nicholas Boyle has written of the attraction secret ‘fraternities’ held for Goethe from his teens onwards, and is surely right to ascribe this to the young man’s wish to regularize ‘the social marginality of his family’.88 The early liking for student fraternities and fraternities of strolling players89 led to a more serious engagement with the secret societies of the time, the attack on the group of players in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre being a reflection of the dangers of travel at the end of the eighteenth century, when bands of marauding robbers and unpaid ex-mercenaries were a constant danger. Nothing is more characteristic of the late eighteenth century than these mushrooming secret societies, some of which begin as Enlightenment-style philanthropic organizations à la franc-maçonnerie but, by way of reaction 84 85

86 87 88 89

Available in Göttingen University Library. The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, ed. R. E. Prothero, 6 vols (London: Murray, 1904-1924), IV, 97 (letter of 7 June 1820). See also IV, 97 (letter of 4 April 1817 to Samuel Rogers). It has also been claimed that Melmoth shaped Goethe’s ‘tragic vision,’ see Frederick S. Frank, The First Gothics (New York & London: Garland, 1987), 230. Horst Oppel, Englisch-deutsche Literaturbeziehungen, 2 vols (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1971), II, 18. Boyle, I: 58. The same factor lies behind Goethe’s patrician attitude to the plebs. The Gothic novelist C. H. Spieß started off as a strolling player of the sort described in Wilhelm Meister.

72 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective against the Aufklärung, take on an increasingly occultist character, while others go back to the Gothic fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. There is even – another German first! – a Bund der Teufelsbeschwörer. The main and most characteristic secret society of the time is the Masonic Order, including its ramifications in the Templars, who are a considerable presence in late eighteenth-century fiction (cf. Naubert, Schiller), in Illuminism and, to a lesser extent, in Rosicrucianism. Until it was banned in Bavaria in 1784, together with its parent body, the Freimaurerbund, the Bund der Illuminaten had many lodges (Hochgradkapitel) in universities and literary circles. R. van Dülmen has reprinted a document entitled ‘Ueber Gewalt der unsichtbaren Brüder’ (1796) that shows why the Illuminatenbund was banned.90 A. Barruel (Mémoires pour servir à l’Histoire du Jacobinisme [1797-8], in German 1800-1803) and J. Robison (Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe [1797], in German 1800) were the chief proponents of the Conspiracy theory, Robison referring to the Bavarians as ‘die Lehrmeister in der Kunst, die Welt zu zerstören’ (masters in the art of destroying the world).91 The German secret-society novel as such, a major subset of the Gothic novel, goes back to the depiction of a quasi-Masonic-Illuminist secret society in Schiller’s Der Geisterseher, and includes the Illuminatenroman (Illuminati novel) and the Rosenkreuzerroman (Rosicrucian novel). As a category the Illuminatenroman includes novels as different as Schiller’s Der Geisterseher, Veit Weber’s Bund für Freyheit und Recht, Carl Grosse’s Der Genius, Jean Paul’s Die unsichtbare Loge, and Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister with its Turmgesellschaft, as well as lesser novels like Ignaz Arnold’s Mirakuloso, oder der Schreckensbund der Illuminaten (1802). Also known as perfectibilists (or, in Peacock’s Headlong Hall, perfectibilians), the eighteenth-century Illuminati, who took their name from a fifteenth-century German Satanist sect,92 were a republican society of deists and visionaries who, because they also believed in spiritism, magnetism, alchemy and magic, and claimed to be able to conjure up the invisible and the arcane, attracted charlatans like Cagliostro, who, befriended at arm’s distance by Goethe and invoked in Schiller’s Der

90

91

92

See Richard van Dülmen, Der Geheimbund der Illuminaten (Stuttgart: fromannholzboog, 1975, 417-419. The document in question originally appeared in Eudämonia oder deutsches Volksglück, 2 (1796), 232-5. See Dülmen, 94. Much of Peter Will’s ‘Translator’s Preface’ in Horrid Mysteries is devoted to the ‘secret order of the Illuminators’ in the form of a lengthy translation from Knigge’s Ueber den Umgang mit Menschen (2 vols, 1788; Will claims to quote from vol. III, 135-13). An early ‘Historical Account of the Order of the Illuminati’ is contained in the The German Museum, I (1800), 207-218, 296-305, 390-396. Cf. the Spanish Alumbrados founded in 1575.

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Geisterseher, performed feats of magic and alchemy, and is said to have founded a secret masonic sect, narrowly escaping death at the hands of the Inquisition. A theosophical secret society, the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross can be traced back to the anonymous Fama Fraternitatis des löblichen Ordens der Rosenkreuzer (1614), which tells of a fifteenth-century knight, Christian Rosenkreutz, who learned the proverbial ‘wisdom of the East’ before founding the secret order that bears his name. Many new societies were subsequently founded under the same name, the most important being the Neue Rosenkreuzer formed in southern Germany in 1765 and organized on similar lines to the Order of Jesuits. Another branch was still active in Prussia at the end of the eighteenth century. Cagliostro is also associated with the order, so that overlaps between fictionalizations of Rosicrucianism and Illuminism are the order of the day. The Rosicrucian-novel proper is represented by Johann Karl Wezel, Kakerlak; oder, Die Geschichte eines Rosenkreuzers (1784) and J. F. E. Albrecht, Geheime Geschichte eines Rosenkreuzers (1792). The often amorphous secret societies depicted in novels of this type93 variously reflect the late eighteenth century’s obsession with the idea of a great conspiracy against civilization, in which a number (spun by fear and fervid imagination into scores) of secret societies were supposedly involved. The Illuminati in particular were popularly thought to have been behind the French Revolution, in the wake of which it was feared they might be conspiring to bring about world revolution. The air was full of conspiracy theories in those days heady for Goths and democrats alike. Like Schiller and so many Gothic novelists Goethe was engrossed by the myriad secret societies of the time and their real and imagined conspiracies. On the most specific level this involves, as it did in the case of Schiller, his reaction to ‘Count Cagliostro’. The story starts with Schiller’s almost-Gothic novel Der Geisterseher (1789), in which the Sicilian is based on the adventurer and confidence-trickster ‘Count Cagliostro’, notorious for his part in the Diamond Necklace affair,94 which seemed to Goethe, who was driven almost out of his mind by it, to threaten the stability of the French monarchy; he subsequently regarded it as a prime cause of the French Revolution. He was deeply impressed by Schiller’s novel and, it seems, by its two most influential imitations - Kahlert’s Der Geisterbanner (1790) and Grosse’s Der Genius (1791-4) - and by Alessandro Conte Cagliostro (real name Giuseppe Balsamo, 1743-95), whose destitute family he visited in Palermo (Sicily) in 1787 and helped financially in 1788, the ‘Count’ being in 93 94

Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel’s novel Kreuz- und Querzüge des Ritters A bis Z (1793) attacked ‘das gesamte Ordenwesen’. See Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, or, for a full account, Carlyle, The Diamond Necklace (1837).

74 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective residence in the Bastille at the time.95 Cagliostro, like Mesmer, St. Germain, and the Gothic novelist Carl Grosse, who copied them, was a purveyor of mystery and a source of mystification to the mystery-hungry Goths. In the Papiere zur Italienischen Reise Goethe called him ‘Eins der sonderbarsten Ungeheuer [...] welche in unserm Jahrhundert erschienen sind’ (One of the oddest apparitions of our time). A spin-off from his befriending of the Balsamo family was Die Mystifizierten, subsequently changed to Der GroßCophta (1792), a counter-revolutionary ‘Masonic’ comedy involving the supposed founder of Egyptian Freemasonry, whose envoy Cagliostro claimed to be. A slight work, Gothic in content, Der Groß-Cophta96 connects Der Geisterseher, Der Geisterbanner and Der Genius with Wilhelm Meister. In it the Count, who claims to be the agent of the Groß-Cophta or Grand Kophta - a title used by Cagliostro when setting up an ‘Egyptian Lodge’ in Lyons in 1785 - founds a Masonic/Illuminist secret society that is a forerunner of the Turmgesellschaft in Wilhelm Meister. The real theme of Der Groß-Cophta, as of Der Geisterseher and its imitations, is, quoting from the English title of Cajetan Tschink’s Geisterseherimitation, ‘magical delusion’, meaning the way in which so many are being gulled by supposedly magical means. As early as 1773 Goethe had, in Satyros,97 mocked the gullibility that was to be challenged in Der Geisterseher; as Schiller was to do, he linked the illusions of occultism with those of religion and philosophy. What is surprising is that another, related influence appears to be at work in Wilhelm Meister, that of Carl Grosse’s Gothic monster of a novel, the Schiller-imitation Der Genius, better known in the English-speaking world as Horrid Mysteries. Goethe had wanted to study at Göttingen under Michaelis. Grosse not only briefly studied there, but got himself engaged (no less briefly) to Michaelis’s daughter Luise, whose sister Caroline he ridiculed, to his cost, in Der Genius. Goethe’s interest in mineralogy is well known; what is less well known is that Grosse eventually settled, under the name of Baron Bedemar, in Denmark, where he constructed a successful career for himself as a mineralogist of, it would seem, some distinction. Among extracts of letters received by Goethe in 181798 is one reading ‘Lenz habe eine Antwort von Prinz Christian von Dänemark erhalten. Von Graf Bedemar erwarte er ebenfalls ein Gegenschreiben, verbunden mit den wichtigsten nordischen Mineralien’ ([Professor Johann Georg] Lenz [Director of the Mineralogische 95 96 97 98

On Goethe and Cagliostro, see Boyle, I, 468-70; II, 171-7. See Boyle I: 468-70; II: 171-7. Satyros (1773, published 1817), a slight farce, features a Satan-like satyr and robber. Briefe an Goethe. Gesamtausgabe in Regestform, Bd 7 (1816-1817) (Weimar: Böhlaus Nachfolger, 2004), 457.

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Gesellschaft in Jena] has received a reply from Prince Christian [later King Christian VIII] of Denmark. He also is expecting a reply from Graf Bedemar [Keeper of Prince Christian’s Mineralogical Collection],99 together with [samples of] the most important Northern minerals). Graf Bedemar, friend of Prince Christian of Denmark, is none other thanthe one-time adventurer and Gothic novelist Carl Grosse, who thus attracted Goethe’s attention in 1817 as an eminent mineralogist. Whether or not Goethe, who was President of the Mineralogische Gesellschaft of Jena recognized Graf Bedemar (who was an honorary member of the society) as Carl Grosse, Grosse will no doubt have been amused to find himself treated by Goethe, no less, as one of the great and good. A self-ennobled adventurer who also gave himself the title of Hofrat,100 among many others, Grosse (the Don Carlos of the novel) was a man with an inflated if unclear self-image and a serious Cagliostro-complex. Backdrop to Der Genius are the ramifications and machinations of an Illuminist-type secret society, whose agent is the Genius in question.With its title harking back to the ‘geniuses’ of the early 1770s, Grosse’s novel was always likely to attract and, by virtue of its Geheimbündelei, to hold Goethe’s attention. He may have heard ofit from Schiller. Be this as it may, it is clear that Goethe borrowed from Grosse, among other things, the figure of the Genius or agent of an Illuminist-type secret society; hence the close parallels between Wilhelm Meister and Der Genius in this respect. At least two (J. G. H. Feder, C. Meiners) of the group of professors around whom Grosse hovered, acolytestyle, in Göttingen were Illuminati, and in Halle the renegade theologian Karl Friedrich Bahrdt (1741-92) tried, in 1788, while Grosse was studying there, to establish a secret order on the lines of the Illuminati. Goethe’s Turmgesellschaft too is au fond an Illuminati-like body. Having been a Mason since 1780, Goethe became a member of the Weimar branch of the Illuminati in February 1783;101 the branch (lodge) closed in 1784 after the Illuminati were banned by the Bavarian government. In 1784-5 he was working at an epic poem entitled ‘Die Geheimnisse’, involving a Rosicrucian order initially led by one Humanus, his name standing for the religious humanism of the order, who is succeeded by a Brother Markus. This is, as it were, the preliminary stage of the Turmgesellschaft (Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, VII, 9; VIII, 5), which reflects both the secret society in Grosse’s Der Genius and Goethe’s own experience as a Mason and Illuminatus; like the secret society in Der Genius it both guides and obstructs. It retains the air of 99 100 101

Om vulkaniske Producter fra Island(1817) is Bedemar’s descriptive catalogue of Prince Christian’s collection. And more especially ‘gräflich-Stollberg-stollbergischer Hofrat’. See W. Daniel Wilson, Geheimräte gegen Gegeimbünde (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1991), passim.

76 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective mystery and the mystification that surrounds the ‘Genius’, but serves a different purpose: whereas Grosse’s Illuminati are nihilists and revolutionaries, Goethe’s Turmgesellschaft stands for secular humanism.102 Some details in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (the use of the word Genius in the sense that it has in Der Genius; names including Elmire and C(h)lorinde; the title Marchese) appear to be playful allusions to Grosse’s novel, with which it proves to have not a little in common. If Goethe was capable of reading Carl Gottlob Cramer’s Leben, Thaten und Sittensprüche des lahmen Wachtel-Peters (1794-96) while on holiday in Karlsbad in 1812, it is hardly surprising that he read Der Genius in or before 1795. It is the fact that he borrowed from it in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre that constitutes an extraordinary footnote in the history of Gothic. The Romantic/Gothic motif of the ‘stranger’ - a series of strangers in Wilhelm Meister - also goes back to similar figures in Der Geisterseher and Der Geisterbanner, with the important difference, noted by Boyle,103 that the stranger, who in Gothic fronts the irrational rigmarole of a secret society (in Der Geisterbanner he is almost invariably referred to as the mysterious stranger), becomes with Goethe the representative of reason. It is a decisive difference between two novels that are in many ways strikingly similar: both are autobiographical fantasias that turn on the idea of the invisible web of fate in relation to personal development, it being primarily in their honesty and in their subtexts that they differ. Both novels have the search for self-definition at their centre. Der Genius is the work of a self-engrossed, lost young man - on the face of it, an adventurer, pilferer and fraud - who is labouring under the urgent need to produce a best-seller in order to make endsmeet, let alone finance the lifestyle of an ‘aristocratic’ adventurer. Grosse blurs the line between life and letters, as Goethe does too. His novel is based on the papers of Marquis C* von G** in the sense that the self-ennobled Carl Grosse is extrapolating from a pile of papers, in which Schiller, Tschink,104 the Illuminati, and (in Halle) Bahrdt’s preposterous order no doubt loom large, thereby giving the impression that he is narrating the events of a life that has already happened,

102 103 104

See Rosemarie Haas, Die Turmgesellschaft in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Bern: Lang, 1975). Boyle, II: 239. Cajetan Tschink’s Geschichte eines Geistersehers (1790-93) concerns a Portuguese Count, Miguel, and the ways in which he is duped by a controller-figure heading an Illuminist-inspired conspiracy. It differs from its model, Der Geisterseher, in that the series of scams (‘cheats’ in the language of the time) is endless. They all involve supposed magic which is detailed and explained at length. Tschink’s novel lacks all the qualities that make Der Geisterseher so outstanding.

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whereas in reality he is describing his own confused, chaotic inner life at a time when he has, as a result of exhibitionism and dishonesty, just destroyed the brilliant academic future that might well have been his (he had been regarded as having the potential to become a second Herder), shattering a nascent dream of fame. Der Genius is a terror-novel in that it revolves around a secret society that is based on the Illuminati and, at its more terrific moments, on the secret tribunal. If it revolves around the search for selfdefinition and discovery of his destined place in the world on the part of its subject, so too does Wilhelm Meister. The two novels have much in common, but their authors and narrators are very different. ‘Wilhelm’, who becomes Wilhelm Meister once he has mastered himself, is aninfinitely more complex man of letters and man of the world than ‘Marquis’ C[arlos] ‘von’ G[rosse]. Much of the time Wilhelm Meister defines Wilhelm’s place in the world by revisiting the events of the past, thereby depicting the inner world and growth of its subject. Basically it is a fictionalized autobiography that shows Goethe reflecting on his life up to his initiation into the Illuminati in 1783. Wilhelm Meister is, notionally, the sort of novel that Grosse should have written, and, in practice, the sort of novel he never could have written. Goethe tells the story of his own personal development against the backdrop of history and literary history, but Grosse, at the age of twentythree (as he was when Der Genius began appearing; whereas Goethe was forty-five when he began writing Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre in earnest) was not in a position to write such a novel. The only things on his mind at the time will have been the way in which he had thrown away what might have been a brilliant future and the need to scratch together a living, which he proceeded to do by means of unprincipled Vielschreiberei, most of ‘his’ subsequent works being purloined (by means of unachnowledged translation) from unnamed foreign writers . Both men are fascinated by secret societies, and in particular by the Illuminati. In the Bundesroman such societies are the front for a process of mystification designed to bamboozle the reader. The mysteries in question are usually resolved rationally, so that what initiallyseems to be the uncanny at work turns out to be the work of a sinister outside agency. This contrived demonic (dark landscapes, blue flames, mysterious strangers, revenants, vaults, caskets, elixirs, magic writing, magic mirrors, magic rings and so forth)105 may well have attracted Goethe, who already knew the Mille et une

105

I am indebted to Eric A. Blackall, The Novels of the German Romantics (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1983), 63f. As a poet, Goethe was a collector of Realien (images, concrete particulars). Seemingly demonic blue flames are found again in Dracula. The blue flame as such is a fairytale motif (See Grimm, ‘Das blaue Licht’).

78 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective nuits in which some of these demonic effects are featured. Blackall has an excellent description of what goes on here: The Romantics [...] take over much of this paraphernalia, but give it a deeper metaphysical basis, presenting a true ‘marvelous’, not an illusory one. Among the motifs of this provenance that we find in Romantic novels are: unknown parentage, visions and dreams, warning figures, initiation rituals, journeys in the service of something, disguises for a purpose, mysterious towers, vaults and caverns, archives, secret societies with a Superior representing their spiritual aims and an Emissary or ‘Genius’ who is sent out to accomplish some practical aim and often guides (or misleads, if the Bund be evil) a developing hero, so that life becomes a process of education. Anyone who has read Wilhelm Meister will recognize how much of this was used by Goethe for his own artistic purposes.106

In Wilhelm Meister Goethe has borrowed from the Gothic Geisterseherroman and Bundesroman. The process of borrowing in question begins with Schiller’s Der Geisterseher and its imitations by Kahler and Tschink, but the real link is Grosse’s Der Genius. The way in which the Turmgesellschaft watches over Wilhelm’s development parallels the way in which the Genius, as the agent of an amorphous Geheimbund, keeps an eye on Carlos. The Masonic emblem of the all-seeing eye-of-God that penetrates every mystery is applicable to both novels. Autobiographies of a kind, Wilhelm Meister and Der Genius can be compared in terms of literary kind, level and purpose, and of their readability. In their very different ways they both combine the Gothic Bundesroman with the Romantic Bildungsroman, but while Der Genius is mainly a Bundesroman, Wilhelm Meister is above all a (prototypical) Bildungsroman with a touch of the Bundesroman for seasoning. The fact that in Germany the early Gothic novel in the form of the Bundesroman à la Grosse was appropriated by the Romantic novelists, for instance by Tieck, who in his William Lovell (1793) took over much of its ultimately explained supernatural and gave it a psychological basis,107 meant that there was an obvious albeit misleading contrast to be made between the popular (‘low-brow’) Gothic novel and the high-brow Romantic novel which took over much of the Gothic paraphernalia of the popular novel, including: unknown parentage, visions and dreams, warning figures, initiation rituals, journeys in the service of something, disguises for a purpose, mysterious towers, vaults, and caverns, archives, secret societies with a Superior representing their aims and an ‘Emissary’ or ‘Genius’ who is sent out to 106 107

Blackall, 64. Blackall, 64.

Goethe 79 accomplish some practical aim and often guides (or misleads if the Bund be evil) a developing hero, so that life becomes a process of education.108

The qualitative gulf separating separating Carl Grosse’s Der Genius (1791-5) from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795-6) and Jean Paul’s Die unsichtbare Loge (1793)), which does much to account for German reservations on the subject of the popular novel of the high Gothic period, has for too long drawn attention away from their common ground and particularly the fact that they are both Bundesromane: Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre [...] is in part a ‘Bundesroman’; the hero is secretly watched over and guided by members of a secret league until he ‘learns to live’ and is himself inducted into the ‘Tower’ [Turmgesellschaft]. Der Genius represents the darker side of the genre.109

For all the many differences between Goethe’s and Grosse’s secret societies the high-brow and low-brow novel are alike products of an age obsessed with secret societies. Differences in literary quality should not be allowed to erect an artificial barrier between two novels that have so much in common, especially when the ‘high-brow’ one has evidently borrowed from the ‘lowbrow’ one. It was no doubt his misgivings about Der Geisterseher with its Bucentauro that caused Schiller to have reservations about Goethe’s Turmgesellschaft. Herder went further, maliciously remarking that Lafontaine’s heroines were superior to Goethe’s Philine. It would perhaps have been more to the point if he had remarked that Wilhelm Meister was less readable than Lafontaine’s popular novels.The high and low-brow novels of the time, which have many motifs in common, are distinguished mainly by their tone, quality and implicit aims; even the readership of the two forms overlaps. In The Progress of Romance Clara Reeve noted that ‘There is frequently a striking resemblance between works of high art and low estimation, which prejudice only hinders us from discerning’.110 The point is as valid today as it was in 1785, but in the present context the bottom line is that the ‘motifs in common’ no more make Wilhelm Meister a Gothic novel than they make it a low-brow one. There remains the question of the effect on Goethe of his knowledge of Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. That Walpole attracted attention in Germany 108 109

110

Blackall, 64. Harvey W. Hewett-Thayer, Hoffmann: Author of the Tales (New York: Octagon Books, 1971), 144. It would have been good to know what Schiller made of the common ground between these two novels, both of which he knew. Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance, 2 vols (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1785), I, 24.

80 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective from an early date is shown not by the early translation of Otranto (Seltsame Begebenheiten im Schloße Otranto, eine gotische Geschichte, 1768), which was a flop, butby the Gothisches Haus at Wörlitz, built between 1773 and 1809 for Prince Leopold Friedrich Franz of Anhalt-Dessau, which was intended as a kind of German Strawberry Hill.111 Goethe visited Wörlitz with Duke Karl August on several occasions in the late 1770s, andused the park there as a model for the new layout of the park at Weimar. He was, of course, aware of neo-Gothic taste in the form of artificial ruins, and also knew The Castle of Otranto, although he may not have read it until 1798. His Nachlaß proved to include the following unremarkable, undated lines: Die Burg von Otranto, Fortsetzungs Weissagung: Sind die Zimmer sämmtlichbesetzt der Burg von Otranto Kommt, voll innigen Grimms, der erste Riesenbesitzer Stückweis an und verdrängt die neuen falschen Bewohner Wehe! den Fliehenden. Weh! den Bleibenden, also geschieht es.112 (The Castle of Otranto and the prophecy of the sequel: If the rooms of the Castle are all occupied and the gigantic first owner returns, piecemeal, filled with rage, and drives away the later impostors, then woe betide those who flee. Woe betide those who stay. Thus would it be)

These lines do little justice to Walpole’s novel, a copy of which Goethe twice borrowed from or via the Schegels, returning it eventually with a new jacket to replace the one that had been ‘read to pieces’, but they do appear to indicate that Goethe toyed with the idea of writing a sequel to Otranto. Walpole’s melding of the far-fetched and the commonplace Goethe connected with Märchen, noting in his diary ‘Mährchen. Variante der Burg von Otranto’. Whether he is referring to Märchenin general, with the 1001 Nacht in mind, or to his own Das Mä[h]rchen, or to a Märchen (Die neue Melusine) inserted into the text of Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, is not clear; what is clear is that he associates Otranto with fairytale, whence Walpole in fact obtained much of his inspiration. The world of Goethe’s Märchen, like Otranto, is a fantasy world. His diary for 19, 21 and 23 November 1798 shows him visiting Schiller to talk about Walpole’s novel, the last of the three diary entries noting ‘Weiterer Plan über das Schloß von Otranto’ (Further plans regarding The Castle of Otranto). It seems that at one time 111 112

See Paul Clemen, ‘Strawberry Hill and Wörlitz, in Neue Beiträge deutscher Forschung. Zum 60. Geburtstag Wilhelm Worringers, ed. E. Fidder (Königsberg: Kanter, 1943), 37-60. W. A., I , 469. See Ulrich Thiergard, ‘Schiller und Walpole’, Jahrbuch der deutschen Schiller-Gesellschaft, 3 (1959), 102-105; Rosina Reckenberger, August Wilhelm Schlegels Interesse für Horace Walpole (Diss. Vienna, 1933).

Goethe 81

Goethe and Schiller toyed with the idea of producing a sequel to Otranto, but after reading a very positivereview of The Mysterious Mother in the Intelligenzblatt of the Allgemeine Literatur Zeitung on 24 February 1798, Schiller moved on to Walpole’s The Mysterious Mother (1768, publ. 1791), the first Gothic play in English,113 which was to be an important source for Die Braut von Messina. He and Goethe discussed The Mysterious Mother (Das Geheimniß der Mutter) in March 1800, with a view to producing a joint adaptation; but after Goethe had read the piece twice, he quickly lost interest in the idea, which was accordingly dropped. All that remains as an epitaph to his brief involvement with Otranto114 are the lines already quoted and the unfinished libretto Der Löwenstuhl. Walpole evidently failed to hold his attention.

IV It has been said that ‘While great portions of Goethe’s oeuvre and reception are classical, organic, and scientific, his imagination is Gothic writ large.’115 Leaving aside the overstatement, the validity of such a statement depends, in the first instance, on what is meant by Gothic, and then on whether it is true. Notwithstanding the fact that the stranger, who in Gothic fronts the irrational rigmarole of a secret society, becomes with Goethe the representative of reason, Otto Rommel’s well-known and perennially useful definition of the demonism or diablerie of the German Gothic novels as a rationalistische Dämonie, a rationally mediated and contrived demonism, or, in Marianne Thalmann’s words, ‘das dämonische Spielzeug eines Aufklärergehirns’ (the demonic plaything of a rationalistic brain),116 applies to the work of, say, Veit Weber, but not to that of Goethe. Goethe’s demonism, which he was at pains to control, is the real thing, the irrational, Mediterranean Schicksalsdämonie that goes back to the ancient Greek myths that were the foundation of his pagan, poetic, anti-Christian world, a very different thing from the Gothic play with diablerie, which involves a rational toying with the irrational. The imagination, when in irrational mode, can be contained but not controlled, hence Goethe’s wise determination to ignore his subconscious and thereby avoid the tragic mode that could so easily have 113 114

115 116

The Mysterious Mother is not the Bühnenauffassung of Otranto for which it has been mistaken. See Ulrich Thiergard, ‘Schiller und Walpole. Ein Beitrag zu Schillers Verhältnis zur Schauerliteratur,’ Jahrbuch der deutschen Schiller-Gesellschaft, 3 (1959), 105, on which my argument is based. In The Handbook to Gothic Literature, 72. M. Thalmann, 116.

82 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective been his undoing. Although he was in awe of his imagination because of the way in which it was apt to run away with him, nothing could be further removed from the closed, plagiaristic, self-regarding, sensation-seeking world of the Gothic novelists than the open world experienced by Goethe. He shows his awareness of the low-brow, Gothic literature of the time by including some of its best-known motifs in his early work, but these remainisolated elements within works that are, as a whole and for the most part, other than Gothic. Götz von Berlichingen, with its relatively mild extravagances,117 appealed to many Gothic novelists, British as well as German, but compared to Schiller’s Die Räuber, which led to the Gothic Räuberroman, it is merely a (non-Gothic) Ritterstück that includes a brief, tantalizing glimpse of the Vehmgericht at a time when it has not yet acquired its Gothic aura. Its real subject is German history and, for my money, the German language. Goethe’s two most nearly Gothic works are the Faust complex, which has Gothic interludes along the way, but ends by turning its back on the Gothic, and Werther, a novel that seemingly has a number of Gothic themes and features without thereby becoming a Gothic novel, although itis, much of the time, the proto-Gothic features of the novel that seem best to define it. The Gothic mood (which Werther unquestionably embodies) and the Gothic mode (which some readers may discover in it) are not the same thing. Wilhelm Meister, for its part, merely includes some features reminiscent of the Gothic popular novel - I am thinking primarily of the Turmgesellschaft118 and the stranger, but also of Mignon and the Harper, figures who might have stepped out of the popular mystery novel119 without becoming in any sense a Gothic novel. The crux of the matter is that while Goethe’s imagination is innately unruly and potentially Gothic, he kept it under strict control and did not produce a single work that is adequately described as Gothic, for the context is always personal and poetic. This certainly applies to Werther, which, notwithstanding the fact that the two terms are usually considered synonymous, is better described as an example of Dark Romanticism than of Gothic. Even to argue that one of his ‘minor tonalities’ is Gothic is to overstate the case. Critics and historians of Gothic flatter themselves when they seek to mount Goethe on their hobby horse.

117 118 119

Menhennet, 30. Relatively mild, that is, compared to those of Die Räuber. In 1784-5 Goethe worked at an epic poem, Die Geheimnisse, revolving around an early version of the Turmgesellschaft. M. Thalmann, Der Trivialroman des 18. Jahrhunderts und der romantische Roman (Berlin: Ebering, 1923, repr. Nendeln: Kraus, 1978), 166. In Der Genius, Carlos’s wife Elmire may owe her name to Goethe’s Erwin und Elmire of 1775.

2 VEIT WEBER Veit Weber (pseudonym of Leonhard Wächter, 1762-1837) is the founder of the modern German chivalric romance which was for a while the fashionable sensation of late eighteenth-century/early nineteenth-century German literature, although it swiftly became first, in Cramer’s hands, an increasingly subliterary phenomenon and then, in Fouqué’s, an irrelevance. Even today most readers, asked to name one German Gothic novelist, would probably name Veit Weber. His Sagen der Vorzeit are part and parcel of the Romantic cult of the Middle Ages and of the ideal of German nationhood which, though not to be realized for many years, was, in cultural terms, very much in the air at the time of the Wars of Liberation. When Möser spoke of unsere Nation everyone understood what he meant, and even inc. 1815, when he enrols at the university of Tübingen, Satan finds that he goes down well with the beer-swilling ‘bemooste Häuser’ (old fossils, perpetual students) so long as he emerges from his stupor from time to time to say ‘Freiheit, Vaterland, Deutschtum, Volkstümlichkeit’ (Freedom, Fatherland, Long Live Germany, Power to the People).1 Weber’s startingpoint was the same as Schiller’s and Scott’s, admiration for Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen. Schiller was scathing on the subject of Veit Weber, as was Hoffmann. While they both object to Weber’s lack of style, they have different reasons for disliking his work: Schiller objects to popular fiction, Hoffmann to the way in which Weber puts ethics before aesthetics. Tieck knew some of his work, but was, alas, more impressed by the Scharteken of Weber’s imitators and competitors (Schlenkert, Spieß, Cramer), and the same is true of Hauff and others. In the early 1790s Veit Weber’s mockmedieval dramatic novels were widely copied by the literary Fußvolk of the time. One such is Friedrich Christian Schlenkert (1757-1826), best known for Friedrich mit der gebißnen Wange. Eine dialogisirte Geschichte (1799), a Ritterroman written, like not a little of the fiction of the period from Veit Weber onwards, in the form of dialogue, which gave Kleist his starting-point for Das Käthchen von Heilbronn. The Gothic novel derives from fairytale and, as we shall see in Chapter 14, may be compared to it on many grounds. Veit Weber, who gave up writing Gothic fiction long before the Grimm brothers’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen appeared, is unusual for a ‘Gothic’ writer in that his

1

See Wilhelm Hauff, Werke, ed. B. Zeller, 2 vols (Frankfurt a. M.: Insel, 1969), II, 372.

84 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective aims are, at root, educational.2 Like the Grimms he is concerned for the moral economy of his country.

I Leonhard Wächter was born in Ülzen in 1762. When he was fourteen his family moved to Hamburg, to which great city and to Göttingen he owed his anglophilia. He began writing while still at school, the direction of his interests being shown by his one published work from this time, Rudolf von Erlachs Tod, eine Szene der Vorzeit, involving one of the oldest noble families in fourteenth-century Berne It was followed by a similar work, Franz von Sickingen, the title of which proclaims his indebtedness to Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen. Either before or at university he read Ferdinand Count Fathom and The Castle of Otranto. In 1783 he proceeded to Göttingen to study theology. Among those whose lectures he attended were Ludwig Timotheus Spittler, author of works on church and local history, and Christoph Meiners, whose view of the middle ages as anything but ‘merry’ is preserved in Historische Vergleichung der Sitten und Verfassungen des Mittelalters mit denen unseres Jahrhunderts in Rücksicht auf die Vorteile und Nachteile der Aufklärung (3 vols, 1793-4); Weber must have recalled Meiners’ classes as his own view of the Middle Ages changed from positive to negative. In Die heilige Vehme (1795) in particular Weber compares late medieval and late eighteenth-century decadence. Meiners, whose lectures Carl Grosse was to attend a few years later, was a member (under the name Dicearch) of the Göttingen branch of the order of Illuminati, as was Spittler, to whose Geschichte des Fürstenthums Hannover (1786) Weber referred in Der Müller des Schwarzthal’s (1788). More important to him than Meiners and Spittler was the poet Bürger. In August 1783 a group of students, Wächter among them, founded a literary club whichgrew into the celebrated Thursday Club, the honorary president of which was Bürger, who became a Privatdozent in 1784, when he began teaching a five-times-weekly course on ‘German style’. Young Wächter had no style to speak of - his German is forceful but heavy-handed - but Deutschtum (Germanness) was close to his heart. He became friendly with Bürger, who gave him encouragement and a helping hand as a writer, and dedicated the first volume of the Sagen der Vorzeit to Meinem biedern Freunde Gottfried August Bürger, the word ‘bieder’ (honest, upright) indicating a quality both men valued. It was thanks to Bürger that the first volume of the 2

Der graue Bruder’ (Sagen der Vorzeit, 2), though said to be written ‘In des Frauenlobs Ton’, begins ‘Es war einmal ein deutscher Graf’, and is a quasi-fairytale.

Veit Weber 85

Sagen der Vorzeit was published by Friedrich Maurer in 1787 after trial publication in a Berlin annual. In 1789 Bürger was promoted unpaid titular Professor of Aesthetics, this being the capacity in which he will have become known to Grosse and Tieck. Göttingen in the 1780s was known for its opposition to tyranny and emphasis on national culture and democracy. All in all, it provided a highly productive experience for young would-be writers, among them three Gothic novelists (Veit Weber, Carl Grosse and Ludwig Tieck), who all found there what they variously needed, very different as it was. For Wächter national culture and democracy were what he valued most. His opposition to tyranny he proved by fighting for Revolutionary France and by writing Die Brüder des Bundes für Freyheit und Recht. Veit Weber (as he now became) went down from Göttingen at Easter 1786, intending to follow in his father’s footsteps by becoming a Lutheran minister, but it became clear to him that he had no vocation. When he left Göttingen part of the first book of the first of the Sagen der Vorzeit had already appeared; most of the rest were written by 1791. He was drawn to France in the aftermath of the Revolution. On 8 July 1792, when taking a somewhat bibulous trip down the Rhine, he and his friend Diede were attacked at Boppard by a group of French émigrés for singing, in French, a pro-revolutionary song, and were arrested and taken to Coblenz. Weber’s account of that incident, in Der Nachtbothe oder Geschichten der französischen Auswanderung [...] Nebst Veit Webers Schilderung des Betragens einiger in Deutschland geduldeten französichen Flüchtlinge gegen reisende Deutsche (Berlin 1793, 2nd imp. 1794), is a reminder that the presence of French émigrés on German soil was one of the causes of war between France and Germany in 1792. Weber was eventually freed after the Duke of Braunschweig arrived in Coblenz with his chaplain, the novelist August Lafontaine, who recognized the name Wächter. It was at about this time that Schiller was offered honorary French citizenship by the revolutionary government. Not long afterwards, on 6 November 1792, Wächter was wounded while serving as captain in a cavalry regiment under Dumouriez, who, with General Egalité (later King Louis Philipp) defeated the counter-revolutionary army of Austria at Jemappes. When General Dumouriez’ army was disbanded following its subsequent defeat by the Austrians at the battle of Neerwinden on 18 March 1793, Wächter returned to Hamburg, obtained a teaching post (as usher, in the English terminology of the time) in an academy (private school) established by a university friend, Professor Johann Voigt, and eventually, in 1814, became its headmaster. When Colonel Freiherr von Tettenborn occupied Hamburg with a Russian cavalry corps in March 1813 the schoolmaster became a Major in the Bürgermilitär (home guard), which was stood down

86 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective when the French returned. He died in 1837, a figure much respected in Hamburg, to the history of which he had devoted much time. Dumouriez, for his part, who was blamed for the defeat and had a price put on his head by the National Convention, managed to escape to England. Veit Weber is, of course, best known for ‘tales of yore’ (partly Gothic in English terms) as embodied in his Sagen der Vorzeit (7 vols, 1787-98) series of Ritterromane, of which a second edition appeared, without the last volume, in 1790-96, and a third in 1840. The volumes that are relevant in the Gothic context are I (1787 [first part pre-published in 1785-86]: Männerschwur und Weibertreue; II (1788: Der Müller des Schwarzthal’s); V (1791, Die Teufelsbeschwörung and Die Brüder des Bundes für Freyheit und Recht, part 1); V (1795, Die Brüder des Bundes für Freyheit und Recht, part 2); and VI (1795, Die heilige Vehme). In calling his main works ‘Sagen’, Weber was distancing them from historical truth. His readers, who were not the sort to make fine distinctions between different literary or philosophical kinds, were bitterly disappointed when they realized that his work was concerned not with real history read in a comforting way (cf. the myth of ‘Merrie England’), but with a fictional counterfeit, the message of which was far from comforting. ‘Sage’ is a fashionable word at the time: Musäus, whose Volksmärchen der Deutschen (1787-88) appeared at the same time as Weber’s early work, uses ‘Sage’ and ‘Märchen’ interchangeably, but for Veit Weber the word ‘Sagen’ simply means fictions. His Sagen der Vorzeit are at times close to fairytale. Der graue Bruder (II, 393-444), for instance, sub-titled ‘In des Frauenlob’s Ton’ (meaning that it is written in the manner of Heinrich von Meissen), actually begins ‘Es war einmal ein deutscher Graf’ (There was once a German count), and keeps up the fairytale diction. In Der Müller des Schwarzthal’s (II, 268) too the language is occasionally reminiscent of fairytale, e.g. ‘Ha, Vater! gebt mir Roß und Schwerdt und ich will ziehen durch alle Lande’ (Give me but sword and steed, father, and I will range the world). These are not isolated instances. The earlier volumes of the Sagen der Vorzeit, together with Die Betfahrt des Bruders Gramsalbus (1793), show Weber’s black-and-white view of the German middle ages with the emphasis on drunken, lecherous monks, and on the danger to the public in the form of the ‘wild riders’ who are the medieval forerunners of the banditti of the late eighteenth century. Order is personified in and maintained by the orders of knighthood, and therefore by the heilige Vehme, that ‘old German’ institution that was, for centuries, the guarantor of law and order, and even at the end of the eighteenth century was believed to be still in existence.3 The Vehme features in passing in 3

See Jean-Nicolas-Etienne de Bock, Histoire du tribunal secret (Metz: Behmer, An IX

Veit Weber 87

Männerschwur und Weibertreue, but it is not until Sagen der Vorzeit IV-VI that Weber’s concern with secret societies and orders is accentuated as his view of them develops and becomes more criticalThe main Gothic titles in the series also appeared as dramatizations: Die Brüder des Bundes für Menschenglück (by Karl Friedrich Kahlert, author of the once-famous Der Geisterbanner, 1796), and of Das Vehmgericht (‘Ein dramatisches Gemälde’, by the dramatist and novelist August Klingemann, 1820). Die Teufelsbeschwörung appeared in English as The Sorcerer [tr. Robert Huish] (1795), Die heilige Vehme in French as Le tribunal secret, but, surprisingly, not until 1830. Die Betfahrt des Bruders Gramsalbus (1793, but partly written in 1788) is not part of the Sagen der Vorzeit, but belongs with the series. Kahlert, Klingemann and Huish are reputable writers whose association with Veit Weber is proof of the reputation he once enjoyed. When the first volume of Sagen der Vorzeit came out in 1785-86 it was arguably the first ‘Gothic’ work in German. Little is known about Weber’s early reading and sources of inspiration. By comparison with Schiller and Naubert, he is an amateur historian, not over-zealous in his reading, more likely to delve into one or two source books than into three or four.When he proceeded to Göttingen University he found it pervaded by the values underlying Götz and Die Räuber, which he, like most of the literary young men of the time, greatly admired. August Bürger and, through him, the patriotic historian Justus Möser (Osnabrückische Geschichte, 1768, Patriotische Phantasien, 1774-78), who had been the making of the young Goethe, were major influences. The Sagen der Vorzeit are themselves patriotische Phantasien. Judging by the imagery and motifs of Männerschwur und Weibertreue (1787) Weber almost certainly knew Leland’s Longsword (1762: Langschwert, 1775), and appears to have known Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, but the main starting point for his absorption in the world of medieval chivalry was JeanBaptiste de la Curne de Sainte-Palaye’s Mémoires sur l’ancienne chevalerie (17591781: Das Ritterwesen des Mittelalters, tr. Johann Ludwig Klüber, 1786-91),4 and he also knew Chevalier de Mailly’s Esprit des croisades (1780: Geschichte der Kreuzzüge, tr without de Mailly’s name, 2 vols, Leipzig, 1782). By the time Die heilige Vehme was published in 1795 he knew Naubert’s Hermann von Unna and Huber’s Das heimliche Gericht. Veit Weber was, for a time, well received by the public and by the order of scribblers, but not by his literary betters. Tieck, whose literary judgments are notoriously unreliable, regarded him as the equal of Scott. Schiller, on the other hand, who knew the Sagen der Vorzeit, Vols 1-5 (1792-95), which he 4

[1801]), 15-18 (‘Note sur l’existence de l’état actuel du tribunal secret en Allemagne’). Walther Pantenius, Das Mittelalter in Leonhard Wächters (Veit Webers) Romanen (Leipzig: Voigtländer. 1904), 31.

88 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective asked Cotta to send him on 2 October 1794, subsequently dismissed them as ‘Schmiererei’; but then Schiller was a highly conscientious historian who detested dumbing-down in any shape or form. It will probably come as a surprise to readers that Weber was second only to Schiller in his condemnation of what he sees as the ‘schlimmen Einfluß der Modeschriftstellerei auf unsere Moralität’ (adverse effect of fashionable scribbling on the nation’s morals); he even called for censorship of Belletristik.5 It is not clear whether Schiller knew Die heilige Vehme, which appeared in 1795 (as Vol. 6 of the series), but if he did, he would surely have deemed the treatment of the subject banal. More generally, Schiller’s assessment of Veit Weber has been vindicated by history. The Illustrierte Geschichte der deutschen Literatur of Salzer and Tunk, for instance (III:226), having misspelled Wächter’s name, merely refers to the ‘wüste Erfindungen seiner Phantasie’ (the wild fabrications of his imagination).The rest is silence, but the silence is deafening. In the mid to late 1790s, and later, he was a regular visitor to England, so that if any German writer was in a position to know about the English early Gothic novel, it was Veit Weber, who cannot but have been aware of the excitement Ann Radcliffe’s novels were causing in Britain at the time, but with the exception of Die heilige Vehme (1795) his Gothic work had already appeared by 1791,and after 1795 his Gothic career was over. There is no question of his being influenced by Radcliffe: his work has more in common with the English historical novel before Scott than with the work of Mrs Radcliffe: They show the same inability, with all their facts, to produce historic atmosphere, the same sentimentalizing of historic characters and events and the same anachronisms of thought and speech.6

Like so many of his contemporaries he was a fan of the English sentimental novel, and might therefore be expected to be drawn to the sentimental Gothic of Clara Reeve and Charlotte Smith. There is, however, no reason to suppose that he was. He could have met Lewis and Scott, although there is no reason to suppose that he did. It is a pity he left no memoirs or diary of his travels in England at a time when the anglophilia of many sentimental travellers was giving way, in the wake of the French revolution, to a new critical realism, for now it was not France but England that seemed repressive. 5 6

Quoted from Pantenius, 88. J. M. S. Tompkins, Ann Radcliffe and her Influence on Later Writers (New York: Arno Press,1980), 94.

Veit Weber 89

It was Veit Weber who led the Ritterroman in the direction of what in English is termed the Gothic novel (sub-variety gothified history). The Ritterroman is, typically, pseudo-historical, historical faction or fantasy, oftenin Gothic fancy dress. Veit Weber’s characters are wholly fictional, counterfeits of the real thing. He is a popular writer and popular historian with a predilection for the Gothic and a love-hate attitude towards the Middle Ages, his view of which, always didactically driven, changed as he responded to political events. Right from the beginning he insisted that ‘Hier ist nicht Dichtung sondern Wirklichkeit’ (Here is not poetry but reality); on another occasion he explained that he was obliged to depict the Middle Ages ‘in des Höllenbreughels Manier’ (in the manner of Hell Bruegel).7 His view of the Middle Ages was increasingly dark (Gothic), hence the comparison with Pieter Bruegel the Younger, who painted the underworld, the seamy side of late medieval life. Marion Beaujean, in describing Veit Weber, reasonably enough, as ‘der Vater des Ritterromans’ (the father of the Ritterroman [chivalric romance]), unaccountably seems to think that this makes him a more important figure than Benedicte Naubert, who is - merely, it is implied - the author of historical novels.8 The truth is precisely the opposite. However, more important than generational changes of perspective is the fact that Weber grows out of the Ritterroman, and in Die Brüder des Bundes für Freyheit und Recht and Die heilige Vehme produces what are best described as Gothic novels in that they combine the Ritterroman with the in literary terms more significant and in historical terms more interesting Bundesroman. Veit Weber is the father of the late eighteenth-century Gothic Ritterroman in the sense that it was he who, to English minds, ‘raised the Ritterroman to the level of literary respectability’.9 This dubious neo-Victorian judgment, a reflection of English critics’ greater tolerance of the popular novel in the past, would be difficult to sustain now that the Ritterroman, the work of Veit Weber included, is looking decidedly threadbare. At the time Samuel Rose, writing in the Monthly Review (n.s., 21 [Dec. 1796], 458-60), found his treatment of the terrific too much: every sentence ‘dispatches the imagination to the very boundaries of the universe’. His work was seen as forceful rather than elegant, and in that sense as typically German. In England he was never widely known since most of his work was never translated. Nowadays his work is virtually unknown in England and Germany alike, although The Sorcerer was re-issued in English, by Zittaw Press, in 2006. Otherwise it has been out of print since 1840 (the date of the 7 8 9

Quoted from Pantenius, 24. Beaujean, 113. Tompkins, Ann Radcliffe, 98.

90 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective third edition of Sagen der Vorzeit) in Germany. Most of the novels of the series are available second-hand at prices that show how inflated British second-hand book prices have now become. More than half his work was never translated into English. James Powell’s Wolf; or, The Tribunal of Blood (1806) was a rifacimento made up on the basis of Veit Weber’s Wolff (in the second volume of Sagen der Vorzeit, 1790); it reappeared in the Romancist and Novelist’s Library in 1841, asWoman’s Revenge, or: The Tribunal of Blood.10 It is not a Gothic work and has no connexion with the Vehmgericht. Weber’s most popular novels in English were The Sorcerer (tr. Robert Huish, 1795) and The Black Valley (anon. tr., 1796), of which a crude, abridged copy appeared in chapbook format in 1803. ‘The whole of the Works of Weber, that have not yet appeared in English’, announced in 1806 as in course of translation by James Powell and shortly to be published, never appeared. Presumably Powell or his publisher J. F. Hughes had second thoughts about Weber, whose reputation, which peaked in 1795, had by then long outstripped his capacity and his readers’ patience. German literary medievalism began back in the mid-century. Weber’s early view of the German middle ages begins with Justus Möser’s Patriotische Phantasien (4 vols, 1774-8), and with the work that was the source of Goethe’s knowledge of the Vehmgericht, Möser’s Osnabrückische Geschichte mit Urkunden (2 vols, 1768).11 Walther Pantenius12 states that so far as the Osnabrückische Geschichte is concerned, it was the essay ‘Der hohe Styl der Kunst unter den Deutschen’ (also known as ‘Von dem Faustrecht’) that gripped Wächter. Bürger no doubt quoted Möser in his lectures on German style, thus introducing Wächter to one of his heroes, although young Wächter was interested not in ‘hoher Styl’ (high style) as such, but in the German national moral economy and identity, its sense ofuprightness and honour, these being understood as German qualities. Möser’s lines Die Zeiten des Faustrechtes in Deutschland scheinen mir allemal diejenigen gewesen zu sein, worin unsere Nation das größte Gefühl der Ehre, die mehrste körperliche Tugend und eine Nationalgröße gezeiget hat.13 (The periods when Germany was ruled by force always seem to me to correspond to those in which our nation evinced the greatest sense of honour, the greatest degree of physical virtue and a proper sense of its own greatness.)

10 11 12 13

This is why it puzzled Frauke Reitemeier, Deutsch-englische Literaturbeziehungen (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2001), 178. Justus Möser, )Osnabrückische Geschichte mit Urkunden (1768 [repr. Berlin & Stettin: Nicolai, 1780]. For Möser’s account of the Vehmgericht, see Vol. I, 248-55 f. Pantenius, 27. Justus Möser, Sämtliche Werke, 10 vols (Berlin: Nicolai, 1842), I: 395.

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are what Veit Weber is all about. His patriotism and love of the medieval period withits ‘old German’ virtues celebrated by the painter Caspar David Friedrich, whose viewof nationhood and national virtue he shares, are at the heart of his work.14 Inthe early volumes of the Sagen der Vorzeit he sees these virtues as embodied in the knighthood of the time, which he glorifies accordingly. In the early work the order of knighthood is honourable, while the church is dishonourable. Such black-and-white judgments are, alas, typical not only of Weber’s earliest work, but of his literary work as a whole;15 he never overcame this characteristic Schwarzweißmalerei (tendency to see things in crude, simplistic terms). It was the early volumes of the Sagen der Vorzeit, whichwere positively received, that made his reputation in Germany: From the outset his’tales of yore’ were the means to an educational end, and so long as they were accepted as conveying a broadly ‘true’ picture of the middle ages, his reputation grew. He was at the height of his fame in the early 1790s, when publishers would choose to describe other writers’ work as ‘eine Geschichte in Webers Manier’ (a tale in the manner of Veit Weber). Such a work is an anonymous novel, Die Rächenden, oder das Vehmgericht des 18. Jahrhunderts (1802), an unoriginal mix of Veit Weber’s Die heilige Vehme and Kahlert’s Der Geisterbanner, involving a charlatan and would-be sorcerer who is also the chief of a band of robbers. Fame so swiftly gained evaporated no less swiftly. A number of reasons came together to cause this sudden change, including the break in the Sagen from 1791 to 1795, and what Wächter was doing at that time, but as the series continued and it became clear that their author was not so much painting as counterfeiting the middle ages, of which he had a view that was increasingly at odds with his readers’ views, and that he showed no sign of taking on board the widespread criticism of his work for its carelessness16 and crassness, his reputation began to slip away. It is also a fact that after the first two volumes, as his didactic (‘democratic’) intention took over, his work became significantly less readable, as a comparison of the rambling Die Brüder des Bundes für Freyheit und Recht with the earlier and crisper Der Müller des Schwarzthal’s shows. German readers had liked his glorification of the German Ritterideal, and were unhappy about the new-fangled ‘revolutionary’ attitude of the later volumes, particularly when it became known that their author had fought for the Jacobin army. The average German reader of the time, who was both conservative and anti-French, did not like to findGerman knights (in 14 15 16

In Weimar Goethe occasionally appeared in ‘old German’ dress. See ‘Über das Gute und Böse des Mittelalters’, Journal aller Journale, Feb.-Aug, Oct. to Dec. 1787, a series of articles summarizing his view of the Middle Ages at the time. Schiller’s Die Räuber was also criticized for being carelessly written.

92 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective volumes IV to VI of the Sagen) speaking and behaving like so many streetJacobins. Whereas the early volumes had emphasized the individual virtue of ‘der deutsche Ritter’ (the German knight) or ‘Biedermann’ (the solidly upright citizen), in the later volumes the knight becomes the ‘Träger einer Staatsidee’ (moving force behind a new idea of the state).17 The knights of the early volumes were in effect acting in accordance with Möser’s idea of German virtue, which turned on loyalty to the state; by contrast, those of the later volumes are, like the French Revolutionaries, prepared to act against the (feudal) state (ancien régime) and to destroy it in order to replace it by a new Verfassungsstaat (constitutional state). Weber’s distortions of historical fact became so pronounced that by 1795 he was described, in a review of Die heilige Vehme in NADB that illustrates the sudden change for the worse in his reputation, as a ‘schauerlicher Märchenerzähler’ (a teller of horrid fairy stories),18 a label pointing to the close connexions between Gothic fantasy and fairytale and also to strongly held differences of opinion regarding the propriety of part-historical fiction, let alone the propriety of Veit Weber’s new-found Jacobinism, which to his readers was a newfangled, enemy doctrine. His interest in the Vehmgericht stems from the fact that it is the system by means of which the nobility and knighthood of the Middle Ages combined to maintain and enforce law and order and with them the good ‘old German’ order of things (which includedless goodfeatures like robber barons, wild riders and the rule of force). In the later, ‘Gothic’ volumes he sees the knighthood, and with it the heilige Vehme, as tainted with corruption. The volumes in question, V-VI of the series, were popular with other Gothic novelists and with uncritical readers of Gothic, but the general public, clinging to Möser’s view of the German Middle Ages, now saw Weber as guilty of betraying, in profoundly unsettling times, what they held dearest. The fact that he was only following the view of the theologian and historian Dietrich Hermann Hegewisch, who edited the Hamburg Neue Zeitung until called to the chair of history in Kiel in 1782, made no difference, for Hegewisch’s view of the heilige Vehme was not shared by most historians of the subject, although the Gothic novelists, focused as they were on sensation rather than historical truth, had from the outset tended to view the Vehmgerichte as corruptible and indeed corrupt. The German reading public, badly rattled by the French Revolution and its attendant wars, which were largely fought on German soil, was dismayed that Weber had reneged on his earlier, popular view of an old German institution19 at a time when 17 18 19

Pantenius, 97. NADB, Anhang Bd I (1797), 206. More than a century later the Gothic romancers were taken to task for their part in

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‘Germany’ and all things German were under attack by the French. The man in the street instinctively shared Möser’s view of the state as being legitimated by particularity, the particular history of places and peoples.20 National identity and with it individual identity depends on the idea of Eigentümlichkeit (particularity). So far as the Vehmgericht is concerned, it is appropriate that its modern history begins with one of the most respected of all German historians, whose work was admired by Goethe and Weber alike. Weber refers to it in the notes to his Die heilige Vehme. Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand (1773), so popular with writers of the Gothic/Romantic generation, depicts precisely the sort of community that Justus Möser admired. Monkish treachery, which he saw as the downside of the else glorious middle ages, Weber could have found, if he knew it, in William Hutchinson’s The Hermitage: A British Story (1772), but there was a model closer to hand in the novels of J. F. E. Albrecht, which he is bound to have come across during his time as a student in Göttingen in the mid1780s.Göttingen University Library has a notable collection of works by Albrecht. The Castle of Otranto most likely attracted Weber’s attention(in English or German) when he was studying at Göttingen at a time (1783-6) when the English novel was so popular there. It is easy, though not necessarily right, to imagine him being impressed by the violent, theatrical, spooky medievalism of The Castle of Otranto, another matter to prove the influence of Walpole, which Coleridge much exaggerated. Tompkins notes that Müller-Fraureuth quotes as typical romantic motifs ‘two incidents obviously borrowed from The Castle of Otranto’;21the motifs are identified presently. Weber’s debt to Walpole is at best minimal, that to Götz huge.

II As an admirer of English literature and a regular visitor to Britain, Veit Weber was inevitably aware of The Castle of Otranto, but an immediate caveat is necessary, for Walpole’s flip style would hardly appealed to the didactic medievalist and pedagogue in the making.Weber’s patriotische Phantasien have

20 21

the Femelüge, that is, for spreading lies about the heilige Vehme, which in the eyes of nationalist critics of the 1930s amounted to defamation of the German national character. See Joseph Leo Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the subject of landscape (London: Reaktion, 1990), 60. Tompkins, Ann Radcliffe, 93. See also Carl Müller-Fraureuth, Die Ritter- und Räuberromane (Halle: Niemeyer, 1894), 8-31.

94 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective little in common with Walpole’s whimsical aesthetic fantasia. As a future purveyor of Gothified history, Weber probably also took an interest in Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron (1778), and in Sophia Lee’s The Recess (178385), but the starting point for his absorption in the world of medieval chivalry was actually Jean-Baptiste de la Curne de Sainte-Palaye’s Mémoires sur l’ancienne chevalerie (3 vols, Paris, 1759-81: Das Ritterwesen des Mittelalters, tr. Johann Ludwig Klüber, 1786-91).22 In terms of possible impact on the Ritterroman Leland’s Longsword (1762) is in any case more to the point than Otranto. That Weber knew and was impressed by Longsword is indicated by his Männerschwur und Weibertreue (Berlin: Friedrich Maurer, 1787), the first book of which had been tried out in Maurer’s annual Ephemeriden der Literatur und des Theaters (II/1785, Parts 31and 32; III/1786, Parts 1-3), this making it the first Gothic-period Ritterroman.23Longsword may haveattracted little attention in England,24 or in Germany when it appeared in translation in 1775, but it probably helped to colour the Ritterroman as developed by Veit Weber, for it is not far from Leland’s novel with its emphasis on ‘monkish villainy and wifely truth, war, imprisonment and flight [...] suspense and terror’25 to Weber’s Männerschwur und Weibertreue (1787). This, the first of the Sagen der Vorzeit, is inevitably also indebted to Götz, and may be compared with Die Räuber in that it is both a ‘treffendes lebendiges Konterfey’ (accurate, true-to-life reproduction) of the German Middle Ages, in which Weber is not greatly concerned with historical accuracy; except that the language he uses is a counterfeit of the German of the time,26 and a ‘Gemählde’ (portrait) of German knighthood at the time. It was Veit Weber who set the model for the modern Ritterroman, a model to which his numberless imitators added nothing new.27 Männerschwur und Weibertreue consists of a series of set-piece rencontres and stereotypical adventures between characters representing good and evil. These mostly involve confrontations between knighthood (seen as mostly upright) and church or monkhood (seen as frequently corrupt). The noblest of the noble knights is Leonhard von Wildungen, named after Leonhard Wächter. His brother-in-arms, Karl von Kleeborn, a doughty knight with a 22 23 24 25 26 27

Pantenius, 31. In German, that is, for Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron (1778) is a Ritterroman. Baker, 5:178: ‘No one took much notice of Longsword.’ J. M. S. Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England 1770-1800 (London: Methuen, 1932), 225. Cf. Chatterton’s English and Wilhelm Meinhold’s German (see Chapter 13 below). Pantenius notes that there are soon ‘ganze Bibliotheken der grauen Vorwelt’. One exceptionally interesting take on Veit Weber’s work is J. B. Durach’s Weibertreu und Pfaffengrimm, eine vaterländische Ritterscene aus den Zeiten der Kreuzzüge (Vienna & Leipzig, 1791).

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weakness for amorous adventures (‘Hätte er keine Weiber gekannt, er wär ein Engel auf Erden gewesen’: If he known no women, he would have been a veritable angel on earth), pays for his weakness when, disguised as a pilgrim named Lambert Moor (a nod to Die Räuber), he is killed in combat with Leonhard after his own paramour has put poison on his sword, which he lends to Wolffstein when his sword blade breaks. Conrad von Wolffstein (the first use of a name that is recurrent in the early German and English Gothic novel) is the type of the dishonourable knight, while the monk Bartholomäus is a good example of the type of the profligate monk that is found again in Benedicte Naubert’s Elisabeth, Erbin von Roggenburg (1789) andin much subsequent historical and Gothic fiction. There are two ‘Bünde’ in the novel: in addition to the Bund der Freischöffen(see Part II, 6, 18; III, 17)there is the Brüderschaft zum Einhorn, whose job it is to protect virtue (deutsche Tugend und Biedersitte) and punish vice. For repeated unknightly behaviour Conrad von Wolffstein is first deprived of his membership of the Brüderschaft and then summoned to appear before the Freistuhl in Bamberg. Weber, unlike Benedicte Naubert, at this stage lacks the knowledge to describe the meeting of the Vehmgericht - not until Die heilige Vehme will Weber place the ‘secret tribunal’ centre stage, and then he does so for didactic reasons - but he nonetheless has Wolffstein banished in impressivesounding but unhistorical words; ‘Wir weisen dich in alle vier Strassen der Welt, im Namen des Teufels’ (In the name of Beelzebub we banish you to all four points of the compass).28 More impressive than this bogus formula is the way in which all the Gothic terrors of castle and monastery alike are accentuated. The Castle, as in so many subsequent novels, can be seen as the hero of the tale: ‘Auch die Burgen haben Örtlichkeiten, deren Qualen überall in den stärksten Farben geschildert werden: alte Türme oder Gewölbe, Höhlen und Felsenlöcher, düster, unheimlich, schwach erleuchtet’(Castles too have their [imprisoning] spaces, the miseries of which are vividly portrayed: old towers or vaults, caverns and recesses in the rock, dark, uncanny, feebly lit). The uncanny is present, as is, for the first time in Gothic, the Burgverließ (dungeon) that owes its name and Gothic status to Veit Weber, together with secret underground rooms, passages (dunkle öde Gänge) and trap door and vault that may originate in Otranto. As is so often the case in Gothic fiction, the most Gothic - in the sense of terrifying - and uncanny, are the spatialities of the tale, for Gothic terrors and horrors lurk in the dark spaces of the text and of readers’ minds. The novel contains a number of other ‘Gothic’ motifs.29 In addition to murder and patricide there 28 29

See Pantenius, 19-21. See Müller-Fraureuth, 8-31, for a long and thorough account of Weber’s first novel.

96 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective is incarceration in a subterranean prison, which is accompanied by the motifs of abduction and expulsion. Here too are masked figures, false friends and feuding families. There is even a dumpfe Geisterstimme (hollow, ghostly voice) that isreminiscent of the ‘hollow sound’ in Otranto, as are the subterranean passages. These will bethe two features that Tompkins had in mind.

III The second volume of Sagen der Vorzeit (1788) includes a tale, Der Müller des Schwarzthal’s, that was done into English as The Black Valley; a Tale from the German of Veit Weber (1796), a rifacimento that sensationalizes and does mindless violence to Weber’s text, of which it leaves little but its worst qualities. This was then further debased by an anonymous hack into an 1803 chapbook of the same title30 in which nothing remains of Veit Weber except the setting. The Black Valley was widely reviewed, and therefore became as well-known in English as Die Teufelsbeschwörung (1791). The Critical Review described The Black Valley as’the work of no „weak master“,’ and commented that ‘The author’s intention seems to be to to slay the slain by ridiculing superstition and holding up friars to contempt and abhorrence.’31 Samuel Rose, writing in The Monthly Review, noted that the author ‘seldom misses an opportunity of attacking the superstitions of popery, and the tyranny of hereditary [ecclesiastical] institutions’.32 Set in eleventh-century Northern Bohemia, classic Gothic country from Die Räuber onwards, Der Müller des Schwarzthal’s opens with what would soon be known as a typical Gothic landscape-and-castle that shows Weber at his best: the first two pages of the tale, describing the landscape of the black valley and the castle of Ritter Diederich von Aarhorst, which, as Aarhorst’s name implies, sits like an eagle’s eyrie atop a rocky peak, are as good as anything he ever wrote. The castle is accessible only by a rope ladder, a motif that went on to become a Gothic trope. Diederich von Aarhorst has a daughter, Mathilde, who is lured away from her grieving father, whose wife has just died after being robbed of a valuable piece of land by the Abbott of the nearby monastery of St Florian, by that same Abbott, who is as lecherous as he is avaricious. Mathilde at the time is about twenty, and is a virtuous and pious young woman bearing no resemblance to her counterpart in the English version of Weber’s tale. The Abbott has her locked up in a 30 31 32

For a full description see Frank, The First Gothics, 29f. The Critical Review, 19 (Feb, 1797), 227. The Monthly Review, 21 (Dec. 1796), 458ff.

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space behind the altar in a side chapel, on which is a picture of the Virgin with whom Mathilde is associated and confused. Here are the essentials of The Monk: the lecherous monk lusting after the Madonna-like Mathilde. When to this are added the sensational ending of Die Teufelsbeschwörung, which Lewis appropriated, the extent of his indebtedness to Veit Weber is immediately clear. Meanwhile Mathilde is freed by a young knight with whom she escapes from the monastery via an underground passage leading to the forest (another soon to be classic Gothic trope that survives into the mid-nineenth century, cf. G. P. R. James, The Castle of Ehrenstein [1847]), in which lives the old hermit so beloved by the Romantics, Gothic and otherwise. Diederich, not knowing that his son has been killed by the Priorof the monastery, sets out with a retainer in search of Mathilde,and dies in her arms after various negative incidents that include his being robbed by a monk. The tale, the first half of which is exceptionally gripping, is, the reader will have gathered, a lay sermon on monkish vice, a leitmotif of the Klosterroman and of many Gothic novels. In the comparative Gothic context The Black Valley is of interest not least because it has been claimed that its ‘grotesque odyssey of one of the most voluptuous of Gothic women, Cunegonde’ shows that ‘Lewis’s Matilda [...] finds a near sister in Veit Weber’s phantom of carnal delight’.33 Unfortunately this claim is based not on Veit Weber’s original, but on the English rifacimento, The Black Valley, which, widely reviewed and presumably widely read, will have done Veit Weber’s English reputation no good at all, for it reduced one of the best of his works to the level of the mindless titillation of the moment. Here, too, is further proof that the kind of crass carnality of which English critics accused German Gothic novelists was in fact an English phenomenon. The English 1803 chapbook with the same title has little connexion with Weber’s tale apart from the ‘Black Valley, a forbidding cleft that lives up to its name as a corridor of all horror’,34 and the castle adjoining it. The best-known sorcerer-novel in the Gothic period,35 Die Teufelsbeschwörung (Sagen der Vorzeit, Vol. IV, 1791: The Sorcerer: A Tale, 1795), notably criticized by Samuel Rose for its ‘German’ overwriting, its propensity for ‘breaking a butterfly upon a wheel’,36 has long since shrunk to 33 34 35

36

Horror Literature, ed. Marshall B. Tymn (N.Y. & London: Bowker, 1981), 166. The point was missed by Lewis’s biographer. See Frank, The First Gothics, 29-30, for a full account of this chapbook. The best German example of the genre is Wilhelm Meinhold’s Sidonia von Bork, die Klosterhexe (1847-48: Sidonia the Sorceress, 1849), see Patrick Bridgwater, Anglo-German Interactions in the Literature of the 1890s (Oxford: Legenda, 1999), 73-122. The Monthly Review, 21 (Dec. 1796), 458-60.

98 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective a footnote in literary history as the work from which Lewis took the ending of The Monk. It is only marginally Gothic. The English translation, The Sorcerer (1795, thought to be the work of one of the ablest translators from German of the time, Robert Huish), widely reviewed at the time,37 was overshadowed in public esteem by The Ghost-Seer and The Necromancer, both of which had far greater impact in Britain. Thematically it belongs together with Goethe’s Faust, ein Fragment (1791), from which it took its motto, and with Schiller’s Der Geisterseher (1789): it is one of the more original of the novels deriving from Der Geisterseher. The sorcerer in question, Pietro Barliardo, is reminiscent both of Faust and of Cagliostro (on whom Schiller’s text was based), a charlatan offering eternal youth to those sufficiently gullible to pay for the secret. Barliardo is associated with Rosicrucianism, although the fact is unimportant. Weber’s friend and Hamburg fellow-novelist, J. F. E. Albrecht, who was to publish a Rosicrucian novel (Geheime Geschichte eines Rosenkreuzers) in 1792, established a circle of’ Defenders of reason and human rights against mystery-mongering and mumbo-jumbo’, of which Veit Weber, as a stout supporter of the Aufklärung and a passionate opponent of Geheimbündelei (the cult and/or membership of the mushrooming illegal secret societies of the time), was a member. The first thirty pages of Die Teufelsbeschwörung ramble in Weber’s usual way - his very sentences are endless - before giving way to Rosicrucian rigmarole; he uses Rosicrucian symbolism in bower-bird style to adorn his text. The subject of Die Teufelsbeschwörung is ‘love’ (read lust) and marriage. Francesco, tutor to Pietro’s nephew Benedetto, is both moneyless and lusting after Enemonde. Pietro, invoking Juvenal’s satire on women, bullies Francesco into giving up the idea of marriage, promising to leave all his property to him in the event of Benedetto’s death. The outcome is inevitable: when Benedetto enters Pietro’s Rosicrucian shrine, Francesco dons a bearskin and horns, appears before the hapless youth, and murders him. Pietro, heartbroken, dies soon afterwards, leaving Francesco with the means to marry. Enemonde, reading Francesco like a book, turns him down, whereupon he goes off to commit suicide. There is in the tale too much of what Scott rightly called Weber’s affectation of deep metaphysical reflexion and protracted description and discussion.38 Anyone reading Die Teufelsbeschwörung will surely agree that Tieck’s view of Veit Weber as in some ways superior to Scott is nonsense. Weber did nothing that was not done better

37 38

See AR, 23 (1796), 53; BC, 7 (1796), 430; CR, 17 (1796), 113; EM, 29 (1796). 260; MR, 21 (1796), 458; SM, 59 (1797), 49. See Scott’s letter to Daniel Terry of January 1823.

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by Scott and Bulwer-Lytton. Turned into a farce, The Devil of a Lover (Covent Garden Theatre, 1798), it was, predictably, a flop. The Critical Review (May 1796, 113) saw The Sorcerer as an example of the German or impassioned style of writing, concluding that The catastrophe [...] harrows up the soul with emotions too shockingly vivid to be gratifying; they exceed in a great degree all the limits of pleasure which critics point out as the sources of the satisfaction we receive from the perusal of works of this nature, - and we shut the book with a sensation of horror bordering on disgust.

The catastrophe in question is the ending of The Monk, which Lewis took from Weber, altering it in the process to make it altogether more striking. The Monthly Review (Dec. 1796) saw both The Sorcerer and The Black Valley as crudely overwritten, which was unfair since the comment was based on the crude English rifacimento of The Black Valley, for which Veit Weber cannot be held responsible; butHuish’s translation of Die Teufelsbeschwörung could not disguise the weaknesses of the tale, which is, to quote from the text, ‘das schrecklichste Mordmährchen’ ([a] tale of murder most horrid’),39 an echo of a critical comment already noticed. The murder of Benedetto and Francesco’s suicide are both described in ghastly detail. A contemporary reviewer was right to conclude that ‘we shut the book with a sensation of horror bordering on disgust’.40 Gothic are the horrific, the bloody murder and even more harrowing suicide, the charlatanism of Pietro, the duplicity of Francesco and his masquerade. Francesco appears to masquerade when he dons the bearskin and horns to kill his young charge, but in reality he was dissembling when, before that, he pretended to abandon the wish to possess Enemonde. It is when he dresses up as the Devil that he shows his true colours.

IV That Veit Weber shares his time’s post-Revolutionary obsession with Geheimbündelei is shown by the fact that he joined the ‘Verteidiger der gesunden Vernunft und der Rechte der Menschheit wider Geheimniskrämerei und Unterdrückungssucht’ (Defenders of reason and human rights against mystery-mongering and mumbo-jumbo) in 1793. A Freemason, like Bürger, he was interested in Illuminism and Rosicrucianism, 39 40

Sagen der Vorzeit, Vol 4, new edn (Berlin: 1810), 97. CR (May 1796), 113.

100 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective with both of which he had contact: Christoph Meiners and Ludwig Timotheus Spittler in Göttigen were members of the Illuminati, and Johann George Forster, whom Weber visited in Mainz, had connexions with Rosicrucianism, as had his Hamburg friend Dr Albrecht, who founded the ‘Verteidiger der gesunden Vernunft’ following the publication of his novel Geheime Geschichte eines Rosenkreuzers (1792: [Secret History of a Rosicrucian], not translated). In Die Brüder des Bundes für Freyheit und Recht there is a character who is associated with, among many other things, Rosicrucianism, although the fact amounts to little more than name-dropping.41 The orders and secret societies which loom increasingly large in Weber’s work are as much a feature of the contemporary novel of both Gothic and non-Gothic (Goethe, Jean Paul) persuasions as they are of contemporary life. They include the order(s) of knighthood as such, and more especially the [Ritter]Bund zum Einhorn, the Bund für Freyheit und Recht, and the Bund der Freischöffen [heilige Vehme], to which are opposed bodies like the Ketzergericht der Dominikaner [the Inquisition], theJesuits and the Rosicrucians. While the Brüderschaft zum Einhorn and the Vehmgericht featured in a minor way in Männerschwur und Weibertreue, the first of Weber’s secret-society works proper is Die Brüder des Bundes für Freyheit und Recht (1791-5), in which the Bundesbrüder face opposition from another (sinister, reactionary, obscurantist) order. Weber’s belief in the ‘old German’ virtues and in reason and democracy underlies the novel. Set in 1305-08 this long rambling novel in the dialogic novel form of the time initiated by A. G. Meißner in 1785 revolves around a goodly knight, Ernst von Falkenhelm, who, returning from unspecified wars, finds that the virtuous peaceful world he left behind has in the meantime become unsettled and decadent. He is denied entry to his own castle, which has become his friend’s whore-house with Falkenhelm’s sister Eleonore as his Buhldirne (paramour). In his youth Herzog Adelbert, the friend in question, had sworn allegiance to the Tugendbund, but has now forgotten his duty as a knight and his honour as a prince. Old German virtue has given way to greed (Raubgier), reckless self- indulgence, and fleshly abandon. The Bund für Freyheit und Recht, of which Falkenhelm was a founder-member, in his absence allowed him to be robbed of his property. When Adelbert demanded that the Bund should be disbanded since, in the words of every tyrant large or small, he was capable of taking care of justice himself, the Bund turned into a Geheimbund, which for Veit Weber and his mouthpiece Falkenhelm is acorruption of Bund: ‘Das Gute liegt offen da, das Böse verborgen’ (Good is plain to see, it is evil that hides itself away) (I: 144). 41

See E. Sierke, Schwärmer und Schwindler des 18. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1874);

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This is the reason why Veit Weber and other Gothic writers turn against the Vehme. In the present novel the Vehme is merely a background presence, its place being taken, in literary terms, by the Ketzergericht der Domikaner or Inquisition, a session of which is described in memorable detail (see I: 320346), while it is the Knights Templar who are implied to be an example of the corrupt Geheimbund, a subject to which Weber, who shares Naubert’s and Schiller’s interest in the Templars, returns later in the novel.In the foreground of Die Brüder des Bundes für Freyheit und Recht is the Bund of the title and, ranged against it another Verbrüderung (brotherhood) that is forever plotting in the background. Marion Beaujean writes of this mysterious Geheimbund: Charakteristisch in diesem Roman ist, daß dem ‘Bund für Freiheit und Recht’ ein Gegenbund als Vertreter von finsterer Machtpolitik und Reaktion entgegentrritt. Das im Verborgegen tagende Femegericht wird zum Verfechter dunkler Machenschaften: es ist nicht mehr der geheimnisvolle und verehrte Ort des Rechtes, sondern das Machtmittel eines finsteren Geheimbundes.42 (What is characteristic in this novel is the fact that the Bund für Freiheit und Recht is opposed by a reactionary secret order bent on sinister Realpolitik The Vehmgericht, meeting in camera, is drawn into sinister machinations: it is no longer the secret and venerable repository of law, but has become the instrument of a recidivist secret order.)

However, to identify this Gegenbund, founded by a Cagliostro-like scoundrel, with the Vehme or Vehmgericht is wrong: the sinister secret society at work in the background is not the Vehmgericht but the even more sinister organization that was based on it, the Inquisition or, called here by its original name, the Ketzergericht der Dominikaner, which represents the church’s will-to-power. The heilige Vehme is first mentioned in writing in 1211; the Inquisition, which was modelled on it, was founded in principle in 1215, and in 1232 the Dominican order was put in charge of the Inquisition, which is thus identical with what Veit Weber calls the Ketzergericht der Dominikaner. The session of the Ketzergericht here (I: 320-346) is, to the best of my knowledge, the longest and fullest fictional description of a session of the Inquisition. Pantenius seems unaware that the Ketzergericht der Dominikaner is identical with the Inquisition, but his comment is to the point:

42

Beaujean, 123. Eric Blackall, agreeing with Beaujean (Blackall, 64), calls it ‘an organization bent on sinister Realpolitik and obscurantist reactionariness’.

102 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Als eine Art Feme, auch äußerlich in der Art ihrer Zusammenkünfte, erscheint das Ketzergericht der Dominikaner, mit dem treibenden Motiv: Herrschaft der Kirche und damit Bekämpfung der Aufklärung.43 (As a kind of Feme, which it follows even as regards the nature of its meetings, the Dominican Court for the Prosecution of Heresy is driven by the desire to protect the power of the Churchand, to that end, to counter the Enlightenment.)

Die Brüder des Bundes für Freyheit und Recht has a number of Gothic features, including the trap-door through which Falkenhelm falls into darkness and incarceration, subterranean vaults and passages beneath monasteries, immurement, secret murder and assassination, secret societies and conspiracies, a session of the Inquisition complete with the machinery of torture, a Cagliostro-like scoundrel and necromancer, lecherous and unscrupulous monks, characters masked by their visors, a bogus marriage, an Engelseher (visionary) and charlatan, a mysterious ‘stranger’, allusions to Rosicrucians, and so forth. In German terms Die Brüder des Bundes für Freyheit und Recht is both a Ritterroman and a Geheimbundroman; in English terms it is a Gothic novel of the gothified, fictionalized history kind. More important, however, is the fact that it is a novel in which Weber makes clear his opposition to the Geheimbündelei of the late eighteenth century and his commitment both to the ‘Old German’ values and to the political ideals of the French Revolution. In the text he draws attention to his allegiance to the political ideals of Möser and Bürger. Given his obvious admiration for Schiller’s Die Räuber, it is interesting to see that by 1795 he has in one respect reached a similar point to that reached by Schiller, who in 1793-94 was working on Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, in that his protagonist, Ernst von Falkenhelm, is in effect an example of the extreme idealist or ineffectual Schwärmer of Schiller’s typology: his suicide represents not moral strength and self-sacrifice for the greater good -a notion much discussed in the novel - but his defeat by life. Falkenhelm’s conclusion, which is also Weber’s, that ‘Was recht ist, soll offen als am Tage sich zeigen, nur das Lichtscheue sucht das Dunkel’ (Justice ought to appear openly; only shady things seek out darkness)44 applies to any secret society and to none more than to the Inquisition. Outside the novel it applies both to the Vehmgericht that was said to be still in existence, in a debased form, in late eighteenth-century Germany,45 and to 43 44 45

Pantenius, 102. Pantenius, 101. See Baron Bock’s ‘Note sur l’existence de l’état actuel du trubunal secret en Allemagne’, in the Preface to his translation of Les chevaliers des sept montagnes (Metz: Behmer, An IX [1800]), 16-21.

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the Terror that was raging in France even as Veit Weber was writing, for between the lines Die Brüder des Bundes für Freyheit und Recht has more to do with the French Revolution than with the Middle Ages. The term ‘dritter Stand’ (V: 175), for instance, has nothing to do with the Middle Ages, and clearly refers to the Tiers État of the French Estates General at the time of the Revolution, to which Weber refers when he writes of’den traurigen Zustand der Bürger und Bauern in Frankreich’ (the sorry state of the citizens and peasants of France: V: 235). When he says that a time will come when princes will no longer be necessary (V:279ff) the reference is as much to the French Revolution as it is to the Swiss Confederation which broke free from Habsburg overlordship in 1291. This fundamental point was made by Pantenius: ‘Die Bundesbrüder errichten schließlich einen idealen Verfassungsstaat. Ein neuer Fürst, als „erster Diener des Gemeinbesten“ huldigt der „Landesverfassung und den Gesetzen“’ (The members of the Bund für Freyheit und Recht end by creating an ideal constitutional state. A new prince, acting as ‘the prime servant of the state’ pays homage to ‘its constitution and laws’).46 Marion Beaujean made much the same point: Die Brüder des Bundes für Freiheit und Recht bilden ein Kollektiv in einer Zeit, in der ihre Ideale durch Tyrannei und Kirche vernichtet zu werden drohen. Das Kostüm des Mittelters ist nur noch äußere Schablone. Der Ritter wird zum rechtsbewußten Bürger des 18. Jahrhunderts, der seinen Anspruch auf eine verfassungsmäßige Staatsform durchsetzen will.47 (The Brüder des Bundes für Freiheit und Recht constitute a collective at a time when their ideals are in danger of being destroyed by tyranny and the church. The medieval fancy dress is merely a cliché. The knight turns into a citizen of the eighteenth century, with a sense of right and wrong, who is determined to enforce his demand for a constutional form of state.)

In the wake of the defeat of Dumouriez’ revolutionary army by the Habsburg ancien régime (Holy Roman Empire) at the bartle of Neerwinden on 18 March 1793, which he experienced at first hand, Veit Weber went back in his mind to the old German values which meant so much to him and which were associated in his mind with Justus Möser and August Bürger. At the beginning of the second part of the novel he quotes lines from Bürger,48 praising as sublime the idea of dying ‘Für Tugend, Menschenrecht und Menschenfreyheit’ (for virtue [honour], justice and freedom). These are the values admired by Weber and personified in the novel by Ernst von 46 47 48

Pantenius, 100. Beaujean, 123. Bürgers sämtliche Werke in vier Bänden, ed. Wolfgang von Wurzbach (Leipzig; Max Hesse, n.d.), II, 26. (‘Die Tode’).

104 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Falkenhelm. Towards the end of the novel Weber quotes from Möser’s Patriotische Phantasien, which was also in his mind at the time. In the long war fought on German soil from 1793 to 1815 the ancient, backward-looking structure of the Holy Roman Empire was challenged and in 1806 destroyed by the French army, so that the clash between reaction and revolution, which is repeatedly seen in the novel, is a reflection of what was going on in the real world as the populations of the German states and principalities swung backwards and forwards between fear andnostalgia. The fear and idealism at work in France spread as the French army advanced, so that the populations of the German principalities, of which Duke Adalbert’s is one, were caught between the feudal past with its undemocratic security and the ‘democratic’ future which the Terror rendered so challenging.

V The most interesting of the secret orders in the Sagen der Vorzeit is the Freischöffenbund, Weber’s view of which has changed: having initially seen it through Goethe’s eyes as a venerable ‘Old German’ institution, he came, in Die heilige Vehme, to see it as a Criminalanstalt (criminal organization). This change was in large measure brought about by his reading of Dietrich Hermann Hegewisch’s Übersicht der deutschen Kulturgeschichte (1788), which includes a hostile account of the Vehmgericht. In Die heilige Vehme (1795) Weber addresses head-on the Geheimbund that is most significant for him, and for Gothic writers generally, the Bund der Freischöffen or Vehme. In the early Sagen der Vorzeit, including Die Brüder des Bundes für Freyheit und Recht (1791-95), he is largely content, as a popular historian, to record historical reality as he sees it, but by 1795 his attitude has changed and he has become a pedagogue with several axes to grind, one of them concerning the heilige Vehme. He is no longer content to use the Vehme as Goethe had used it in Götz, for dramatic reasons. Pantenius argues that Die heilige Vehme is modelled on L. F. Huber’s play Das heimliche Gericht,49 to which Weber may have had his attention drawn by his friend Johann George Forster, to whose daughter Therese he was married, but Das heimliche Gericht, which first appeared in the second number of Schiller’s Thalia in 1790, and was later reprinted, with a new 28-page Preface, in Huber’s Schauspiele (1795), is such a weak, unfocused work that it is difficult to imagine anyone being impressed by it, but Huber’s view of the Vehmgericht system largely corresponds with the view Veit Weber had, by 1795, come to embrace. 49

Pantenius, 79.

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Huber’s starting-point is to be found in Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen; like this, it is a Ritterstück, but with the emphasis on the Vehmgericht as such. The fact that Huber, like Weber, is indebted to Benedicte Naubert’s Hermann von Unna helps to explain Pantenius’s misapprehension. It having become clear that readers of the original 1790 publication were disappointed not to find there the kind of historical preface that was becoming usual in ‘historical’ works, Huber duly added a Preface to the 1795 edition of Das heimliche Gericht. It was, however, an evasive, unhelpful one in which he wrote of his awareness ‘daß die historischen Umstände von den Fehmgerichten, ob ich sie schon gebraucht hatte, um meine Phantasie zu nähren, doch mehr in zufälliger als wesentlicher Verbindung mit dem Geiste meines Gedichtes ständen’ (that the historical circumstances surrounding the Vehmgerichte, which I had used to stimulate my imagination, were only accidentally connected with the spirit of my work) which does no more for the reader’s confidence than does the statement that ‘das Historische an diesem Stück [...] nur als Vehikel oder Einfassung anzusehen war’ (the historical element in this play was to be regarded merely as a vehicle or framework [for what, the reader is not told]) (xxi). That the play did not go down well when performed in Mannheim, is not surprising. It was criticized both for being too ‘horrid’ and for its vagueness. The latter criticism is fully justified. The play opens weakly, without any obvious point or direction, and while it doesimprove in this respect, there is so much vague talk, at the expense of action, that the reader’s (and no doubt the spectator’s) attention is strained. It is a play about the Bund der Freischöffen, mostly called the ‘Orden’ (order [of free judges]), to which it is largely devoted, of which it paints a black picture. The Preface speaks of ‘das Banditenmäßige’ (a banditlike quality) as one of the qualities of this secret order whose members, here given the sensational title of ‘Brüder des unterirdischen Rechts’ (brothers of clandestine justice) are, at their worst, no better than bandits writ large. The text speaks of ‘Räuber auf den Gerichtsstühlen’ (robbers in high places), and the underground vault in which the court meets is likened to a ‘Räuberhöhle’ (robbers’ den). Das heimliche Gericht was one of the first works of Gothic fiction to feature an initiation ceremony. Inevitably the ceremony is described differently in Das heimliche Gericht and Alf von Dülmen, for in default of historical documentation Huber and Naubert had to use their very different imaginations to extrapolate from what was known about the secret tribunal and its sessions. Huber sets the initiation in a large underground vault, in which the judge’s table is covered with a blood-red cloth (other writers have a black cloth), beneath which are the members’ poniards. Westhausen is required to swear various plausible-sounding oaths before being given a

106 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective poniard as a symbol of membership of the tribunal. Eventually the Archbishop (of Cologne, Westhausen’s father, presiding genius of the Vehme) is obliged to resign for trying to save his son,who, guilty of perjury, takes his own life. Sontheim, guilty of murder, is executed. Arlheim speaks for author and reader alike when he says that he has seen ‘die niedrigsten Leidenschaften, hinter dem Schutz des Gesetzes, ungestört ihr nächtliches Werk treiben’ (the basest passions, protected by the law, going about their shady work without let or hindrance). The unprincipled Truchseß (Bailiff) is a case in point. Notwithstanding the Preface, rather too much of the play is spent in a discussion of the membership of the Vehme, which generates little light and gives the lie to what Huber later wrote in the Preface. History showed, however, that he was right to claim that there was a danger not only of the wrong people joining the order, for the wrong reasons, but also of the untrammelled power of the Vehme corrupting the corruptible. When Huber, writing in the Jenaer Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung inJuly 1792 (col. 174), joined the chorus of voices taking Weber to task for his sloppy approach to writing, he was referring to Weber’s early work, not to Die heilige Vehme. Impressed as he evidently was by Huber’s Das heimliche Gericht, Weber was much more impressed by the historian Dietrich Hermann Hegewisch’s Übersicht der deutschen Kulturgeschichte (1788), which includes a hostile account of the Vehmgericht as a Criminalanstalt, meaning not so much a body dealing in criminal law, as a criminal body. Largely as a result of reading Hegewisch, Weber has now become highly critical of the secret tribunal and all its works, which he has in any case come to see, from his new post-revoltionary perspective, as a branch of the ancien régime. The printed text of Die heilige Vehme (1795) includes a lengthy note on the history of what Weber calls ‘diese Criminalanstalt’ (he employs the term, an unusual one in historical studies of the Vehmgericht, first used by Hegewisch in 1788), a term that might equally well be applied to the Inquisition and to the various medieval and post-medieval bodies involved in witchcraft trials:50 The Ketzergericht der Dominikaner in Der Bund für Freyheit und Recht was implicitly presented as a just such a criminal organization. Initially Weber’s purpose was to reveal the real nature of the Westphalian secret tribunals to those who were not in a position to read contemporary accounts of this ‘old German’ instution for themselves; now he is concerned to demonstrate their corruptibility and criminality. The pedagogue has taken over from the historian. Die heilige Vehme leaves the reader in no doubt that he saw the Vehme as a Criminalanstalt that by 1438 had degenerated into a criminal fraternity. Two 50

See, for instance, Michael Kunze, Straße ins Feuer. Vom Leben und Sterben in der Zeit des Hexenwahns (Munich: Kindler, 1982: Highroad to the Stake. A Tale of Witchcraft, tr. William E. Yuill (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1987).

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years later Vulpius was to take a similar view of the ‘black fraternity’ in Rinaldo Rinaldini, der Räuberhauptmann (1797). Die heilige Vehme, set in 1438, at the beginning of the reign of Albrecht II, is Veit Weber’s best-known and was once his most-read work. There are two striking Vehmgericht ‘scenes’ (203-234, 282-306), but in a real sense the heilige Vehme or Bund der Freyschöffen is the hero-villain of the piece. The Stuhl at Greiffenhain is represented by a Freygraf, eight adelige Vehmschöffen, five bürgerliche Vehmschöffen, and three Frohnbothen. The novel-in-dialogue form, typical of Weber,sits uneasily with his use of the form, for it opens with a footnote nine pages long, and speeches are always in danger of becoming too long (98-9, 161-66, 173-77, etc.). Weber is most verbose when he is riding his hobby horse by describing the Vehmgericht system in detail that may seem useful to those coming to the subject for the first time, who are, however, likely to take it all at face value, even when Weber is describing something for which there is no historical evidence. In addition such long passages are directly at odds with the form of the novel and its dramatic pretensions. The initial long footnote is useful in that it details Weber’s sources of information on the Vehmgericht. It mostly consists of a lengthy quotation from Möser’s Osnabrückische Geschichte (1768, I; 248-255). Otherwise Weber acknowledges Karl Meißner, ‘Über die westphälischen oder Fehmgerichte,’ in the Hannöverisches Magazin (1786), Nos 38, 39 and 40; N. Kindlinger, Münsterische Beiträge zur Geschichte Deutschlands, hauptsächlich Westphalens, 4 Vols (Münster, 1787-93), see VolIII, 141-222; and C.P.Kopp, Über die Verfassung der heimlichen Gerichte in Westphalen, completed and edited by U. F. Kopp (1794, repr. 1984), which Scott also owned. Rüdiger von Maltingen, Freygraf des Stuhls zu Greiffenhain (Chairman of the Greiffenhain Bench) and the villain of the piece, appears to refer to Illuminism when he says of Georg von Aspenau: ‘In seinem Kopfe spukt’s von einer Fähigkeit des Menschen, stets vollkommener zu werden’ (19: He has the crazy idea of the perfectibility of man), although this may simply be intended to put the reader in mind of something that Maltingen is unable to do. Predictably, Weber fails to acknowledge the obvious influence on him of Hermann Hegewisch’s hostile account of the Vehmgericht as a Criminalanstalt. That he was not interested in keeping up with the history of the Vehmgericht is shown by the fact that he evidently did not know Karl Hütter’s Das Vehmgericht (Leipzig: Köhler, 1793), which is the best such study at the time and arguably one of the best of all. The Vehmgericht, the corruptibility of which parallels that of the ancien régime in pre-revoutionary France, is now used by Weber as the means to an end, the end – in which it failed – being to convince readers that the French Revolution was justified and indeed

108 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective necessary. His readers, who will have linked the Vehme with the Terror, were not impressed. The foremost Gothic feature of the novel is, of course, the secret tribunal as such, but there are many incidental images and motifs that are typical of early Gothic. They include the ruined castle and ruined chapel in which the Freyschöffenbund holds its sessions (supposedly deep underground), the wild, rocky landscape surrounding the ruins, an ‘unergründlicher Verließ’ (dungeon deep underground), masked men, disguises, terrifying masked figures seen in dreams and nightmares,counterfeiting, perjury, the use of poison and its lurid effects, secret doors, secret underground waterways, secret murder, a chest full of bones, Raubhöhlen (robbers’ lairs), incarceration (in a cell, in a tower),the idea of a Blutgericht (court motivated by bloodlust) and of Unschuldiggemordete (murdered innocents), daggers (Vehmdolche), the guilty being stabbed to death in the sacristy, being dragged off to the nearest tree to be strung up there, the idea of being liable to be killed on sight by a member of the court, ‘die Teufeley von der verkehrten Welt ‘ (the diabolical notion of an upside-down world),51 and so forth. The novel starts from the fact (24) that Martin Bleyer (one of Georg von Aspenau’s vassals) has confessed to having prepared, with Georg’s mother, the poison that killed her first husband, Ulrich von Eberhorst. That murder turned Adelgunde into Veit von Aspenau’s wife and Georg von Aspenau’s mother-in-law. Not long afterwards two masked men, who turn out to be ‘die Rächer der heimlichen Acht’ (avengers of the secret tribunal), agents of the Vehmgericht sent to execute its orders, kill Katharine von Hohenwart’s steward by stringing him up on the nearest tree; she is told that he had stolen her father’s valuables. The action of the novel turns on these two events, which involve the key question: whether the Freystuhl zu Greiffenhain the Greiffenhain bench of the Vehme - in the person of its presiding judge, Rüdiger von Maltingen, is acting in the interests of justice in pursuing criminals, or is corrupt and motivated by greed and personal vengence. For a number of years the impression has been gaining strength that ‘die heimliche Acht handle oft gar ungerecht’ (the secret tribunal often acts illegally) (54) and that its members are ‘Empörer gegen die Menschheit’ (enemies of mankind) (82); later a mysterious knight, who is revealed to be Berthold von Aspenau, says that he has heard of many a knight who ‘den Mantel des Gesetzes in seine Faust wickelt, damit er ohne Gefährde den Stahl selbst in den Rachen des edelmütigen Löwen bohren könne’ (wraps the cloak of the law round his fist so that without any danger to himself he 51

Cf the devil’s upside-down castle of folktale .Veit Weber may have known the anonymous Die verkehrte Welt welche anders spricht wie sie denkt und anders denkt wie sie spricht (1769).

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can even ram his poniard down the throatof the noble lion) (154). That this is a reference to Maltingen is confirned when the knight reveals that Maltingen is officially considered to be motivated by Blutgier (bloodlust) (157), meaning the desire to destroy his enemies, of whom Georg von Aspenau is known to be one. The omnipresence of the secret tribunal is emphasized; every household is said to include one of its secret agents, which means that it can be seen as a forerunner of the Stasi, but also of the Gestapo which appropriated the Vehmdolch or dagger so much in evidence in the workings of the Vehme. Georg von Aspenau, who realizes that his mother is guilty, and that as a Freyschöffe he should denounce her, is summoned to appear before the Vehmgericht. He appears and is accused by Maltingen of a twofold misdeed. Maltingen calls for his death, but a brave (hence his name) member of the court, Kühner, intervenes on the ground that Maltingen is known to be the sworn enemy of the accused. Maltingen condemns himself when he says, in the quaint parlance of the tribunal, ‘giftigen Mundes’ (out of his own guilty mouth): ‘Schuldig oder unschuldig: was kümmert’s mich!’ (Guilty or innocent, what do I care?) The question is whether Maltingen, as Freygraf of the Greiffenhain tribunal, will be condemned for abusing the Vehme by using it as a vehicle for private revenge. In the event Georg is taken to the sacristy to be stabbed to death, while Maltingen is merely disgraced after Berthold von Aspenau, who at this stage is acting as chairman (on exactly what authority is not clear) lists the abuses of his position (301) by Maltingen, who escapes with his life. This means that the Vehme, at least locally, is motivated by dishonesty, greed and the thirst for revenge. In the context what matters is not whether Maltingen is executed or not, just that in this, the last of his Sagen der Vorzeit, Veit Weber has had his last word on the so-called heilige Vehme, his view of which has changed radically in the course of the series. From initially seeing it as a venerable Old German institution guaranteeing justice to those who have no other access to it, he has come to the conclusion that it is a monstrous criminal institution whose very secrecy is the seed from which corruption inevitably sprang. Walter Scott, for his part, having grown up on tales of knight errantry (Ritterromane) and then, by natural progression, on Gothic novels, wrote and thought more or less in Gothic throughout his career, not least when he is experiencing what Parsons has calledthe ‘discordant and infelicitous, though spasmodic, influence of German literature’ on his work.52 This includes the early translations from Veit Weber’s friend Bürger (The Chase and William and Helen, 1796) and Goethe (Goetz of Berlichingen with the iron hand, 179; repr. 52

Parsons 95.

110 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Zwickau, 1829, as Vol. 137 of The Works of Walter Scott). Goetz of Berlichingen with the iron hand not only - with Tytler’s translation of Die Räuber introduced German Sturm und Drang drama into England, but introduced a work that was influential in the development of Gothic fiction. The translation, though well received (‘No Englishman capable of understanding dramatic excellence can peruse it without delight’),53 was less succesful than Scott had hoped, largely because it appeared at a time when for historical reasons German literature was under a cloud in England. His other ‘German’ works include Anne of Geierstein (1829), his rifacimento of Veit Weber’s Die heilige Vehme (The House of Aspen, 1830), and early unpublished versions of two Ritterdramen, Jakob Maier’s Fust von Stromberg (1782; 4th impression, 1807) and Josef Marius von Babo’s Otto von Wittelsbach (1782), both of which remained unpublished,54 which is hardly surprising, given that Scott himself, in a letter dated 13 December 1827, described them as ‘sad trash’.55 Scott admired Weber’s work because as a young man he had been fascinated by the Vehme, which he associated above all with Weber’s Die heilige Vehme. The fact that he regularly wrote of Veit Weber shows that he had only a loose grip on the horrid mysteries of Fraktur. Scott’s imagination, then, initially caught by Bürger and Goethe, was held for a time by the ‘Vehmgericht’ that he associated with Weber, so that his German reading remained an important background factor in his work, whichin its turn became hugely influential in Germany. In the present context the most important of these are the versions of Goethe and Weber, which are linked by the presence of the Vehmgericht, in which Scott took a keen if unfulfilled interest. His library contained, in addition to Francis Palgrave’s The Rise and Progress of the English Commonwealth (1832), from which he quoted at disproportionate length in the Introduction to Anne of Geierstein, at least four books on the subject: C. P. Kopp, Über die Verfassung der heimlichen Gerichte in Westphalen (Göttingen, 1794), Paul Wigand, Das Femgericht Westphalens (1825), Ludwig Tross, Sammlung merk-würdiger Urkunden für die Geschichte des Femgerichts (1826), and François-Adolphe Loeve-Veimars, Précis de l’histoire des Tribunaux secrets, dans le Nord de l’Allamagne (1824).56 For whatever reasons, and one was the fact that when he wrote Anne of Geierstein (discussed in Chapter 10) he

53 54

55 56

The Critical Review, 26 [1799], 429-32. See D. M. Mennie, ‘Sir Walter Scott’s Unpublished Translations of German Plays,’ MLR, 33 (1938), 234-9, and Otto Brahm, Das deutsche Ritterdrama des 18. Jahrhunderts (Strasbourg: Trübner, 1880). Quoted from Mennie, 236. Loeve-Veimars was Hoffmann’s French translator.

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was away from his library, this interest never bore the fruit that might have been expected. The House of Aspen, Scott’s first Vehmgericht fiction, written shortly after Goetz of Berlichingen with the iron hand, and performed once, in 1799, to a London audience that signally failed to applaud it, belongs together with Lewis’s The Castle Spectre (1797), which was inspired by Die Räuber. In 1799, when they were much discussed, Scott referred to ‘the excellent romances called Herman of Unna and Alf von Duilmen [sic]’, and in 1811 he referred to ‘A very good little [!] German romance entitled Hermann [sic] of Unna’ in connexion with the ‘Invisible Tribunal’, but he was not interested in these two titles (neither of which he owned)57 as early historical novels worth taking seriously as such. For him they were purely and simply Vehmgerichtfictions.58 By 1801 he was already dissatisfied with The House of Aspen, calling it a ‘Germanized brat’. By 1811 it had come to seem ‘a sort of half-mad German tragedy’. The operation of the Vehmic secret tribunal, unconvincing in Anne of Geierstein, where it reeks of melodrama, is more credible in The House of Aspen. The House of Aspen (1799, published 1829), a rifacimento of Die heilige Vehme (Sagen der Vorzeit, vol VI, 1796), was not published in1799 because The Rovers had killed the market. Lockhart wrote that The House of Aspen owed its most successful scenes to the Secret Tribunal, which fountain of horror had first been disclosed by Goethe, and had by April 1799 ‘lost much of its effect through the „clumsy alacrity“ of a hundred followers’,59 a justifiable exaggeration. Scott described The House of Aspen as ‘rather a rifacimento of the original than a translation, since the whole is compressed, and the incidents and dialogue occasionally much varied’, but he also implied it to be an imitation which merely ‘borrowed the substance of the story and a part of the diction’. In reality it is in no sense a translation, or even a rifacimento in the normal 1799 sense; it is simply Scott’s own shorter and in large measure different treatment of or gloss on Veit Weber’s material. The Vehmgericht trial scenes in particular, of which there are two in Die heilige Vehme and one in The House of Aspen, are different, with completely different endings; both writers make considerable use of Vehmgericht formulae, although even these formulae are different.Both works keep close to Vehmgericht procedures so far as they are known, but there’s the rub, for although a good deal is known about the composition of the court and its proceedings (see Chapter 9), very little is known, in detail, about what actually happened in the course of their 57 58 59

He probably borrowed Herman of Unna from one of the Edinburgh circulating libraries, and may have borrowed Alf von Deulmen from a friend. On Scott and Naubert, see Reitemeier, 243-6, and Brown, 121-24. J. G. Lockhart, Life of Scott, 83.

112 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective summary trials. Writers of fiction are therefore not only able to use their imaginations, but are obliged to do so. This means, in Gothic terms, that they are obliged to counterfeit history, to make it up as they go along. Weber and Scott both show the Vehme at odds with itself. In both works the protagonist is the Vehme itself, a fact that distinguishes them from many other works in which it is merely a trope or sensational incidental feature. The Vehme is seen as involving a blinkered form of justice: the Freischöffen are deluded, not least by their own rituals, so that they easily degenerate into idolaters worshipping at the altar that Weber and Scott place at the heart of their proceedings, so absorbed in their quasi-mystical ritual that perjury comes easily to these ‘midnight murderers’. Veit Weber writes as an antiquarian, this being part of his appeal to Scott, to whom every word and act of the Vehmgericht is of abiding interest; but in doing so, he loses sight of the reader. Scott, scarcely less interested in the heilige Vehme and its old Saxon antecedents, writes as a dramatic poet, cutting down to fifteen the fifty-five pages of Weber’s court proceedings, which are split between two scenes and regularly interrupted by a thud from the wings as victim after victim of the court’s vengeance is conducted from life to death by one Freyschöffe after another, with a poniard, in the sacristy. He changes the ending of Weber’s text radically by contriving the entrance of the Duke of Bavaria, who, as provincial grand master, proceeds to purge the ‘freyer Stuhl zu Greiffenhain’, which Scott, probably through ignorance of German pronunciation and orthography, turns into Griefenhaus, an impossible name. This version of the ending, it has to be said, is at once more concise and more dramatic as we see Roderic Count of Maltingen degraded from office as Freygraf, banished from Bavaria, and stripped of his knighthood. Weber’s original is, by comparison, wordy and repetitive, especially in its over-use of supposed Vehmic formulae. When all is said and done, Die heilige Vehme and The House of Aspen belong together, not only because they are both written by antiquarians fascinated by this most Gothic of institutions, with one work derived from the other, but because they involve a similar view of the once supposedly incorruptible Vehmic system as having become, by the late middle ages, dangerously open to abuse.

VI Caught as he is between the late Enlightenment and the French Revolution, both of which left their mark on him, Veit Weber is typical of his time not least as a once celebrated popular novelist whose work suddenly came to an

Veit Weber 113

end because, having alienated his natural readership, he had nowhere left to go. He is, as Scott was right to note, a writer given to affectation of deep metaphysical reflexion and to protracted description and discussion. He has been compared to the popular, patriotic twentieth-century Erfolgsautor Karl May,60 with whom he shares a devotion to the ‘old German’ virtues, but in the technical sense May, who clearly knew Veit Weber’s work, from which he borrows much, including the name Greif(f)enklau, is by far the better writer of the two. More often named than discussed in literary histories and studies of the Gothic novel, Weber deserves to be remembered as the man who first (in Männerschwur und Weibertreue) initiated and Gothified the modern Ritterroman and then, in a process which begins in Die Brüder des Bundes für Freyheit und Recht and is complete in Die heilige Vehme, amalgamated it with the Geheimbundroman. The very fact that the Ritterroman so swiftly degenerated into the subliterary as Weber’s many imitators adopted the genre that he had left behind helped, by contrast, to keep his name alive, but the medieval, chivalric element of Gothic, always its most vulnerable and dispensable feature, was forced - by him - to yield to the harsh realities of post-Revolutionary life. It is to his eternal credit that, as Aufklärer and democrat, he stood up to be counted. The rest, as they say, is literary history.

60

See Beaujean, 117.

3 BENEDICTE NAUBERT That Benedicte Naubert (1756-1819), once so celebrated, the German equivalent of Clara Reeve, Sophia Lee and Ann Radcliffe, but also of the Porter sisters, is virtually unknown nowadays, shows the extent to which critical prejudice can become self-defeating. Whether the subject is the Gothic novel, the secret-society novel, the secret-tribunal novel, the early historical novel, or the Märchenroman, she is an exceptionally interesting writer who deserves to be far better known, especially in the context of the early history of German and English Gothic. She is unique among the major German Gothic novelists in that she was decisively influenced by the English Gothic novel in the form of Sophia Lee’s The Recess. One of the greatest German popular writers, Naubert was until recently forgotten, and is today known mostly as a writer of Western fairytales (Neue Volksmärchen der Deutschen, 4 vols, 1789-92, repr. 2001); her Eastern fairytales (Almeoder Egyptische Märchen, 5 vols, 1793-97) remain virtually unknown. She established one of the two most important and successful German subsets of Gothic, the secret-society novel (and more especially the secret-tribunal novel), and is a novelist whose work, which establishes much of the repertoire of succeeding Gothic novelists, is generally set in the late Middle Ages, of which she had an exceptional knowledge. As an early historical novelist she did much to reclaim German national history for the novel.

I She was born in Leipzig at a time when Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield (1766: Der Landpriester von Wakefield, 1767) and Sterne’s Sentimental Journey (1768: Empfindsame Reise, 1768) were all the rage in Germany. The family novels that she went on to write in the late 1780s and early 1790s were modelled on Fielding and Goldsmith, while her first historical novel, Geschichte Emma’s Tochter Kaysers Karl des Grossen und seines Geheimschreibers Eginhard (1785), was firmly rooted in the sentimental tradition she never quite left; it bears the imprint of Fielding and Sterne, but above all of Richardson, whose work experienced a new dawn in Germany in 1786-90. She was taught philosophy, history, Latin and Greek by her elder brothers, and taught herself English, French and Italian, from all of which she went on to translate. She read widely in the history of Germany, France and Britain in the medieval period. The Anglophilia of the time left its mark on her work

116 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective in the form of a string of translations of English novels of uneven quality, of which the most significant are her translation of Sophia Lee’s The Recess, and, in the present context, her translations of two minor English Gothic novels. She was clearly familiar with the work of the British historians (Goldsmith, Hume, Hurd and Robertson) used by Sophia Lee. In a letter to Friedrich Rochlitz dated 20 Sept 1817 she wrote: ‘Die Geschichte ist meine Fürstin; ich kenne die Ehrfurcht, mit welcher ich mich ihr nahen muß’ (History is my goddess; I know that she is to be approached with respect). More of an historian than Sophia Lee, she allowed herself less fictional licence. She knew Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, probably knew Hurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762),1 and may have known Clara Reeve’s The Progress of Romance (1785) as well as The Old English Baron. She once said that ‘Keine gelehrte Schreiberinn bin ich nicht’ (I am not one of your learned writers),2 by which she meant that she had no academic or poetic pretensions, but her modesty is misleading, for she is a notable historical novelist, the most interesting part of whose work consists of gothified, part fictionalized history. From its outset in 1785 the German early historical novel, which, like its English counterpart, is often gothified, is associated with Benedicte Naubert, who in the course of translating The Recess learnt from it how to combine fact and fiction, going on to produce, among other things, a number of historical romances that belong in the context of Gothic, including Walter von Montbarry (1786), Hermann von Unna (1788), Alf von Dülmen (1791), Die Ritter vom Siebengebürge (1797, in the unlikely event that it is proved to be by her), and Elisabeth Erbin von Toggenburg (1789), all of which are discussed presently. Her translations of Gothic novels include Sophia Lee, The Recess (1783-85: Die Ruinen, eine Geschichte aus den vorigen Zeiten, 1786), Ann Howell, Rosenberg. A Legendary Tale (1789: Graf Rosenberg oder das enthüllte Verbrechen, 1791), and Sarah Sheriffe, Correlia; or, The Mystic Tomb (Minerva, 1802: Corelia oder die Geheimnisse des Grabes, 1803). Hermann von Unna, which so impressed Scott, left its mark on Schiller’s Der Geisterseher, Veit Weber’s Die heilige Vehme, Kleist’s Käthchen von Heilbronn, and Anne Radcliffe’s The Italian. Her Elisabeth, Erbin von Toggenburg (1789), translated by M. G. Lewis as Feudal Tyrants, was his first Gothic novel and thus, in the formal sense, the making both of The Monk and of Lewis as a Gothic novelist. Even in terms of the English Gothic novel The Recess is a more significant landmark than Walpole’s Otranto. Naubert’s translation of it gave her what she needed to become a writer of Gothified histories à la Sophia 1 2

Hurd’s work was cited by Raspe in his verse romance Hermin und Gunilde (1766). See Nikolaus Dorsch (ed.), ‘Sich rettend aus der kalten Würklichkeit’: Die Briefe Benedikte Nauberts (Berne: Peter Lang, 1986), 23.

Benedicte Naubert 117

Lee, and may well also have impressed Schiller, who began work on Der Geisterseher in autumn 1786, although he does not mention The Recess/Die Ruinen in his correspondence. In a letter dated 2 Nov. 1788 Gottfried Körner suggested that, in order to boost his income, Schiller might consider writing, ‘in der Manier des Geistersehers’ (in the manner of Der Geisterseher), novels like Walter von Montbarry and Hermann von Unna. Schiller did not act on Körner’s suggestion, for ever since Der Geisterseher he had been touchy on the subject of ‘popular literature’, although this did not prevent him from recommending Naubert’s Amalgunde, Königin von Italien, oder das Märchen von der Wunderquelle (1787) to Charlotte von Lengefeld in a letter dated 4 July 1788. In his letter of 2 Nov. 1788 Körner drew Schiller’s attention to Naubert’s Geschichte der Gräfin Thekla von Thurn (1788), thereby giving him a model for one of his best-loved figures, the Princess Thekla of Friedland in Wallenstein. Naubert’s Hermann von Unna with its secret-tribunal trial scene may have led to the Inquisition scene in Der Geisterseher, for which there was no other literary model available at the time, although Schiller need not have had a model, and her Walter von Montbarry, Großmeister des Tempelordens (1786), may conceivably have given Schiller the idea for a projected tragedy, Die Malteser, which dates from 1788.3 Further evidence of the continuing fascination with the Knights Templar is Vulpius’s Der Maltheser (1804: The Knight of Malta, 1997). The context, in either case, is the contemporary fascination with secret societies and the conspiracies they were thought to be fomenting. In Dresden there was, in the 1770s, a secret society of Tempelritter, whose fame will have reached Leipzig. The military-monastic order of Knights Templar, founded in 1119, the leading members of which were burned at the stake in the early fourteenth century, is, of course, one of the most enigmatic and powerful of all secret societies, to this day a cult object. Schiller’s ballad ‘Ritter Toggenburg’ (July 1797) presumably goes back to his reading ofNaubert’s Elisabeth, Erbin von Toggenburg (1789), as does Friedrich, der letzte Graf von Toggenburg, ein Ritterspiel (1794) by Spieß. It is therefore appropriate, and indeed necessary, to discuss Naubert and Schiller in the same context,4 something Schiller-criticism has until now been loath to do, presumably on the grounds that it would not do for a canonical writer to be seen to be indebted to an extra-canonical one, a backward notion that Kleist exploded back in 1810 in a short piece entitled ‘Ein Satz aus der höheren Kritik’.

3 4

See also his Vorrede zu Niethammers Bearbeitung der Geschichte des Malteserordens von Vertot (1792-93). It is a pity that the otherwise excellent Schiller-Handbuch (ed. Helmut Koopmann, Stuttgart: Kröner, 1998) found no occasion to mention Naubert.

118 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective

II More accomplished than Geschichte Emma’s, closer to the Gothic tradition (it is prefaced with lines from Young’s Night Thoughts [IX, 77ff: ‘From the Dust/Call up the sleeping Hero’]), and the first of her historical romances to combine history and fancy on a stage where real and fictional characters mingle, an Ordensroman entitled Walter von Montbarry, Großmeister des Tempelordens (1786: Walter de Monbary, Grand Master of the Knights Templars, 1803)5 was written while Naubert was preparing her translation of The Recess, hence the overlaps in the plots of the two novels, to which Hilary Brown has drawn attention.6 Three of the characters in Walter von Montbarry Eleonore, Matilde and Graf von Leicester - share their names with characters in The Recess. In the Gothic context the most interesting aspects of the novel are the way in which the description of the Tempelorden (Order of the Knights Templar) with its secret rites and humanitarian ideals leads naturally to Naubert’s preoccupation, in succeeding novels, with the heilige Vehme, and the way in which King Richard I and Sir Walter de Monbary, losing their way, find themselves among the Assassins, the Shiite sect who, under the leadership of the Old Man of the Mountain and the influence of hashish, were planning the secret assassination of all their enemies. The Assassins were to appeal to the likes of Shelley, De Quincey and Tieck. Shelley left an unfinished romance, The Assassins, written in 1814, containing ‘strange, weird and unnatural [...] incidents’, and De Quincey was fascinated by Joseph von Hammer’s Geschichte der Assassinen (1818: Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, History of the Assassins, 1835), to which he refers in the paper On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts (1827),7 in which he takes the Schillerian notion of criminal sublimity to its absurd conclusion. However, the Order of Assassins is not the only Gothic feature of Walter von Montbarry, for there is a prevailing sense of threat and foreboding in the novel: ‘The hero’s true origins are secret, and mysterious forebodings, separations, abductions, and imprisonments abound. The action is controlled by cabals and the secret order of the Templars.’8 The novel’s theme is Geheimbündelei and its genre the previously non-existent Bundesroman. 5 6 7 8

See Beaujean, 108-113. See Hilary Brown, Benedikte Naubert (1756-1819) and her Relations to English Culture (Leeds: Maney Publishing, 2005), 68, for details of the numerous overlaps. See Patrick Bridgwater, De Quincey’s Gothic Masquerade (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2004), 99-104. Anna M. Wittmann, ‘Gothic Trivialliteratur: From Popular Gothicism to Romanticism,,’ in European Romanticism. Literary Cross-Currents, Modes, and Models, ed. Gerhart Hoffmeister (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990), 70.

Benedicte Naubert 119

Given that she shared Walpole’s love of the middle ages, and was familiar with the English, French and German chronicles of the period, Naubert is likely to have read The Castle of Otranto, which first appeared in German under the title Seltsame Begebenheiten im Schloße Otranto, eine gotische Geschichte in 1768. She probably read it in English. However, for the gothification of her future historical tales she was indebted not to Walpole’s Gothick whimsy, which was not her style, but to Sophia Lee. Nor did she need the mediation of Walpole to attract her to D’Aulnoy’s fairytales. It has been said that The Castle of Otranto ‘wurde das Urbild aller sogenannten Schauerromane’ (became the model for all so-called Gothic novels),9 started a trend in Germany, andhelped to shape the German Gothic novel. This is overstated. Hadley was right to argue that ‘the insistence of some observers of English literature that Walpole’s Otranto initiated a new fashion in Germany or revitalized an old one, seems specious at best’.10 Even in Britain, Otranto was less instrumental in inaugurating the Gothic novel than Sophia Lee’s The Recess and Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron. Walpole was in any case a deal more serious about the Gothic Revival than he was about his novel.11 It is true that Naubert’s gothified historical novels from Walter von Montbarry onwards have a good deal in common with The Recess, part of that seemingly going back to The Castle of Otranto, but I have found neither evidence that she was influenced by Otranto nor proof positive that she read it. Whilethe Second Preface to Otranto is a plea for imaginative licence with which she would have agreed, and while both she and Sophia Lee seem at times to follow the example of Walpole, it is truer to say that Lee follows Walpole and Naubert follows Lee. In Naubert’s novels there is nothing of the stagey whimsy that brings Otranto closer to pantomime than to history. Walpole had called The Castle of Otranto ‘an attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern’. The ancient is the chivalric romance with its inherent improbability, as opposed to the probability of the modern historical romance. In practice Walpole combined probability in respect of character with imaginative freedom in respect of event and situation. While borrowing the recess and inventing the twin daughters of Mary Queen of Scots, Sophia Lee regarded herself as obliged to respect the character, and therefore the probability of action, of her historical characters. It is Sophia Lee’s example that Naubert follows. Part-history, part-fancy, and thus a model both for the early hybrid historical novel and for historical and female Gothic, The Recess is an early 9 10 11

Meyers Lexikon, 7. Aufl. (Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut, 1930), Vol. 12, 990. Hadley, The Undiscovered Genre, 112. Baker, V, 179.

120 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective historical novel, a sentimental novel of adventure, and a much underrated early Gothic novel that was instrumental in launching the genre in both Britain and Germany. More specifically it is a gothified historical novel with a strong admixture of sentiment and terror. Sophia Lee’s sister Harriet rightly describedit as ‘The first English romance that blended interesting fiction with historical events and characters, embellishing both by picturesque description’.12 Sophia Lee, like Benedicte Naubert, blurs the distinction between Gothic romance and what Jane Austen was to call ‘real solemn history’, with the result that The Recess was taken as wholly historical by at least one credulous reader, and no doubt by others whose reactions to it went unrecorded. The reviewer for The Gentleman’s Magazine (1786) had doubts about ‘the custom of interweaving fictitious incident with historic truth’, as had other British and German reviewers of The Recess and similar hybrid romances, which were legion and subject to identical conservative criticism in both languages. Some German critics even complained of the way in which works such as Naubert’s Walter von Montbarry, Hermann von Unna and Alf von Dülmen coupled fictional figures with well-known historical ones. Sophia Lee goes further, not only in introducing invented figures such as Mary Stuart’s twin daughters, Ellinor and Matilda, by her historically projected marriage to the third Duke of Norfolk, but also in manipulating and thus falsifying historical incident and chronology for fictional ends. While critics on both sides of the channel made heavy weather of the issue of hybridity, Miss Tilney in Northanger Abbey (ch. 14) probably spoke for the majority of readers when she said I am fond of history - and am well contented to take the false with the true. In the principal facts they have sources of intelligence in former histories and records, which may be as much depended on, I conclude, as any thing that does not actually pass under one’s own observation; and as for the little embellishments [...] they are embellishments, and I like them as such.

Illegitimate birth and mysterious descent are found both in The Recess and in Naubert’s work in general with its themes of ‘geheimnisvolle Herkunft, uneheliche Geburt, Entführungen, Liebesfahrten, Flucht und Wiederfinden, Mord und Tod’ (mysterious descent, illegimate birth, abductions, lovers absconding, being forced apart andfinding one another again, murder and death).13 Miscegenation, present in The Recess in the sense not only of illegitimacy, but of the ‘illicit’ blending of fact and fiction, history and fantasy, brings us to Gothic transgressiveness and counterfeiting. Historical 12 13

Qu oted from Summers, The Gothic Quest, 167f. Naubert, Neue Volksmärchen der Deutschen, 4: 344.

Benedicte Naubert 121

romances à la Lee, in which past events are re-arranged and imaginatively enhanced in a part-fictional narrative, historical faction, make for good fiction, but, however good it may be as literature, fictionalized history is counterfeit history. Given that the writing of history involves interpretative reconstruction, the line between such reconstruction and imaginative construction is a fine but crucial one. In general terms it is true to say that ‘Wer Romane schreibt, der lügt’ (novelists lie),14 but The Recess is more specifically presented as that which it is not, a manuscript, originally written in an ‘obsolete stile’, in which time has left ‘chasms’ which the ‘editor’s’ respect for truth will not allow her to bridge. The author performs her selfimposed Walpolian role with all the aplomb her theatrical background leads us to expect. It will have been that background that prompted her to use in the prose romance the technique of poetic elaboration on history that had long been established practice in the theatre. Indeed, readers approaching the early historical novel from the point of view of the theatre or of French fiction of the earlier eighteenth century must have wondered what all the fuss was about. In presenting her romance to the world Sophia Lee not only poses as the editor of an implicitly counterfeit manuscript, thereby drawing readers’ attention to the whole issue of narratorial untrustworthiness that Schiller raises in Der Geisterseher - begun shortly after the publication of Die Ruinen but does so while writing, tongue in cheek, of her ‘inviolable respect for truth’. Walpole’s position in The Castle of Otranto is similar, as is Schiller’s in Der Geisterseher, and in retrospect the whole issue can be seen to lie at the heart of Gothic. Following the example of Walpole, who was himself following that of Voltaire, Lee poses as the editor of a supposedly incomplete manuscript in which the depredations of time have left ‘chasms’. The chasms in question, a form of recess, are purely imaginary. At this quintessentially Gothic point the reader’s mistrust ought to be aroused. Equally Gothic is the mystification in which Sophia Lee indulges at the reader’s expense when she writes of ‘Not being permitted to publish the means which enriched me with the manuscript from whence the following tale is extracted’. Then, in a further enhancement of the Gothic, she proceeds to present a narrative, complete with encapsulated sub-narrative in the form of Ellinor’s life (addressed to Matilda), with conflicting points of view. The transgressive, cross-generic nature of the text is reflected in its detail, from Ellinor’s cross-dressing (she escapes to Ireland in male disguise, dressed à la Caroline Lamb as a page) to the way in which she counterfeits death. 14

Quoted from Hadley, The Undiscovered Genre, 63.

122 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective While counterfeiting is arguably its most important Gothic theme, The Recess, like many other Gothic novels, turns on the issue of space, which is the Gothic dimension par excellence; more especially it is a question of the inner space represented by the ‘recess’ which became a key concept in Gothic consciousness. The old monastery, ‘half-sunk in ruin, and overhung with ivy and trees of growth almost immemorial [...]the very cell of melancholy’, is redolent alike of the graveyard poetry of the previous generation, which left its mark on this ‘uniformly gloomy’ work, and of Werther and the work of Caspar David Friedrich.15 The recess itself, ostensibly a cavernous complex of ‘subterraneous chambers’ complete with a vaulted passageway with many stairs, is in the first place exactly what it seeems to be, the Gothic ‘cavern’ that was to be given such a profound extension of meaning first in Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance (1790) and then, in a more general psychological way, in the hypnagogic imagery of De Quincey’s work. Walpole may have started the fad for subterraneous vaults and passages, but Sophia Lee (in The Recess) and Benedicte Naubert (in Elisabeth, Erbin von Toggenburg) expand and develop this Gothic domain on the basis of Sophia Lee’s spatial imagery, not of Walpole’s. Initially the recess stands for the private domestic sphere, but events turn it into a ‘place of dark menace’.16 In Gothic terms a refuge or retreat, the domain of das Heimliche is invaded by das Unheimliche in the form of madness. At its heart is a hidden room containing an unhinged woman, the precursor of the ‘mad woman in the attic’ that was to loom so large in female Gothic. The recess is accordingly among other things an emblem of the melancholy, recessive situation of late eighteenth-century woman, but within the inscape of The Recess there are also many Gothic features, including midnight murder, a jealous and vindictive countess who administers poison to Mary, the supposedly supernatural, uncanny noises off and terrific claps of thunder, the marvellous, a pattern of perpetual flight and pursuit, persecution, Ellinor in her madness being taken for a ghost by Elizabeth (the wailing figure of the gruesome lady [Ellinor] at the bedside [of Elizabeth]), an accusing spectre, family secrets, assumed names, secret identity and the disclosure of this, bandits, confinement, the secret recess/exit behind a picture, the encapsulated narrative, and so forth. The Recess was translated by Naubert as Die Ruinen, eine Geschichte aus den vorigen Zeiten (1786). She was most likely drawn to Sophia Lee’s novel because of the way in which it had been received in the German critical press: ‘Unter der ungeheuern Menge von Romanen, die hier monatlich 15 16

Friedrich’s paintings, made from memory, typically combine elements of several landscapes, thereby counterfeiting reality. Fred Botting, Gothic (London & New York: Routledge, 1996), 58.

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erscheinen, zeichnet sich vorzüglich aus the Recess [...] Die Kunst, mit der dieser Roman angelegt ist, verdient Bewunderung’ (Amid the huge number of novels that are published here every month one stands out, The Recess. The skill with which this novel is constructed is admirable).17 The novels she proceeded to write from 1786 onwards, and especially in 1786-1791, not a few of them gothified histories à la Lee, show that Sophia Lee’s type of fictionalized and gothified royal/aristocratic history spoke to her. Hilary Brown is, I think, right to suppose that Naubert may have been drawn to the two-layered format à la Lee on account of its subversive, Gothic (and, seen in retrospect, feminist) potential for rewriting the past.18 Her novels lack the graveyard gloominess of The Recess, which was not to her taste, but the protracted study of a sympathetic fellow-novelist’s work that is involved in translation gave her the key to her own literary castle in the sense that she learned from it both how to combine history with fiction, and how to control a mass of material while using Gothic motifs to add complexity and enmesh the reader. The Recess also gave her the starting point for the secrettribunal novel Alf von Dülmen in the form of the manuscript in which the aged writer lives over again the misfortunes of her (his) youth. In addition to The Recess, Naubert also translated a number of other novels, two of them Gothic ones: Ann Howell’s Rosenberg. A Legendary Tale (1789: Graf Rosenberg oder das enthüllte Verbrechen, 1791) and Sarah Sheriffe’s Correlia; or, The Mystic Tomb (Minerva, 1802: Corelia oder die Geheimnisse des Grabes, 1803). The Critical Review praised the ‘wilder horrors’ of Howell’s novel, which is set in classical secret-tribunal territory, in Bohemia, has a plethora of Gothic features (a haunted castle, banditti, murders, midnight spectres, hidden corpses, flagellation, monkish superstition, premature burial, and a heretic’s torture and death in the vaults of a monastery) and yet remains, for all that, a sentimental family saga. The blend of sentimental and Gothic is surprisingly common in both language areas at this time. Sheriffe’s Correlia, equally little known, is a sentimental Gothic novel (as opposed to the sentimental novel with a handful of fashionable Gothic flourishes that is Rosenberg), a typical ‘German tale’ or faux-Radcliffesque romance complete with supernatural effects and the inset tales favoured by Naubert and many of her contemporaries. The Gothic sound-effects ranging from a sigh to a piercing scream that emanate from the ‘mystic tomb’ of the title, a characteristic feature of the novel, are foreshadowed in The Castle of Otranto and The Old English Baron. There are two Correlias, the young innocent in a sinister castle, and an older, phantasmal stranger by whom she is visited, the 17 18

Neue Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und der freyen Künste, 32/1 (1786), 328. Brown, 70.

124 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective elder eventually proving to be the mother of the younger. The novel, set initially in a mysterious Castle Perilous, in which a young woman of uncertain parentage is beset by uncanny happenings that place her in physical and moral danger, includes a sighing grave, a ghostly stranger, a nunnery in Italy to which the heroine (the younger Correlia) is abducted on the eve of her wedding, and a mother believed dead who, it transpires, has all along been safeguarding her daughter’s welfare in various ghostly disguises. In the end, for this is a sentimental Gothic romance, virtue is triumphant: Correlia discovers her real identity and noble lineage, gains a mother whom she had believed dead and a father whom she had not known as such, and is enabled to marry her beloved Count. It is, as Hilary Brown has rightly said, ‘the classic sentimental denouement’,19 the fairytale ending, deriving from D’Aulnoy, of female Gothic.

III Naubert’s Elisabeth, Erbin von Toggenburg, oder Geschichte der Frauen von Sargans in der Schweiz (1789), appropriated by M. G. Lewis as Feudal Tyrants; or, The Counts of Carlsheim and Sargans. (1806), is a long and involved chronicle novel of the houses of Carlsheim and Sargans, Toggenburg and Homburg, set, the reader is left to conclude, in fifteenth-century Switzerland.Published three years after her translation of The Recess, it is a typical gothified history in which the background is historical and the foreground imaginary: here is the interweaving of fictitious incident and historical truth, with a multitude of historical personages acting, for the most part, according to history, but from entirely different motives - history decked out by fantasy - that Naubert learned from Sophia Lee. Elisabeth, Erbin von Toggenburg is a little known but important example of early Gothic. Like Hermann von Unna a treasury of Gothic arcana, it is tale of tyranny and treachery, calumny and double-dealing, the pages of which abound in villains and moral monsters, including several of a monkish hue (Abbé Luprian; Guiderius, Hilarius); here are misanthropes, psychopaths and the plain bad. Set in the Gothic world of the late Middle Ages, it consists of a series of adventures in typical Gothic locations (castles, catacombs, convents, and so on), told by a number of different narrators in the then popular form of letters and memoirs (the novel contains a plethora of supposedly historical documents), the narratives woven, with the skill that became characteristic of Naubert’s work after her discovery of The Recess, 19

Brown, 43.

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into a formidable web, with over a hundred characters named in the course of the work. Seen in retrospect, this narrative complexity, which perplexed contemporary readers, is the romance’s most impressive Gothic feature. Some of the credit that Varma gives to Lewis - ‘His Feudal Tyrants [...] is an excellently told romance. The intrigues and incidents are woven with wonderful skill and adroitness into a web of bloody vengeance and misfortunes’20 - rightly belongs to Naubert, the author of an outstanding novel that Lewis revised and improved, in the process enhancing its Gothicity. Although death, doom and disaster are ever-present, Elisabeth, Erbin von Toggenburg is, like many Gothic novels, only intermittently Gothic. It is a lengthy novel with a number of Gothic features, including the castle-fortress of Rabenstein, evidently raised in the time of Charlemagne, a mouldering pile useful only for the confinement of the innocent, that is classically Gothic, an ancient fortress, perched on the brow of a precipice. The incessant howling of a storm seems to presage its imminent downfall. Those approaching see it from a distance seemingly suspended on the very brink of a steep and barren rock. The terror is increased when the ancient pile is set on fire; conflagrations (one of Beattie’s kinds of the sublime) punctuate the novel. Another Gothic edifice is Donat-Fortress which presents a reverse image of Rabenstein Castle in the sense that much of it extends underground, like the Devil’s castle of folk-tale. Here nothing is to be seen but winding staircases, narrow passages and gloomy vaulted dungeons without end or number. In the figurative sense Donat-Fortress is another ‘Rabenstein’. Its low-vaulted passages end in the subterranean cemetery of the monks of Kloster Curwald, a more obvious model than Romeo and Juliet for the charnel vault in Chapter 11 of The Monk. Subterraneous passages, cells, vaults and dungeons are ubiquitous and ever-present, a constant reminder, for contemporary readers, of The Castle of Otranto and The Recess. Naubert goes further than Walpole and Sophia Lee in the development of the ‘cavern’. The novel includes most of what became early Gothic stock motifs in the form of ‘Kerker, verfallende Schlösser, verbrecherische Burgherren, tobende Unwetter, lasterhafte Mönche und ihre Geliebten, Überfälle, Aufstände gegen tyrannische Burgvogte, nächtliche Waldgefechte, Räuber, unheimliche Stimmungslandschaft’ (Dungeons, ruined castles, criminal burgraves, raging storms, corrupt monks and their paramours, ambushes, taking arms against tyrannical castellans, nocturnal skirmishes in forests,

20

Varma, in the Introduction to Lewis, The Monk (London: Folio Society, 1984), xiv.

126 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective banditti, uncanny landscapes),21 to say nothing of blood, vengeance, blackest tyranny, incarceration unto death, mysterious deaths, old moth-eaten writings, a wicked abbott, and the sacking of a convent and a monastery. Further Gothic features include the leitmotif of the abyss or precipice and of literal or metaphorical immurement, the way in which the whole garrison of Rabenstein is killed and the rest of the castle turned to ash, Ethelbert’s profound and fearful melancholy, assassination in the depths of a forest, mysterious descent and shifting identities, and so forth. In short, the solitary castle contains within its massive walls ‘alle Schrecken und Schauer „gotischer“ Burgen’ (all the terrors and horrors of Gothic castles).22 It is a classic early Gothic text that deserves to be far better known. Most memorably Gothic is the extended section in the last volume beginning with the intended immurement of Ida of Werdenberg, from which she is ‘rescued’ by a group of banditti calling themselves the Warriors of the Mountains, whose captain, randy Sir Randolf of Mansfeld, plans to marry Ida in order to become Count Toggenburg, while his second-incommand, Sir Gero of Altheim, has designs on Ida’s sister Constantia. The robber-band, consisting of ruined noblemen, fugitive monks, murderers, and suchlike, one thousand in all, has its retreat in the ruins of Castle Donat (cf. Kahlert’s Der Geisterbanner, published a year later. where a smaller group, also pretending to be ghosts, infest a ruined castle). Eventually the banditti are exterminated in a notable battle led by Elizabeth of Toggenburg, but in the meantime, Ida and her sister, the Damsels of Werdenberg, are taken to the robbers’ hideout in a cavern, whence they escape over mountains and glaciers, realms of terror that are described in a narrative tour de force. Whether the detail comes from Naubert’s knowledge of Aargau, or reflects her reading of, say, Bourrit,23 does not matter; the real subject is sublimity. Although the sublime of nature is generally associated with Ann Radcliffe, in whose first novel, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789, ch. 1), it features as ‘terrible [...] and grand [...] landscape’, it is in this novel, also published in 1789, that it is first found in the more developed and memorable form of the leitmotif of the precipice or abyss. There is a revealing contrast: Radcliffe, in The Romance of the Forest, has La Luc’s party go riding to ‘take a nearer view of the Glaciers’, while Naubert shows two women in a titanic struggle with Nature as they cross icy mountains at their most sublime. Radcliffe’snovelis tame by comparison with Naubert’s. 21 22 23

Karl S. Guthke, Englische Vorromantik und deutscher Sturm und Drang (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1958), 186. Guthke, Englische Vorromantik, 187. Marc Théodore Bourrit, A Relation of a Journey to the Glaciers [...], tr. C. and F. Davy (London: G. Robinson, 1776).

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Throughout this long and involved chronicle novel the emphasis is on feudal tyranny, dynastic manoeuvrings and clerical corruption. Beneath the historical costume lies a sentimental family saga with Gothic sections and with Gothic trimmings throughout. Unlike most Gothic novelists, Naubert’s underlying concern is with history and with historical truth in the sense of extrapolations that can reasonably be made from known history. While Elisabeth, Erbin von Toggenburg has many of the external trappings of Gothic, including the episodic nature of the genre, Naubert’s focus is that of the historian rather than the Gothic novelist with an imaginative axe to grind: she is far from merely deploying, in pursuit of a moral literary end, an imaginative geography of a feudal Catholic Europe. The very fact that it is an epistolary chronicle novel means that Elisabeth Erbin von Toggenburg necessarily depicts a series of villains who get their come-uppance in turn. While the idea of placing the whole history of the rejected heiresses of Toggenburg before the widowed Countess Elizabeth was understandable, the very inclusiveness of the undertaking involved an inevitable loss of focus. Had Naubert been writing a few years later, and setting out to write a Gothic novel as such, the inner organization of the novel would have been different. Horror, instead of being episodic, would have been climactic. As it is, the reader, drained, like the reviewer in the Monthly Review, by the seemingly non-stop succession of horror upon horror, is made to share the author’s historical perspective. Gothic novels typically create an atmosphere of ever-impending and therefore ever more suspenseful horror and terror. In Elisabeth, Erbin von Toggenburg the Gothic architecture is in place, but not the inner dynamic. Heroic though she undoubtedly is, Elizabeth Countess of Toggenburg is not a Gothic heroine, not least because the collapse and recovery of a family or dynasty is less affecting than that of an individual. The ‘untrammelled indulgence of lust and cruelty’24 of the novel would have been more telling had there been fewer villains, for, faced with so many, the reader remains detached: the succession of villains in Naubert’s novel is merely a succession of episodes that offer the reader no central focus other than the somewhat amorphous feudal past as such. Elisabeth, Erbin von Toggenburg was appropriated by M. G. Lewis as Feudal Tyrants; or, The Counts of Carlsheim and Sargans. A Romance taken from the German. In four volumes. By M. G. Lewis (London: J. F. Hughes, 1806), which appeared under his own name and without mention of Naubert or the original title of her novel.25 Given that Elisabeth, Erbin von Toggenburg was, 24 25

Chloe Chard, in her edition of Ann Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), xvii. Les Orphelines de Werdenberg, par M.G.Lewis, tr. R.-J. Durant (Paris: Dentu, 1810) is a

128 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective like most of her work, published anonymously, it is likely that Lewis, at the time of making his ‘translation’, did not know it was by Naubert, although that does not excuse his failure to name the original. Even in 1806 he may not have known it. However, when Feudal Tyrants was reviewed in The Critical Review as ‘an original work founded on German romance’, Lewis held his peace, which is probably why the editor of The Life and Correspondence of M. G. Lewis (2 vols, 1839) surmised that it ‘may [...] be said to be rather an English work copied from the German, than a translation of any portion of German literature’, a misconception that misled subsequent critics. There was, of course, no copyright law at the time; had there been, the Gothic novel, large swathes of which are plagiaristic and parasitical, would have been radically different, if not non-existent. Feudal Tyrants is a typical rifacimento or remake. Guthke has shown26 that while Lewis carried out ‘eine recht treue Übersetzung des Inhaltlichen’ (a faithful translation of the content), he modified the form and style of the novel in the way described by Peck: he [Lewis] treats the text freely, adding, deleting, occasionally transposing phrases and short passages, and, rightly judging the narrative too complex, supplies retrospective transitions. The portion of the German represented by his fourth volume shows the most rearrangement and condensation.27

However, notwithstanding such minor improvements, Lewis’s translation remains close; indeed, it would have been better if it had been less close, for Naubert’s text is unnecessarily long: there is too much elaboration, too much irrelevant detail, too much sentiment. Better would have been a De Quincey-type rifacimento cutting the text down to the bare bones, although this would have been too much to ask of a first translation. Collectively the mostly minor alterations made by Lewis changed the tone and complexion of the novel, for while Naubert, whose interests lay elsewhere, understated the Gothic features of her novel, Lewis overstated them, turning a convoluted feminocentric historical novel into something more like a Gothic melodrama. Lewis’s biographer was surely right to suppose Feudal Tyrants to have been ‘part of the literary toil which preceded the publication of The Monk [...] laid aside for years and then published on the strength of his reputation’.28 It

26 27 28

translation of Feudal Tyrants, as opposed to Elisabeth, héritière de Tockenbourg, which is theofficial French translation of Elisabeth, Erbin von Toggenburg (Geneva: Didier, and Paris: Dufart, 1792). Guthke, Englische Vorromantik, 193. Peck, 135. Peck, ibid.

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is likely that part of Lewis’s half year in Germany, during which he is said to have ‘completed little’, was spent in translating Elisabeth, Erbin von Toggenburg. It is easy to imagine The Monk being written as a reaction to and improvement on Feudal Tyrants, but not the other way round, for The Monk is far more tightly constructed. The reviewer in The Critical Review concluded that in Feudal Tyrants Lewis displayed ‘a most melancholy inferiority to his former compositions’, which is misplaced, for it is virtually certain that Lewis drafted Feudal Tyrants before writing The Monk, and that he did not rework it before publication. Published in 1789, Elisabeth, Erbin von Toggenburg would have been a subject of conversation when Lewis was in Weimar in 1792, by which time Naubert had published, anonymously, almost thirty novels in eight years, among them her best work. Feudal Tyrants is accordingly not only a remake of an early novel by Benedicte Naubert, but also Lewis’s first Gothic novel, the work in the course of translating which he acquired the technical skill that is in evidence in The Monk. It is the work that reveals the extent of Lewis’s debt to ‘German Gothic’. Why did he choose to translate Elisabeth, Erbin von Toggenburg? Was it a Herculean way of mastering German which he also used as a way of approaching a genre in which he already had undisclosed ideas of making his mark? Assuming that he translated it while he was in Germany in 1792, it will have been one of the first German Gothic-type novels that he read. How he came by it is not known. As to what he may be supposed to have learned from it, and how this affected The Monk, he probably decided that the old-fashioned epistolary form would not suit his purpose, partly because it lacked the dramatic immediacy of a straight third-person narrative, and partly because it left no room for the effect through empathy on which the Gothic form seemed likely to depend. By comparison The Monk is more straightforward, albeit still basically episodic in the German manner. Much of the lust and cruelty of The Monk is present in Feudal Tyrants, but in The Monk it is presented in a lurid, shocking manner that is characteristic of Lewis, who overstates what Naubert understates. There are, to the best of my knowledge, no German Gothic tales at that time that are quite as horrid as The Monk, or at least none at the literary end of the scale.29 Overwriting, though considered by British critics to be a German characteristic, is not an exclusively German thing; it is time to stop blaming some imaginary German for the unattractive features of The Monk. Lewis probably thought that the ending of Feudal Tyrants, with the ‘heroine’ installed as the Domina of Zürich,30 was rather tame, a German version of a French fairytale ending. 29 30

Way below the literary end of the scale is I. F. Arnold’s Der schwarze Jonas, which includes every conceivable infamy. Domina, in use from 1751, is less usual than Mother Superior (or, in Gothic,

130 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Be this as it may, in The Monk he focussed on the villain of the piece and his horrific end at the hands of the Devil. Lewis must have spent several months pondering and translating Elisabeth, Erbin von Toggenburg, by the end of which time he will have had a clear idea of the work’s strengths and weaknesses, in other words, of what was, and what was not, worth appropriating, although this does not mean that the impact of Naubert’s novel on him was wholly positive. The Monk, having been filtered through Elisabeth, Erbin von Toggenburg and Der Geisterbanner,and such other German ‘Gothic’ tales as Lewis knew, is more strongly episodic than the work of, say, Radcliffe; it is closer to the work of Naubert and Kahlert. Here, by way of a model to be followed, is episodic structure with its potential way of keeping control of a complex narrative together with the concomitant dangers of losing sight of irrelevancy (how relevant are Chapters 3, 4 and 5 of The Monk?) and of losing control of the reader. In Feudal Tyrants, as in The Monk, horror is piled upon horror in quick succession. Here, in the persons of Abbé Luprian and Brother Hilarius in particular, is the corrupt cleric with a weakness for the world, the flesh and the Devil; in the nature of things there is a parallel between Ambrosio and Luprian.31 But here too is the need for the much sharper focus that Lewis devotes to his villainous priest, his satanic mistress and their ghastly doings. Even the subterraneous cloister charnel vault is present; it is what Lewis has happen there that marks him off so sharply from his German Gothic mistress. In introducing a spectacularly corrupt cleric and his abuse of a series of female victims, Naubert was doing what Lewis was to do in The Monk, but the reader of Feudal Tyrants, faced not only with Abbé Luprian, but with Brothers Guiderius and Hilarius, will draw conclusions different from those that he/she would have been likely to draw if made to empathize with a particular virtuous character imperilled by Catholic skulduggery or political conspiracy. The room and the need for personal reaction is thereby reduced, if not removed altogether. Lewis, with his innate theatrical talent, will have made a mental note to proceed differently. Feudal Tyrants was ridiculed at length by the Critical Review (11 [July 1807], 273-8)32 and dismissed out of hand by the Monthly Review (53 [August 1807], 437f.), whose reviewer remarked ‘Never was heard any thing so dismal as the direful croaking of this German raven!’ The reviewer in the Critical

31 32

Abbess), for it to be likely that Lewis copied Naubert in writing of the Domina of St Clare’s. At this point Lewis’s debt to Veit Weber’s Der Müller des Schwarzthal’s (1788) needs to be borne in mind. Extensively quoted by Summers, Gothic Quest, 278ff.

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Review, with some kind of anti-Lewis axe to grind, vented his spleen on the work: ghosts, bones, chains, dungeons, castles, forests, murders, and rapine pass before us in long order, till sated with horrors and habituated to their view we regard them all with as much composure as an undertaker contemplates the last melancholy rites of his mortal brethren.

This particular critic would probably not have changed his mind, but it seems that other reviewers were equally unaware that Feudal Tyrants was a ‘translation’ of a romance by Benedicte Naubert, whose Herman of Unna had been so successful in England in 1794, when it found its way into two out of every three circulating libraries. It would still have been a selling point if ‘the author of Herman of Unna’ had been named on the title-page.

IV In addition to introducing into German literature the partly Gothified early historical novel à la Sophia Lee, Benedicte Naubert also established the secret-tribunal novel (Vehmgerichtroman) that so impressed Schiller, Kleist, Radcliffe, and Scott, to say nothing of the countless lesser practitioners of that genre. She was taught history by one of two elder brothers, Heinrich Michael Hebenstreit, Professor of Law at Leipzig and author of De Interrogatione Testium in Secreto (1780), who specialized in medieval law (Rechtsaltertümer). It is to him that she owes her exceptional knowledge of the Vehmgericht. Others had to rely on such scarce printed material as they could get their hands on;33 she had the inestimable advantage of being able, prior to his early death in 1786, to discuss the subject, at will, with an expert who could tell her what was historical fact (with which she would take no liberties) and what was not known for sure (which she would feel free to elaborate in her own way). After his death she had the use of his papers. Her knowledge of Latin enabled her to read and consult De Interrogatione Testium in Secreto. She wrote the two earliest novels featuring the Secret Tribunal or Vehmgericht: Hermann von Unna, eine Geschichte aus den Zeiten der Vehmgerichte (1788), tr. (anon) as Herman of Unna: A Series of Adventures of the Fifteenth Century, in which the Proceeedings of the Secret Tribunal, under the Emperors Winceslaus and Sigismond, are delineated) (1794, 2nd edn 1794, Dublin edn 33

There is a bibliography in Karl Hütter, Das Vehmgericht des Mittelalters (Leipzig: Köhler, 1793).

132 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective 1794), and Alf von Dülmen (1791), tr. by A. E. Booth as Alf von Deulmen; or, The History of the Emperor Philip and his Daughters (1794). A third, Die Ritter vom Siebengebürge (1797), tr. Bock as Les chevaliers des sept Montagnes (1800), has been attributed to her, but the attribution, discussed presently, is uncertain and, in my view, unsafe. These are separate works linked by the essay on the Secret Tribunal prefaced to the French translations of all three and to the English translations of the first two, for Die Ritter vom Siebengebürge was not done into English. The French translation of Hermann von Unna, Herman d’Unna, ou Aventures arrivées au commencement du XVe siècle dans le temps où le Tribunal Secret avoit sa plus grande influence (1791), was done by Jean Nicolas Etienne de Bock, whose prefatory ‘Essai sur le tribunal secret’ also preceded the French version of the dramatization, Le Tribunal Secret (1791). Alf von Deulmen is preceded by a similar essay which the translator claims to have translated from a French author who turns out to be Bock, whose essay was later expanded into book form, published as Histoire du tribunal secret (1801). In the Preface to his translation Goetz of Berlichingen with the Iron Hand (Zwickau: Schumann, 1829, xv) Scott referred to ‘the excellent romances called Herman of Unna and Alf von Duilmen [sic]’ as having made readers familiar with the ‘extraordinary judicatory’ of the Secret Tribunal. Both historically and intrinsically the most important of these three secret-tribunal romances is Hermann von Unna, written by Naubert using her usual pseudonym of Professor Kramer, an unfortunate choice that was to lead to her being confused with Karl Gottlob Cramer. It is set in the age of Wenzel I of Germany and IV of Bohemia (1378-1400), who succeeded to the German crown at the beginning of the second Great Schism in the Papacy, which had a disruptive effect in Germany and led him to attempt to delegate the responsibility for maintaining peace within the empire to a series of leagues, one of them the Freischöffenbund, which he allowed to proliferate throughout Germany. The result was anarchy compounded by corruption which spread from the imperial centre to the outlying Freistühle. Wenzel, unable to control himself at the best of times, is naturally unable to control this invisible, demonic power in the land which he regarded as a new way of enriching himself by the appointment of free-judges and other officers of the secret tribunal. It follows that those prepared to purchase a free-judgeship will not be very nice in exercising the power they have thus acquired, which they will inevitably regard as a licence to do as they will. Because he had failed both to maintain peace and to resolve the schism, Wenzel was deposed in 1400. His younger brother, Sigismund, became king of the Romans in 1410 and emperor in 1433. Insofar as it shows the Freischöffenbund, tarred by association with its debauched imperial patron, spreading its tentacles throughout the Holy Roman Empire of Wenzel I,

Benedicte Naubert 133

Hermann von Unna is a Bundesroman, the mother and father of the secretsociety novel, and the first Vehmgerichtroman. One of the most productive and influential novels of its time, it includes much of what became the Gothic repertoire. Summers summarized at some length the intricate storyline of Hermann von Unna, which, like so many Gothic and other novels of the time, is episodic, consisting of a series of ‘adventures’ or ‘Begebenheiten’, with intertwining tales, Gothic in its very complexity, the labyrinthine twists and turns of the text. When he says that Naubert’s work ‘contains so much which was afterwards developed in the Gothic romance’, he is clearly thinking of the British Gothic romance, for Gothic romance Hermann von Unna already is: We have the heroine, supposed of humble (or at least not of noble) birth; the separated lovers; the wicked rival, a malignant and licentious woman of quality who upon being rejected by the hero involves him [...] in trouble and captivity; the imprisonment of the heroine in a lone convent with secret dungeons and the tenebrous in pace; her persecution by the wicked monk (in this case an Archbishop); the tyrant abbess; castles, adventures in forests and at midnight34

There are other Gothic details, including the location of the convent of St. Anne. The latter is worthy of the Great Enchantress herself, who may have been impressed by the passage in which the convent is placed in a situation to which nature had been by no means kind: the lofty mountains, covered with thick forests of gloomy pines, with which it is surrounded, can support no sentiments but those of grief and melancholy. The deep and narrow valley, from the bottom of which rise the all-encompassing, claustrophobic walls of the monastery, preclude all extent of view, and the heart seems to shrink from the sad sterility that everywhere presented itself to the eye. Here, avant la lettre, is Gothic landscape à la Radcliffe. The heroine, Ida Munster, is at one point taken to a subterranean dungeon, the intention being to shut her up in a cavern that had formerly been dug beneath the very foundations of the convent (cf. the ‘subterraneous caverns’ beneath the convent in The Monk, inspired by Elisabeth, Erbin von Toggenburg), a fearful abode from which she manages to escape. In the romance there are, too, a masked stranger and the feud between hostile families reminiscent of that between the Montagues and Capulets. The structure of the novel is Gothic in its stories within a story, the repeated encapsulations that reflect the subterranean machinations of the secret tribunal whose tentacles, extending throughout the action, convey the atmosphere of terror and suspense, when - as indeed proves the case 34

Summers, Gothic Quest, 125-9.

134 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective the hand of the nearest and dearest may at the bidding of the invisible tribunal be directed to strike the blow. The text tells of a thousand executioners prepared to put the unhappy person to death, wherever they meet him, without anyone daring to avenge the deed; they exist everywhere in a thousand different forms, without anyone suspecting them. Historical fact, this became the very stuff of the Gothic novel: it was thanks to Hermann von Unna that the Vehmgericht became established as the key metaphor for the terror that lies at the heart of Gothic. Most of the nightmare situations in the novel involve the secret tribunal. More than any other writer, except for Veit Weber, who was in any case influenced by her in Die heilige Vehme, Naubert shows the corruptibility of the tribunal, which preens itself on being the instrument of divine Justice, yet could all too easily become, in the hands of unscrupulous members, the tool of private vengeance and legally sanctioned murder. The secret tribunal is treated both truthfully and imaginatively. Ida Munster learns from a summons nailed to the door of her lodging, which is also historical, that she has to attend the tribunal, but as to when and where, the only way of discovering where the secret tribunal is assembled, is to repair, three quarters of an hour after midnight, to that part of the town where four streets meet, and where there was always to be found a person who would lead the accused, blindfold, before the judges. This is fact echoing folktale and enhanced in the telling: if the accused person’s address was not known, he or she was interdicted at the four quarters - to the East, South, West, and North, in the place where four high roads meet.35 Later we read that there is no place, as a writer of these times informs us, in which the sessions of the secret tribunal might not be held, provided it were private and secure from surprise. The writer in question will be the author of De Interrogatione Testium in Secreto. Most writers of the time are agreed that the court normally met at dawn on Tuesdays in the open air, but it may well be that the Freischöffenbund held private meetings at other times and places for the purpose of initiating new members, arranging for the surveillance of suspects, and maybe for the setting up of sting operations. Naubert refers to the mysteries of the secret tribunal having become in many respects unfathomable, so that little information is to be gleaned from the available documents. She quotes from Justus Möser, who at that relatively early time was one of the few available sources, used alike by Goethe and Veit Weber. Unlike Veit Weber and Scott, she here narrates the trial scene at second hand, presumably because she knew there was no way 35

William Coxe, A Letter on the Secret Tribunals of Westphalia, addressed to Elizabeth Countess of Pembroke (Salisbury: J. Easton and London: T. Cadell, jun. & W. Davies, 1796), 14f.

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of depicting it truthfully in a more direct manner. Scott, who approved of this ‘excellent romance’, later borrowed from it in Anne of Geierstein: his words ‘you would be safer [...] if you lay below an axe which a thread of silk alone kept back from the fall’ go back to Naubert’s image of the avenging sword, suspended over its potential victim’s head, hanging by a thread. The hero, Hermann of Unna, has a number of hairbreadth escapes from the daggers of the unknown executioners. Eventually, of course, for this is early fairytale Gothic, he is saved through the intervention of his uncle, who turns out, as if by magic, for we are now in the realm of fairytale rather than history, to be a secret judge of the highest rank and is, exceptionally, able to obtain a repeal of the sentence that has been passed on Hermann. In reality the death sentence was carried out immediately after a guilty verdict, so that Hermann might, at best, have received a posthumous exoneration. Hermann von Unna became ‘a veritable thesaurus of Gothic arcana’36 for German and English Gothics, the principal arcanum being the Secret Tribunal itself, for readers were captivated by the elaborate mystery surrounding the Vehmgericht, of which it gives the best fictional account. The Vehmgericht, Naubert’s readers are told, was composed of more than 100,000 individuals held together by an invisible chain, known to each other, but indistinguishable from the rest of the world, whose sittings were swathed in the most impenetrable secrecy; whose decrees were arbitrary and despotical, and were executed by assassins whose steel seldom failed to reach the heart of its unfortunate victim. For a generation cowed and obsessed by the Reign of Terror in France, and, in England, by ‘Pitt’s Terror’, and by the conspiracy theory of the time, such a secret tribunal, the forerunner, in terms of history, of the Committee for Public Safety, the Gestapo and, in terms of the popular novel, of Ian Fleming’s Spectre,37 held a powerful appeal. The Terror in France that put to death some 2,600 citizens of Paris, and some 17,000 in all, cast a very long shadow. Herrmann von Unna appeared in 1788, so that its reception coincided with the Revolution and its bloody aftermath. By the time it appeared in English, the Terror had taken place. The Vehmgericht also represented the most valuable single addition to English Gothic from German: the Vehmgericht was an important addition to the Gothic pile of horrors. It gave opportunity for striking settings, and it expanded the power of the villain. Such a device of terror fitted naturally into the Gothic pattern. After Boaden’s play [The Secret Tribunal, based on Herman of Unna], the villain was frequently a member or judge of the tribunal [or of the Inquisition, which in

36 37

Horror Literature, ed. Tymm, 123. Special executive for counter-terrorism, revenge and extortion.

136 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective certain respects overlapped with it]. By his association with that body, his stature as an evil force was greatly heightened. The meeting place of the tribunal, an underground vault, secret and awful, necessitated minor alterations in the familiar Gothic setting. The spectacular and mysterious summons of accused persons, usually at midnight, accorded well with Gothic methods, moods and purposes. The hooded, secret judges and the dark figures who glided through the night on mysterious errands for the court were additions of a kind which blended readily with the traditional background. 38

Seen in retrospect, the villainous judge was for the most part more fiction than fact, for we are here in the realm of melodrama, sensation and fairytale, in short, of exceptions to the rule; but it was the exceptions to the rule, represented by the wholescale murder sanctioned by the Committee for Public Safety (!), that were in readers’ minds. Indeed, many readers must have identified the Vehmgericht with the Committee for Public Safety. The Preface to Hermann von Unna includes a nicely ambiguous phrase: let us congratulate ourselves that we live in age of illumination, and at a time when the artifices of superstition and tyranny are fated to vanish before the torch of truth. An age not of enlightenment, but of illumination, that is, an age obsessed with the dangers popularly associated with Illuminism. The Secret Tribunal, like the law itself, of which , as we have seen, not least from the essay prefaced to Hermann von Unna, it is but an early form, has eyes everywhere.39 The question is: which poses the greater danger in this age of ‘sophisters, oeconomists, and calcalators’, the great conspiracy itself, or the violent measures, taken in the name of freedom, to combat it? It is a problem as relevant today as it was then. It would have been good to have Schiller’s thoughts on the subject. Though less well-known, Alf von Dülmen (1791), tr. A. E. Booth as Alf von Deulmen; or, The History of the Emperor Philip and his Daughters (1794), belongs together with Hermann von Unna, for these two secret-tribunal novels appeared in translation at more or less the same time. A notably gothified historical romance, praised by a reviewer in The British Critic (6 [Aug. 1795], 189) for the facility with which it mixed the ‘fictions of fancy’ with ‘the truths of history’, Alf von Dülmen is set in the early thirteenth century, in the time of Philip of Swabia, who was elected king of the Romans in 1198. Three months later the Welfs set up Otto of Brunswick as rival king (Otto IV; Emperor, 1209-18). The long civil war between Otto IV and Philip of Swabia ended in the assassination of Philip (in fact by Otto von Wittelsbach, in the novel by the fictional Alf von Dülmen) in 1208. Throughout this period there was a struggle for ascendancy in Italy between the empire and 38 39

Evans, 125. Cf. the Masonic symbol of the all-seeing eye.

Benedicte Naubert 137

the papacy as the weaknesses of the German electoral system were exploited by Pope Innocent III. Naubert’s romance is less the history of the Emperor (as she calls him) Philip and three of his four daughters, than that of the regicide Alf von Dülmen alias Adolf Graf von ***. It tells a story of dynastic marriage-broking, power-politicking and non-stop intrigue, much of it by the church. In all the intrigues in question the Secret Tribunal looms large; indeed, in a general way the reader sees and learns more of the Vehme here than in any other work of fiction. Alf von Dülmen has a remarkably Gothic/sublime mise-en-scène: the desolate valley, Rosaesque cliffs, the violence of the river’s fall in this forsaken nook of nature, the heath, barren rocks, the ruined castle with its dungeon in which Alf spent forty years (at the time tantamount to a whole life), the funeral monument blasted apart by the storm which caused a near-Biblical flood, forming in the process a notably horrid scene. Here are the herovillain, two Cain-figures, a robber band, and a memorably Gothic contraption, related to the Iron Maiden of Nuremberg,40 in the form of a socalled sword-mill41 by which Alf’s dog is destroyed in a way that anticipates the death of Otto von Wittelsbach, for in each case death finds the wrong victim. Nor is this all, for here too are a buried manuscript, papers said to contain the story that is about to be told, assumed names and titles, dreams, and, for good measure, some notable Gothic (and baroque) metaphors: the dark caverns of death, the abyss of misery, and the like. The story takes the form of a mainly epistolary novel, its constituent narratives encapsulated in Naubert’s usual Gothic manner.42 The opening narrative is set in the fifteenth century, shortly before Pfalzgraf Robert der Jüngere (Count Palatine Robert the Younger) became Emperor in 1400 following the dethronement of Wenzel. The main narrative is set two hundred years earlier. The series of letters that comprises much of the first half of the tale and part of the second, gives way to Alf von Dülmen’s Confession to Posterity, within which is contained Otto von Wittelsbach’s account of the events that were to end in Alf’s death. Alf von Dülmen not only has a Doppelgänger as protagonist; it has two protagonists, Adolf Graf von *** whose pseudonym is, appropriately, the name of a town south-west of Münster, on the red earth of Westphalia, and the secret tribunal or Bund der Freischöffen, in which Alf serves first as Freischöffe and then as Freigraf. Whatever twists and turns the narrative takes, 40 41 42

Described in Brewer. Derived from die Mühle der Justiz. Naubert’s technique of (spurious) authentication in the novel is discussed by Michael Hadley in his The German Novel in 1790 (Bern: Herbert Lang, and Frankfurt/M.: Peter Lang, 1973, 132-5.

138 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective the secret tribunal, that formidable unknown power which is said to govern throughout Germany with such wonderful secrecy that its power is comparable to that of the Empire and the Papacy, is sure to be involved. Like Hermann von Unna, Alf von Dülmen features a struggle for supremacy between good and evil, with evil, in this case, represented mainly by villainous churchmen and, to a lesser extent, unscrupulous members of the Freischöffenbund. Whereas Hermann von Unna was fairytale-like in depicting the victory of virtue, Alf von Dülmen starts off as a fairytale, only to turn into a tragic history in which the good, the bad, and the headstrong are all destroyed. The hero-villain, Alf, is lucky to be initiated into the Bund der Freischöffen, when, unintentionally, he finds himself witnessing a session of the court, and soon comes to hold high office as a Freigraf. His Confession includes a description of the assembly of the secret tribunal, on which he happened, and of his initiation - something which no other Gothic novelist ventured to undertake - which is ahistorical both in the sense of taking a form for which no documentation exists and in the sense that in real life an intruder would, all the evidence suggests, have been put to death on the spot. His initiation is barely credible: finding himself present at a session of the court, he has the temerity to speak up in defence of an accused person he does not know, is rewarded for his temerity and professed love of what the Bundesbrüder call the tremendous divinity of Justice with membership of the tribunal, and sets about finding evidence of the innocence of the accused, who is duly acquitted. Right from the beginning, however, he is aware that the tribunal has both humane and honest (the Duke of Saxony) and inhumane and dishonest (the Duke of *** and Peter von Kalatin, but also Alf von Dülmen himself) senior members. The story is kept going by the way in which the headstrong Alf keeps on throwing letters away unread, for, in accordance with the theatre of the time, recklessness is the fatal flaw in Alf’s disposition. Nice touches include the incident where an apparently harmless old man suddenly ups and offs on Alf’s horse, revealing himself to be the leader of a band of robbers, and the way in which this is echoed in the den of ecclesiastics shortly afterwards (Alf von Deulmen, II, 158, 161). Here, as elsewhere, Naubert, like Veit Weber, makes little distinction between robbers and predatory ecclesiastics, and it may be argued that while the secret tribunal is shown as capable of persecuting the innocent and of being subverted by corrupt senior members, the real villain of this Gothic piece is the Church. Whereas Hermann von Unna showed individual members of the secret tribunal as willing to go out of their way to avoid miscarriages of justice, the emphasis in Alf von Dülmen is on those who take advantage of a system that

Benedicte Naubert 139

is of its very nature open to abuse. When the tribunal defines its aim as revenge, as it continually does in all the historical documents, it is reasonable to surmise that the unscruprulous were, at times, liable to use it as a vehicle for private revenge. The Duke of *** and his henchman Kalatin are common villains. Bernhard Duke of Saxony, head of the secret tribunal, refers to the disorder and abuses which the Duke of *** allowed to creep into the mysteries that were entrusted to him. More crucially, perhaps, he who broke the silence that is imposed by the conventions of the tribunal is dismissed from office in the heilige Vehme for abusing it in the pursuit of private vengeance. Whether this is to be understood as preliminary to his judicial execution, is not made clear, but presumably it is. Adolf Count of *** (no relation of the villainous duke) is a more interesting case. Having acquitted himself before the tribunal, he becomes its tool. When Emperor Philip is accused of poisoning Conrad, Archbishop of Cologne, and is found guilty, it is the hapless, headstrong Alf von Dülmen who is appointed his executioner. Because Dülmen happens to be wearing Otto von Wittelsbach’s armour when he stabs the Emperor, it is Otto von Wittelsbach who becomes the object of the tribunal’s revenge. The rest is historical romance. Whether that romance exaggerates the omnipresence and omnipotence of the Vehme cannot be said with any certainty. Both the regicide and the falsely accused regicide are likened to Cain, that ‘fugitive and vagabond in the earth’ (Gen. IV, 12). Otto von Wittelsbach finds himself outlawed and subject to instant death on discovery, living in a cave, on roots, awaiting the executioner’s poniard. The underlying view of the Vehme is largely the same as in Hermann von Unna, but there is another perception, voiced by Alf’s sister Alverda, who sees this strange secret association of men who call themselves the Judges of God, as nothing but a gang of killers who, under the cloak of justice, permit the greatest outrages against humanity. The novel illustrates what is surely Benedicte Naubert’s own view, which in the novel is attributed to Alf’s father-substitute, Conrad von Remen, that when authority is without control justice may sometimes be administered, but the innocent will inevitably suffer oppression. That is the inescapable truth about the Vehmgericht system. Justice, as Vulpius put it a few years later, does not hide in holes and corners. Given the corruptibility of the Freischöffenbund and the corruption of the Church, which, even before the establishment of the Inquisition, is shown as prepared to use torture to protect its temporal power and material possessions, the good have a hard time of it. The question of the relationship, if any, between the Secret Tribunal and the Inquisition was controversial in the late eighteenth century.Naubert must be assumed to have had the approval of her brother, an expert on precisely this question,

140 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective for the way in which she implies that the Inquisition was modelled on the Vehmgericht system. Historical chronology validates this view. The Vehmgericht features again in an anonymously published two-volume Ritterroman,43 Die Ritter vom Siebengebürge, 2 vols (1797-98: Les Chevaliers des sept montagnes, ou Aventures arrivées dans le treizième siècle, du temps où le Tribunal secret avait sa plus grand influence; avec une notice sur l’état ancien et actuel de ce Tribunal. [...] Traduit de l’Allemand, par Jean-Nicolas-Etienne de Bock. Se vend chez Maradan, à Paris, Texier, à Leipzig, Devilly, Behmer, à Metz. De l’Imprimerie de Behmer, à Metz. An IX [1800]), which was not translated into English. The German original, published in Weißenfels and Leipzig by Friedrich Severin is extremely rare, its second volume practically nonexistent, which will mean that the first volume did not sell well. Severin, not one of Naubert’s usual publishers, is known as one of the main publishers of Gothic pulp fiction; Maradan is one of his French counterparts. The three-volume translation into French is preceded by an introductory essay by the ‘translator’, ‘Notice sur le Tribunal Secret et les Francs-Juges de Westphalie’ and an additional ‘Note sur l’existence de l’état actuel du tribunal secret en Allemagne’ dated 1800. Set in the thirteenth century, it is a tale of medieval romance, complete with courtly love, ruined castles and knights in shining armour, gothified by the presence of the secret tribunal, an ahistorical and somewhat ‘horrible’ initiation ceremony into which is described. My copy of Les Chevaliers des sept montagnes was described by the bookseller as translated into French from the German of Madame Naubert, which, if true, would need to be proved; the Cambridge University Library copy is attributed to Bock, with Naubert as the translator, which is clearly wrong. The French translation of Die Ritter vom Siebengebürge, which is preceded by a ‘Note sur l’existence de l’état actuel du tribunal secret en Allemagne’, may well have inspired the anonymously published Die Rächenden, oder das Vehmgericht des 18. Jahrhunderts (1802), if indeed this was not by Naubert herself. Whether Die Ritter vom Siebengebürge is Naubert’s work has never been established. What is clear is that the novel was written in order to cash in on the success of Hermann von Unna and Alf von Dülmen, but, particularly in France, the former (translated into French by Bock in 1791 and published in Metz by Lamort; Alf von Dülmen was not translated into French until 1810). It was assumed at the time that Die Ritter vom Siebengebürge was by Naubert, for it featured the Secret Tribunal that she had made her own, and in addition once again included Bock’s introductory essay, updated to add sensational value and relevance. Since Naubert never

43

There appears to have been a one-volume German edition as well.

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commented on matters concerning the authorship of her work, the assumption, once made, was never seriously challenged. Less original than Naubert’s two famous Vehmgerichtromane,44 Die Ritter vom Siebengebürge was taken to task by a reviewer: Wer einigermaßen mit dem Geiste und Tone unserer Ritterbücher bekannt ist, der findet hiernichts Neues, keine Abentheuer, keine Situationen, keine Verwicklung, keine Lösung, die er nicht schon aus anderen Ritterromanen kennen sollte.45 (Anyone at all familiar with the spirit and tone of our chivalric romances will find nothing new here - no adventures, no situations, not a single complication or resolution that is not familiar to him from other chivalric romances.)

In brief, it reads like the potboiler that such a prolific novelist was bound to produce from time to time writer, especially when she was, in 1797, distracted by marriage, shortage of money, and moving house from Leipzig to Naumburg. If it were by Naubert, this would explain the change of publisher, but the fact is that it includes the sort of fanciful detail concerning the Vehme that Naubert deliberately avoided in Hermann von Unna and Alf von Dülmen. My own view is therefore that it is not by her. There is no evidence to support the idea that Bock, whose Histoire du tribunal secret, d’après les lois et les constitutions de l’Empire germanique (Mannheim: Fontaine, 1799; rev. edn, Metz: Behmer, 1801) is described by the publisher as the fourth volume of Les Chevaliers des sept montagnes, was himself the author, although this cannot be ruled out. Whereas Naubert’s first and second Vehmgericht fictions show the secret tribunal rent by the conflicts out.f the time, Die Ritter vom Siebengebürge shows it in conflict first with the incipient Inquisition and then with the League of Siebengebürge. The absence of Conrad IV in Italy, and his death there in 1254, at the age of twenty-six, left the German Reich without an accepted overlord and therefore in a state of increasing anarchy. 1254 saw the foundation of the Rheinischer Bund, a defensive military alliance between the seventy-odd towns of the Rhineland, with which the author associates the Ritter vom Siebengebürge, a fraternity of knights in the Siebengebirge46 district set up to afford protection and assistance to the otherwise vulnerable. Two 44 45 46

See Hadley, The Undiscovered Genre, 46, for part of a review that appeared in NADB, 39 (1798), 336. NADB 39 (1798), 336. Siebengebürge (modern Siebengebirge) is not to be confused with that even more Gothic territory, Siebenbürgen (Transylvania).

142 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective sessions of the secret tribunal are shown. At the first (Vol III of the French version, 152-63)47 the presiding Freigraf, who chooses to describe the Chevaliers as intent upon infringing the authority of the secret tribunal, summarily sentences a knight to death for robbery unless he can, within nine days, produce evidence of his innocence, by which is meant sufficient money to buy it, so venal is the secret tribunal seen as having become. The second session (Vol III of the French version, 180-226) is even more dramatic, for the proceedings are interrupted by the entrance of a stranger, who, revealing himself (in a departure from history) to be King Conrad IV, takes charge of the court, rapidly arriving at the truth, thereby saving the life of Otto von Drachenfels. The Freigraf and the Freischöffen are stripped of their offices and ordered to appear at Cologne for sentencing.

V In her early, Leipzig period (1779-1797) Naubert produced not only an impressive number of historical novels, but, at the same time, two collections of fairytales, Neue Volksmärchen der Deutschen (1789-92) and Alme oder Egyptische Märchen (1793-97), of which the latter remains virtually unknown. Some overlap between novel and tale is to be expected, but it comes as a surprise that in reviews of the third and fourth volumes of the Neue Volksmärchen der Deutschen it was said daß sie sich angeblich dem Trivial- und Schauerroman annähern und dessen Mängel aufweisen, besonders ‘affektirt sentimental’ in der Gestaltung der wörtlichen Rede verfahren. Nauberts Gebrauch des Unheimlichen und Wunderbaren bediene die Sensationslust des Publikums und verletze den guten Geschmack.48 (that they supposedly come close to the Gothic novel, exhibit its shortcomings, and in particular are over-sentimental in the handling of direct speech. Naubert’s deployment of the uncanny and marvellous is thought to pander to the public’s craving for sensation, thereby offending against good taste.)

Notwithstanding such clearly biased criticism, Naubert’s most celebrated novel, Hermann von Unna (1788) is also a Märchenroman in that, like Ann 47 48

I have been unable to locate the second volume of the German original, and am therefore obliged to cite the French edition. NADB (I:1, 1793 and VI: 1, 1793), quoted from Benedikte Naubert, Neue Volksmärchen der Deutschen, ed. Marianne Henn, Paola Mayer and Anita Runge, 4 vols (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2001), IV, 365.

Benedicte Naubert 143

Radcliffe’s comparable novels, it features the types, situations and structure of the fairytale à la D’Aulnoy. In English terms it is simply another Gothic novel, albeit better than most, that serves to show how close the two conventions are, a subject addressed in Chapter 14. Hermann von Unna is fairytale-like in its basic opposition of figures, mostly identified by epithet, personifying good and evil. Winceslaus, that depraved prince who presides over a court that is likened to a typically Gothic cavern of murderers (the symbolism duplicated in the Castle of Cyly, that den of murderers), is the ogre of fairytale. The Princess of Ratibor, governess of the royal household, a witch-like creature with ‘the severity of a rigid governess’, would be at home in one of D’Aulnoy’s tales, for instance in ‘Gracieuse et Percinet’, out of which she has probably stepped, and Winceslaus’s mistress, Susanna von Baden, is another figure straight out of fairytale or pantomime. Then there are the wicked abbess, the lecherous archbishop, and so on. These characters representing evil, mostly in the form of unbridled greed, envy, and the lust for power, with lechery thrown in for good measure, are contrasted with others representing good (Ida, Herman, Munster, Sophia, Alicia, the good Walter, the good queen Mary, Albert the noble Duke of Austria, the old Count of Unna, Ulric of Senden, and others of that ilk). The basic storyline of the page and the supposed statuary’s daughter who overcome the machinations of the wicked and live happily ever after is pure fairytale à la D’Aulnoy and Radcliffe. Discovery of noble birth is a plot motif in the French fairytale of the Perrault-D’Aulnoy era. Benedicte Naubert and Ann Radcliffe are writers of a comparable type of Gothic Märchenroman, the tale of terror with a happy ending. Writing of Hermann von Unna, the one of Naubert’s novels by which Radcliffe was certainly influenced, Le Tellier has claimed that Radcliffe took the basic ground-plan of her novels from Naubert: depicts a pure and noble couple separated by the villainous machinations of evil men and women, ecclesiastics among them. The eventual reunion and marriage of the hero and heroine represents the vindication of a beneficent world-order. This is the essential plan of all Mrs Radcliffe’s romances. 49

If she was able to read German by the time she started writing, it is possible that she chose to follow Naubert’s general model, but, that said, it is far more likely that she was simply following the same fairytale model (in D’Aulnoy) as Naubert. That said, she also borrowed from Naubert.

49

R. I. Le Tellier, Kindred Spirits: Interrelations and Affinities between the Romantic Novels of England and Germany (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1982), 38.

144 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective In preparation for The Italian (1797), she evidently read Herman of Unna (English translation 1794), doing so because she was already an admirer of Naubert’s Elisabeth, Erbin von Toggenburg (1789: Feudal Tyrants, 1806), in a memorable passage of which robbers cause the deserted wing of a castle (Donat-Fortress) to be considered haunted. Radcliffe, in The Mysteries of Udolpho, borrows this episode.50 Herman of Unna, which clearly left its mark on The Italian, is the one German romance to which Radcliffe owed a real debt. She borrowed the secret society as such (Naubert’s Secret Tribunal, her own Inquisition) from Naubert, and also borrowed the man of mystery associated with it. Given ‘le long cheminement, encadrée par ses gardes, le lieu de jugement, sinistre architecture, à peine éclairée, les juges vêtus de noir et coiffés de cagoules, la même atmosphère de mystère et d’angoisse, le même silence de mort, la même menace de tortures’ (the long walk, surrounded by guards, the barely lit court room with its forbidding architecture, the judges clad in black and hooded, the same atmosphere of mystery and fear, the same deathly silence, the same threat of torture)51 it is reasonable to suppose the Inquisition scene in The Italian to be in part inspired by Benedicte Naubert’s description of the workings of the Secret Tribunal. Radcliffe is, however, describing the Holy Office at work, not the heilige Vehme, and there are telling differences between the two ‘inquisition’ scenes: while Naubert plays down the gothicism of the secret tribunal, partly because not to have done so would have led her into ahistoricism, Radcliffe divorces herself from history and describes Vivaldi’s confontation with the Inquisitors at some length and in greater detail. Naubert’s prime concern is historical truth, Radcliffe’s is the drama of the scene. There are other parallels between Herman of Unna and The Italian. The story of Ida Münsterin, for instance, in large measure anticipates that of Ellena Rosalba: a young girl, supposedly of lowly parentage but proved to be of noble birth, who is kidnapped by her enemies, carried away to a mountain convent, persecuted by a bigoted abbess and her nuns to induce her to take the veil, and consoled by the society of a gracious woman whom the world thinks dead. 52

Like Ida, Ellena is ‘looked after by people who are not her parents, and early on makes an impression on a young nobleman’.53 Although the motif derives from D’Aulnoy, Tomkins was surely right to suppose that Radcliffe 50 51 52 53

Radcliffe’s knowledge of German is discussed in Chapter 14. Otherwise, see Tomkins, Ann Radcliffe and her Influence on Later Writers, 109. Lévy, 257. Tomkins, Ann Radcliffe, 109. Brown, 125.

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borrowed from Naubert in this respect, and there are other parallels including the visit of one convent to another and the message conveyed to Ida during the festival. It is clear that Radcliffe read Herman of Unna before writing The Italian, and that Naubert’s romance gave her useful details on which she elaborated, or on which she rang changes.

VI Benedicte Naubert frequently wrote of times of anarchy, and therefore of the uncertainty and terror that are central both to life in the Age of Terror and to the Gothic fiction that was written in its monster shadow. The very fact that she impressed writers as various as Schiller, Kleist, Radcliffe and Lewis is a measure of her stature. While Lewis learned his trade as a writer of Gothic fiction mainly from her, she learned her trade as a writer of gothified historical romances from Sophia Lee. Like all the most significant German Gothic novelists, she is not a Gothic writer tout court, but in the field of Gothic fiction she is an important innovator. She introduced into German literature the partly Gothified early historical novel that did much to establish the German historical novel, and is the originator of the secretsociety novel (Bundesroman) and its major subset the secret-tribunal novel (Vehmgerichtroman) which gave to German, English and French Gothic one of their most significant and productive kinds. The Vehmgericht provided first German and then French and British Gothic novelists with a striking metaphor and an elaborate machinery for the terror that was their stock-intrade; for historical reasons German Gothic tends to prefer the Vehme to the Inquisition for this purpose. Hermann von Unna left its mark on Schiller’s Der Geisterseher, Kleist’s Käthchen von Heilbronn and countless sensation novels featuring the heilige Vehme and its often lurid offspring, which serve, by contrast, to underline the objectivity and quality of Naubert’s work. Hermann von Unna was almost as large a presence in the literature of the time as Der Geisterseher, and Naubert’s kind of Märchenroman closely parallels Radcliffe’s, on which it left its mark.

4 SCHILLER Long celebrated in German literary studies as one of the most canonical of German writers, Schiller is now claimed, in the more recent and still expanding discipline of Gothic studies, as one of the fathers of the Gothic mode that has come to be seen as a significant expression of the late eighteenth-century Zeitgeist. Appropriately, in view of the dualism that runs through his thought and work, there are now two Schillers, the canonical Schiller and Schiller the author of works highly regarded in the alternative, Gothic canon.1 Given that guardians of the German canon tend, following Schiller’s own example, to denigrate Gothic as a sub-literary phenomenon, the very idea of associating him with it will be anathema to some readers.2 It will be argued that one of the reasons why he left Der Geisterseher incomplete was, in effect, that he did not wish to be associated with what we now think of as Gothicism and all its works, did not wish to run the risk of seeming to pander to the readers of popular literature whom his novel had been intended to cure of their gullibility and, implicitly, of their deplorable taste in literature. It was not only Swabian Pietism that left its mark on the young Schiller; so too did his medical training, which in the literary context took on an ethical guise. Like most of the major German contributors to Gothic, Schiller is not a ‘Gothic writer’ as such, just the author of works such as Die Räuber, Das Spiel des Glücks, Der Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre, and Der Geisterseher that have various kinds of Gothic dimension. However, the links between these and the rest of his oeuvre (notably Die Verschwörung des Fiesko zu Genua, Don Karlos, Die Jungfrau von Orleans, Die Braut von Messina) mean that Gothic threads extend throughout his work. Die Räuber and Die Braut von Messina are linked by the motif of the hostile brothers that kept on surfacing in his mind, by a series of dramatic fragments, and by their respective and very different links to the Gothic. Most of the fragments in question (Die Braut in

1

2

Much the same apples to Goethe, for Götz, Werther, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, Faust and poems such as Die Braut von Korinth have Gothic dimensions. Carlyle, in the Preface to the second edition (1839) of his translation of Wilhelm Meister, refers to Goethe’s perceived Gothic persona as ‘a dealer in demonology and osteology’. ‘ See Benno von Wiese, Friedrich Schiller, 3rd edn (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1963), 301f., and Fritz Martini, ‘Erzählte Szene, stummes Spiel’, Untersuchungen zur Literatur als Geschichte. Festschrift für Benno von Wiese, ed. Vincent J. Günther et al. (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1973), 36-60..

148 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Trauer, 1783-86;3 Die Malteser, 1788;4 Die Flibustiers, 1798;5 Die Kinder des Hauses, 1799-1802;6 Die Polizei, 1799;7 Warbeck, 1799;8 Rosamund oder die Braut der Hölle, 1800;9 Die Gräfin von Flandern, 1801)10 have a Gothic connection of one sort or another. It is not only the early plays (Die Räuber, Fiesko) that are close to Gothic, for Die Jungfrau von Orleans includes Gothic effects, and Die Braut von Messina, seemingly the most classical of his tragedies, shares the incest-motif, which derives from Walpole’s Gothico-classical tragedy The Mysterious Mother, with the most vicious and vacuous Schauerromane. My aim in this chapter is to explore, for the first time, Schiller’s position vis-à-vis the convention that in English is known as Gothic, of the German and European branches of which he was the unwitting founder.

3

4

5

6

7 8

9

10

The title goes back to J. E. Schlegel’s unfinished translation of Congreve’s The Mourning Bride (1697). Schiller’s sketch for Die Braut in Trauer included that Gothic favourite, a ghostly nun, who turns out to be Amalia. Benedicte Naubert’s Walter von Montbarry, Großmeister des Tempelordens (1786) may have given Schiller the idea for his projected tragedy Die Malteser, one of his background sources for which was Patrick Brydone’s A Tour Through Sicily and Malta. In a Series of Letters to William Beckford (1773: Reise durch Sicilien und Malta, 1774), which he read in German, and which Ann Radcliffe used as background for her A Sicilian Romance (1790). Die Flibustiers was prompted by J. W. von Archenholz, Geschichte der Flibustier (1803). The modern German pirate-novel begins with Johann Ernst Daniel Bornschein’s Antonia della Roccini, die Seeräuberkönigin (1801) and Der Seeräuberkönig (1803), which are as trivial as most of the Räuberromane of the time. Narbonne oder die Kinder des Hauses presumably goes back to Robert Jephson’s dramatization of Walpole’s Otranto, The Count of Narbonne (1781), thus providing evidence that Schiller knew Jephson’s work. By 1799, the date of the Narbonne fragment, he also knew Otranto. Die Polizei, based on Pitaval, points forward to Eugene Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris (1842-43). Warbeck was indebted to the tale in Baculard D’Arnaud’s Suite des nouvelles historiques (1774-84) translated by the founder of historical Gothic, Sophia Lee, as Warbeck. A Pathetic Tale (1786), which led to a Gothic tale, Margaret Holford’s Warbeck of Wolfstein (1820), influenced by Shelley’s St. Irvyne. Schiller’s sources for Die Braut der Hölle include Bürger’s ‘Lenore’ and ‘Der wilde Jäger’, now long since assimilated to the Gothic canon. His Rosamund, as a female Don Juan, belongs to the type of fatal woman inaugurated by Lewis’s Matilda in 1796. One of Schiller’s sources is Jakob Maier’s Fust von Stromberg (1782) which Scott translated (together with Josef Marius von Babo’s Rittertragödie Otto von Wittelsbach [1782]), but decided not to publish.

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I The main types of German ‘Gothic’ novel include the Geisterseherroman (the ghost-seer or necromancer novel, unintentionally established by Schiller in 1789), of which the early ghost story à la Gespensterbuch (ed. Apel & Laun, 4 vols, 1810-13) is a variation; the Bundesroman (modern Geheimbundroman), the secret-society novel initiated by Naubert’s secret-tribunal novel Hermann von Unna (1788) and consolidated by Der Geisterseher with its Masonic/Illuminatist conspiracy; and the literary part of the modern Räuberroman inspired by Die Räuber (1781), which overlaps with the Bundesroman since robber bands are by definition secret societies. The modern Ritterroman, initiated in 1785 by Veit Weber, whose work Schiller found disappointing, eventually gave way to the gothified history initiated by Benedicte Naubert, and was itself subsumed into the Schauerroman, which is essentially sub-literary, although that did not prevent it from impinging on and even inspiring high-brow literature. The influence of Grosse’s Der Genius on Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, of Spieß’s Maria Stuart on Schiller’s Maria Stuart, and of Schlenkert’s Friedrich mit der gebißnen Wange on Kleist’s Das Käthchen von Heilbronn,11 cannot be ignored. It is ironic that Schiller, author of the most distinguished (but - despite its commercial success - unfinished) Gothic novel in the German language, is outspoken in his opposition to popular literature, so that he can be blamed both for German Gothic and for German critical prejudice on the subject of the popular novel of the high Gothic period. What the illconceived 1789 review of Bürger’s Gedichte reveals is in the first instance Schiller’s innate hostility towards the low-brow ‘popular’ literature to which he was initially attracted in Stuttgart, but of which he quickly came to despair, writing of the sickly sentimental popular novels produced by the Schundskribenten (his word) of the time that ‘Sie bewirken bloß Ausleerungen des Thränensacks und eine wollüstige Erleichterung der Gefäße; aber der Geist geht leer aus, und die edlere Kraft im Menschen wird ganz und gar nicht dadurch gestärkt’ (They merely bring about the emptying of the lachrymal sac and apleasurable dilation of the blood vessels; but the mind does not benefit, and the human capacity for high-mindedness is by no means enhanced).12 There is no reason to think that his view of terror/horror-novelists was not similar; after all, he dismissed Der Geisterseher as so much ‘Schmiererei’ (scribble).13 The importance he attached to the 11 12 13

See my ‘Kleist and Gothic’, Oxford German Studies, 39/1 (2010), 30-53. Quoted from J. Schulte-Sasse, Die Kritik an der Trivialliteratur seit der Aufklärung (Munich: Fink, 1971), 74. Letter of 17 Mar. 1788 to Körner.

150 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Bürger review is shown by its length and nature and by the ‘Verteidigung des Rezensenten’ that follows it. As the poet of ‘Lenore’, Bürger has an honoured place in the Gothic pantheon.14 His influence in the Gothic context is demonstrated alike by some of Goethe’s ballads, by Veit Weber’s Die Brüder des Bundes für Freyheit und Recht, by Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, ‘an attempt to dethrone German sublimity’ that began life as the tale of a nightmare journey à la ‘Lenore’, by the last of De Quincey’s dream-visions, the ‘Dream-Fugue’ that brings the Gothic fantasia The English Mail-Coach (Blackwood’s, 1849) to a close,15 and more generally, by the fact that it is said to have been Bürger’s Lenore that turned Shelley into a poet. Schiller’s objection to Bürger’s poetic work is partly that of the rationalist confronted by the irrational, partly that of the ‘classical’ poet confronted and challenged by the popular, for however great his own largely unwitting contribution to the popular Gothic mode, the austere national poet viewed the pop poet’s work with distaste, and partly that of the moralist confronted by the aesthetic. But there is more to it than that, as his overreaction to Bürger shows, and in any case Schiller was himself a writer of ballads, and the ballad is a popular form. Who, it might well be asked, is the better Balladendichter, Schiller or Bürger? We have seen that Goethe was more appreciative of Bürger, as was Veit Weber, who attended Bürger’s lectures at Göttingen. Having an axe to grind, Schiller is unable to rise above his prejudice against Bürger. The hostility towards ‘popular’ literature revealed in the review runs so deep that it is reasonable to suppose Schiller’s target to be not Bürger but himself, the hieratic idealist whose alter ego is to have a hand in a long series of works with their roots in the mud of the popular, ‘Gothic’ convention. The fact of the matter is that there is a wild, Gothic streak in Schiller that he seeks to curb but which is, throughout his literary career, continually liable to erupt. Goethe was the first to recognize that there was a streak of violence in Schiller’s imagination.16 On one level this is the reason why the motif of the hostile brothers runs through his work like a burning fuse. What the Bürger-review really reveals is his unhappiness about his own contribution to the popular mode in Der Geisterseher, which was still very much on his mind in 1791, compare Kleist’s complex, contradictory attitude towards Das Käthchen von Heilbronn. Schiller and Kleist face the same 14 15 16

See Wolfgang Trautwein, Erlesene Angst. Schauerliteratur im 18.und 19. Jahrhundert (Munich & Vienna: Hanser, 1980), in which Bürger is one of the authors discussed. See Patrick Bridgwater, De Quincey’s Gothic Masquerade (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2004), 92f. Jeffrey L. Sammons, in his Introduction to Schiller, The Ghost-Seer, tr. Bohn (Columbia: Camden House, 1922), ix. Walter Pater is a similar case.

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dilemma: the urgent (financial) need for a popular success, something they both regard with disdain.

II Born in 1759, the same year as William Beckford, Schiller attended, from 1773 to 1780, the military academy situated first in Schloß Solitüde and then in Stuttgart. Because German Gothic barely existed before he did so much to establish it, we need to look in his early Sturm und Drang and other reading for evidence as to what helped to turn him in the direction of the convention that has been well described as the poor man’s Sturm und Drang,17 and then in his correspondence and library for later evidence. Whereas Grosse, Tieck, Kleist, Hoffmann, Hauff, Alexis and Meinhold were young enough to have their early Gothic reading to which to respond, Schiller, being older, found elements of the proto-Gothic in Sturm und Drang drama. 1773, which saw the suspension until 1814 of the Jesuitenorden, was the year of publication of Goethe’s Götz, which Schiller read repeatedly and which more than any other work inspired Die Räuber in the historical and theatrical sense. It was Götz that translated from history to literature the Vehmgericht that swiftly caught the European Gothic imagination. Bürger’s Lenore, a strong influence on early Gothic which Schiller knew well - it was after all one of his sources for Die Braut der Hölle (a sentimental-Gothic title if ever there was one!) - also appeared in 1773. Months later he was avidly reading and planning to emulate Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774), which, though not a Gothic novel as such, has obvious Gothic period features, including the abyss and the view of the universe as ‘an allconsuming, devouring monster’ that is reflected in the series of Gothic monster-figures infesting the pages of the popular novel of the time,18 and did much to establish the Gothic mood. It was about this time, too, that he discovered Macpherson’s Fingal, the mournful Ossianic word-music of which did much to sustain the mood inaugurated by Young. In winter 17734 a school-friend drew his attention to Gerstenberg’s Ugolino (1768), a Greuelstück inspired by Canto XXXIII of Dante’s Inferno, in which Count Ugolino and his sons are incarcerated in a tower by a corrupt bishop and left to starve to death, the brute power of which also impressed, among others,

17 18

Albert Ward, Book Production, Fiction, and the German Reading Public 1740-1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 53. Whereas high-brow literature has moral monsters, popular literature, like the painting of the period, has literal ones.

152 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Goethe and Hoffmann.19 Ugolino left its mark on Die Räuber in the form of the tower in which old Moor nearly starves. While at the Academy Schiller also fell, as Horace Walpole had done before him20, under the spell of Shakespeare and Milton: in his review of Die Räuber he likened the ‘noble criminal’ Karl Moor to Milton’s Satan, prototype of the ‘heroic villain’ of the Gothic novel. It was a significant point, for the very idea of the ‘hero-villain’ impinged on one of Schiller’s central concerns, the interface between heroism and villainy, sublimity and depravity. In 1775 he read, in the Schwäbisches Magazin, C. F. D. Schubart’s story ‘Zur Geschichte des menschlichen Herzens’,21 which gave him much of the content of Die Räuber, except that he went further than Schubart in turning his hero-villain into a larger-than-life-sized figure and Satanist. Nothing is less sublime than a merely life-sized criminal, unless, as Oscar Wilde might have said, it is the over-life-sized criminal. His very idealism led Schiller astray, for instance in his view of lyric poetry, which is dated, and in his view of the sublimity of the ‘great’ criminal, a flawed notion that only a ‘theoretical’ man (or woman) could come up with. In 1776-8 he read Lenz’s Die beiden Alten, in which a son buries his father alive in a Gothic vault, and, a major influence, Leisewitz’s tragedy of fraternal hatred, Julius von Tarent, much of which he soon had by heart, which gave him a motif that was to run through his work from Die Räuber to Die Braut von Messina. That he was also reading Young’s proto-Gothic Night Thoughts, means that he could have read Otranto in English at this time, although I have found no evidence that he did. Impressed at first by Young, he later rightly turned his back on the Night Thoughts as leading away from life. Die Räuber, on which he had been working since 1777, appeared in 1781, the work of a brilliantly gifted, distinctly angry young man. Kabale und Liebe (1784) was translated by M. G. Lewis in 1793 and published in 1797 as The Minister, a work (unlike Mistrust [1808], his translation of Kleist’s Die Familie Schroffenstein [1802]), without literary or literary historical significance. Don Karlos (1785-87)22 is, in part, manipulated by the Grand Inquisitor of the Inquisition, which overlaps with the heilige Vehme on which the Inquisition was modelled. Don Karlos was initially planned as a verbal onslaught on the Inquisition, by whose 19 20

21 22

See Herder’s review of Ugolino in AdB (1770), reprinted in the Reclam edition. Cf. Walpole, Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis, 40 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937-80), XL, 379, where Walpole refers to ‘the extravagant beauties of Shakespeare and Milton’. See Schiller, Die Räuber, ed. L. A. Willoughby (London: Oxford University Press, 1922), 18f. Schiller’s main source was the Abbé de St. Réal’s Histoire de Dom Carlos, fils de Philippe II (16 ), which he read in Bauerbach in 1783.

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inhumanity and gross abuse of power Schiller was appalled, especially when the Spanish Inquisition was re-established in 1788. A gauge of contemporary superstition is the fact that the last execution for witchcraft in Germany occurred as late as1793. In 1792, the year of the abolition of the French monarchy, Schiller was offered French citizenship by the Revolution. The document in question only reached him after the Terror, when the signatories had been guillotined; he included the honour in the Weimar calendar entry on him, but in Britain his reputation was tarnished by the award. Veit Weber, who went further in fighting for France against Austria, also in 1792, lost his popularity with the German reading public partly as a result of doing so. When Schiller’s most Gothic work, Der Geisterseher, appeared in 1787-89, few Gothic novels existed in German. Most significant of what did exist was Benedicte Naubert’s little known but historically important translation of Sophia Lee’s The Recess (1783-5), Die Ruinen (1786), which, by introducing invented figures such as Mary Stuart’s twin daughters by her historically projected marriage to the third Duke of Norfolk, may well have caught Schiller’s eye, for he too throughout his creative life had to negotiate between historical truth and creative necessity. Naubert’s Walter von Montbarry, Großmeister des Tempelordens appeared in 1786, and two more of her Gothified novels had appeared by 1789: Hermann von Unna: Eine Geschichte aus den Zeiten der Vehmgerichte (1788), and Elisabeth, Erbin von Toggenburg (1789). The first two volumes of Veit Weber’s Sagen der Vorzeit, whichhad also appeared (1787-88), included his first Gothic novel, but they signally failed to impress Schiller when he later ordered them from his bookseller. Already in circulation in English were Smollett, Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753), discussed in the next paragraph; Leland, Thomas Longsword, Earl of Salisbury (1762: Longsword, Graf von Salisbury, 1775); Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1765: Seltsame Begebenheiten im Schloße Otranto, eine gotische Geschichte, 1768); and Beckford, Vathek. An Arabian Tale (1786: Der Thurm von Samarah, tr. by Georg Schatz ‘from the Arabic’, 1788, and Vathek, eine arabische Erzählung, tr. by Georg Römer from Beckford’s French, 1788). One of the works that he later read as background to Die Malteser and Die Braut von Messina was Patrick Brydone’s A Tour Through Sicily and Malta. In a Series of Letters to William Beckford (1773: Reise durch Sicilien und Malta in Briefen an William Beckford, 1774); his interest in Sicily was not sufficiently aesthetic for him to have read Henry Swinburne’s Travels in Two Sicilies (1783-5), which was Ann Radcliffe’s background reading of choice. The Castle of Otranto flopped on its first appearance in German, so Schiller is unlikely to have come across it in 1768, when he was only nine years old, although Dostoevsky - mirabile dictu - claimed to have read all Radcliffe’s novels by the

154 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective age of eight. There is no evidence that he read Otranto until the late 1790s, but before then he may have known Robert Jephson’s dramatization of it, The Count of Narbonne (1781), German versions of which appeared in 1784 and 1785. Although details are hard to come by, in the second half of his time at the Karlsschule he read some of the then much-vaunted English novelists (Richardson, Fielding, Sterne). He knew Fielding’s Tom Jones, but did he also know Jonathan Wild with its scoundrel as protagonist, types of villain, and the ironical bracketing of greatness and criminality which he himself takes all too seriously? He could have read, and probably did read, in either English or German, that proto-Gothic novel-cum-criminal biography, The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, by another literary medical man, Tobias Smollett. First translated as Begebenheiten des Grafen Ferdinand von Fathom (Copenhagen: Rothe, 1770), this was followed by another translation, Ferdinand Graf Fathom (1772), about which little is known. In 1799, too late to be of interest in the present context, Friedrich von Oertel,23 whom Schiller knew, and who had already won his spurs as the author of a Gothified satirical novel, Denkwürdigkeiten des ehemaligen Nachtwächters Robert von Zwäzen (1794)24 and as the foremost translator of Lewis’s The Monk, published a new translation of Smollett’s proto-Gothic masterpiece, Graf Ferdinand Fathom (Leipzig & Sorau: Beygang & Ackermann); a new edition appeared in Mannheim in 1803. The 1770 translation, published in Copenhagen, attracted little attention, but the 1772 translation, Ferdinand Graf Fathom, did, for it came immediately after the great success in Germany of The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker (1771), which appeared in German within months of its publication in English.25 Schiller may, of course, have read Smollett’s novel in English. Fathom, whose life of gross moral turpitude began back in 1753, reappears in Humphrey Clinker as a village apothecary in Yorkshire and, of all things, a ‘sincere convert to virtue’. Ferdinand Count Fathom includes a model for the explained supernatural of which the ‘exposed magic’ of novels of the Geisterseher complex is part. Schiller, with his interest in the Werdegang of the criminal, may well have found it there, although there is as yet no evidence that he did, for Fathom is just the sort of corruptible character whose seemingly inevitable slide into criminality so fascinated him. Jeffrey Sammons has wondered aloud whether Der Geisterseher might be seen as an anti-Bildungsroman avant la lettre.26 This is precisely what Fathom is, and moreover it includes elements of criminal biography, an unstable, self23 24 25 26

And his twin sister Mimi. On Oertel, see Hadley, The German Novel in 1790, 223ff. See D. Risch, Smollett und Deutschland (Diss. Göttingen, 1950). Der Geisterseher, ed. Sammons, xiv, n. 10.

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subverting text, and Gothic effects galore. Not without influence on the German Gothic novel (Kahlert, Grosse), it is discussed in Chapter 10. While few Gothic texts had been published when Schiller began writing, his creative lifetime exactly corresponded with late eighteenth/early nineteenth-century high Gothic. In the course of time he acquired for his library a number of Gothic texts including William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794). In mid-July 1796 he wrote to Sophie Mereau, asking whether The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794) had been translated into German. In fact it had appeared, unbeknownst to Schiller and his correspondent, in Riga in the previous year, translated by Dorothea Liebeskind as Caleb Williams, ein philosophischer Roman (1795).27 Another translation, by A. Wilhelmi, Gemälde nach dem Leben oder Begebenheiten Caleb Williams, appeared in 1797-8, when Schiller acquired it for his library. Caleb Williams is a powerfully written novel of several kinds, including the early ‘detective novel’, in which respect it may be compared with Der Geisterseher, which Godwin read in English. Described by Godwin’s Jacobin fellow-novelist Mrs Inchbald, as ‘sublimely horrible captivatingly frightful’,28 Caleb Williams is something of a dark horse among early English ‘Gothic’ novels admired by German literary men like Schiller and Tieck, both of whom took an interest in it. Schiller’s detestation of the abuse of patriarchal power as practised by Karl Eugen Duke of Württemberg, his sympathy with the French Revolution (as opposed to the vile means which betrayed the idealism of its founders and supporters), and his interest in fellow-idealists and the idealist mindset are sufficient to account for his interest in Caleb Williams, and he may also have been curious to read a novel that had been compared to Der Geisterseher. Godwin, for his part, knew not only Schiller’s The Robbers and The GhostSeer, but also the main German imitations of the latter in the form of Kahlert’s The Necromancer, Tschink’s The Victim of Magical Delusion, and Grosse’s Horrid Mysteries. All these he read in English, for, unlike Holcroft, he appears to have had no German. His discussions with his son-in-law Shelley of German Gothic works like The Ghost-Seer and The Necromancer were based on both men’s readings of those works in English. The attraction of The Ghost-Seer and its imitations lay, for Godwin, in the fact that they, like him, were preoccupied with the credulity that makes fools of human beings, and with the corruptibility and therefore latent criminality of the human animal. What is it that makes people so credulous? What secret weakness, hope or fear is at work? Under what circumstances does selfdeception come into play? Grosse’s grandiose pursuit-novel Der Genius did 27 28

Dorothea Margarete Liebeskind is remembered for her brilliant translations of Ann Radcliffe. Quoted from Summers, Gothic Quest, 403.

156 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective not appear in English until 1796, but may nonetheless have helped to inspire Godwin’s pursuit-novel. Godwin benefitted from the example of Schiller’s The Ghost-Seer in a novelistic, but unfortunately not in a stylistic way, for Caleb Williams is as stodgily unreadable as Schiller’s novel is brilliantly readable. He shared Schiller’s and Tieck’s keen interest in crime and criminal types; he read the Lives of the Convicts29 in 1793, and later published his own Lives of the Necromancers (1834, repr. London, 1876; New York, 1976). Like Schiller’s Prince and Count O. in The Ghost-Seer, Godwin’s St. Leon, in the novel published in 1799 that bears his name (see Vol III, ch. 8 and 9), is seized by officers of the Inquisition. In detail there is little overlap, for Schiller’s account is as concise and concrete as Godwin’s is abstract and rambling. The description of Bethlem Gaborin the same novel (Vol IV, ch 5)30 is taken from Kahlert’s description in The Necromancer of the robber chief Wolf.31 Bethlem Gabor is an historical character, but the character who bears his name in St. Leon is simply a prototypical Gothic villain/monster. In the guise of ‘Mr Higgins of St. Mary Axe’ Godwin was, with Schiller, one of the butts of The Anti-Jacobin, best known for its ‘The Rovers’, in which Die Räuber is described as a work ‘in which Robbery is put in so fascinating a light that the whole of a German University went upon the highway in consequence of it’. The reference is to the University of Göttingen, alma mater of Leonhard Wächter (ps. Veit Weber), author of another early Jacobin novel, Die Brüder des Bundes für Freyheit und Recht (179195), and of Carl Grosse and Ludwig Tieck, among others. Godwin knew Weber’s ‘shockingly vivid’ The Sorcerer (Die Teufelsbeschwörung), on which he drew in St. Leon, but did not know Die Brüder des Bundes für Freyheit und Recht, which was not translated. With their respective Pietist and Calvinist backgrounds, Schiller and Godwin have much in common. Schiller’s original intention had been to become a Lutheran pastor, while Godwin was for a time a Dissenting minister. There is something of the Moraltrompeter in both these ‘theoretical men’. If Schiller is the Idealist, Godwin is the more extreme Utopian fantast. They are both reflective writers in Schiller’s definition, idealists or ideas-men, but also psychologists. Schiller is a

29 30 31

A Select and Impartial Account of the Lives [...] of the most remarkable Convicts [from 1700 to 1760] (London: Hodges, 1760). William Godwin, Travels of St. Leon (London: Colburn and Bentley [Standard Novels, No 5], 1831), 395f. Gary Kelly, The English Jacobin Novel 1780-1805 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 235. The description in question is to be found in The Necromancer, tr. Peter Teuthold, rev./ed. Montague Summers (London: Holden, 1927), 196.

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philosopher, Godwin a French-style philosophe.32 In literary terms they are both innovators: Schiller’s Der Geisterseher established one of the main subsets of Gothic, and Godwin’s Caleb Williams is the prototype of nineteenth-century internalized Gothic. Godwin took the Gothic novel in a new philosophical direction, but also in a new psychological one. It is above all in their respective reactions to the French Revolution that philosopher and philosophe come together. The fact that Caleb Williams is ‘the first ostensible Jacobin Gothic [novel]’33 and a work that represents the terrorist genre ‘at the peak of its potential as a means of conscious intervention in the political events of the day’34 accounts both for Godwin’s interest in Schiller’s early work and for Schiller’s interest in Caleb Williams, which is a powerfully written novel of several different kinds. Like The Ghost-Seer, it is a kind of early mystery or detective novel written in the terrorist mode of the day, but, unlike The Ghost-Seer, it is a political novel, an example of political or Jacobin Gothic, a ‘psycho-political thriller’,35 and accordingly an example of ‘psycho-Gothic’. In The Ghost-Seer Schiller is more interested in religious brainwashing, which makes monkeys of those exposed to it, than in politics as such. However, while Caleb Williams can be read as a novel of several kinds, it is, above all, a political novel in the sense that its author’s intention was to change society. Godwin’s basic concern is freedom and justice. Caleb Williams is the victim of injustice. As a public novel, Caleb Williams works dramatically, through the confrontation of one individual with another, and is marked by Godwin’s brilliant psychological penetration and play of ideas. The emphasis is on psychological motivation, with the decisive events of the novel, those which trigger psychological change, taking place in public. Godwin, who believed, passionately, and, it is to be feared, mistakenly, in the perfectibility of Man and hence of human society, writes as a social philosopher and as an idealist concerned with uncovering the wellsprings of human conduct and the relationship between the individual and society. Schiller, who is said to have read Gothic-type novels during his not infrequent bouts of illness,36 also knew a whole catalogue of them:

32 33 34 35 36

That is, a rationalist and revolutionary, a social philosopher. Robert Miles, in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Hogle, 48f. See E. J. Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 172. Nora Crook, in A Companion to Gothic, ed. David Punter (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 60. Pantenius, 129f.

158 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Veit Weber’s Sagen der Vorzeit, Vols 1-5 (1787-95), which he asked Cotta to send him on 2 October 1794, and subsequently dismissed as ‘Schmiererei’. This means that he knew Die Teufelsbeschwörung and Die Brüder des Bundes für Freiheit und Recht. It is not clear whether he knew Weber’s once celebrated Bundesroman, Die heilige Vehme, which appeared in 1795 (as Vol. 6 of the series) and would have been more likely to hold his attention, given his very high opinion of Goethe’s Götz, which introduced the Vehmgericht to its many readers. Initially interested by the footnotes which give details of the essays on the heilige Vehme on which Weber drew, he would surely have deemed the treatment of the subject banal. He did know Weber’s Wilhelm Tell. Ein Schauspiel (1804), but by 17 March 1804 his own Wilhelm Tell had already been first performed in Weimar. Benedicte Naubert’s Neue Volksmärchen der Deutschen (4 vols, 1789-92). He knew her Amalgunde, which he sent to Charlotte von Lengefeld on 24 July 1788, and Geschichte der Gräfin Thekla von Thurn (1788), which is reflected in his famous description of Thekla. As we shall see, he almost certainly knew other works by Naubert, and certainly knew Baron Bock, well known for his translations into French of Naubert’s Vehmgericht novels, and for various essays on the Vehmgericht, who also did a parttranslation of Der Geisterseher. Bock was a self-appointed expert on the secret tribunal in its late eighteenth-century decadence. L. F. Huber’s play Das heimliche Gericht, which first appeared in the second number of Thalia in 1790.37 Schiller must have known very well that Huber’s weak, rambling, wordy work did not deserve to appear in Thalia; his letters to Huber show him struggling to tread the fine line between truth and friendship. Without possessing them, he also knew (of) a number of other writers of well-known Gothic texts or of texts associated with Gothic: Jacob Maier’s once celebrated Ritterdrama, Fust von Stromberg (1782), which Scott translated but later decided not to publish; Schiller, on the lookout for another Götz, probably read it in its year of publication. If he did, he will have been disappointed.

37

See Schiller’s letter to Huber of 30 Sept. 1790 (‘Als Trauerspiel kann ich es nicht gelten laßen; schon in der Wahl des Sujets ligt ein Fehler, der durch die vortreflichste Behandlung nicht gut gemacht werden konnte’).

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C. H. Spieß, Maria Stuart (NA, Bd 23: Schillers Briefe 1772-1786, 290), which appeared in October 1783, after he had begun work on his own Maria Stuart (1801). The idea of a head-to-head meeting between Elizabeth and Mary, of which he made such brilliant use, he probably borrowed from Spieß, thereby confirming, avant la lettre, the truth of Kleist’s later essay entitled ‘Ein Satz aus der höheren Kritik’ (1811) in which it is argued that ‘der Gedanke zu unsern vollkommensten Kunstwerken [...] bei der Lektüre schlechter, der Vergessenheit ganz übergebener Broschüren und Scharteken entstanden ist’ (the starting point for our most consummate works of art is [sometimes] to be found in long-forgotten chapbooks and trashy novels).38 He knew Zschokke’s Abällino and was not at all amused when the second volume of a French translation of his own dramas published in 1799 included not Die Räuber, but that cuckoo in an eagle’s nest, Abällino. He met Christian August Vulpius, future author of Rinaldo Rinaldini (1797), in 1787,39 and left a droll description of him that anticipates the description of the devil in Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl. There is no indication that he took Rinaldo Rinaldini any more seriously than he did its author. Both Abällino and Rinaldo Rinaldini, as imitations of Die Räuber, eventually stole his thunder. He knew William Coxe’s Travels in Switzerland (1789, German translation 1792) with its description of the ‘singularly wild and romantic’ passage over the Alps 40 on which Ann Radcliffe had drawn when describing the Alpine landscape in The Mysteries of Udolpho. He knew F. L. W. Meyer, translator of Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1794), and Friedrich von Oertel, translator of Lewis’s The Monk (1797) and Smollett’s Ferdinand Count Fathom (1799). He knew both The Castle of Otranto (and its dramatization by Jephson) and The Mysterious Mother: He wrote to Goethe on 9 Mar. 1798 on the subject of The Mysterious Mother, which they discussed early in 1800 before deciding not to proceed with their plan for a joint adaptation of Walpole’s tragedy. It will have been 38 39 40

Kleist, SWB, ed.Helmut Sembdner, 4th edn (Munich:Hanser, 1965), 347. In a letter to Körner dated July 1787. Vulpius’s celebrated Räuberroman is a genial but relatively shallow take on Die Räuber. See William Coxe, Travels in Switzerland, 2 vols (London: T. Cadell, 1794), I: 2, 25; II: 9. Naubert includes a memorable such passage in her Feudal Tyrants.

160 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective at that point that Schiller decided to use the first English Gothic play, Walpole’s The Mysterious Mother, in his till then still amorphous ‘feindliche Brüder’ project, which now became Die Braut von Messina. Goethe visited him on 19 Nov. and 21 Nov. 1798 to discuss Otranto. He seems not to have known any other English early Gothic plays of 178492. He knew Grosse’s Der Genius (1791-94), the novel that not only left its mark on Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, but also had such a nearcatastrophic effect on Tieck and Hoffmann, and, in its English guise of Horrid Mysteries, on Shelley. It is mentioned, but not discussed, in Schiller’s correspondence in 1793. More relevant to his own work is Grosse’s early essay, Über das Erhabene (1788), on a subject that was much on his own mind in 1793; he used Grosse’s title for his third and final essay on sublimity in 1801. He knew Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) from his friend Christian Garve’s anonymously published translation, Edmund Burkes Über den Ursprung unserer Begriffe vom Erhabenen und Schönen deutsch (1773), and was later familiar with Reflexions on the Revolution in France (1790) via Friedrich Gentz’s translation. Betrachtungen über die Französische Revolution, nach dem Englischen des Herrn Burke neubearbeitet (1793). He knew Johann August Apel (who reviewed Die Jungfrau von Orleans) and Friedrich August Schulze, ps. Friedrich Laun, editors of the celebrated Gespensterbuch collection of early ghost stories influenced by Der Geisterseher. He knew Sophia and Harriet Lee’s Canterbury Tales (1798), which includes an important Gothic tale, ‘The German’s Tale: Kruitzner’, but I have found no evidence that he knew Sophia Lee’s The Recess (178385: Die Ruinen, eine Geschichte aus den vorigen Zeiten, 1786), which was of such consequence in the development of the early, Gothified historical novel in Germany. In the preface to the first volume of Merkwürdige Rechtsfälle als ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Menschheit (4 vols, Jena, 1792-95) Schiller condemned the ‘geistlose, geschmack- und sittenverderbende Romane’ (mindless, tasteless and morally corrupting novels) that were the staple fare of the lending

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libraries.41 In doing so, he no doubt had the work of Veit Weber in mind. By then he knew Veit Weber’s Der graue Bruder, Die Teufelsbeschwörung and Die Brüder des Bundes für Freiheit und Recht (all 1792-5), as well as Naubert’s Walter von Montbarry, Großmeister des Tempelordens (1786), Hermann von Unna (1788) and Elisabeth, Erbin von Toggenburg (1789), to which his stricture does not apply. In the course of the 1790s he got to know Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764, tr. Meyer 1796), Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794, Ger. tr. 1797), Lewis’s The Monk (1796, tr. Oertel 1799), Grosse’s Der Genius (1791-95), Zschokke’s Abällino (1793), and Vulpius’ Rinaldo Rinaldini (1798). Strange to say, he also possessed two English Scharteken listed in Summer’s Gothic Bibliography, Eliza Parsons’ Women as They Are (1796) and Eliza Bromley’s Ivey Castle (1794). How he came to possess them is a mystery. By 1800, when Kleist wrote to his fiancée on 14 September that, the work of Goethe, Schiller and Wieland being banned,42 the lending library in Würzburg contained nothing but Rittergeschichten, the novels in question were, in English terms at least, Gothic ones. Schiller’s work was not, of course, bannned throughout the German-speaking lands, but his writings were banned in Bavaria throughout the 1790s. In Austria a decree of 1802 made the selling of Hexen- und Gespensterromane (novels about witches and ghosts) illegal, and in 1806 - by which time the horses in question had well and truly bolted - Räuberromane and Ritterromane were banned there too. In the German-language Catholic and conservative south (Swabia, Bavaria, Austria, Bohemia) literary works were liable to find themselves banned for moral or political reasons; the situation in the Protestant north was more relaxed. In another letter to his fiancée, dated 11 January 1801, Kleist dismissed the genre, which was to leave its mark on his work, as ‘abentheuerlich’ (far-fetched). Schiller’s position was similarly ambiguous, for the popular fiction of the day, which he regarded with disdain, was deemed to include Der Geisterseher and its imitations by Grosse, Kahlert, Tschink and others. It was because of those of his works that have come to be associated with Gothic and with Jacobinism that his work came to be banned from the lending library in Würzburg.

41

42

Schiller, Sämtliche Werke, ed. K. Goedecke, 15 vols (Stuttgart: Cotta, 18677-76), XIII, 166. August Gottlieb Meissner’s Kriminal-Geschichten (1796) was no doubt inspired by Schiller’s Merkwürdige Rechtsfälle. Coleridge’s view of Gothic literature as ‘poison for youth’ (see CR [1796], 197) shows that Schiller’s view was shared by others. See Ward, 98-101. The lending libraries were described by one choleric, conservative critic as ‘diese moralischen Giftbuden’

162 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective

III When the Romantic tragedy Die Räuber appeared in 1781, like a bolt from the blue, it was universally regarded as a politically revolutionary play. In retrospect its assault on the tyranny of the German petty-princedoms reads as a harbinger of the French Revolution, the event that underlies and helps to explain the popularity of Gothic literature in the 1790s. There can be no doubt that Schiller detested the abuse of patriarchal power as practised by Karl Eugen Duke of Württemberg, and that his deeper interest was in the nature of virtue and vice, morality and immorality, and their dark interface. Die Räuber remains an uninhibited play inhabited by wild men whose wild talk leads to wild actions and induces them to commit damnable crimes of the kind portrayed by Goya, who, in 1792 and again in 1819, takes Gothic commonplaces such as murder, rape, and robbery, and turns them into paradigms of human existence. In his review of Die Räuber Schiller likened Karl Moor to Milton’s Satan, prototype of the ‘heroic villain’ of the Gothic novel, celebrated by Edmund Burke for his sublimity43 and idolized by the Gothics for his resistance to patriarchal power. Franz Moor he termed ‘ein schleichender Teufel’ (a shifty devil). Much of this is in line both with Sturm und Drang drama and with the Gothic writing of the next decade. The ‘popular’ literature that Schiller read at the Karlsschule, where it was banned, consisted mainly of Sturm und Drang plays and stories of local criminals, the staple fare of middle-class and working-class readers respectively. Such reading, combined with the idea of the sublime to which he was introduced by Abel, was to be the making of his dramatic and narrative work and more especially of its Gothic dimension. A reviewer in Nicolai’s Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek described Franz Moor as ‘ein Geschöpf, wie es deren nie gegeben hat. So ganz von Grund aus verdirbt, vergiftet, ohne daß man weiß woher’ (a creature the like of whom did not previously exist. So depraved, so baneful, that one can only wonder where he got it from),44 and it is a fact that Franz became the model for countless unprincipled villains in the lower reaches of German Gothic, whereas Karl represents the future Gothic hero-villain. Schiller himself described Die Räuber (1781) as both a ‘treffendes lebendiges Konterfey’ (accurate, true-to-life copy) of the real world and the portrait (‘Gemählde’) of a vicious, ignoble man, in the automatic, unthinking nature of whose vice he was interested, and a virtuous, albeit deeply flawed one. Die Räuber, originally planned as a novel, and indeed presented to the public as ‘ein 43 44

Burke implies that it is Milton’s poetic packaging that gives Satan his sublimity. AdB, 49/1, 1782, 127.

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dramatischer Roman’ (a dramatic novel), includes many proto-Gothic features, some of them noted by Coleridge, who wrongly (see section VII below) saw its mysterious villains (‘on a level with the meanest ruffians of the condemned cells’), ruined castles, dungeons, trap-doors, skeletons, fleshand-blood ghosts and perpetual moonshine as deriving from Otranto.45 The epithets applied to Die Räuber by reviewers (schauderhaft, gräßlich, etc.) are those that would be applied to Gothic work. Other Gothic features include the Count and his Castle; ‘live burial’ in the sense of incarceration in an underground dungeon such as can be seen to this day in the form of Tübingen’s historic Universitätskerker (university clink or cooler); the outcast as Gothic hero-villain in the mould of Milton’s Satan; the robber-band and the desperate captain of banditti; the Bohemian forest in which they operate, home of the dark privations that Gothic shares with the sublime; dispossession and disinheritance; usurpation; purloined/forged letters; the effect on the reader (cf. Coleridge: ‘I tremble like an aspen leaf’); and the motif of revenge, although this is a feature alike of the high- and low-brow literature of the time, not just of Gothic. Gothic in the sense of over-the-top are Karl Moor’s wild, madcap words and actions, what Coleridge termed ‘the material sublime’: ‘to produce an effect, he sets [...] a whole town on fire.’46 The only other pre-Gothic work to contain so many ‘Gothic’ features is Smollett’s Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753, German editions 1770, 1772 and 1803), which is Gothic in all but spirit. However, this list of Gothic features, long as it is, is also misleading, for when all is said and done the tragedy is diminished by the Gothic epithet: its dialectic of villainy and virtue, vengeance and regeneration, freedom and order goes way beyond Gothic as such. Karl Moor’s band of eighty47 assassins (to give them the name that applies to their trade and has talismanic value in the mind of Shelley and De Quincey as well as the early Schiller),48 one of those troops ‘das in der heiligen Stille der Wälder residiret’ (that chuse the hallowed recess of the forest for their abode), is inaugurated when Karl declares’Räuber und Mörder! - So wahr meine Seele lebt, ich bin euer Hauptmann! [...] Mörder und Räuber! - Mit diesem Wort war das Gesetz unter meine Füße gerollt (Robbers and assassins - as my soul lives, I will be your Captain! [...] 45 46 47 48

Coleridge, Biographia Literaria , new edn (London: George Bell, 1876), 276. Quoted from T. J. Reed, Schiller (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1991, 22. We shall see that fact catches up with fiction in the shape of ‘Frà Diavolo’s’ band of eighty outlaws. Frà Diavolo too is thought to ‘put on the dress of a Capuchin’. ‘Assassin’, as opposed to the common murderer, has, for those who acccept the concept, a tincture of sublimity.

164 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Assassins and robbers! With these words I set all laws at defiance!).49 It is not long, however, before Karl is appalled at the barbarity of his band: ‘[ich] gehe, mich in irgend eine Kluft der Erde zu verkriechen, wo der Tag vor meiner Schande zurücktritt’ (hence! let me seek some cavern of the earth to hide me - to hide my shame from the light of day’). The real unprincipled terrorist is his brother Franz, who in the soliloquy that opens the second Act, exclaims ‘Schreck! was kann der Schreck nicht? Was kann Vernunft, Hoffnung, Religion wider dieses Giganten eiskalte Umarmung?’ (Terror is the word! What is proof against Terror? Reason, religion, hope - all must give way before [the icy embrace of] this giant fiend!). That Franz is himself a giant fiend, a moral monster, is shown by his misdeeds, notably his incarceration of his old father in a tower that goes back to the earliest beginnings of German Gothic in the form of Gerstenberg’s Ugolino. Otherwise the tower as the prison of choice was inherited by Gothic from Mme d’Aulnoy, whose work Schiller appears not to have known. Karl Moor, guessing that ‘Irgend ein Ungeheuer von Geheimnis liegt in diesem Thurme verlarvt’ (Some horrible mystery, for certain, is conceal’d in that tower), is addressed by Herrmann: ‘Furchtbarer Fremdling! Bist du [...] der Sbirren der dunkeln Vergeltung einer, die durch die Unterwelt patrouilliren gehen, und die Geburten der Mitternacht mustern?’ (Terrible stranger! art thou [...] one of the agents of that unfathomable retribution, who make their circuit in this lower world, and take account of all the deeds of darkness?), to which Karl replies: ‘Würgengel ist mein Name. Fleisch und Blut hab ich wie du!’ (The Exterminating Angel is my name, but I am flesh and blood, as thou art). The reader may wonder whether Herrmann is mistaking the robbers for members of die heilige Vehme, the more so when they are presently described as ‘der Arm höherer Majestäten’ (instruments in the Almighty’s hand), and indeed when Karl terms himself ‘Ein Bevollmächtigter des Weltgerichts’ (minister of heaven’s Almighty King, the Judge of right and wrong). This is precisely how the Freischöffen (members of the ‘Secret Tribunal’) saw themselves. While no reference to the Vehmgericht was intended, the parallel was sufficiently close for contemporary readers, and some of Schiller’s French translators, to have made it in their own minds, which helps to account for the extraordinary success of Naubert’s Vehmgericht romances in France. Die Räuber, already ‘gothic’ enough, was further gothified in a French rifacimento by an Alsatian named Schwindenhammer (in French, La Martelière, the name under which he wrote); entitled Robert, Chef de Brigands 49

The translations here are Tytler’s; they are rather free, but are retained for their historical authenticity.

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(1793) that included various extraneous references to the heilige Vehme or Secret Tribunal. La Martelière followed up Robert with a sequel entitled Le Tribunal Redoutable ou la suite de Robert, Chef de Brigands (1793), which was too revolutionary even for the Committee of Public Safety, who banned it. The next French translation, Les Voleurs [...] imitée de l’allemand (1795) followed suit: incongruously and quite unhistorically; the robbers here constitute themselves into a Vehmgericht or ‘tribunal sanguinaire’. By then the ‘secret tribunal’ was well known in France from Bock’s essay ‘Notice sur le Tribunal Secret et les Francs Juges de Westphalie’ (in his Oeuvres Diverses, II, 1788), his translation of Naubert’s Herman d’Unna (1791) and dramatization of it as Le Tribunal Secret (1791).50 Schiller repeatedly planned, but never wrote, a continuation of Die Räuber under the title Die Braut in Trauer, oder zweiter Theil der Räuber, in which ‘alle Immoralität in die erhabenste Moral sich auflösen muß’ (all immorality is to dissolve into the most sublime morality). In the event a sequel, in some respects not so far removed from Schiller’s planned one, was written by Frau von Wallenrodt, Karl Moor und seine Genossen nach der Abschiedszene beim alten Thurm. Ein Gemälde erhabener Menschennatur, als Seitenstück zum Rinaldo Rinaldini (1801), which invokes Vulpius’s novel in order to associate Die Räuber with what had by then become its equally popular, if tamer and lamer, successor. The impact of Die Räuber on English Gothic was scarcely less considerable. Maturin’s Bertram (1816) owes much to it, as Goethe recognized when he noted that it contained ‘Schiller’s Moors’,51 and the ending, in which Bertram stabs himself, exclaiming with a burst of wild exultation, ‘I died no felon death — / A warrior’s weapon freed a warrior’s soul’, echoes Rinaldo’s words in Vulpius’s Aurora. Coleridge’s play Remorse (1813) owes its plot to Die Räuber and is also indebted to Der Geisterseher, compare the scene in Act III where Albert dons a sorcerer’s robe and pretends, with the help of clouds of incense and claps of thunder, to conjure up a ghost. Dealing in the Spanish Inquisition, mystery and menacing violence,52 Remorse reflects the Gothic mode that was by then coming to an end. Southey’s planning of atragedy, The Banditti, on the lines of Die Räuber provides a conceptual bridge with the Gothic, as does John O’Keefe’s Banditti (1781). Die Räuber, while reflecting Cervantes’ story of the noble robber Roque Guinart in Don Quixote (to be translated by Tieck in 1799-1801), the story of Robin Hood, which Schiller knew from Herder’s Volkslieder, and Goethe’s feindliche Brüder in the romance Claudine von Villa Bella (1775), one of whom is a bandit, is also the first of a large number of literary works based, in part, 50 51 52

Veit Weber’s Die heilige Vehme was not translated into French until 1830. Quoted from Die Räuber, ed. Willoughby, 73. Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Darker Reflections (London: HarperCollins, 1998), 322.

166 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective on the historical robber bands of the time and the banditophobia to which they gave rise.53 Banditti, who, as Goya made all too clear, were often murderers in waiting and had nothing Robin Hoodish about them, were such a reality of life for travellers that it is hardly surprising that they feature in the painting54 and novel of the time and, more especially, in the early Gothic novel. One of the main kinds of German Gothic novel, product of this banditophobia, the modern Räuberroman or novel of banditti,55 was inspired by Die Räuber (1781).56 Robert Miles has recently written that the really influential German writer, as far as the Gothic novel goes, was Friedrich Schiller. His play The Robbers [...] created an immense fad for stories of Banditti, a sub-genre that turned on the ethical question of whether it was right, in corrupt times, to form an outlaw society [...] Gothic artists found Banditti to be an irresistible source of picturesque terror.57

Ann Radcliffe, a great admirer of Die Räuber, follows Salvator Rosa in seeing banditti in aesthetic terms as wild men, primitives, whereas the young Schiller, for all his creative excitement and sometimes naive idealism, sees them as the criminals they really are. At this point it is more instructive to compare the different effect on Lewis and Shelley of their reading of Die Räuber and the wild, hot-headed German terror novels spawned by it. Such works are characterized by two things: the portrayal of violence and the belief that ‘social violence is the product of social injustice’, so that the bandit behaves in a justifiable way in responding to ‘the impositions of an unjust and unjustifiable society’.58 Fiesko faces a similar moral-philosophical crux in a more socially elevated form. Lewis, who was attracted to the portrayal of violence as such, took the aesthetic way out, leaving it to Shelley to draw the political conclusion that Schiller had long since drawn; he himself shows ‘little explicit involvement with the politically radical content of the German terror novels.’59 This is extraordinary when one bears in mind that Lewis was a member of parliament from 1796 to 1802, during Pitt’s Terror, and that Schiller’s passionate idealism had been given added

53 54 55 56 57 58 59

See G. Kraft, Historische Studien zu Schillers Schauspiel ‘Die Räuber’. Über eine mitteldeutschfränkische Räuberbande des 18.Jahrhunderts (Weimar: Arion, 1959). Smollett knew Fuseli, who illustrated Pickle. See Holger Dainat, Abaellino, 284-9, for a bibliography of Räuberromane. W. Rullmann, Die Bearbeitungen, Fortsetzungen und Nachahmungen von Schillers ‘Räubern’ 1782-1802 (Berlin: Ges. f. Theatergeschichte, 1911). In The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Hogle, 50. David Punter and Glennis Byron, The Gothic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 16. Punter and Byron, 194.

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point by the giant historical event, traumatic for the run of English politicians, by which it was overtaken. Die Räuber was followed by a related piece, the ‘republican tragedy’ Die Verschwörung des Fiesko zu Genua (1783). Schiller lists his source material in a preface which excludes an obscure work that provides an historical link to the conspiracy theories of the Gothic age. I am referring to the Histoire générale des conjurations, conspirations et révolutions célèbres tant anciennes que modernes (new edition, Vol. III, 1768) by L. E. Duport du Tertre, which Schiller is thought to have used, for after being greeted in the mid-1790s with excessive enthusiasm, German literature was, by the late 1790s, ‘demonized by being associated with French revolutionary excess’.60 These were wild, heady times, but the critical excess is understandable, given Schiller’s status as an honorary citizen of the country whose revolutionary régime had recently murdered its king and some 20,000 citizens. In two extremely influential books, Abbé Barruel’s Mémoires pour servir à l’Histoire du Jacobinisme (4 vols, London, 1797-8; Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism, tr. Robert Clifford (London: Burton, 1798) and John Robison’s Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe (Edinburgh, 1797), German literature was linked with atheism and Jacobinism. Barruel’s and Robison’s books depicted a Europe riddled with cells of revolutionaries hell-bent on causing mayhem; it was a picture that appealed to writers and readers of Gothic fiction. In June 1798 the The Anti-Jacobin, with the cases of Goethe’s Stella (English translation, 1798) and Schiller’s Die Räuber in mind, implicitly defined German drama as ‘morally promiscuous and bent on overthrowing all government’.A few months later a correspondent of Der Genius der Zeit (17 [1799], 498) followed suit, describing the German writers and philosophers of the time as being, to a man, ‘leidenschaftliche Beförderer der königsmörderischen französischen Freiheit’ (passionate supporters of the regicidal French notion of freedom).

IV From the outset Schiller enjoyed the reputation of being, in Coleridge’s words, ‘tremendous in sublimity’. In aesthetic theory and tragic practice he made the sublime so much his own that it might be supposed to be, par excellence, the quality that distinguishes his high-style, high-moral-tone tragic oeuvre from Gothic with its populist aesthetics and morals. And yet 60

Gamer, 222. See also David Simpson, Romanticism, Nationalism and the Revolt against Theory (University of Chicago Press, 1993).

168 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective this is not the case, for the sublime is, ironically, the very ground on which Schiller is confronted by those he considers Gothic Schmierer (hacks).61 More especially it is the ground on which he faces Carl Friedrich August Grosse (1768-1847), literary adventurer and author of the novel, Der Genius. Aus den Papieren des Marquis C* von G* (4 vols, 941pp., Halle: Hendel, 1791-5) that borrowed heavily from Schiller’s Der Geisterseher and Naubert’s Hermann von Unna, and of a series of early works on the sublime starting with Über das Erhabene (Göttingen & Leipzig: Brose, 1788, repr. 1801; repr. St. Ingbert: Röhrig, 1997, edited by Carsten Zelle), a title re-used by Tieck in reaction to Grosse in 1792 and by Grosse and Schiller in 1801. Grosse’s treatise on the sublime was published anonymously as Über das Erhabene. In 1792 Tieck, after reading Der Genius, which was in course of publication in Halle, wrote his own essay on the sublime, Über das Erhabene,62 in which, his head turned by Grosse’s novel, he sees the sublime as an aesthetic category, so that ‘the Gothic and the sublime being close partners, the aesthetic mode can be seen to justify all manner of frightfulness in the novel.’63 A trivial contribution to one of the most important aesthetic debates of the age, it helps to explain Schiller’s estimation of Tieck’s work as agreeably light-weight but lacking in moral fibre. Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756) appeared in German (Über den Ursprung unserer Begriffe vom Erhabenen und Schönen, [tr. Christian Garve])64 in 1773, as did Anna Laetitia Aikin’s On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror. Garve had published his translation of Ferguson’s Institutes of Moral Philosophy a year earlier as Grundsätze der Moralphilosophie (1772).65 Schiller’s philosophy teacher at the Karlsschule, Jacob Friedrich Abel (1751-1829), encouraged discussion of Ferguson’s philosophy and of Burke’s ‘On the Sublime’,66 which begins with the idea that underlies his importance for the Gothic generation:

61 62

63 64 65 66

In the lower reaches of Gothic sublime effects are not mediated by thought. Tieck wrote, at much the same time, his own essay Über das Erhabene that remained unpublished until Edwin H. published Tieck’s Essay ‘Über das Erhabene’ in PMLA, 50 (1935), 537-549. For an improved text see Ludwig Tieck Schriften 1789-1794, ed. Achim Hölter (Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1991), 637-51,1137-1170. Paulin, 22. Schiller was, of course, familiar with Burke’s work and corresponded with Christian Garve; see his letters to Körner of 25 Jan. 1793 and 29 Dec. 1794. See 287-420: ‘Ferguson-Kommentar’. See Riedel, in SHB, 162, and Carsten Zelle, Angenehmes Grauen.Literaturhistorische Beiträge zur Ästhetik des Schrecklichen im achtzehnten Jahrhundert (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1987), which explores in depth the aesthetics of horror/terror.

Schiller 169 Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant with terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime, that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. (A Philosophical Enquiry, Pt I, sect. 7)

In other words, the excitement that is inherent in our response to the idea or prospect of pain or danger is at its greatest when it is mixed with terror because our sense of self-preservation is aroused. Such terror challenging our very existence may be induced by the spectacle of the awe-inspiringly great - the classical examples are our feelings on contemplating the Swiss Alps or Mount Etna, mountainous seas, awe-inspiring ruins, subterranean vaults - or by the privations that are central to Gothic and, more generally, to the awareness of sublimity (vacuity, darkness, solitude, and silence, but also insecurity and, greatest of all, uncertainty) - are central to writer after writer. Two types of sublimity arise in the present context, the moral/aesthetic and the natural sublime. By the moral/aesthetic sublime I mean the sublimity that is personified in Milton’s Satan and in Schiller’s Karl Moor, in other words the notion of the ‘sublime’ criminal that so fascinated Schiller, a type that involves a moral judgment vitiated by aesthetic approval of the subject or action. Grosse inherited his admiration for the ‘erhabener Bösewicht’ (sublime villain)67 from Schiller. Die Räuber also contains extravagant gestures and effects that are at once sublime and Gothic, for the concept of sublimity which, in one form or another, underlies all his major dramas, paradoxically also serves to link Schiller’s work with Gothic. Throughout his creative lifetime the literary domain of the sublime is the Gothic novel with its mountain crags, heart-stopping abysses, moonlit ruins, charnel vaults, and the rest. At the end of his life, in his ‘Romantic tragedy’ Die Jungfrau von Orleans (1802), he partially reverts to Die Räuber, for here are medieval (Gothic) mysteries and over-the-top Gothic effects in the form of warnings from a spectral knight and the thunderclaps to which Beattie refers that are a standard Gothic effect in the novel and theatre from Otranto onwards. Paradoxically, he uses Walpole’s Gothico-classical tragedy The Mysterious Mother to arrive at what he calls true tragedy in the shape of Die Braut von Messina (1802). Gothic is used to overcome Gothic. Schiller’s fascination with the moral ambiguity of the great criminal, conspirator and cozener is evident in his dramatic protagonists, who share the moral ambiguity of the contemporary Gothic hero-villain and include banditti, conspirators, traitors, and murderers. From the outset his focus is 67

The modern shift of meaning of ‘Bösewicht’ (rascal) does not help.

170 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective on the evolution of the criminal and more especially on the morally challenging, peculiarly Schillerian notion of the ‘sublime’ criminal which underlies Die Räuber.68 It is glossed by Der Verbrecher aus Infamie (1786) (subsequently Der Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre) and by the planned series Geschichte der merkwürdigsten Rebellionen und Verschwörungen aus den mittlern und neueren Zeiten, of which only the first volume appeared, in 1788. Throughout his work he endeavours, indeed struggles to define the difference between moral grandeur and criminal sublimity. The idea of the ‘sublime criminal’ appeals to Schiller, as it was to do to Thomas De Quincey, who shares Schiller’s preoccupation with criminality, and with the potential ‘greatness’ or ‘nobility’ or ‘sublimity’ of the criminal. De Quincey’s prime example is Karl Moor, with whom he identified his whole life long. Schiller, as a born dramatist, was interested in the moral ambiguity and psychological growth of the ‘sublime criminal’; De Quincey, while also taking Milton’s Satan and Schiller’s Karl Moor as paradigms of the type, focuses on the subjective applicability of the concept, for he identified both with ‘Charles de Moor’ and also, though without ever consciously admitting it, with Satan as the personification of the guilt that reduced him from creative writer to ‘coiner’.69 Schiller’s fascination with the great criminal is shared by Gothic writers great and small but mainly, it has to be said, by the small, for the interest in criminals, when taken out of Schiller’s high-minded context and stripped ofhis depth and width of historical reference and understanding, leads to the Schauerroman. An age that (mis)applies the notion of sublimity to criminal actions is arguably not ‘deprived’70 but depraved.

V Literary interest in notorious felons goes back at least to the Inventaire Général de l’histoire des larrons (1625). It was in 1781 that Schiller, as acting editor of the twice-weekly Stuttgart paper Nachrichten zum Nutzen und Vergnügen, wrote an account of the trial at the Old Bailey of one La Motte, meaning (Baron) François Henri de la Motte, a retired French army officer resident in England, who was tried at the Old Bailey on 23 July 1781, accused of spying for France by supplying the French court with details aimed at enabling the capture of an entire British naval squadron. After a trial lasting thirteen hours he was found guilty of high treason, and was hanged, drawn and 68 69 70

See D. Peyrache, ‘Le Sublime et le crime: Autour des Brigands de Schiller,’ Revue de Litterature Comparée, 65 (1991), 227-288. See my De Quincey’s Gothic Masquerade , 94f. Reed, 87.

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quartered at Tyburn on 27 July 1781; his case features in Thackeray’s unfinished novel Denis Duval. Schiller’s early article notwithstanding, the vogue in 1790s Germany for accounts of the careers of criminals and other social outcasts could be said to have been initiated by Spieß’s Biographien der Selbstmörder (4 vols, 1785), and, this being more important, by the sentimental-Gothic novelist Charlotte Smith, who in her The Romance of Real Life [A collection of tales based on Pitaval] (3 vols, London: T. Cadell, 1787: Gemälde menschlicher Schwächen und Leidenschaften, Leipzig, 1789) argued that real-life romance and fable are as attractive to the reader as romantic fiction.71 Smith’s collection led the way for those of Schiller, Spieß (a second collection), Tieck and Alexis. Schiller, fascinated by criminality and, more especially, by the moral ambiguity surrounding some criminal acts, edited Merkwürdige Rechtsfälle als ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Menschheit (4 vols, Jena, 1792-95), a selection of cases from François Gayot de Pitaval’s Causes célèbres et intéressantes (26 vols, 1734-71), which was continued by Julius Eduard Hitzig and Wilhelm Häring (Willibald Alexis) as Der neue Pitaval (67 vols, Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1842-87). Spieß’s Biographien der Wahnsinnigen (4 vols, Leipzig: Voss, 1795-96, repr. Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1976) was followed by the volume of Biographien berühmter Schwärmer, Gauner, Mörder, Mordbrenner und Strassenräuber that Ludwig Tieck, then in his Gothic phase, published in Hanover in 1797 in collaboration with his former teacher and, in literary terms, misteacher, the Gothic novelist72 Friedrich Eberhard Rambach. From Schiller’s Der Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre onwards the Gothic tale was not infrequently based on real-life crimes or on what the local despot in the arrogance of power deemed a crime;73 this closely parallels the British development from Gothic tale foregrounding the uncanny to the Blackwood’s tale in which there is a new interest, shared by Gothic writers like Hoffmann and Hogg, in aberrant mental states, but also a greater realism and explicitness in the description of actual horrors supposedly witnessed by the narrator. Die Räuber is the first of a large number of literary works based, in part, on robber bands of the time, of which the Buxen (1736-79) is perhaps the best known. The historical reality of wild riders, ‘robber barons’, brigands, and bloodthirsty superannuated ex-mercenaries far exceeded the darkest

71 72 73

Charlotte Smith, The Romance of Real Life, 3 vols (London: T. Cadell, 1787), v-vi. In the sense of writer of Ritter- und Räuberromane. See Kriminalgeschichten aus dem 18. Jahrhundert, ed. H. Dainat (Gütersloh: Historische Buchgemeinschaft, 1990). Schiller’s godfather General Rieger, Count Montmarin, and the poet C.F.D.Schubart, all incarcerated by Karl Eugen, who were n ot criminals in the normal sense, represent the arbitrary incareration of the Gothic age.

172 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective imaginings of the average Gothic novelist.74 Robber bands were a reality of the time, especially in the Rhineland (where there was an epidemic of brigandage during the Gothic 1790s) and Black Forest areas of Germany and in the Abruzzo, Calabria and much of the Italian South. Some of the most celebrated Räuberromane reflect the impact of the exploits of real-life robbers such as Angelo Duca (1734-84, the model for Rinaldo Rinaldini), Matthias Klostermayer (1738-71), and Johann Bückler (1777-1803) on the popular imagination. It is only the most lurid or supposedly ‘trivial’ Gothic novels that even begin to approach the everyday reality of murder, rape and robbery, and of legal systems that were, by later standards, completely inadequate. Ironically, such novels were criticized for being too ‘horrid’, for portraying horrors that ‘could not happen’ in real life. The story of Frà Diavolo (Michele Pezza), told in Chapter 10, shows that they could and did. From today’s perspective it is not the sublimity but the banality of evil that stands out.75 Der Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre is the telling, in literary form,76 of the story of a real-life criminal, with emphasis on the evolution of the criminal character; Schiller eschews the sensational potential of the story, which goes back to Die Räuber, which had started life, in 1780, as a proto-Gothic prose tale based on stories circulating locally about the ‘Stuttgarter Sonnenwirt’ Johann Friedrich Schwan (executed in 1760 for murder and robbery), who had been arrested by the father of one of Schiller’s teachers at the Karlschule. Robber, bandit chief and murderer, Schwan receded into the background so far as Die Räuber was concerned, but resurfaced as the herovillain Christian Wolf of Der Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre (1786), whence he was abducted and smuggled into the English translation (The Necromancer; or the Tale of the Black Forest; Founded on Facts, 1794) of Karl Friedrich Kahlert’s Der Geisterbanner (1790) by the translator, Peter Teuthold. At this point Der Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre (and, with it, Der Geisterbanner) slipped into the English Gothic canon, for The Necromancer, unlike the German original,is not merely an overfree translation of the kind so common at the time, but a rifacimento consisting of a free translation of Der Geisterbanner with, tacked on to it, a scarcely less free translation of most of Schiller’s Der Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre, which occupies the last thirty-four pages of Teuthold’s volume, beginning when, ‘contrary to all expectation’, the prisoner at the 74

75 76

See C. MacFarlane, The Lives and Exploits of Banditti (London: Bull & Andrews 1833); Carsten Küther, Räuber und Gauner in Deutschland, 2nd edn (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1987), discusses banditti active in the Rhineland and in central and southern Germany in the mid to late eighteenth century. Cf. Hitler and Eichmann. The title is a variation on Iffland’sVerbrecher aus Ehrsucht (1784).

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dock addresses ‘My Lord and gentlemen’. Kahlert himself drew attention to Teuthold’s hijacking of his novel at the end of the second German edition. Like Der Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre, Das Spiel des Schicksals77 (first published in Teutscher Merkur in January 1789) is a revenge tale. It is based on the ‘awful destiny’ of Schiller’s godfather, General Philipp Friedrich von Rieger (1722-1782), the powerful, brutal first minister of Duke Karl Eugen of Württemberg from 1762 to 1767, who was subsequently incarcerated in the Gothic prison-fortress of Hohentwiel, for supposed high treason, as a result of a court intrigue on the part of Count Samuel Friedrich von Montmartin (Montinengo in the text). He was eventually restored to favour, in an equally arbitrary way, in 1775, and in 1776 became commandant of another prison-fortress, Hohenasperg, in which Schiller’s friend the poet C. F. D. Schubart was incarcerated from 1777 to 1787 on the instigation of Duke Karl Eugen of Württemberg, of whom he had fallen foul for indulging in poetic licence in describing the ‘Hohe Karlsschule’ as a ‘Sklavenplantage’ (slave plantation). Schiller, lucky not to have shared Schubart’s fate, visited him there in December 1781, gaining in the process the first-hand knowledge of a prison-fortress that most Gothic novelists apart from Kleist lacked. Not a romance, but a tale depicting Gothic reality, Das Spiel des Schicksals has many Gothic features including the arbitrary power exercised by the petty prince and his henchmen, and the loss of control and lack of security this engenders, themes to be met again in Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas (1804-10). The sudden change for the worse - that dreadful moment, at which, from being the object of universal homage, the victim of arbitrary power is destined to sink down into that of the uttermost misery, the whole frightful revolution of fortune - is as fundamental to Gothic as the incarceration in a hideous subterranean vault 78 on a trumped-up charge. Guilty or not in moral terms, what counts in Gothic terms is the arbitrariness of what befalls him: ‘wie er hieher komme? und was er verbrochen habe? Aber keine Antwort von oben: die Hände verschwinden, und der Laden geht wieder zu.’ (Why was he brought hither? What offence had he committed? But no answer came from above; the hands disappeared, and the trap-door slammed shut). Ten years later he emerges, ‘ein blasses, totenähnliches Gerippe’ (a ghastly deathlike skeleton). Gothic are the infamy and secret excesses, the ‘Italian’ dissimulation, and the ambiguity of the so-called evidence on which he is condemned, but also the way in which he is said to 77

78

An early translation, by William Tooke, ‘The Sport of Destiny’, appeared in his Varieties of Literature (1795).More accessible is the version by H. G. Bohn in his Schiller’s Early Dramas and Romances(London: Bohn, 1849). Cf. the ‘recesses of a frightful cavern’ in D’Aulnoy’s ‘The Yellow Dwarf’.

174 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective be petrified with death-like horror, and the way in which, in that dreadful dungeon, existence loses reality to the point where it becomes indistinguishable from nightmare, the human being indistinguishable from the animal. There is nothing in Gothic fiction to compare with the foul realities of the way in which a once proud human being is reduced to a monster, the sight of which makes the blood run cold when he is discovered in a frightful vault that resembles the lair of a wild beast rather than the abode of anything human.79 This is a tale of multiple revenge. G*** himself rebuilt Hohentwiel under the impulse of ignoble revenge; Martinengo has him incarcerated there out of vengeance; finally, G*** avenges himself on a nameless state prisoner, thereby forfeiting any sympathy the reader might otherwise have had with him. Schiller’s abiding interest in the criminal mentality explains Die Polizei (1799-1800), a play (‘Tragödie und Komödie mit einem Polizeisujet’ [a mixture of tragedy and comedy involving material from police records]) in which he aimed to paint a comprehensive picture of the Parisian underworld.80 Although he planned to cast the police in the role of Nemesis in order to maintain a ‘classical’ perspective and control over his dubious material, a development that was to lead to the use of the chorus in Die Braut von Messina, the extraordinary fact remains that it was that same sensational material that was used by Eugene Sue, in Les Mystères de Paris (1842-3), a novel of Parisian low life that was followed in 1844-45 by a plethora of imitations.81 Marx and Engels analysed it in their German Ideology (1846). Schiller did well to drop the Polizei project, his sources for which included Pitaval’s Merkwürdige Rechtsfälle (1792) and Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s Tableau de Paris (1781), for the ‘Unterhaltung, welche diese Rechtsfälle schon durch ihren Inhalt gewähren’ (entertainment which these cases provide by their very subject matter)82 was not for him: In descending, through mystery in the Geisterseher and crime in the Verbrecher, into the cockpit of the popular, he risked loss of contact with ideality, and with rationality, and a sinking to the level of the cheap novels which he so despised.

79 80 81 82

The reader is referred to Henry Bohn’s translation of this memorably Gothic tale in his The Works of Frederick Schiller (London: Bohn, 1849), 483-493. A. Menhennet, ‘Schiller and the „Germanico-Terrific“ Romance’, PEGS (1981), 36. See J. W. Appell, Die Ritter-, Räuber- und Schauerromantik (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1859), 78-80, 90f. Schiller, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Goedeke, III, 166f. He is referring to cases in Pitaval.

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Alan Menhenne’s important point would have arisen all the more forcefully had Schiller gone ahead with Die Polizei, the very stuff of which was ‘the mire of das Gemeine’.83

VI Like so many writers of his time, high-brow and low-brow alike, Schiller was fascinated by secret societies and, in particular, by the conspiracies with which they were popularly associated. He knew ‘die Richter des heimlichen Gerichts’ (the judges of the secret tribunal) from Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen and, in far greater detail, from Naubert’s Hermann von Unna.’’84 In his review of Huber’s Das heimliche Gericht85 he wrote of the time ‘wo für und gegen geheime Verbindungen so viel gesagt, geschrieben und getan wird’ (when so much was said, written and done both for and against secret societies), and went on: Man setzt bei jedem Leser [...] voraus, daß ihm das heimliche Gericht aus dem Götz von Berlichungenwenigstens bekannt ist. Eine kleine Nachricht von dieser heimlichen Gesellschaft, die im vierzehnten und fünfzehnten Jahrhundert fast ganz Deutschland überschwemmte, hat der Herr von Möser in der Berliner Monatschrift gegeben. (Every reader may be supposed to be aware of the secret tribunal in Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen. [The late Justus] Möser published, in the Berliner Monatsschrift, a short note on this secret society which in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries spread out over most of Germany)

He was referring to Justus Möser’s ‘Eine kurze Nachricht von den westfälischen Freigerichten’ (Berlinische Monatschrift, 1786, 375-91), and appears not to have known Möser’s Osnabrückische Geschichte mit Urkunden (1768 [repr. Berlin & Stettin: Nicolai, 1780], see Vol. I, 248-55), on which Goethe and Veit Weber drew. His interest in the Vehmgericht phenomenon was limited: he was more interested in the temptation to resort to crime, and in its impact on the individual.

83 84

85

Menhennet, 37, 45. Schiller is known to have been acquainted with Naubert’s historical work, which treats history in much the same way as he does, and to have been indebted to it in a minor way, see Christian Gottfried Körner’s letter to Schiller of 2 Nov. 1788 (in Karl Goedeke, Schillers Briefwechsel mit Körner, Leipzig: Veit, 1878), 1. Teil, 232. See Schiller, Sämtliche Werke, Band V (München: dtv, 2004), 862.

176 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective In Der Geisterseher he introduced both the Venetian Inquisition86 and the machinations of an Illuminati-like secret society, the Bucentauro,87 and Die Verschwörung des Fiesko zu Genua (1783, for its part, turns on an Illuministtype conspiracy to overturn tyranny and restore the republic, which comes to nothing when Fiesko renounces the idea of a sublime renunciation of power and opts for autocracy, deluding himself, like many a despot before and since, that the greater the individual the greater the crimes that are permissible to him. In 1788, having completed Don Karlos, he set to work on a tragedy, Die Malteser, that was never completed, memorials to which are his Vorrede zu Niethammers Bearbeitung der Geschichte des Malteserordens von Vertot (1792-3) and the poem ‘Die Johanniter’ (initially ‘Die Ritter des Spitals zu Jerusalem’) dating from 1795. His preoccupation with the enigmatic Knights of Malta, which lasted, on and off, for fifteen years, and came to little in the end, reflects his reading of René Aubert de Vertot’s Histoire des chevaliers hospitaliers de S. Jean de Jerusalem appellez depuis les chevaliers de Rhodes, et aujourd’hui les chevaliers de Malte (1726) and, presumably, of Benedicte Naubert’s novel of the Knights Templar, Walter von Montbarry (1786; a comparable English Gothic novel is Anna Maria Porter’s The Knight of St. John, a Romance, 1817). Carl Grosse’s interest in the Malteserorden took a different form when he later acquired a ‘gefälschtes Malteserpatent’ (forged letter patent as a Knight of St. John), dating from 1795, which he used to support his bogus claim to be Baron Bedemar. Fact, at this time, was liable to be stranger than fiction. When the first English translation of Der Geisterseher, The Ghost-Seer; or, Apparitionist, appeared in 1795 it was rightly saluted by William Taylor in The Monthly Review as ‘a novel of great originality’ which ‘pointed out a new source of the TERRIBLE, - the pursuit of an influence over the invisible world’. Even then it was said to have given birth to ‘imitations as contemptible as they are multifarious’. It was conceived in 1786, at a time when the self-styled Alessandro Conte Cagliostro, who claimed to be able to foretell the future, was the sensation of Europe, rumoured to be a member of the Illuminati and to be employed in their behalf in brainwashing potential converts to the great Jacobinical conspiracy to topple the crowned heads of Europe in which they were commonly thought to be engaged. 86

87

He may conceivably have used the same history of the Inquisition as Radcliffe, namely Philip a Limborch, The History of the Inquisition, tr. Samuel Chandler (London: Gray, 1731). Rosemarie Nicolai-Haas’s essay on ‘Die Anfänge des deutschen Geheimbundromans’ (in Ludz, Geheime Gesellschaften, 267-92) deals only with one secret society, the Illuminati, so that she does not give Benedicte Naubert the credit that is due to her as the author of the first novel involving the secret tribunal or Bund der Freischöffen.

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Geheimbündelei was a fact of life and, for some, a way of life. Europe was at this time riddled with secret cells of supposedly revolutionary Freemasons, many of them Illuminati. The Order of Illuminati,88 a secret society founded by Adam Weishaupt in Ingolstadt (Bavaria) in 1776, aimed to reform church and state in accordance with Enlightenment principles, and was in that sense a conservative revolutionary society. Every member started as a Freemason; those deemed illuminable were eligible to become Illuminati.89 Schiller was introduced to the ideas of the order by Abel, his philosophy teacher at the Karlsschule, who was head of the Stuttgart section.90 In the early 1780s Abel tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade him to become a member. Schiller is on record as saying ‘Ich bin weder Illuminat noch Maurer’ (I am neither an Illuminist nor a Mason),91 but he will have known more about the Order of Illuminati than any Gothic novelist, as demonstrated in Don Karlos and the Briefe über Don Karlos. He knew Baron von Knigge, who from 1780 to 1784 was one of the leading members of the Illuminati, conducting undercover conspiracies against both the Jesuits and the Rosicrucians. It is no chance that Peter Will, the translator of Horrid Mysteries, also translated Knigge’s Practical Philosophy (1799). As a republican society of deists and visionaries who claimed to be able to conjure up the invisible and the arcane, the Illuminati also attracted charlatans like Cagliostro, who, invoked as he is in Der Geisterseher, performed feats of magic and alchemy. The final decades of the eighteenth century are the age of the charlatan. The Illuminati and the Inquisition were popularly supposed to be doubles one of the other, but in reality Cagliostro almost died at the hands of the Inquisition in 1795, shortly before the ‘spectral technologist’ Etienne-Gaspard Robertson began staging in Paris a display of ‘phantasmagoria’ exposing the tricks of the Illuminati. Such tricks and their exposure are a major component of the German 88 89 90

91

See Richard Van Dülmen, Der Geheimbund der Illuminaten (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1975). Meyers Lexikon, 7. Aufl. (Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut, 1927), VI: 357. On Abel, who went on to become Professsor of Philosophy at Tübingen in 1790, see Julius Hartmann, Schillers Jugendfreunde (Stuttgart: Cotta,, 1904). In Abel’s Sammlung und Erklärung merkwürdiger Erscheinungen aus dem menschlichen Leben, 3 vols (Stuttgart: Erhard, 1784-90), Vol. 2, 1-86, will be found the story of Friedrich Schwan which Schiller used in Der Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre. Schiller’s relations with the Illuminati have been researched in a series of studies by H.-J.Schings: ‘Die Illuminaten in Stuttgart’, DVjs 66 (1992),48-87; ‘Freiheit in der Geschichte. Egmont und Marquis Posa im Vergleich’, Goethe-Jahrbuch 110 (1993), 61-76; Die Brüder des Marquis Posa.Schiller und der Geheimbund der Illuminaten (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1996). Schiller gave some account of his experience of the Illuminati in Don Carlos and in Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen. In the tenth of the Briefe über Don Karlos.

178 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Gothic novel and a major German contribution to the European Gothic novel. Magic exposed and the supernatural explained cross and recross as they draw together Gothic novels of every order of repute and disrepute. The best account of the Gothic elements in Der Geisterseher is by E. J. Clery, who writes that the simulation of the marvellous disguises and prepares for the revelation of a nightmare-like reality, a waking nightmare beyond a nightmare. The substance of everyday existence is honeycombed by invisible conspiracies, nothing can be taken for granted; friends, lovers, relations may be hired assassins; the outwardly normal order of things may be only a mise-en-scène contrived by unknown and malevolent puppet-masters [...] The key element of the narrative was the double bluff. The scene of the séance from The Ghost-Seer is exemplary. The false ghost, produced by a mechanical apparatus, is the front for a second false ghost; but even after the second exposure a mystery remains to entice the victim: the question ‘Why?’ 92

Schiller’s novel establishes the Gothic masquerade that was to be most highly developed in De Quincey’s Klosterheim. All is mystery. Identity is blurred by the wearing of masks, ‘natural’ forms of selfhood and identification are submitted to estrangement.93 Illuminism is so typical of the High Gothic generation because it embodies Gothic’s attempt to overcome the uncertainty that is expressed via the Gothic/sublime imagery of privation. Uncertainty is the essence of Gothic. Neil Cornwell has emphasized that Der Geisterseher anticipates Gothic at many points and contains many of the ingredients of what is now seen as classic Gothic: A series of mysterious events, occurring in a Venetian setting, are explained as the acts of a Sicilian charlatan (posing as a medium); the remaining narrative, supplied by the Sicilian self-confessed impostor, recentres attention on the story’s central figure, variously posturing as Armenian, Russian, officer of the Inquisition and Franciscan monk, known otherwise only ‘by the name of the Incomprehensible [...] This ‘Armenian’, as he is usually styled, is presented as a demonic figure of Wandering-Jewish type pedigree: he seems able to foretell death, detect spiritualist fraud and produce ‘actual’ spirits at will. The story appears ultimately to retain the supernatural, though some doubt may reside due to the removes and [questionable] reliability of narration. It should, however, be noted that the work is [...] unfinished and [...] that the dynastic jealousies underpinning the (concluding) narrative of the Sicilian bring the story firmly back onto Gothic terrain.94 92 93 94

Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 141, 159. Clery, 159. Neil Cornwell, in A Companion to the Gothic, ed. Punter , 31-2. The Wandering-Jew aspect of the ‘Armenian’ derives from C. F. D. Schubart’s poem ‘Der ewige Jude’,

Schiller 179

It is, above all, the novel’s narrative means, the ‘plots and plots-within-plots, violence, executions, prophecies, apparitions false and problematic’,95 the apparent magic explained by reason, the air of mystery, the secret societies, the novellas within the novel, and so on, that are Gothic in the late eighteenth-century sense. Gothic in today’s sense are, above all, the constantly shifting narrative perspective and the doubt this implants in the reader’s mind: Each book contains an encapsulated novella, each by yet another narrator. From these observations it is only a step to suspicion of the main narrator’s reliability, and from there to a recursive irony in the novel itself of doubt about the moral standing of rhetoric and artistry.96

In short, the way in which Gothic ‘exaggerates its own extreme fictionality’,97 which might be supposed a piece of late twentieth-century Gothic sophistry, is demonstrated by Schiller, back in 1789, in what is in effect, notwithstanding his intention in drafting it, a Gothic novel avant la lettre. The novel’s incompleteness should not be seen as a Gothic trait, for Schiller did not leave the novel incomplete in order to enhance its Gothicity, which scarcely existed at the time. On the contrary, he had simply outgrown his material and did not wish to run the danger of being seen to be pandering to a sensation-seeking public. His aim in beginning the novel was educational in the sense of showing the public how it was being duped, while at the same time making it wonder whether it was perhaps being duped by the serial narrators of Der Geisterseher too. The novel became unfinishable because Schiller’s real interest was in the psychology of gullibility in the abstract rather than in its surface fictional elaboration. It is ironic that a novel written with the object of demystification fed the irrational need for mystification of men like Shelley and De Quincey. The statement that Schiller’s novel is ‘not so much a contribution to the „Gothic“ mode as a commentary on its atmosphere’,98 does not do justice to the fact that it is also a gripping, extremely well written work, incorporating

95 96

97 98

which also impressed Shelley and left its mark on both his Gothic novels, Zastrozzi and St Irvyne. T. J. Reed, The Classical Centre (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 105. See Scott Abbott, Fictions of Freemasonry: Freemasonry and the German Novel (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 46-58. The series of narrators is imitated by Kahlert in The Necromancer Hogle, 14. Jeffrey L. Sammons, in Friedrich Schiller, The Ghost-Seer, tr. Bohn (Columbia: Camden House,1992), vii.

180 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective many ‘Gothic’ features, which became a conduit for the emergent Gothic mode and thus a work that led its readers’ thoughts away from the direction in which Schiller would have led them, hence his unwillingness/inability to complete it. It was subsequently completed by F. C. Follenius and, much later and more interestingly, by H. H. Ewers.99 Schiller began his necromancer-novel when, finding himself in need of a piece for the fourth (1788) number of Thalia, he remembered Karl Philipp Moritz’s Fragmente aus dem Tagebuch eines Geistersehers (1787), from which he derived the central figure in what became Der Geisterseher, a ground-breaking work that influenced many Gothic writers, who imitated it, some of them quite shamelessly, though always without matching its literary quality. The Monthly Review for August 1795 spoke of ‘those numberless imitations to which the Ghost-Seer of the celebrated Schiller has given rise in Germany’. The three most important imitations, which are also three of the internationally best known early German Gothic novels, are Karl Friedrich Kahlert’s Der Geisterbanner (1790), Cajetan Tschink’s Geschichte eines Geistersehers (1790-93), which is discussed separately in the next section, and Carl Grosse’s Der Genius (1791-95, remembered in the English-speaking world as Horrid Mysteries). Der Genius/Horrid Mysteries is the most celebrated of these in Germany and England respectively. In either of its two very similar versions the novel that Grosse regretted not writing more carefully is a complex, sprawling, diffuse narrative that reflects the way in which an amorphous secret society, based on the Illuminati, but with (like the French imitations of Die Räuber) more than a hint of the Vehmgericht or Secret Tribunal thrown in for good measure, has spread its tentacles throughout Europe. In English terms Kahlert’s The Necromancer, which, unlike its German original, contains thirty-odd pages of Schiller’s Verbrecher, is very much a Gothic novel with its apparent mixture of fact and fiction and its real mixture of the original and the counterfeit, the labyrinthine bogus documentary text with its constantly shifting narrative voices and points of view, aimed at cozening and confusing the reader, its ‘false or charlatanic science’,100 the supposedly and fraudulently supernatural subsequently explained, the Gothic outlaw, imprisonment, fraud, the robber band in the forest, entrapment in a burial vault, incarceration in a subterraneous chamber, and, last but by no means least, the entrapment of the gullible reader in the coils of the text.

99 100

H. H. Ewers, Der Geisterseher (Munich: Georg Müller, 1922; repr. Bergisch-Gladbach: Bastei-Lübbe, 1982). Bulwer-Lytton, in Zanoni, Book IV, ch. 2.

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VII Cajetan Tschink (1763-1813) was born in Olmütz (Silesia), and became Professor of Philosophy there at a time when the prevalence of ‘vampirism’ locally had made the credulity of the populace a matter of some consequence. He is the author of a Grundriß der Logik (1802). His Geschichte eines Geistersehers. Aus den Papieren des Mannes mit der eisernen Larve, 3 vols (1790-93), tr. by P. Will as The Victim of Magical Delusion; or, The Mystery of the Revolution of P——l: A Magico-Political Tale, 3 vols (London: Robinson, 1795),101 is historically important as the first imitation of Der Geisterseher. The fact that, compared to Der Geisterseher, the Geschichte eines Geistersehers is virtually unknown, is all the more reason for discussing it at some length. It is indebted, as its baroque sub-title once indicated, to an anonymous French story of political intrigue that had just appeared in German translation as Geschichte des Mannes mit der eisernen Maske (1790).102 Before becoming associated with Dumas the iron-mask motif recurred in Rambach’s Die eiserne Maske, eine schottische Geschichte von Ottokar Sturm (1792), the final chapter of which was written by Tieck. In addition Tschink is indebted to the Abbé Vertot (1655-1735): at the end of the third and last volume of the English version Peter Will reveals that the incidents in the novel are, in part, ‘not the offspring of imaginary fiction, but [are] founded on historical facts, recorded in Abbé Vertot’s excellent History of the Revolution in Portugal [1700]’. The Monthly Review for August 1795 dismissed Tschink’s novel as ‘one of those numberless imitations to which the Ghost-Seer of the celebrated Schiller has given rise in Germany’, but it was notably well received by The Critical Review, which gave a useful summary: The hero is Miguel duke of C, who, having been sent on his travels under the tuition of Antonio [Galvez], a Portuguese count, meets accidentally with an extraordinary and most artful impostor, who first deceives Miguel into a belief [in] his supernatural skill, and then deludes him into [taking part in] the conspiracy by which the revolution of Portugal was to be effected. Miguel is led on step by step in this web of error and superstition, from whch he endeavours in vain to extricate himself: for although at times his reason enables him to penetrate [...] the deception, yet the Unknown (the impostor’s name) by some new stratagem overpowers his faculties again; nor does he completely recover the use of his senses before he is brought, with the rest of the conspirators, to the tribunal of justice [...] The purpose of the author [...] is

101 102

Both editions are available in Oxford, the London edition in Bodley (249.s.232), and the Dublin one in the Taylorian (Fiedler J. 6130. 1, 2). The original Homme au masque de fer died in the Bastille in 1703.

182 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective to shew how easily a mind addicted to superstition may be deceived by the most common appearances at certain times and under certain impressions.103

Tschink’s is, then, a tale of magical delusion. Like The Ghost-Seer, it is essentially a tale of duplicity and credulity, with Schiller interested in the psychology, and Tschink in the machinery of delusion. Miguel is duped by a string of supposed necromancies into believing himself in touch with occult powers in the person of that favourite Gothic figure later personated by Scott, the Unknown. In reality the gullible young duke is being drawn into a conspiracy aimed at revolution, for The Victim of Magical Delusion and Grosse’s Horrid Mysteries are linked by the fact that ‘in each romance the hero finds himself entangled with clandestine businesses which are murderous and bloody beneath the [...] pretext of liberty’.104 The Victim of Magical Delusion derives from The Ghost-Seer the idea of magical delusion by the supposed supernatural, and the nefarious activities of secret societies, to which, for good measure, it adds the devilish (and devilishly popular) idea of raising the dead. Episodic in nature, like The Ghost-Seer, The Necromancer and Horrid Mysteries, Tschink’s novel focuses on the ‘infernal machinations’ of a controller-figure, who appears in a variety of identities and disguises, to say nothing of cloaks of half a dozen different colours. However, since impostors can only impose upon the credulous, The Victim of Magical Delusion, like The Ghost-Seer and The Necromancer, is about that monster, Credulity, for the crux of the matter is that, as the reader is later told (III, 9), Miguel is from the outset doomed to deceive himself and to be deceived, for he is peculiarly gullible. Once Tschink gets into his stride it is the explained supernatural that dominates his work, as it also dominates his Wundergeschichten sammt dem Schlüssel zu ihrer Erklärung (1790). The non-stop, supposedly supernatural happenings, the endless series of phantoms and apparitions, very quickly become otiose as the hero fails to learn from experience. He speaks of the need to guard his understanding against the dangerous delusions of an over-active imagination (I, 60), but signally fails to do so. It is this that accounts for the length and ultimately for the failure of the novel, which is made more complex than The Necromancer by the continual Arabian-Nights-style intercalation of tale within tale within tale, the gross impositions involved, the endless ramifications and delusions, the ingenious deceptions and revelations. Tschink’s novel, like Tieck’s Abdallah, goes too far in its Gothic rigmarole. Tschink is oblivious of the fact that there are simply too many scams (‘cheats’ in the language of the time), all of which of which are first 103 104

The Critical Review, N.S., Vol. 15, Sept. 1795, 63-74, see 65. Montague Summers, The Gothic Quest, 133.

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narrated and then explained ad nauseam. That his aim could have been more effectively achieved in a less complex and long-winded way is shown by Schiller and Kahlert, and even by Grosse. Tschink’s novel is overwritten, not in being too horrid in the way that English reviewers thought typical of German writers, but simply in not knowing where to draw the line. It is the sort of work that justifies Goethe’s and Schiller’s low opinion of the popular novel. It is only in the second half of the novel, which reads like a caricature of the narrative machinations of Gothic, that the narrator reaches the real subject, Miguel’s involvement in an Illuminist-inspired political conspiracy. There is, it is true, some notably Gothic detail (torture on the rack, being hung up in chains, the beheading of an innocent person, personations of the dead, identity as a continual problem, the party at which one mask too many is present),105 while the dread assembly of twelve masked men points toward the ‘secret tribunal,’ that was so much in the air in the 1790s - but there is also far too much repetitious detail. The Victim of Magical Delusion is an ambitous but ultimately misconceived and undisciplined exercise in the explained supernatural. Overrated by The Critical Review, it was far less successful in translation than Kahlert’s and Grosse’s comparable novels; and was not reprinted in English after the London and Dublin first editions. At the end the Revd P. Will, exceeding his brief as translator, adds a ‘Translator’s Address to his Thinking Readers’ in which he - literally preaches to a supposedly captive, but by then captious, audience. The ‘explained supernatural’, a feature of late Enlightenment thinking that is found in Smollett’s Ferdinand Count Fathom in 1753, albeit without attracting attention at the time, resurfaces, in the form of ‘exposed magic’, in the German ghost-seer novel in 1787-9, and lasted until 1799. The fashion for the ‘explained supernatural’ in Germany at the time of Ann Radcliffe’s greatest influence in England in 1792-9 is attributable to Schiller’s Der Geisterseher and Cajetan Tschink’s Wundergeschichten sammt dem Schlüssel zu ihrer Erklärung, both of them published in 1789, and to Kahlert’s Der Geisterbanner (1790) and Tschink’s Geschichte eines Geistersehers (1790-93). The ‘parallel between the “explained supernatural” and the debunking of the pseudoscientific deception, the “original smoke and mirrors” practised by the Armenian in Der Geisterseher’, has rightly been called ‘very striking’.106 The main difference between Schiller and Radcliffe is that whereas Schiller and his German imitators expose the machinations of charlatans whose ‘phantasmagoria’ or magical effects are designed to gull the gullible, Radcliffe and her followers show how easily the mind may mislead itself into 105 106

The one-mask-too-many motif is also found in Laun’s ‘Die Totenbraut’ in the Gespnsterbuch. Trainer, 14.

184 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective supposing the supernatural to be at work. Schiller, while sharing Radcliffe’s view of superstition and credulity in general, concentrates on the criminality of those who gull the gullible for their own pecuniary or other ends, and his imitators do likewise. Another German Gothic classic that goes back to Der Geisterseher is the Gespensterbuch edited by Johann August Apel and Friedrich Laun (6 vols, Leipzig: Göschen, 1811-17), known in French as Fantasmagoriana (1812) and in English as Tales of the Dead (1813); the French and English versions are different selections from the German original. The tales in the Gespensterbuch are, in English terms at least, Gothic tales, closely related to the ghost-seer novel. Phantasmagoria denotes optical illusions of the kind staged in Paris in 1798 and in London in 1801-2 by Etienne-Gaspard Roberts(on), but also a gothically shifting series of phantasms or imaginary figures as seen in a dream or fevered condition or as conjured up bythe imagination in a state of nervous agitation or fear. Sébastien Mercier described the Parisian phantasmagoriana as ‘the reflection of the revolutionary days’.107 In an age already obsessed by ghosts the Terror inevitably spawned nightmares and spectral visions. Etienne Gaspard Roberts(on)’s ‘Gothic extravaganzas’, as they were dubbed, involved the projection of a series of images (Fuseli’s ‘The Nightmare’, the ‘Bleeding Nun’, and so on), along with the eerie sound and lighting effects that were part and parcel of the Gothic repertoire from Otranto onwards.

VIII The Castle of Otranto first appeared in German, under the title Seltsame Begebenheiten im Schloße Otranto, eine gotische Geschichte, in 1768, when, far from noticing an odd, old-fashioned looking novel by an unknown English author, German-speaking northern Europe was in a fever of admiration for Young’s Night Thoughts, which more than any other work prepared the way for the Gothic novel by introducing the Gothic mood. When Otranto was noticed, in 1770, the reviewer in Nicolai’s Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek castigated it as ‘höchst ekelhaft’: hier ist nichts als ein unendliches Gewirr übel zusammenhängender Träume durcheinander, die anstatt die Einbildungskraft zu belustigen, solche nur ermüden. Das erbärmliche Gewäsche einiger furchtsamen Bedienten, die sich für Gespenster halten, und alle die Sprache alter Weiber reden, die der 107

Quoted from Terry Hale’s Introduction to Tales of the Dead (Chislehurst: The Gothic Society, 1994), 13.

Schiller 185 Verfasser gleichwol so schön findet, daß er dem Shakespeare hierinnen nachzuahmen glaubt, steht hier ganz an der unrechten Stelle und macht den Roman höchst ekelhaft.108 (the reader is faced with a confused jumble of ill-connected visions which, instead of stimulating the imagination, merely exhaust it. The pathetic twaddle spoken by a handful of timid servants who are afraid of ghosts and speak like so many old women, which the author finds so sublime that he fancies himself a second Shakespeare, is totally misplaced and makes the novel quite revolting to good taste.)

So much for the idea that The Castle of Otranto had a transformative effect on German Sturm und Drang writing. There is no evidence that Schiller knew the 1768 translation or that he knew of Otranto by the time he came to write Die Räuber. It is true that Die Räuber has a castle, a crumbling tower and subterranean dungeon, a diabolical villain, a sublimely satanic hero, and a damsel in distress, but there is no reason to suppose any of these features to derive from Otranto as opposed to Sturm und Drang drama. Willoughby, in his very thorough study of Schiller’s sources and literary relations in Die Räuber, found no reason even to mention Walpole. Nor is there any evidence that the apparitions and imaginary necromancer of Der Geisterseher (1789) go back to Walpole. The real reception in Germany of Walpole’s novel dates from the publication of the better known second German version, Die Burg von Otranto. Eine Gotische Geschichte, translated in 1794 by the dramatist F. L. W. Meyer who was a frequent visitor to England in the late 1790s and knew it well. However, by the time Otranto began to attract literary attention in Germany in the late 1790s, what in English is called the Gothic novel was already established there, so that Germany did not need Otranto, its own Gothic fiction being by then more advanced. By comparison Walpole’s novel appeared old-fashioned, pedestrian and whimsical. In Germany The Mysterious Mother (1768) was more influential, on Schiller’s late work, especially the fate-tragedy Die Braut von Messina,109 and on A. W. Schlegel,110 than Otranto. Walpole’s novel was, of course, known to many German men of letters including Goethe, Schiller, and Tieck, but not before 1794, when it left clear marks on Tieck’s Peter Lebrecht (1795). Goethe’s diary for 19, 21 and 23 November 1798 shows him visiting Schiller to talk about Walpole’s novel, the last of the three diary entries noting ‘Weiterer Plan über das 108 109 110

AdB, 112 (1770), 363. See NA 10: 301, 314. See Rosina Reckenberger, August Wilhelm Schlegels Interesse für Horace Walpole (Diss. Vienna, 1933).

186 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Schloß von Otranto’ (Further plan concerning Otranto). It seems that at one time both Goethe and Schiller had plans for producing work in the form of a sequel or adaptation ofOtranto. Evidence of Schiller’s preoccupation with Walpole at this time are the dramatic fragments Die Braut in Trauer and Die Kinder des Hauses. After reading Otranto in 1798 Schiller planned a play, Narbonne oder Die Kinder des Hauses (1799-1804), the title of which shows that by then he also knew Robert Jephson’s dramatization of Otranto, The Count of Narbonne (1781: Der Graf von Narbonne, 1784, repr. 1785), which retains the essential qualities of the novel;111 the key figure is Raymond, Count of Narbonne, the Manfred of Otranto. Karl-Heinz Hucke and Olaf Kutzmutz have nothing to say about The Count of Narbonne, but they rightly see Die Kinder des Hauses as indebted to Walpole: Beeinflußt von Horatio Walpoles Burg von Otranto, 1794 aus dem Englischen übersetzt, und seiner Mysterious Mother, 1798, entwirft Schiller mit den Kindern des Hauses einen ‘Sonderfall von Schicksalstragödie’, in der der Schuldige mit dem Schein von Notwendigkeit seiner verdienten Strafe zugeführt word. In diesem Rahmen erhebt Schiller im Lauf der Arbeit die Polizei zu einer nemesisähnlichen Macht [...] An einem dies fatalis in Walpoles Manier ist Louis Narbonne am Ende Opfer schicksalsdramatischer Zufälle.112 (Influenced by Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, translated into German in 1794, and his Mysterious Mother (1798), Schiller drafts in his Die Kinder des Hauses an ‘exceptional kind of fate tragedy’, in which the guilty individual is brought, seemingly by necessity, face to face with the punishment he deserves. In the course of the work Schiller transforms the police into a Nemesis-like power [...] One fatal day Louis Narbonne becomes, in Walpolian manner, the victim of fatal chance events.)

The other, related fragment, Die Braut in Trauer (1799-1802), is similarly indebted to The Castle of Otranto: Wegen des vergleichbaren Aufbaus bedient sich Schiller als Quellen Schicksalsdramen sowie englischer Schauerliteratur. In Horatio Walpoles Roman Die Burg von Otranto [...] und seiner Tragödie The Mysterious Mother, 1798,findet Schiller [...] Handlungsmotive für sein Drama. (On account of their similar construction Schiller uses fate tragedies and the English Gothic novelas sources. In Horace Walpole’s novel The Castle of Otranto and tragedy The Mysterious Mother (1798) he finds motivations that could be used in Die Braut von Messina.)

111 112

See Evans, 49-61. SHB, 524.

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More important than these fragments is the connexion between Die Braut von Messina (1803) and the first Gothic play in English, Walpole’s The Mysterious Mother (1768, publ. 1791), which was to be an important source for Schiller’s tragedy.113 Walpole’s ‘horribly impressive’ (the epithet is Scott’s) The Mysterious Mother, a favourite of Ann Radcliffe’s, which Byron, for whom it served as a model for Manfred, called the ‘last tragedy in the language’, left a clear mark on Schiller’s Die Braut von Messina, which, as a Schicksalsdrama, shares common ground with the Schauerdrama.114 In the runup to beginning work on his final tragedy Schiller appears to have read the very positive review of The Mysterious Mother in the Intelligenzblatt of the Allgemeine Literatur Zeitung on 24 February 1798 noting that ‘Sie wird als eine vollkommene Tragödie im Geschmack und Sinn des Ödipus Rex gerühmt’. This was based on the review in the Monthly Review (23 [1797), 248ff.) arguing that The Mysterious Mother might fitly be compared with the Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles, for unity and wholeness of design in the fable, for the dexterous conduct and ascending interest of the plot, for crowded maxims of sublime instruction, and for the abominable horror of its petrifying event.

It was following his reading of the review in the Intelligenzblatt that Schiller wrote to Goethe, thus initiating their exchange of visits and views on the subject of The Castle of Otranto. Both The Mysterious Mother (1768) and Die Braut von Messina (1803) are fate tragedies that mix the severely classical - classicists, both playwrights observe the unities - with the loosely Gothic.That said, they differ stylistically, for the language of Walpole’s tragedy is Gothic-Shakespearean while Schiller’s tragedy, though set in the middle Ages, is Greek-classical. Both tragedies are pervaded by Gothic images of darkness and what Walpole termed ‘gloomth’, but while Walpole’s tragedy is Gothic, Schiller’s, for all its Gothic touches, including the necromancer (schwarzer Magier), is not. Mutatis mutandis, Evans’ description of Walpole’s tragedy as ‘a picture of the barbarous time seen through the eyes of a classicist and painted in tones of horror for an age which viewed it similarly’115 can, however, be applied to Schiller’s final tragedy. Both tragedies go back to Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, 113

114 115

The editors of Schiller’s Sämtliche Werk in 5 Bänden (Munich: dtv, 2004), Band II (Dramen 2), 1281, are mistaken in listing Die Burg von Otranto among the main sources for Die Braut von Messina. They should have referred to The Mysterious Mother. See NA 10: 301, 314. See Thiergard, 105-117, and Thiergard, Schicksalstragödie als Schauerliteratur (Diss. Göttingen, 1957). Evans, 31.

188 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective turn on the regal mother/noble widow figure, involve incest between brother and sister (the details differ, but the fact remains), and include castles, convents, horror, and suicide. Frank, arguing that what is Gothic in The Mysterious Mother is almost entirely a matter of mental horror and moral stress’, describes The Mysterious Mother as ‘probably the darkest tragedy written on incest [...] in the entire eighteenth century’,116 will not have known Die Braut von Messina, which is equally dark. The names of two characters (Isabel[la] and Beatrice) are common to both works. Presumably Die Braut von Messina remained untranslated for the same reason that The Mysterious Mother remained unperformed: the incest theme did not lend itself to public performance. It is Die Braut von Messina that claims to depict (via the chorus) the working out of a family curse, but the term is scarcely less applicable to The Mysterious Mother, at the end of which Adeliza is Edmund’s sister, daughter and wife. Schiller’s Beatrice may well owe her name to Walpole’s invisible character of the same name.

IX Schiller not only prepared the ground for the Räuberroman; he also unwittingly established one of the two most significant forms of German Gothic, the Geisterseherroman, and powerfully reinforced the other, the fledgling Bundesroman. What have been described as ‘Beifallsbekundungen für den Geisterseher, die auf die Neigung weiter Leserkreise zum Geheimnisvoll-Gruseligen zurückgingen’ (applause for Der Geisterseher reflecting many readers’ penchant for the Gothic)117 cannot be dismissed as an unfortunate early phase in the reception of Schiller by the wayward, morally irresponsible British, for the place of honour he now occupies in the Gothic canon underlines the importance of Germany’s contribution to the first phase of European Gothic writing. What the early British, American, French and Russian Gothic enthusiasts were responding to was, in part, Schiller’s most fundamental and characteristic achievement, his manifold depiction of sublime behaviour and effects, with which theirs should be contrasted. The fact that he is the most important early German contributor to international Gothic, does not, of course, mean that he is a fully fledged Gothic writer as such. If he had been, he would have completed Der Geisterseher instead of losing sight of the mystery while he pondered the issue 116

117

See Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto and The Mysterious Mother, ed. F. S. Frank (Ontario: Broadview, 2003), 29, 34. Incest is not uncommon in the Gothic novel; there is even a whiff of it in Radcliffe’s ASicilian Romance (1790). SHB, 796.

Schiller 189

of credulity in the abstract. However, the mysteries of his proto-Gothic novelfostered the mystification that spread throughout the early Gothic novel, appealing to such sophisticates as Shelley and De Quincey, who connected it in their minds with contemporary conspiracy theories and the threat of Europe-wide revolution. As the most original and arguably the most important European Gothic novel, Der Geisterseherinfluenced a host of imitative novels and a highly influential collection of early ghost stories, theGespensterbuch, that led to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Unfortunately, mistaken for his imitators, he was blamed for the swarm of ‘Geheimbündler und Geisterbanner, die Geniusse und Beelzebube, hauptsächlich durch Schiller’s Geisterseher angeregt’ (members of secret societies and necromancers, geniuses and devils, most of them inspired by Schiller’s GhostSeer), and for the fact that ‘Von der Justiz geächtete Strolche, Tag- und Nacht-, Kirchen- und Marktdiebe, Raubmörder, Brandstifter und andere Galgenvögel wurden als hochinteressante Erscheinungen aufgefaßt; sie wurden zu verunglückten Genies gestempelt’ (Ruffians outlawed by the judiciary, robbers of every ilk, murderers, arsonists and others ripe for the gallows were understood to be fascinating social phenomena and were branded failed geniuses).118 This is as absurd as it would be to blame him for the failings of all his undistinguished ‘mainstream’ successors. In reality parts of his oeuvre constitute the brightest jewel of German Gothic literature, which is still better known and appreciated outside Germany. It is time for the Gothic dimension of his work to be acknowledged by guardians of the classical canon, for it is impossible to do full justice to him, or to Germany’s outstanding contribution to European Gothic, unless the ‘Gothic’ aspects of many of his works and the tentacles reaching from them into his oeuvre as a whole and out into the Gothic realm are understood. The best way to put second- and third-rate purveyors of Gothic fiction in their place is to give credit where it is due, starting with Naubert and Schiller.

118

Appell, Die Ritter-, Räuber- und Schauerromantik,, 70ft

5 GROSSE & TIECK 1. Carl Grosse Carl Friedrich August Grosse (1768-1847) whose life and work are reminiscent of the early eighteenth-century adventurer-novel, once celebrated in Germany as the author of Der Genius, and in Britain as the author of Horrid Mysteries, two virtually identical versions of a cult novel that was idolized by some (Tieck, Wackenroder, F. L. W. Meyer, Hoffmann, Shelley) and denounced by others (Caroline Schlegel, Thomas Love Peacock), stands out in the Gothic context in that he was, with De Quincey, the only Gothic novelist to turn his own life into a Gothic masquerade. With the exception of Schiller, who was, strictly speaking, not a Gothic novelist as such, Grosse is the only Gothic novelist who wrote extensively on the sublime, which, unlike Schiller, he tackled before turning his hand to fiction, probably because in 1788 he was hoping for an academic career; at the time, a teenage prodigy, he was already being spoken of as a second Herder. He is the author of the first Gothic cult-classic novel, Der Genius/ Horrid Mysteries, that had the dubious distinction of being both one of Jane Austen’s Northanger Seven, all of which are imitations of Radcliffe or Schiller, and the butt of Peacock’s satire in Nightmare Abbey. The other, later Gothic cult classic is Meinhold’s Sidonia von Bork - I quote the English title because it was in English that it achieved cult-classic status. Schiller’s Der Geisterseher, which established the type to which Der Genius belongs, was hugely popular and hugely influential, but, as a measured, top-end tale, did not have cult status in the way in which Der Genius and Sidonia von Bork did. Cult classics need to have an extravagant extra dimension, and, judging by these two, a dash of eccentricity. As Goth-cum-fraudster Grosse can be compared with Raspe; as a dyed-in-the-wool plagiarist the appropriate comparison is with De Quincey.

I With his indeterminate identity as Marquis Carl von Grosse (from among whose papers Der Genius is said to be taken), Graf von Vargas, Baron Bedemar, and so forth, penchant for plagiarism, and fixation on the idea of conspiracy, Carl Grosse, son of a local doctor in unfashionable Magdeburg, whose credentials he was not above appropriating, is the very embodiment of Gothic, his whole life a masquerade. Göttingen, where he began and

192 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective prematurely ended his university studies, was known at the time not only as ‘die Hofburg des deutschen Spätaufklärungsempirismus’ (the bastion of Late Enlightenment empiricism in Germany), but as a centre for the diffusion of Illuminist ideas. At least two (J. G. H. Feder, C. Meiners) of the group of professors around whom Grosse hovered, acolyte-style, in Göttingen were Illuminati, as was A. L. Schlözer,1 and in Halle, where the renegade theologian Karl Friedrich Bahrdt (1741-92) tried, in 1788, while Grosse was studying there, to establish a secret order on the lines of the Illuminati, there were precedents aplenty for the way in which Grosse, like Cagliostro, ennobled himself: In den Hochgradkapiteln, wie man die Logen jetzt nannte, die auf pompöse Titel und Abzeichen angelegt waren, waren auch Adelsprädikate für Geld und schöne Worte zu haben. Solche Zusammenkünfte verließ man als Chevalier de l’epée, als Ritter a Pavone, a Pialla, a Capite Ursi. Es hat eine ganze Aristokratie von eigenen Gnaden gegeben [...] Grosse tritt in Halle in die Reihe der betriebsamen Grafen wie Cagliostro und Saint-Germain, die zu faszinieren verstanden.2 (In the worshipful chapters, as they called the lodges which were organized around pompous titles and insignia, even patents of nobility could be had for money and fine words. One left chapter meetings as a Chevalier de l’epée, or as a Ritter a Pavone, a Pialla, a Capite Ursi. There was a whole self-appointed aristocracy [...] In Halle Grosse joined the ranks of such enterprising counts as Cagliostro and Saint-Germain, who knew how to attract attention.)

Bahrdt was a controversial figure: Kotzebue, using Knigge’s name for the purpose, directed a defamatory pamphlet against him, B. mit der eisernen Stirn (1790). On the literary level Marquis Carl von Grosse is the very image of the self-ennobled Ferdinand Count Fathom, who ‘broke forth [...] under the title and denomination of a foreign count’ (Fathom, ch. 31). Grosse, who knew Fathom, must have been as impressed as Fathom himself was by the idea of a ‘travelling Marquis’-adventurer, the likes of which were ten a penny at the time. Rinaldo Rinaldini, in Vulpius’ Räuberroman that bears his name, has half-a-dozen noble aliases. The way in which Grosse returned to Göttingen in spring 1790 dressed in the fancy green uniform of a gräflich stolbergischer 1 2

Göttingen actually had only a small contingent of Illuminati. The real hotbed was Munich. Marianne Thalmann, Die Romantik des Trivialen (Munich: List, 1970), 52. The Comte de Saint-Germain (1710-1784), who used a variety of titles, was a famous adventurer, and, one may guess, something of a role-model for Grosse; see G. B. Volz, Der Graf von Saint-Germain, das Leben eines Alchimisten (Dresden: Pail Aretz, 1923).

Grosse & Tieck 193

Hofrat, sporting the Malteserkreuz or cross of a Chevalier of the Order of St John - he was known locally as ‘der Malteser-Ritter’ - and telling a cock-andbull story of having married a rich Venetian woman who died soon after, bequeathing on him the title of a Marquis (von Grosse) and Count (Graf von Vargas) is typical of Grosse and in line with what Fathom would have done. It is also completely at odds with the fact that throughout the nineties he had to indulge in potboiling in order to make ends meet, which he did by filching the work of foreign writers, publishing it as his own. The authenticity of documents sold to him in 1789 for the princely sum of 300 Thalers by a certain Herr de Greville (no doubt another Bösewicht operating under an assumed name), which he produced in support of such stories, could not be confirmed for the simple reason that they were forged. Even his date of birth was in doubt until relatively recently. Exposed as a fraud, he had to leave Göttingen for good a year later, this spelling the end of his early academic pretensions. In his ‘Poetische Blumenlese aufs Jahr 1793’ August Bürger wrote of Grosse: Carl der Grosse, als Dichter aus dem Piemontesischen. So schnell, als er, stieg noch kein dichtendes Genie Zum Hofrat, Envoyé, zum Domherrn und Marquis. Bald wird er, fährt er fort, so rühmlich sich zu zeigen, Was irgend Ehre heißt, durch Dichtkunst übersteigen.3 (Charles the Great, poet from back of beyond. Never before did poetic genius advance so swiftly To Counsellor and Minister, to Canon and Marquis. If he continues to distinguish himself like this He will soon leave even Honour itself behind.)

In a review of his Memoiren des Marquis von G*** (1792) Grosse was accused of ‘marktschreyerische Gaukelei mit dem Marchesetitel [...] von dem ganz Deutschland weiß, daß er [...] ein eignes, lächerliches Fabrikat ist’ (blatant imposture with the title of marquis, which the whole of Germany knows to be a pathetic fabrication).4 His adoption of the life of a confidence trickster was as fatal to his subsequent literary career and reputation as De Quincey’s opium-addiction was to his. In both cases their very identity was left in question. Grosse went to Spain, moved to Italy, which he was obliged to leave hurriedly when he found himself facing charges of conspiracy, and eventually settled, under the 3 4

Signed ‘Menschenschreck’, the lines appeared in theGöttinger Musenalmanach, 1793, 194. In Bürger’s collected works they appear as ‘Karl der Große als Dichter’. In NADB, V/2 (1793), 455.

194 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective name of Baron Bedemar, in Denmark, where he constructed a successful career for himself as a mineralogist of, it would seem, some distinction.5 It is a strange coincidence that he and that other Goth-cum-fraudster, Rudolf Erich Raspe, both set up shop as mineralogists. In Callisen’s medical lexicon6 Grosse again appears appears in full dress: ‘Phil. et Med. Dr,7 Marchese von Pharmusa, Fähnrich bei der Garde, Kammerherr am sardinischen Hofe, Canonicus von Halberstadt’ (DPhil, MD, Marquis of Pharmusa, Lieutenant in the Guards, Chamberlain at the Court of Sardinia, Canon of Halberstadt); earlier he had described himself as ‘ordentliches Mitglied der Gesellschaft für Naturforscher in Halle, der lateinischen Gesellschaft in Karlsruhe, gräflich-Stollberg-stollbergischer Hofrat’ (Member of the Society of Naturalists of Halle and of the Latin Society in Karlsruhe, Hofrat in the service of the Counts of Stolberg-Stolberg); on the title page, his Versuche was described as being by ‘Ed. R. Grafen von Vargas, Einem von den Vierzigen der Italienischen Akademie, Pfalzgrafen, Ritter vom Lateran, ordentl. Mitgliede der königl. Akad. d. W. von Siena, Mitgl.der Akad. von Turin, Florenz, Mantua, Cortona, Fossano, Alessandria, Volterra’ (Ed[ouard] Rom[eo] Count Vargas, One of the Forty [Members] of the Italian Academy, Count Palatine, Knight of St John Lateran, Member of the Royal Academy of Siena and of the Academies of Turin, Florence, Mantua, Cortona, Fossano, Alessandria [in Piedmont], and Volterra). Not only is the whole preposterous rigmarole bogus; elsewhere he invested himself with many other imaginary honorifics. Both his life and his literary life’s work are largely the work of a confidence trickster-cum-plagiarist, a man with an inflated if unclear self-image and a serious Cagliostro-complex. As Goth-cum-fraudster Grosse can and should be compared with Rudolf Erich Raspe (1737-94), ‘author’ of the tall stories attributed to Freiherr von Münchhausen, which are forgeries in the sense that they are mostly neither the work of the man to whom they are attributed nor of Raspe himself. Hanoverian by birth, after studying at Göttingen and Leipzig in the late 1750s, Raspe stole precious coins from the cabinets of his employer, the Landgrave ofHesse, was arrested, and escaped to England, where he worked in a German coffee house, translated, became assay-master and store-keeper of Cornish mines [...] In Scotland he was employed to make a mineralogical 5 6 7

See Else Kornerup, Graf Edouard Romeo Vargas/C. Grosse (Copenhagen: Gad , 1954, and Edouard Vargas Bedemar. En Eventyrers Saga (Copenhagen: Gad, 1959). Adolph Carl P. Callisen, Medicinisches Schriftsteller-Lexikon, 33 Vols (Copenhagen, at editor’s expenset, 1830-45), VII (1831), 403). Grosse matriculated in Göttingen as a student of medicine, but, unlike his father, never qualified as a doctor; maybe Fathom was his model here.

Grosse & Tieck 195 survey of the Highlands. [...] In [...] 1789 the ‘ingenious traveller’ located lead on Sir John Sinclair’s Hill ofSkinner in Caithness.8

The lead turned out to be Cornish ore planted there by Raspe, who once again left in disgrace. Still masquerading as a mining expert, he was carried off by scarlet fever at Muckross (near Killarney, in south-west Ireland) in 1794, and is entombed in the DNB. Scott based his Dousterswivel in The Antiquary on Raspe, whose celebrated Baron Munchausen’s Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia, appeared in 1785 after earlier versions of the first seventeen tales had appeared in a disreputable Berlin periodical, the Vade Mecum für lustige Leute, in 1781 and 1783. Many of Raspe’s tales are of ancient date, some going back to Lucian (to be translated into German by Wieland in 1788-91);9 a number of them appeared under the title ‘Mendacia Ridicula’ in the third volume of Deliciae Academicae (Heilbron, 1665). The Travels and Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen was a forgery in the sense that it was the work not of Hieronymus Karl Friedrich, Freiherr von Münchhausen (1720-97),10 but of an unscrupulous German expatriate scholar-embezzler on the run in England, who, not wishing to reveal his own whereabouts, attributed his tall stories to Münchhausen, a famous raconteur with a reputation for gilding the lily. This English-language forgery then became the basis for a German rifacimento brought out in 1786 by the poet Bürger of Lenore fame, which is part of the stream of whimsical and fantastical fictions that fed into the Gothic romance. Raspe was also the author of an early Gothic Ritterroman entitled Hermin und Gunilde, Geschichte aus den Ritterzeiten (1766)11 and of a Räuberroman supposedly narrated by ‘Baron Munchausen’, Königsmark der Räuber; oder, Der Schrecken aus Böhmen (1790), which was adapted by J. H. Sarratt, whose rifacimento (Koenigsmark the Robber; or, The Terror of Bohemia, 1803) became the basis for a pirated chapbook purporting to be by M. G. Lewis. Raspe’s Baron Munchausen can be described both as a Gothic travel book, and as a Lügenmärchen, the secondary category to which Grosse’s Der Genius belongs, which goes back to the mendacious Vera historia of Lucian. It has long since been shown that the 8 9

10 11

Coleman O. Parsons, Witchcraft and Demonology in Scott’s Fiction (Edinburgh & London: Oliver and Boyd, 1964), 92f. One of the first to appreciate Wieland’s Lucian was Schiller, who wrote to Körner on 17 Dec. 1787: ‘Von Wielands Lucian habe ich schon viel gelesen [...} Ich habe nicht geglaubt, daß in Lucian so herrliche Wahrheit steckt. Man kann von dem heutigen Paris und unsern grossen Städten keine schönern und treffendern Tableaux finden als Lucian, ohne es zu meynen, davon gemacht hat. C’est tout comme chez nous.’ English translations drop the Umlaut and the second h in the good Baron’s name. See Hadley, 52-5.

196 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Gothic novel is a kind of Märchenroman, but Der Genius is the work of a pronounced Märchenerzähler in the figurative sense of writer of cock-and-bull stories.

II That De Quincey was greatly impressed by The Travels and Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen can be extrapolated from his later penchant for exaggeration to the point of untruth, which ultimately has a psychological explanation. The idea of ‘spiritual transfigurations of a word or a sentence’ became an abiding concern. What is in question is the aesthetic idea of a sublimity that can be attained through words, for instance by the non-sublime means of exaggeration - hyperbole was a constant temptation - and the disregard of truth; but words also embellish, enabling the lowest to vie with the highest, the outcast with the king, by putting sublimity within the reach of both. De Quincey is less interested in writing than in rewriting, rewriting his own life and bolstering his ego in the process by correcting others’ work, putting them right, putting himself in the right. By such means the nobody becomes, in his own estimation, somebody of consequence. As a writer whose penchant for plagiarism goes way beyond the petty pilfering practised by so many writers of the Gothic/Romantic period, it is with De Quincey that Grosse must be compared, although little is known of his early life and psychology. Like Tieck’s Abdallah. (1795), an extended Oriental (Gothic) tale of terror modelled on Beckford’s Vathek. An Arabian Tale (1786), Grosse’s first work, the only one published under his own name, Helim, oder Über die Seelenwanderung (1789), points to the continuing influence of the Oriental tale in the late eighteenth century. The echo of Addison’s Story of Helim and Abdallah12 is fortuitous. Helim is a work of popular philosophy in dialogue form that borrows from Johann Georg Schlosser’s Über die Seelen-Wanderung (1781). The transmigration in question is the process of change in the course of time to which all are subject; in the context it points forward to Grosse’s successive transformations, each more colourful than the one before, which obscured his ‘real’ identity, so that the time soon came when he was unable to write in propria persona. His main publications in book form include, in the present context, Über das Erhabene, published anonymously (Göttingen & Leipzig: Brose) in 1788 (repr. 1801 under his own name) and translations and editorial matter on the 12

In The Guardian, 22 Sept. 1713.

Grosse & Tieck 197

subject of the sublime. Given that the 1801 impression of Über das Erhabene is the only one of his Gothic related books to be published under his real name, it is ironical that it is based on Johann Georg Schlosser’s Versuch über das Erhabene (1781). For better or worse his main work is Der Genius. Aus den Papieren des Marquis C* von G* (4 vols, 941 pp., Halle: Hendel, 1791-5), translated by Joseph Trapp as The Genius; or, The Mysterious Adventures of Don Carlos de Grandez (2 vols, London: Allen & West, 1796), and Der Genius. Aus den Papieren des Marquis C* von G* (4 vols, 900 pp., Hohenzollern [Vienna]: Wallishausser, 1794-6), translated by Peter Will as Horrid Mysteries (4 vols, London: Minerva Press, 1796).13 Der Dolch, 4 vols (Berlin: Friedrich Maurer, 1794-5, tr. as The Dagger (1795) and Chlorinde (Berlin: Maurer, 1796) are less important sequels to Der Genius. He also published another novel, Der zerbrochene Ring (2 vols,1797; identification by means of a broken ring is a folk fairytale motif) as well as numerous volumes of short fiction, including Novellen (2 vols, 1792), Erzählungen (2 vols, 1793), Vermischte Blätter (2 vols, 1793-4), Kleine Romane (4 vols, 1793-4), and Spanische Novellen (4 vols, 17945), which typically consist of translations of pieces by foreign authors presented as his own work.14 If his novels are all autobiographical fantasias, the numerous short prose pieces are not even his. His publications were, until Hans-Joachim Althof produced a complete critical bibliography,15 difficult to trace because of the number of names under which he wrote; there remains the thankless task of establishing who the real authors of his many and varied publications are. The same problem arises in connexion with some of the work of De Quincey, whose Historico-Critical Inquiry into the Origin of the Rosicrucians (1824), for instance, amounts to no more than a rifacimento of an obscure German work, Ueber den Ursprung und die vornehmsten Schicksale der Orden der Rosenkreutzer und Freymaurer. Eine historisch-kritische Untersuchung, (Göttingen: Roewer, 1804) by Johann Gottlieb Buhle (1763-1821). De Quincey states that he has ‘abstracted, rearranged, and in some respects [...] improved’ on Buhle’s work: ‘It was a paper in this sense mine, that from me it had 13

14

15

These two versions of the same novel have been the subject of much confusion Even the admirable The English Novel 1770-1829 confuses the versions and their respective titles in translation with Memoiren des Marquis von G *** which appears to be a short, separate but related text, published in Berlin by Vieweg in 1792 (repr. 1795), that may be identical with the second volume of the Wallishausser edition of Der Genius. Spanische Novellen (1794-6), ‘Von Grosse, Verfasser des Genius’, includes, in the third and fourth volumes, ‘Die Ruinen’, which is the title of Benedicte Naubert’s anonymous translation of Sophia Lee’s The Recess (1786). I have as yet been unable to ascertain whether Grosse’s tale is taken from Lee. Hans-Joachim Althof, Carl Friedrich August Grosse (1768-21847) (Diss. Bochum, 1975).

198 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective received form and arrangement; but the materials belonged to the learned German’.16 Most of the supporting materials were in fact omitted by De Quincey, who paraphrases each paragraph in turn, translating the key sentences literally;17 even his conclusion is taken from Buhle. This is all the more remarkable in that De Quincey shares the late eighteenth-century preoccupation with secret societies, on which he might be expected to have ideas of his own. Grosse goes further than De Quincey: carrying Gothic plagiarism to an extreme, he made a living by translating other writers’ work and publishing it as his own, sapping his long-term reputation in the process. De Quincey was haunted by the idea of the man and writer he might have been. It would be surprising if Grosse was not similarly haunted. The technique of rifacimento, to give it its Gothic name, is characteristic of De Quincey in the extent to which he uses it, which goes way beyond ‘translation’ as such, and in the way in which it epitomizes his whole approach to writing, for he uses translation as a metaphor that comes to stand for his work as a whole. In his own day he was known for his skill as a translator and for the fact that he could never resist the temptation to ‘improve’ the original. Charles Knight, editor of Knight’s Quarterly, said that De Quincey was incapable of going about this sort of work without improving all he touched.18 He used free translation or rifacimento both as a way of constructing his work out of that of others, vitiating both his work and his reputation in the process, and as a way of reconstructing his own work. Though he seems to be a scholarly kind of man, he is really more journalist than scholar, but also more editor than creative writer. The idea of refurbishment, recycling, transforming, transplanting is central to his ‘creative’ process, and, although he pretends to be, and sometimes is, echoing himself, he is frequently echoing others: When he has no topic to write on, he translates [...] There is abundant evidence throughout De Quincey’s work that he adopts on a large scale the method of translating or ‘transplanting’ [...] This method of creative translation is evident not only in his essays and tales, but is also at work in his confessions [...] De Quincey’s idea of free translation or rifacimento, which refers to a creative rewriting of the original [...] could be [...] applied to some

16 17 18

De Quincey’s Works, ed. D. Masson, 14 vols (London: Black, 1896-7), VII (1897), 201f.). See Erhart H. Essig, Thomas De Quincey and Robert Pearse Gillies as Champions of German Literature and Thought (Diss. Northwestern University, 1951), 159f. Charles Knight, Passages of a Working Life During Half a Century, 2 vols (London: Bradbury & Evans, 1864), I, 327.

Grosse & Tieck 199 of [his] own writings, where translation in both its literal and metaphorical senses takes precedence over invention.19

Indeed, it could be argued that with De Quincey ‘invention’ is liable to have its original Latin meaning of finding or discovery, as it certainly has for Grosse, whose whole Gothic masquerade has, beneath the surface, much in common with De Quincey’s. De Quincey’s masquerade puts Grosse’s in perspective. One of the contexts in which his work arises is therefore that of literary forgery, it being no chance that one of his least revealing, most disappointing essays is entitled ‘Great Forgers: Chatterton, Walpole, and „Junius“’ (Japp, I, 125-31). The difference between De Quincey and his eighteenth-century forebears (Walpole, MacPherson, Chatterton) and nineteenth-century successors (Alexis, Meinhold, see Chapter 8) is that whereas they present work which appears to be by another, but is in fact their own, De Quincey, like Grosse, does the opposite, presenting as his own work that is largely by another. He appears to be most comfortable when generating text by means of a process of supplementarity. Walladmor is a case in point, for however much De Quincey may have changed the original novel, forging the work of another in the process and thereby compounding Alexis’s forgery of Scott, the novel belongs to Alexis; to pretend that it is an original work by De Quincey is to compound a felony. Alexis’s novel pretends to be by Scott, but is in fact wholly his own; De Quincey’s ‘translation’ not only pretends to be by Alexis, but is indeed largely so. De Quincey forges his own work because, viewing himself as a non-ens (nobody), he lacks the self-confidence to be his own man, hence his relative inability to write fiction. In this respect there is an astonishingly close parallel between De Quincey and Grosse on the one hand and Coleridge on the other. Richard Holmes has stated20 that between 1811 and 1816 Coleridge incorporated in his lectures and published works dozens of unacknowledged passages from German authors, either literally translated or freely adapted, and is surely right to connect this plagiaristic habit with the mendacious habits of his drug-addiction, his astonishing lack of self-worth, and the moral humiliations of his private life, not least as regards his relationship with the Wordsworth circle. How much truer must all this be of De Quincey, who does himself much less justice in his writings. As he writes - indeed, by writing - the pariah seeks to don a cloak of respectability. Under 19 20

Alina Clej, A Genealogy if the Modern Self (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 216. Holmes, 2: 280n.

200 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective the guise of rifacimento, the method became endemic with De Quincey, who, after the early Confessions, mostly remakes or forges his own work and its literary foundations. Ironically, the more he did so, the more he became the non-ens he was so afraid of being. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that he was, as a writer, hoist with his own petard, as, indeed was Grosse, examples of whose literary theft include the short novel La Palinière (Von C. Marq. von Grosse, Halle: Hendel, 1793), a translation of the ‘Histoire de M. de la Palinière’ by Stéfanie Félicité de Genlis, lifted from her Les Veillés du chateau (1784), that in effect announces that the author of Der Genius is a plagiarist. The novel Das Kind der Natur, which appeared as the first two volumes of the Kleine Romane. Von Grosse (1794), is a translation of an anonymous French novel, Le Fils naturel (1794).21 These are just two examples. There are many others.

III As I have already said, in tragic practice and aesthetic theory Schiller made the sublime so much his own that it might be supposed to be, par excellence, the quality that distinguishes his high-style, high-moral-tone tragic oeuvre from Gothic with its populist aesthetics and morals. And yet this is not the case, for the sublime is the very ground on which he is brought face to face with Carl Grosse, author of a sensation-seeking thriller that was preceded by a treatise on the sublime, Über das Erhabene, a title reused by Tieck in 1792 andby Grosse and Schiller in 1801. It is also the ground on which Schiller faces Ludwig Tieck, whose own essay Über das Erhabene (1792) and early gothic novel Abdallah (1795) explore the same ground. Given his view of Tieck as ‘eine sehr graziöse phantasiereiche und zarte Natur, nur fehlt es ihm an Kraft und an Tiefe und wird ihm stets daran fehlen’ (a most gracious, imaginative and sensitive sort of person, only he lacks and will always lack power and depth)22 and what can safely be assumed to be his low opinion of Grosse, he may well have been perplexed and was probably far from pleased to find himself sharing such important common ground with them. If Gothic is the poor man’s Sturm und Drang, then Grosse in the early ‘nineties, preoccupied as he is with the ‘erhabener Bösewicht’ (sublime criminal)23 and with sublimity as a lifestyle, to say 21 22 23

For these details I am indebted to Günter Dammann, who gives additional examples (Der Genius, 744-6). Letter to Körner of 5 Jan. 1801. ‘Bösewicht’, like ‘Spitzbube’, is a euphemism used by criminals at the time to play down their criminality, cf. English ‘scallywag’. Grosse inherited his admiration for the

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nothing of Jacobinical conspiracies, Alesssandro ‘Conte’ Cagliostro and the Illuminati, and with secret societies and tribunals, may appear a kind of poor man’s Schiller. He even poses as a medical man and calls himself Hofrat. Such comparisons are valuable for the differences they reveal, which in this case are profound, although it is the comparisons with Raspe and De Quincey that reveal more of the real Grosse. Grosse’s Über das Erhabene, a tour de force for a twenty-year-old, can be looked at in two very different ways. In relation to contemporary ideas about the sublime, it is necessarily a Mischmasch of Burke, Beattie, Schlosser and others, but Grosse deserves some of the credit for introducing the English (aesthetic) model of sublimity into Germany at a time when the French (moral) sublime was the generally accepted norm, which means that it can be compared with Schiller’s Vom Erhabenen (1792). No less important in the present context is the fact that it helps to define the the fictional identity that Grosse adopted, which in turn is the key to his hitherto misssing inner biography. In 1795 Diderot, in an entry in his Encyclopédie that Grosse clearly knew,24 used Grosse’s adopted ancestor, Alphonse de la Cueva, Marquis de Bedmar (1572-1655), to illustrate the difference between grandezza and terribilità: Eine Sache ist unter zwei verschiedenen Aspekten schön oder häßlich. Betrachten wir die Verschwörung von Venedig im Hinblick auf ihren Anfang, ihre Entwicklung und ihre Werkzeuge, so rufen wir aus: Was für ein Mann ist doch der Graf von Bedmar! Wie groß ist er! Betrachten wir aber dieselbe Verschwörung unter moralischen Gesichtspunkten, [...] dann sagen wir: wie schrecklich ist sie, und wie abscheulich der Graf von Bedmar! (An object, looked at from two different points of view, may be seen as either beautuful or sublime. If we consider the Venetian Conspiracy from the point of view of its beginning, development and means, we exclaim: What a man Count Bedmar is! How great he is! But if we consider the same conspiracy from an ethical point of view, [...] we say how terrible it is, and what a monster Bedmar is!)

It is easy to imagine the young Grosse, a brilliant, self-obsessed and rather lost (Tieck-like) young man, being rivetted not so much by Diderot’s distinction, as by their combination in the great (grosse Grosse) Graf von Bedmar, who thus becomes, together with Karl Moor, his foremost example of the ‘erhabener Bösewicht’. He may well also have come across the name in Huber’s translation, ‘Die Verschwörung des Marquis von Bedemargegen

24

‘erhabene[r] Bösewicht’ from Schiller. Denis Diderot, Ästhetische Schriften, ed. Friedrich Bassenge (Berlin & Weimar: Aufbau, 1967), I, 494.

202 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective die Republik Venedig im Jahre 1618’ that appeared in Schiller’s collection Geschichte der merkwürdigsten Rebellionen und Verschwörungen (1788). That he wore the name of this famous conspirator for the rest of his life, shows, as nothing else could, the extent to which he was obsessed by the idea of conspiracy, and, in psychological terms, of his own worthlessness. Given the slipperiness of his identity it is appropriate that Grosse has been confused with a minor poet, Julius Waldemar Grosse (1828-1902), and with Franz Matthäus Grossinger, the son of a butcher who set himself up as Franz Rudolf Edler von Grossing and in that guise established a Rosenorden für Damen whose diplomas were so fashionable that he enjoyed the favour of Archduchess Maria Theresia and amassed a fortune. It was presumably the decision to adopt Bedmar’s aura of ‘sublimity’ that led to the decision to write an extended essay on the sublime, which was already at the forefront of his mind, and, in 1795, to his appropriation of Bedmar’s very name, which he spells Bedemar. He had already, in 1790, adopted the name of (Edouard Romeo) Graf von Vargas, the name under which most of his work was published, complete with an imaginary father (Carl Emmanuel von Vargas), mother (‘Elizabeth Murray, of an old Scottish family’) and a sister (Rosalia Gräfin von Spreti). The decision to adopt a sublimely terrible self-image, to become an ‘erhabener Bösewicht’ himself, is wholly in line with the comment by his one-time fiancée Luise Michaelis, who was overawed by the young adventurer who had swept her off her feet, that there was something ‘geheimnisvolles, und imponirendes wie furchterregendes’ (mysterious, impressive and frightening) about him.25 The 1788 essay was neither Grosse’s first nor his last on the subject of the sublime. In 1785 his translation of James Beattie’s Illustrations on Sublimity (1783) appeared as ‘Erläuterungen über das Erhabene’ in the Neue Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und freyen Künste (30 [1785], 5-52, 195-228). This was then expanded as ‘Bemerkungen über das Erhabene’, in James Beattie, Moralische und kritische Abhandlungen. Aus dem Englischen [Disssertations Moral and Critical, 1783], mit Zusätzen [von Carl Grosse], 3 vols (Göttingen: Brose, 1790). There followed a critical work, Über Größe und Erhabenheit (1790), that anticipated Schiller’s essays Vom Erhabenen and Über das Pathetische (1792-3), and, finally, there was a systematic traveller’s guide to Switzerland, home of sublime landscape, entitled Die Schweiz (2 vols, 1791) that was all too clearly modelled on William Coxe’s Travels in Switzerland (1789, German translation 1792), on which Ann Radcliffe had drawn when describing the wild and romantic Alpine landscape in The Mysteries of Udolpho. Die Schweiz includes 25

Quoted from Carsten Zelle, in Carl Grosse, Über das Erhabene, 99, and Althof, 80 n. 10.

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engravings illustrating the sublimity of the Alps. In Über das Erhabene he had drawn on Patrick Brydone’s A Tour Through Sicily and Malta. In a Series of Letters to William Beckford (1773: Reise durch Sicilien und Malta, 1777) for a description of the sublime terrors of Mount Etna. Beattie belongs to the Scottish Common-Sense school of moral philosophy, as expounded by Abel and Garve, to which Grosse, like Schiller, was attracted. In the work translated by Grosse he spells out the attractions of Gothic: castles [...] full of dark and winding passages, of secret apartments, of long uninhabited galleries, and of chambers supposed to be haunted [...]; and undermined by subterranean labyrinths as places of retreat in extreme danger; the howling of winds through the crevices of old walls, and other dreary vacuities; the grating of heavy doors on rusty hinges [...]; the shrieking of bats, and the screaming of owls.26

And has a useful summary that is directly relevant to Gothic fiction There is a kind of horror, which may be infused into the mind both by natural appearances, and by verbal description; and which, though it make the blood seem to run cold, and produce a momentary fear, is not unpleasant, but may be even agreeable; and therefore the objects that produce it are justly denominated sublime. Of natural appearances that affect the mind in this manner are vast caverns, deep and dark woods, overhanging precipices, and agitations of the sea in a storm, and some of the sounds above-mentioned have the same effect, as those of cannon and thunder. Verbal descriptions infusing sublime horror are such as convey lively ideas, of the objects of superstition, as ghosts and enchantments; or of the thoughts that haunt the imaginations of the guilty; or of those external things, which are pleasingly terrible, as storms, conflagrations, and the like.27

At the heart of the Gothic sublime is what Beattie calls ‘agreable terror’, which Grosse translates as ‘angenehmes Schrecken’.28 What is meant is the mixture of excitement and terror that is triggered by the sublime. The major difference between Schiller and the Gothic novelists in this respect is that with Schiller the sublime is deployed, via catharsis, in aid of morality, whereas in Gothic it is an aesthetic end in itself, for, as Tieck writes in the Preface to Abdallah:

26 27 28

James Beattie, Dissertations Moral and Critical (London: Strahan, and Edinburgh: Creech, 1783), II, 278. Beattie, Dissertations, 615f. See Zelle, Angenehmes Grauen. The usual German translation is ‘angenehmes Grauen’.

204 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Das Gebiet des Abenteuerlichen und Schrecklichen wird erschöpft, um dem Leser eine langweilige Stunde zu verkürzen, der die Natur und das gewöhnliche Leben ganz aus den Augen verliert, um seine Nerven in eine fieberhafte Spannung zu versetzen; — ohne Erweiterung seiner Begriffe kömmt er endlich von seiner Wanderung zurück, matter, abgespannter und seelenloser, als nach dem langweiligsten Tage. (The realm of the fantastic and the terrible is expended for the sake of cutting short a boring hour for the reader, who loses sight of nature and ordinary life for the sake of getting his nerves into a febrile state of excitement; — without broadening his perceptions in any way he eventually returns from histripmore listless, exhausted and apathetic than after the most boring day.)

IV Der Genius is a long-winded, over-excited imitation of Schiller’s Der Geisterseher that was slated by The Critical Review (Nov. 1796) for also being ‘a wretched imitation of the account of the secret tribunal in [...] Herman of Unna’, and in December 1797 The Critical Review, attacking Horrid Mysteries (‘more gross and absurd nonsense was surely never put together under the name of adventures’), noted that ‘some of the incidents’ in Grosse’s novel were ‘almost literally’ copied from Tschink’s The Victim of Magical Delusion (Geschichte eines Geistersehers), which in German began publication a year earlier. Peter Will was blamed for borrowing from Tschink ‘with so little discretion’. In reality both Tschink and Grosse had borrowed from Schiller without discretion, and, since the translator in each case was Will, the fact became obvious. Schiller knew Der Genius, to which he referred in 1793 without commenting on it. Der Genius shows that Grosse shares the obsession of the time with the idea of a conspiracy against all the religions and governments of Europe which John Robison was soon to describe in Proofs of a Conspiracy (1797), in which Joseph (‘Gunpowder’) Priestley, who, invoking Guy Fawkes, spoke of laying gunpowder ‘under the old building of error and superstition’, is accused of preaching ‘Illuminatism’, meaning revolution. The success of the novel has and had relatively little to do with literature as such, and rather more to do with the secret societies, assassinations, assumed identities, conspiracies, and other forms of hot air with which young writers’ heads were filled. Like many of the best known German Gothic romances of the time, but to a higher degree, Horrid Mysteries is a complex, sprawling, diffuse narrative that reflects the way in which, in the novel, an amorphous secret society based on the Illuminati is seen to have spread its tentacles throughout Europe. It is no chance that Peter Will, translator of Horrid

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Mysteries, also translated the Practical Philosophy (1799) of Baron von Knigge, who from 1780 to 1784 was one of the leading members of the Illuminati, conducting undercover conspiracies against both the Jesuits and the Rosicrucians, activities of which Grosse was clearly aware. If Grosse read it, as he almost certainly did, he would surely have connected it with that Illuminist standard work, Feder’s Lehrbuch der praktischen Philosophie (3rd edn, 1775). He must also have known Knigge’s Der Roman meines Lebens (4 vols, 1781-7), another work blurring the line between life and literature, and it is also likely that he read Knigge’s Umgang mit Menschen (1788) with its eyecatching chapter ‘Zuerst von den sogenannten Aventuriers’ (First, a word about so-called adventurers): Wo eine reiche Witwe zu heiraten, eine Pension, eine Bedienung an irgendeinem Hofe oder dergleichen zu erhalten ist, da sind sie nicht saumselig. Sie taufen sich, adeln sich, schaffen sich um, sooft es ihnen beliebt und es die Sache erleichtern kann. Was sich als Edelmann nicht durchsetzen läßt, das versuchen sie als Marquis.29 (Whenever a rich widow is there for the marrying, or a pension or position at a court or suchlike establishment is to be obtained, they do not hesitate. They change their names, ennoble themselves, re-inventing themselves as often as they please and it is advantageous to their cause to do so. If a baron does not cut it, they try again as marquis.)

Here, appearing at exactly the right time, is Grosse’s starting-point for his life as adventurer and self-made Marquis, for he transferred to Halle in October 1788 and returned to Göttingen as Marquis in spring 1790. What more likely than that he read Knigge’s book in Halle and promptly resolved to adopt the life-style of an adventurer and self-made nobleman?30 Through his contacts in Göttingen and Halle he was well informed on the subject of secret societies and secret conspiracies. The Thursday Club (Donnerstag Gesellschaft) in Göttingen included several Illuminati, and there was also a branch of the student order of Amizisten.31 With additional help from Schiller and Naubert, he develops the conspiracy idea that was to be grist to the mill of the thriller writer. The Illuminati were always liable to get confused with the Vehme, whose senior members were known as Wissende (initiated, and therefore illuminati, but not Illuminators, for the Vehme was 29 30

31

Quoted from Günter Dammann’s ‘Nachwort’ to Der Genius, 808f. Hoffmann, in Klein Zaches, ridicules the contemporary German love of titles when he invents the Order of the Green-Spotted Tiger with Twenty-Two Buttons, of which the ugly dwarf is h ead. Founded in 1746 as the Mosellaner or Moselbund. Another 18th-century student society was the Schwarze Brüder.

206 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective not a supposedly secret society but a genuinely secret form of extra-judicial tribunal). Grosse deliberately conflates the two: The Illuminati shrouded their anarchical aims with a good deal of masquing and mummery, and there is little question that Grosse, although he may somewhat colour his episodes, is writing of actuality. When he realizes that the Illuminati are Nihilists, red-hot revolutionaries, midnight murderers, [...] Carlos seeks to escape and destroy the band, but again and again they hunt him down as he travels through first one country and now another.32

Don Carlos alias Marquis Carl von Grosse is at once the hero of the work and the genius behind it, although he seems at times to be little more than a foil to Amanuel, the ‘genius’ in the other sense, after whom the novel is named, who is such an amorphous creationas to be little more than a will-o’the-wisp. Roger Paulin has epitomized Der Genius as ‘a novel of great artifice and some power, but which also exploits shamelessly and blatantly every device known to the genre’.33 Grosse does not hesitate to purloin the devices in question from other writers. Michael Sadleir, writing in 1927 in the context of the Northanger Seven, called Horrid Mysteries a strange wild work, dealing unashamedly in the supernatural, of lurid, if inconsequent power [...] There is life-story within life-story; the reader seems to assist at a series of apocalyptic visions which by their sheer opulence of language crush him into gibbering acquiescence [...] it is [...] a genuine and powerful Tale of Terror.

That Grosse’s supremely controversial novel is powerful will hardly be disputed. Whether it is genuine is another matter. What does genuine mean when there is no other novel like it, not least because it is a strange, convoluted kind of autobiography written by a pronounced plagiarist unsure of his own identity? In calling the novel Der Genius, Grosse was blowing his own trumpet. Carlos’s name, borrowed from Don Carlos (1787) and the Briefe über Don Carlos, in which Schiller demonstrated his knowledge of the Order of Illuminati, appropriately identifies him with Grosse, for the novel is, among other things, an autobiographical fantasy built into the ‘memoirs’ of Marquis C. von Grosse (Horrid Mysteries has ******, which fits Grosse’s fictionalized name, Grandez, cf. Grandee). Like Knigge before him, Grosse blurs the line between life and letters. The novel is based on the papers of Marquis C* von G** in the sense that Grosse is extrapolating from a pile of 32 33

Summers, The Gothic Quest, 132. Paulin, 22.

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papers, in which Schiller, Tschink, Knigge, the Illuminati, and (in Halle) Bahrdt’s preposterous order no doubt loom large, thereby giving the impression that he is narrating the events of a life that has already happened, whereas in reality he is mostly describing his own confused, chaotic inner life and the turmoil in which it finds itself. Der Genius is a terror-novel in that it revolves around a secret society based on the Illuminati that in its more terrific moments merges with the secret tribunal. Like Der Geisterseher it is Gothic not least in its selfsubversion, but Grosse, lacking Schiller’s artistic self-control, undermines his own narrative, which is seriously overwritten. Like Shelley, who does the same thing in his two Gothic novels, he ignores normal narrative logic, with the result that Amanuel, like Carl Grosse at the trime, has three contradictory identities, and Carlos’s wife, Elmira, dies four times in the course of the text. Der Genius is so riddled with anomalies that today’s reader, who is not drawn into the text in the way in which late eighteenthcentury readers were, is, to put it mildly, in danger of being alienated. These are the sorts of ‘mistake’ for which Shelley was criticized, and in Grosse’s case, as in Shelley’s, they mean that the author had his head in the clouds at the time. Read in the 1790s, Der Genius will have conveyed the frenetic, conspiracy-laden atmosphere and the reality of mysterious secret societies in which members had alternative identities, and their mysterious, more than Masonic ways. Read today, the novel shows its age in terms of the inconsequentialities and oversights that Grosse will have had in mind when he said that he wished he had taken time to write a better novel. His text, far from being teleological, or any kind of logical, is circular, repetitious in its images and situations, its effect on the sensitive, neurotic, excitable late eighteenth-century reader like Tieck overwhelming. Today it merely seems like an old record getting stuck in the same old groove. Tieck referred to Kleist as ‘ein großartiger Manierist’ (a great Mannerist);34 the label is more applicable to Grosse. Although Hadley has shown that the ‘stock furnishings’ of the traditional romance shaped Grosse’s novel,35 it lacks focus because the idea on which it is based is so amorphous. In narrative terms it varies the familiar pattern of flight and pursuit from doorway to doorway down a corridor, or from corridor to corridor within a haunted castle or other Gothic edifice, to pursuit from country to country across a continent, this reflecting Grosse’s own flight from Göttingen to Italy via Spain, but the underlying pattern of this long and intricate novel is that of a ‘labyrinth of conspiracy, accusation, 34 35

Tieck, Kritische Schriften, 4 vols (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1848-52), II, 55. Hadley, The Undiscovered Genre, 93f.

208 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective [and] betrayal’36 in which the hero finds himself enmeshed. If the labyrinth or web is the key image of the novel, its key quality is theatricality in the Baroque manner: in his life and novel(s) alike Grosse is a poseur playing games in the great theatre of life. Like Schnitzler’s later Der Reigen, better known as La Ronde, the novel is a masquerade in which nothing and no one is quite what they seem. Plot is piled on plot as one life story is embedded within another. In this respect it points forward to Die Nachtwachen des Bonaventura. In terms of its content this mammoth novel is very much of its time. It is an eccentric, outlandish, outrageous work, but also, when all is said and done, an undisciplined one, a tiresome mixture of overwriting and underwriting. Hadley writes of ‘Baroque bombast, forced theatricality and wilful mystification of plot’,37 and eventually the reader begins to wonder what all this is in aid of. At the end of the first section of Part IV the hero and heroine are led before a kind of secret tribunal, only for the scene to end in farce and anti-climax: Wir erblickten Dinge, unbegreiflich und unaussprechbar; Töne wallten zu uns herüber aus einer andern Welt; himmlische Gesichte schwankten in geordneten Reihen vorbey, alle Ahndungen wurden erfüllt, und die kühnsten Hoffnungen von der Wirklichkeit zum Schweigen gebracht. (Unspeakable, mystic rites commenced; celestial sounds struck our ears with rapture; heavenly visions astonished our gaping eyes; all presensions [presentiments] were accomplished, and the boldest hopes silenced by reality.)38

The reviewer in NADB (18/1 [1795] 59) remarked that the author simply walks away from the reader; but at this distance in time it is the author who is left looking silly. Compared to the authors of Der Geisterseher and Hermann von Unna he is simply not to be up to his self-imposed task. He enjoys mystification for its own sake, but it does not stop to wonder whether the reader will share his self-indulgent enjoyment. In his writing, as in his life, he is a poseur, a man of many identities, and therefore of none. For him writing is a charade, a counterfeit of life, manner rather than substance. The reviewer in AdB (112 [1792], 107f) remarked that the novel might well have turned out better if Grosse had not been so eager to excel Schiller, a fair point since Grosse is clearly trying to be clever. Generally a remarkably selfsatisfied young man, he was to regret not having written a better novel, 36 37 38

Frank, The First Gothics, 131. Hadley, The Undiscovered Genre, 95f. The translation is Peter Will’s.

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presumably because he was already coming to recognize that his plagiaristic work did not amount to much, and that while he might have dazzled the early 1790s, posterity was likely to judge him much more harshly, as it is now doing. Horrid Mysteries is the only version of the novel ‘known’ (in the sense of being available; in any other sense it is unknown) in the English-speaking world, where it can still be found, at a price, in the secondhand book world in the editions edited by Montague Summers (2 vols, London: Holden, 1927) and Devendra P. Varma (London, Folio Society, 1968, as part of the seven-volume Northanger Set of Jane Austen Horrid Novels). Like Herman of Unna, it has recently appeared online as a print-on-demand paperback. In the German-speaking world, where Der Genius is rightly seen as representing the marginally literary fringe of Gothic, there is a modern paperback reprint (Carl Grosse, Der Genius, ed. Günter Dammann [Frankfurt a.M.: Zweitausendeins, 1982, repr. 1984]) with a valuable Nachwort and bibliography. Outside Germany, Horrid Mysteries is paid extravagant lipservice because of its association with Austen, Shelley and Peacock. It is strange that it became more of a cult object in Britain than in Germany, where the original was seen as a mediocre piece of sensation-mongering, but, that said, German critics had mixed views about Der Genius: Tieck’s friend Wackenroder, himself a Gothic novelist,39 found it enthralling, as did Tieck and Hoffmann, whereas Caroline Schlegel (née Michaelis) saw Grosse as an obtuse windbag.40 Those who try to read the novel will most likely incline to the latter view, for much of it is, in Peter Will’s translation, virtually unreadable, being written in a Kauderwelsch aus Englisch und Deutsch, a maddening mixture of English and German that alienates the reader. One reason for the success of Horrid Mysteries will, I imagine, have been the fact that British readers, reeling from the effect of Will’s ‘English’, are likely to have skipped the weaker second half. By those who persevere Grosse will be seen at his wayward but brilliant best in the first two parts of Der Genius; the other two parts are weaker and less gripping, as are its two sequels, Der Dolch

39

40

Wackenroder’s output included a Ritterroman, Die Unsichtbaren (1794) for which he used a pseudonym, Ernst Winter, and he also published translations of three English minor Gothic novels - Der Demokrat (1796: H. J. Pye, The Democrat, 1795), Das Schloß Montford oder der Ritter von der weißen Rose (1796: Montford Castle, 1796), and Das Kloster Netley (1796: T. Skelton, Netley Abbey. A Gothic Story, 1795) - which appear in Summers’ Gothic Bibliography. Tieck, whose knowledge of the byways of the English Gothic novel they illustrate, had recommended them to Nicolai as the ‘least bad’ of those he had recently read. Caroline Schlegel, Briefe aus der Frühromantik, ed. E. Schmidt (Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1913), I: 265.

210 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective and Chlorinde, although The Dagger reads well enough in its abbreviated English version. The Genius (Trapp’s translation, which appeared a few months before Will’s) was slated by the English critics of the time. The Critical Review was notably unimpressed: In imitation of some of his more successful countrymen, who have harrowed up our imaginations with tales of magic and mysterious horror, the present writer has introduced a sufficient number of ghostly stories and marvellous adventures - in the recital of which he has not more grossly violated the laws of nature and probability than those of composition. The principal part of the story consists in a wretched imitation of the account of the secret tribunal in [...] Herman of Unna. Events [...] unconnected and uninteresting are jumbled together, without method or meaning, resembling the wild ravings of a maniac. The whole production seems an abortive conception, miserably executed. (CR, 18 [Nov. 1796], 342)

The Monthly Review, two months later, spoke of ‘scenes of supernatural horror, ill concocted, [that] in frightful succession agitate the reader’ (MR, 22 [Jan. 1997], 93). It was Will’s version, Horrid Mysteries, that became a cult classic despite the fact that it was sparsely reviewed on publication because the novel had only just been more widely reviewed in Trapp’s version. Given that it borders on the unreadable, it seems safe to conclude that it was only fellow hotheads like Tieck and Shelley who swallowed it hook, line, and sinker.

V How, it will be asked, did such a misbegotten work become a cult classic? The answer has to do with the Gothic cult as such in its German and English manifestations, but also with the fact that Tieck and Hoffmann on the one hand and Austen and Shelley (and Peacock in his negative way) on the other had their own reasons for their part in turning a mediocre German novel into what was subsequently accepted as a classic, and with the nature of the ‘cult classic’ as such. Like not a few of the best Gothic novels, Horrid Mysteries is an extreme, eccentric work appealing to young Romantic hotheads. The tastes and propensities of the young Tieck and the young Shelley, it has to be said, are remarkably similar. Tieck revelled in Der Genius, which he and his student friends Schmohl and Schwinger read aloud to one another at Halle in a mammoth ten-hour session back in the heroic days of early Gothic enthusiasm in June 1792; the result was that for a time Tieck, who had a ‘soft spot’ for popular literature,

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suffered ‘a temporary mental and emotional disturbance close to insanity’41 that is ascribed to Balder in William Lovell, which describes the machinations of a secret society similar to that in Der Genius. Though not all critics share Trainer’s view that Tieck sought refuge from his own imaginative horrors in those of the popular literature of the time,42 he was unquestionably a disturbed young man who was imaginatively and emotionally overwhelmed by Der Genius, which he then exploited in an uncritical way in works like Die eiserne Maske and Abdallah. How he moved on, in William Lovell, is considered presently. Hoffmann, too, delighted in Der Genius, which is the first novel mentioned in his letters.43 He read it in February 1795, projecting himself into it, and recorded the impression it made on him: In the Elementargeist he includes Der Genius among the books of prime influence, noting his youthful fondness for the mystic and themiraculous. Though by implication he now classifies Grosse’s novel among the works ‘of slightvalue’ [...] he says that he is not ashamed of his early enthusiasm, and comments on the vividness of the narration and the skilful handling of the material.44

The involved technique that Hoffmann employs in some of his stories has its source in Grosse,45 but in the course of time he learned to take material similar to Grosse’s and mould it into something rather more concentrated, thus initiating a process that Poe was to perfect. Der Genius inspired the novel Hoffmann wrote in 1795-96 and then apparently destroyed after it had been turned down by a publisher, Cornaro: Memoiren des Grafen Julius von S., the title of which reflected the impact of Grosse, and Hoffmann’s most, and most influentially, Gothic work, the novel Die Elixiere des Teufels (181415), is reminiscent of Der Genius in respect of its ‘constant sense of characters being manipulated by powers outside their control’.46 However, to speak of Grosse’s work as ‘low-brow’ and Hoffmann’s as ‘high-brow’ is to over-simplify, and there is in any case a great deal more to Die Elixiere des Teufels than an echo of a lesser work. Of course, not every German reader shared the enthusiasm of Tieck, Wackenroder and Hoffmann for Der Genius. Caroline Schlegel wrote to F. L. 41 42 43 44 45 46

Hewett-Thayer, 143. James Trainer, Ludwig Tieck. From Gothic to Romantic (The Hague: Mouton, 1964), 79. E.T.A.Hoffmann, Briefwechsel, ed. Friedrich Schnapp, I, 52ff. Hewett-Thayer, 345. See also Hoffmann, Der Elementargeist (Frankfurt a. M.: Insel, 1983), 36. Cf. Hewett-Thayer, 154. Blackall, 231.

212 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective W. Meyer in 1792: ‘Sie finden Grosses Genius erträglich? Mir geht der Kopf rund um. Daß er Sie als Abenteurer interessiert, verzeih ich, weil ich ihn nicht in der Nähe gesehen habe. Er war ein planloser, gegen alle Schande aus Poltronerie gefühlloser Windbeutel’ (So you find Grosse’s Genius tolerable? Never having come face to face with him, I can forgive the fact that he interests you as an adventurer. He was an obtuse windbag, a shameless, unfeeling poltroon). These are strong words, but then Grosse, who in his early Göttingen period had been engaged to Caroline Schlegel’s sister Luise, had taken it upon himself to lampoon Caroline de Böhmer (as Caroline Schlegel then was) in the third part of the novel, where we read that ‘Caroline von B* [...] war nicht schön [...] sie hatte weder einen hervorstechenden Witz, noch einen glänzenden Verstand [...] Charakter hatte sie gar keinen’ (Caroline von B* was not attractive [...] she possessed neither intelligence nor common-sense[...] and as to character, she had none). Grosse, it will be agreed, had asked for it.47 Caroline Schlegel was here writing to F. L. W Meyer, dramatist and translator of Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, and a frequent visitor to Britain, who knew the Gothic novel as well as anyone; interested, as he was, in the literary adventurer as a phenomenon, he evidently accepted Der Genius as a key part of it. In Britain, Horrid Mysteries is known above all as the most celebrated and extreme of the Northanger seven, five of which are imitations of Radcliffe and two of Schiller, as one of the main novels dealing with secret societies in this case the crimes of Spartacus Weishaupt and his followers - and the idea of a grand conspiracy aiming at world revolution, hence the famous passage in the second chapter of Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey: Scythrop [...] became troubled with the passion for reforming the world. He built many castles in the air, and peopled them with secret tribunals, and bands of illuminati, who were always the imaginary instruments of his projected regeneration of the human species. As he intended to institute a perfect republic, he invested himself with absolute sovereignty over these mystical dispensers of liberty. He slept with Horrid Mysteries under his pillow and dreamed of venerable eleutherarchs and ghastly confederates holding midnight conventions in subterranean caves.

Scythrop, author of Philosophical Gas; or, A Project for the General Illumination of the Human Race, stands, of course, for Shelley, whose boundless enthusiasm 47

On Grosse’s relations with the Michaelis family, see his Memoiren des Marquis von G*** (Berlin: Vieweg, 1792); Johann Davis Michaelis, Lebensbeschreibung von ihm selbst abgefaßt (Leipzig: Barth, 1793); Luise Wiedemann [née Michaelis], Erinnerungen von L. W. geb. Michaelis der Schwester Carolinens, ed. J. Steinberger (Göttingen, 1929); Caroline Schlegel, Briefe aus der Frühromantik, ed. E. Schmidt (Leipzig: Insel, 1913).

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for a novel that he himself regarded as pernicious Peacock is here mocking. More generally, however, Peacock’s main target is Coleridge: Peacock in Nightmare Abbey [fashions] his own negative portrait of Romantic Germanism – a mélange including [...] not only Coleridge’s advocacy of German philosophy in 1817 [...] but the very different generation of German novelists and dramatists that he was now disavowing. By 1816-17 the pre-war school of free-love, terror and revolutionary conspiracy to which Schiller and the young Goethe had contributed represented all that Peacock disliked.48

There is, as their titles lead one to expect, a superficial resemblance between Northanger Abbey (1818: Abtei Northanger, 1980) and Nightmare Abbey (1818: Die Burg Alphausen, oder Cyprians Frauenwahl, 1819), both of which satirize what they see as the excesses of modern literature as exemplified in the German-type Gothic novel and drama. If Jane Austen’s target in Northanger Abbey was the second- and third-rate Gothicists of 1798, for whom Peacock too had no time because he ‘heartily disliked the German philosophy and ultra-romantic poetry, drama and fiction that were so fashionable in his youth’,49 his own target in Nightmare Abbey is the literary lions of 1818, the Byrons and Coleridges rather than the Grosses of this world, although he also holds Shelley’s passionate attachment to Horrid Mysteries up to ridicule. Of course, Peacock dipped into it himself, for, as L. Cookson was the first to point out, the scene in which Scythrop tries to persuade Marionetta to join him in a blood-drinking rite reflects a similar scene in Horrid Mysteries (Book I, ch. 12).50 Scythrop’s determination to conduct his life like a German drama or novel (‘the world is my stage, and my direction is exit’) ‘may do very well in a German tragedy, but it will not do in Lincolnshire’ echoes not one of the worst German novels of the period, but the best, The Sorrows of Werter.

VI In 1803, while he was in Everton waiting to be allowed to go up to Oxford, De Quincey read Grosse’s The Dagger (Der Dolch, 1794-5, tr. 1795), which he was inclined to think a translation from the German, but was not sure since the title-page of the copy he borrowed had been torn out. The fact that he 48 49 50

Marilyn Butler, in the Introduction to her edition of Peacock, Nightmare Abbey (London: The Folio Society, 1994), xiii. J. B. Priestley, Thomas Love Peacock (London: Macmillan, 1927), 98. L. Cookson, Thomas Love Peacock: Nightmare Abbey and Crotchet Castle (Beirut: York Press, 1984), 8.

214 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective does not comment on it means that he was not particularly impressed by this mixed bag of a short novel in which Grosse interrupts the narrative to write of himself ‘als Opfer eines bewitzten Betrügers [...] der ihn zum Marchese gemacht habe, und daß er sich gleichzeitig von den Publikationen eines Grafen Vargas distanziert’ (as the victim of a smart alec of a swindler [...] who made him a Marquis, and that by the same token he dissociated himself from the publications of a certain Count Vargas).51 The identity of the smart alec in question is clear. If he had read Der Genius, and had therefore been able to spot Grosse’s subtext, De Quincey might well have found his attention held by the novel, which addresses his own feeling of challenged identity. The words that Grosse wrote in Der Dolch (The Dagger, 99) may be taken as a description of the effect of Der Genius on Tieck: It was the first volume of the Genius that he had been reading, and he was just arrived at the end of it, where Amanuel makes his first appearance. His imagination became filled with ghastly phantoms, his vision [grew] confused, and a thousand strange forms floated before him.

The Dagger features the dissipated court of a German petty prince, divided into the prince and his circle of sychophants on the one hand, and on the other Baron St.--- and his wife Albertina of F., which contains the germ of De Quincrey’s Klosterheim, although I hasten to add that Der Dolch, unlike Klosterheim, is a novel of passion and intrigue (cf. Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe), the intrigue being largely sexual. Beneath the surface this novel too is an autobiographical fantasia and as such a pendant to Der Genius. The circle of sychophants points back to the circle around the distinguished theologian and orientalist Prof. Johann David Michaelis in which Grosse had moved in Göttingen, until, in disgrace, like his protagonist in the final chapter of the novel, he ‘begibt [...] sich nach dem Scheitern all seiner Beziehungen in der Stadt hinaus in ländliche Einsamkeit. Ausgebrannt und melancholisch, wählt er ein kleines Landhaus im Gebirge’ (following the breakdown of all his connexions in town he withdrew into rustic solitude. Burnt-out and depressed, he chose a mountain cottage as his residence).52 There are theatrical shades here of the lone cottage, with not another house within three leagues, in which Fathom, in seeking to avoid Charybdis, falls upon Scylla, a prelude to the most hilarious and most Gothic passage in a novel Grosse knew well. Like Der Genius, Der Dolch is more manner than substance. Hadley has rightly termed this novel of passion and intrigue 51 52

Thalmann, 51. Dammann, Nachwort to Der Genius, 780.

Grosse & Tieck 215 strikingly ‘English’ with its measured clear prose, its delicate though dated sentiment, and its touch of cleverness in handling the central motif. Not only does Grosse draw textual material from Smollett’s Count Fathom, revealing direct acquaintance with English literature; he also evinces a degree of selfirony uncommon in German literature of the period by having his principal character scare himself in bed at night by reading a passage from Grosse’s own Geistergeschichte, Der Genius (1791).53

Some of the ‘English’ features of The Dagger should be credited not to Grosse but to his anonymous English translator,54 whose version is a rifacimento that improved both the narrative and its style. William Taylor, reviewing the novel in the Monthly Review (19 [Feb. 1796], 207), wrote that ‘The completeness of the fable, and its well-timed catastrophe, in the English impression, are merits of the translator, who has judiciously omitted some hacknied episodical adventures’. This is an understatement, for the translator has cut down the 568 pages of the original to just 183 pages. The superiority of The Dagger to Horrid Mysteries, and its apparent Englishness, are clearly down to the translator, who, as De Quincey would have done, has improved on the German original. The Critical Review (16 [1796], 116) described the style of The Dagger as ‘glowing’, which is not applicable to Der Genius, which was also five times as long.

VII 1847, the year of the adventurer-novelist’s death, stands out in the present context as the year that saw a significant revival of the Gothic mode in the form of Zschokke’s Drakomira mit dem Schlangenringe oder die nächtlichen Wanderer in den Schreckensgefängnissen von Karlstein bei Prag. Eine Schauergeschichte aus Böhmens grauer Vorzeit, Wilhelm Meinhold’s Sidonia von Bork, die Klosterhexe, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, and G. P. R .James’s The Castle of Ehrenstein, to say nothing of a re-issue of Bürger’s Leonora (sic) illustrated by D. Maclise. By then it was half a century since he had struck such a dazzling pose: he had published no fiction, Gothic or otherwise, since 1799. At the time of his death he was established as Edouard Romeo Graf von Vargas and Baron Bedemar, Chamberlain at the Royal Danish Court, friend of King Christian VIII, Director of the Danish Museum of Science, and author of Om vulkaniske Producter fra Island (1817), in other words, as an ornament of the 53 54

Hadley, 148. The idea that Grosse occasionally translated his own work for the English Gothic market (Frank, The First Gothics, 129) is as fanciful as the idea that Der Dolch was written before Der Genius; Frank is misled by the dates of the translations.

216 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Danish scientific establishment. It is appropriate that his definitive biography, Else Kornerup’s Edouard Vargas Bedemar. En Eventyrers Saga (1959), was written in Danish. While he is likely to be remembered in histories of late eighteenth-century Gothic fiction as a controversial Schillerimitator and author of a Gothic cult classic, he has no claim to be remembered in the literary historical context, for time has shown that his talents were far outweighed by his weaknesses, and that too little of his output is his ownfor it to be taken seriously.

2. Ludwig Tieck Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853), an original and engaging figure whose Gothic work never quite matches his boundless, undiscriminating enthusiasm for the popular novel of the Gothic ilk, is widely known to have been driven almost out of his mind with delight on reading Grosse’s Der Genius in 1792. On the subject of the English and German Gothic novel he was incomparably better informed and far more widely read than any of his contemporaries.55 He is the first German writer to react to Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, that Gothic prototype on which fairytale left its considerable mark, and his most considerable Gothic work, Abdallah, is, in historical terms, an imitation of Beckford’s Vathek. Otherwise, like it or not, it is that rare thing, a literary Schauerroman.56 He knew some of the work of Veit Weber, but seems not to have rated it, presumably because it struck him as dated and lacking in the poetic quality that he expected the modern novel to involve. On the other hand, leaving aside Kleist’s attachment to Schlenkert’s Friedrich mit der gebißnen Wange, he was the only major writer to take seriously the work of second-rate Weber-imitators such as Cramer, Schlenkert and Spieß. Notwithstanding his early addiction to Der Genius, and the secret society in William Lovell, which is more a matter of Lovell’s selfdelusions than of the machinations of an external order, he was in the long run more curious about spooks and supernatural shenanigans than about the political machinations of secret societies. In his Gothic work banditti are replaced by bogeymen.

55 56

The best commentary on his interest in popular novels of the sensational, Gothic kind is his correspondence with Wackenroder. On Tieck and Gothic, see Heinrich Hemmer, Die Anfänge L. Tiecks und seiner dämonisch-schauerlichen Dichtung (Diss. Berlin, 1910) and, on ‘Der blonde Eckbert’ and ‘Der Runenberg’, Klaus Müller-Dyes, Der Schauereroman und Ludwig Tieck ([typewritten] Diss. Göttingen, 1965).

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Tieck’s early and prolonged grounding in Gothic combined with his theatrical and linguistic ability and penchant for playing with received literary forms to produce a number of minor Gothic works in which, chameleonlike, he adopts other men’s styles in an act of persiflage, often directed against himself as much as against others, that shows what a brilliant young man he was even before he found his own voice, which was delayed by his timewasting preoccupation with Gothic. It is arguably his reaction to the work of others rather than his own contribution to the genre that counts in the Gothic context, in which he is a shadowy, strangely insubstantial figure. Friedrich Gundolf, muttering, as only he could do, about Schundliteratur and Schundliteraten, dismissed everything before William Lovell as ‘Bockmist’ (bullshit, ‘horse manure’),57 whereas Hermann Korff, ignoring the early work as such, pointed out that ‘Dieser herabgesunkenen Form der nationalromantischen Bewegung, ihrer volkstümlichen Ritter- und Schauerromantik, ist der führende Dichter der Frühromantik, Ludwig Tieck, entsprungen’ (It is from this debased form of our national Romantic movement, itspopular chivalric and Gothic romances, that the leading writer of German early Romanticism, Ludwig Tieck, derives).58 Korff’s statement is a matter of literary history. What remains to be ascertained in the rest of this chapter is whether Tieck’s work in the Gothic vein amounts, in retrospect, to anything more than the by now proverbial ‘Bockmist’.

I Tieck grew up in the 1780s, and once he had read his way through the books in his father’s modest collection, he turned to the popular fare offered by the lending libraries and devoured anything on their shelves by way of Geister- und Gespenster-geschichten and Räuber- und Ritterromane. This means that he read many of the celebrated German early Gothic novels of the lowbrow kind as they appeared. It was himself he was describing in William Lovell when he wrote ‘Ich habe Leute gesehen, die Geschmack hatten und die abgeschmacktesten verschimmelten Scharteken mit einem solchen Eifer zusammenkauften, als wenn es ihre Lieblingsschriftsteller gewesen wären’ (I have known people with seemingly good taste who amassed the most 57

58

The word is Marianne Thalmann’s (see Die Romantik des Trivialen, 19) but the sentiment is Gundolf’s. Gundolf’s essay, which appeared in JFDH (1929), 99-195, and was reprinted in Segebrecht, 206f., remains a tour de force of destructive criticism which makes brilliant use of the considerable rhetorical resources of the German language to belittle Tieck. H. A. Korff, Geist der Goethezeit, IV, 125, quoted from Trainer, 9f.

218 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective tasteless, grimy, rubbishy books with such zeal that these might be supposed the work of their favourite authors).59 The famous library of 16,000 volumes that he amassed, and which was sold in 1849,60 included 742 lots in the field of English literature, among them 124 volumes of Scott’s novels (in English, German and Italian), works by Rambach, Cramer, Grosse, Spieß and Veit Weber, and others by Walpole, Lewis and Radcliffe. Specifically, he possessed Cramer, Der deutsche Alcibiades (1791); Grosse, Clorinde (1796), Der Genius (5 vols, 1791-95), and Kleine Romane (4 vols, 1794-95); Hauff, Licheinstein (1826); Hoffmann, Nachtstücke (2 vols, 1817); Naubert, Alf von Dülmen (1791), Elisabeth, Erbin von Toggenburg (1799), and six non-Gothic novels; Spieß, Kriminalgeschichten (1801); Bulwer, Zanoni (Tauchnitz edn, 1842); Godwin, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1838);. Lewis, Tales of Wonder (3 vols, Vienna, 1805); Radcliffe, Gaston de Blondeville (4 vols, 1826) and The Mysteries of Udolpho (4 vols, 1794); Mary Robinson’s bestselling but overwritten Vancenza; or the Dangers of Ccredulity (2 vols, 1792, Ger. transl. 1793); Scott Alexis, Walladmor (3 vols, 1824) and Schloß Avalon (3 vols, 1827); Smollett, The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (n .d.); Walpole’s Works (5 vols, 1798); Young, Klagen oder Nachtgedanken (5 vols, tr. Ebert, 1768-71); Harriet Lee, Canterbury Tales (4 vols, 1797-1801). Given that his library included The Life and Correspondence of M. G. Lewis by Mrs Cornwall Baron-Wilson, it is surprising that he did not own either of Lewis’s two German-based Gothic novels (Feudal Tyrants, Mistrust). He owned Harriet and Sophia Lee’s Canterbury Tales, but not Sophia Lee’s historically more important The Recess. In the mid-1790s we find him reviewing contemporary English (Gothic) novels for his publisher Carl August Nicolai; many years later he recalled that he once recommended for publication three of the ‘better or, rather, less bad’ volumes in question. They were [Henry James Pye,] The Democrat (1795: Der Demokrat, 1796); the anonymous Montford Castle (a Ritterroman pure and simple, 1795: Das Schloß Montford, 1796), and [Richard Warner,] Netley Abbey (1795: Kloster Netley, 1796). The German translations were made by Tieck’s friend Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, who, using the pseudonym Ernst Winter in order to keep the Gothic at arm’s length, had recently published his first book, a Ritterroman entitled Die Unsichtbaren (1794). The very fact that these three English Gothic titles are pretty obscure ones is an indication of the width of Tieck’s knowledge of the field. In addition to these titles included in the sale catalogue of his early library he

59

60

Ludwig Tieck, Frühe Erzählungen und Romane (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1980), 595 (William Lovell, 9th Book, Letter 2 ). Gundolf describes him as a ‘Viel- und Wirrleser’. See Catalogue de la bibliothèque célèbre de M. Ludwig Tieck (Berlin, 1849).

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knew many other Gothic titles, including those to which he refers in Peter Lebrecht Tieck was, with Hoffmann, the German writer to have the most complete knowledge of the work of Ann Radcliffe. Like Dickens and Dostoevsky in the following generation, he grew up with Radcliffe in a literary sense; in the novelle Das Zauberschloß (1830) he was to refer affectionately to ‘alle die guten und schlechten Romane der Miss Radcliff’ (all the good and bad novels of Mrs Radcliffe), his wording implying that he was also familiar with at least some of the many Radcliffe-imitations, albeit without knowing exactly which of all the many works attributed to her were genuine. It is instructive to compare him with Dostoevsky, who in his Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (1863) recalled how, on long winter evenings, before he could read himself, he would listen, spellbound, as his parents read to him, at bedtime, the novels of Radcliffe, and how he would then rave about them in his sleep. By the age of eight he had read them all himself. Before long he was reading Maturin as well; impressed, he later read him to his fellow-students. It therefore comes as no surprise to find that his own early works of the 1840s are Gothic, and that in his writings he, like Dickens, deploys Gothic themes, plots and characters.61 Indeed, Leonid Grossman has argued that ‘there is not a single feature of the old [Gothic] novel that Dostoevsky does not use’. The work both of Dostoevsky and of Dickens is compounded of Gothic motifs. Tieck, by contrast, overimpressed by Gothic in his youth, grew out of it. Though he does not go as far as Dostoevsky in his admiration for Ann Radcliffe, Tieck is unquestionably the German writer with the most extensive knowledge of the English Gothic novel. English friends were invariably astonished by the encyclopedic knowledge of their literature of this self-confessed ‘book maniac’, whose knowledge of popular literature was legendary. His great experience, after Grosse’s Der Genius, was the work of Ann Radcliffe. His early work, like that of Willibald Alexis, is derivative: in each case the young writer is content to write ‘in Gothic’, with the predictable result that he produces work that is, initially, generically identical to that of his models. This adversely affected his reputation: it was his Gothic shadow and its shadowy works that caused him to be marginalized in literary historical terms, although his decision to live in artistically advanced but culturally provincial Dresden also adversely affected his literary career and achievement. Trainer has shown62 that many of the situations in Tieck’s early works are similar, in mood and treatment, to Radcliffe’s, and yet their 61 62

On Dostoevsky and Gothic, see my Kafka Gothic and Fairytale, 8-13. Trainer, 50-73 (‘The development of Gothic themes and styles by Tieck’).

220 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective writings are essentially different. Radcliffe is motivated by the Spieltrieb (play impulse): her work, like that of the later writers of detective stories is an intellectual parlour game. Tieck, using very similar ingredients, produces Romantic tales that are less elegant but run deeper. He writes ‘in Gothic’, but what he writes goes beyond Gothic. Radcliffe writes to a formula that comes from French fairytale and remains a framework. Tieck’s work is more deeply imaginative, and therefore closer to fairytale, for he worshipped at the shrine of Gothic superstition: unlike the ‘great enchantress’, for whom it was merely a cluster of images,63 he actually believed in the supernatural.64 This is why their respective descriptions of nature carry such different implications: The ‘fantastic forms, ‘craggy heights’ and ‘cold projections’ of Mrs Radcliffe were all perpetuated by Tieck, as too were the dark woods, ‘forests of gloomy pine’ and ‘precipices, black with forests’, but these two specific milieux, mountains and woods, were imbued with a particular demonic significance. This originated in the Gothic situation that associated mountains and woods with fear because it was in such solitary regions that bandits and marauders were most likely to be encountered. Tieck removed the bandits and replaced them with demonic forces whose power was much more formidable in that it was intangible and indomitable.65

Trainer exaggerates, for Radcliffe associates such landscape both with the ever-present dangers of bandits and with the sublimity to which she constantly aspires, but whereas she views landscape largely through the eyes of Salvator Rosa as infested with rather picturesque bandits, Tieck sees landscape in a way that points to Caspar David Friedrich and the whole question of the meaning of landscape and of art itself.

II Tieck’s early Gothic-related work begins with his completion of the last chapter of Matthias Klostermeyer oder der Bayersche Hiesel in the second volume of Rambach’s Thaten und Feinheiten renommirter Kraft- und Kniffgenies (Berlin, 1790-1: Vol. 2, 141-334), which the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung (24 July 1792) picked out for praise on the grounds that it was marginally less bad than 63 64

65

Trainer, 52. For other differences, see Trainer, 59-61. It would be interesting to know exactly what led him to buy William Whiston’s An acccount of the daemoniacks and of the power of casting out demons (1737). Trainer, 59.

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Rambach’s text. Matthias Klostermayer (1738-71), a well-known Bavarian poacher turned captain of banditti executed in Dillingen in 1771, is better known from August Heinrich Kerndörffer’s novel Matthias Klostermay’r, der sogenannte Bayerische Hiesel (1800).66 Friedrich Eberhard Rambach (ps. Ottokar Sturm), one of Tieck’s sixth-form teachers, who shared his low literary tastes and took advantage of Tieck’s precocious literary ability to further his own work, was a pernicious influence. In 1795 Tieck, his sister and (August Ferdinand) Bernhardi considered writing first a spoof of and then a sequel to his friend Zschokke’s Kuno von Kyborg nahm die Silberlocke des Enthaupteten und ward Zerstörer des heiligen Vehmgerichts (1795), but, significantly, did not do so. The Vehmgericht was not really Tieck’s sort of thing.67 If his contribution to Matthias Klostermeyer showed his precocious competence, much more of his inner world is revealed in Ryno (1792), a Schauergeschichte that forms his last chapter of Rambach’s exercise in Ossianic Gothic, Die eiserne Maske. As a contribution to someone else’s potboiler, unacknowledged and unpaid for, it is little more than a five-finger-exercise, a gothically written pastiche, replete with every epithet of its genre. However, this does not mean it is unimportant, for its Gothic motifs and epithets betray the hand and the preoccupations that were to produce Abdallah. Ryno’s cry - ‘Wer bin ich, wer könnt ich sein?’ (Who am I, who could I be?)68 - points to Tieck’s uncertainty about his own identity at the time and his fear that his fate might not be in his own hands. The question ‘Who is it that can tell me who I am?’ profoundly impressed Tieck when he first read King Lear (I/4, line 230), a first indication of the fact that not a little of the Gothicity of his work goes back to Shakespeare. Ryno includes a reference to Macbeth, and the preface to Abdallah refers to ‘jenes Grauen, das uns in Macbeth oder Hamlet befällt’ (the dread which overcomes readers of Macbeth or Hamlet). How much of the dark world of Gothic is prefigured in Shakespeare, and in Webster, whose The White Devil was to leave its mark on Vittoria Accorombona. Tieck’s Shakespeare’s Behandlung des Wunderbaren appeared in 1796, and his penchant for the marvellous (Hang zum Wunderbaren) is in evidence throughout his work and explains why it turned from Gothic to fairytale, for the marvellous is at the fairytale end of a continuum that ends in Gothic terror.69 Thalmann refers to Tieck’s ‘Aufgeschlossenheit für die 66

67 68 69

For an account of this unremarkable novel, see Heiderich, 140ff. More generally, see K. T. Heigel, ‘Der bayerische Hiesel und die Hiesel-Litteratur,’ Westermsanns Monatshefte, 63 (1888), 122. Müller-Fraureuth, 101, has an account of this project. Cf. Thalmann, 122: ‘So fragen Almansur, Ryno, Abdallah, Lovell, der blonde Eckbert.’ The relationship between Gothic and fairytale is discussed in ch. 14.

222 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective meraviglia und die terribilità des Lebens’ (receptiveness to the marvellous and terrible aspects of life)70 being already in evidence in Ryno. Ryno, like the later Fermer, is convinced that he is a monster (‘Ich bin abscheulich’), and Tondal points forward to Mondal, the monster of destruction in Abdallah. Thalmann has written that ‘Von Ryno bis William Lovell schließt sich ein Kreis, in dem sich der Umbruch des trivialen Grausens zum artistischen Schauer vollzieht’ (The change from trivial horror to artistic terror takes place between Ryno and William Lovell),71 but it could equally well be said that Ryno belongs with Abdallah, after which Tieck begins to achieve a more objective attitude towards the genre that has hitherto imposed itself upon his imagination, leaving him a prey to his own wayward imaginings and the fears that loom so large in them. Ryno, showing how vulnerable he would be when faced, in June 1792, by Der Genius, reaches the point where ‘sein eigener Ton, seine eigenre Stimme war ihm fremd [...] geworden’ (his own tone, his own voice had become alien to him), a dire state for the writer, while the sudden changes of mood of the piece indicate Ryno’s (and, potentially, Tieck’s) instability. Both the tone of Ryno and its ending (‘Ryno tat unwillkürlich einen Schritt vorwärts, und stürzte zerschmettert von dem Gipfel des Felsens in das tiefe Tal hinab’: Ryno involuntarily took a step forward, and, smashed to pieces, plunged from the top of the cliff into the valley far below) are so strangely similar to those of Veit Weber’s Die Teufelsbeschwörung, published in the same year, that Tieck may be assumed to have borrowed from Veit Weber here.

III Tieck appears to have been the earliest German Gothic novelist to discover The Castle of Otranto, in which, as in his own work, the Gothic is mixed with fairytale. That Horace Walpole attracted attention in Germany from an early date is shown not by the early translation of Otranto, which went largely unnoticed, but by the Gothisches Haus at Wörlitz, near Halle, built between 1773 and 1809 for Prince Leopold Friedrich Franz of Anhalt-Dessau, which was designed to be a kind of German Strawberry Hill. Tieck, who had already read The Castle of Otranto, was fully aware of the historical significance of the Gothisches Haus when he discovered it in summer 1792 during his short spell (April-October) at Halle university, when his head was full of Grosse and Gothic. It was during these months at Halle that Tieck’s already 70 71

Thalmann, Die Romantik des Trivialen, 33. Thalmann, Die Romantik des Trivialen, 114.

Grosse & Tieck 223

long immersion in Gothic came to a head with his discovery of Der Genius. His own and Grosse’s paths very nearly crossed at university: Grosse was at Göttingen from 1786 to 1788 and in 1790-1; he was at Halle from 1788 to 1790. Tieck started off at Halle in 1792, by which time Grosse was in Spain, writing Der Genius, but soon moved to Göttingen, where, with the exception of a spell in Erlangen in 1792-3, he remained until he moved back to Berlin in 1794. It was only after his move to Göttingen, that his real literary education and, with it, his discovery of himself as a writer began. The process began in the university library, where Tieck was befriended by the Deputy Librarian, (Professor) Jeremias David Reuss.72 The University Librarian was the long-serving Professor of Rhetoric, Christian Gottlob Heyne. Coleridge was much impressed by Heyne when he was shown round that same library (‘two immense large Rooms, ornamented with busts & Statues’)73 in 1799. Tieck and Coleridge were to meet in Rome in 1805. Trainer has drawn attention to two points of similarity between Abdallah and The Castle of Otranto. The first involves the use of prophecy: the background to [...] The Castle of Otranto was an ancient prophecy that ‘the castle and the lordship of Otranto should pass from the present family, whenever the real owner should be grown too large to inhabit it’. By this means a fatalistic element was introduced into the action and the triumph of justice as represented by the ancestors was assured. Tieck transferred this prophetic role to the evil genius Mondal, and consequently it is the ultimate downfall of Abdallah which is inevitable.74

The second borrowing concerns buried treasure. In Abdallah, Omar tells Selim ‘Grabe hinter jenem [...] Hügel und ein neues Glück wird dir entgegenblühen’ (Dig on the far side of that hill and your fortune will be restored). This is reminiscent, as Trainer was the first to note, of a passage in Otranto where the Marquis of Vivenza is met by a dying hermit who tells him to ‘Dig under the seventh tree on the left hand of this poor cave, and your pains will...’ The implication is that his pains would be rewarded. Such insubstantial borrowings do not even begin to substantiate the idea that Otranto had a major impact on German Sturm und Drang/early Gothic writing, and in reality it is not until the 1840s, when Otranto impacts on German Gothic in the person of Wilhelm Meinhold (see Chapter 13), that it finally becomes meaningful to speak of the impact of Otranto on German 72 73 74

See A. Gillies, ‘Ludwig Tieck’s English Studies at the University of Göttingen, 17921794’, JEGP, 36 (1936-37), 206-223. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956-71), I, 475. Trainer, 94.

224 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Gothic. Tompkins75 avers that the German Ritter- und Schauerroman is indebted to The Castle of Otranto in that it ‘still preserves traces of Walpole’s sedate and aristocratic spectres, his vaults and fugitive damsels’, but sounder is her statement that many Ritterromane have more in common with the English historical novel before Scott than with the work of Mrs Radcliffe (or, I would argue, of Horace Walpole). As we have seen, Tieck revelled in Der Genius, which he and his student friends Schmohl and Schwinger read aloud to one another at Halle in a mammoth ten-hour session back in the heroic days of early Gothic enthusiasm in June 1792; the result was that for a time Tieck, with his ‘soft spot’ for popular literature, suffered ‘a temporary mental and emotional disturbance close to insanity’76 that is ascribed to Balder in William Lovell. For days on end Tieck lived in a state of mental confusion, believing himself dead, knowing he was close to madness, and for some time he remained close to floundering as he struggled to clear his mind of the influence of Der Genius. Though not all critics share Trainer’s view that he sought refuge from his own imaginative horrors in those of the popular literature of the time,77 Tieck was unquestionably a disturbed young man. Der Genius had such a powerful effect on him because his mind, still full of the trashy Gothic images of his schooldays, was almost overwhelmed by the vivid imagery of Der Genius. Eventually he was to undergo the full-blown imaginative crisis of which Abdallah is the monument. The Geheimbündelei of Der Genius was not the problem, for Tieck, unlike Veit Weber and Grosse, took little interest in actual Geheimbünde. Notwithstanding Grosse’s imaginative concern with Illuminism, the secret societies in both Der Genius and William Lovell are arguably projections of the protagonist. That is why Tieck decided, in 1795, not to write a sequel to Zschokke’s Kuno von Kyborg, and in any case the man who had registered at university as a Jurist (law student) was not interested in law even in the form of a Gothic special jurisdiction. He was more concerned with imaginary (epistemological/ metaphysical) terrors than with political/historical ones: it was these that caused his imagination, already overheated, to come close to crashing. The central appeal of Der Genius was surely its depiction of a young man who, like the young Tieck, had lost control over his inner world and therefore over himself; that he had lost control of his own world was, of course, the central thought in Grosse’s mind as he wrote Der Genius in self-imposed Spanish exile. Der Genius was therefore a magic mirror in which Tieck was 75 76 77

J. M. S. Tompkins, Ann Radcliffe, 93f. See also Rudolf Fürst, Die Vorläufer der modernen Novelle (Halle a. S.: Niemeyer, 1897). Harvey W. Hewett-Thayer, Hoffmann: Author of the Tales, 143. Trainer, Ludwig Tieck, 79.

Grosse & Tieck 225

confronted with his own febrile self, the prospect of his own nervous collapse. Grosse’s Über das Erhabene appeared in 1788, when he was in Göttingen with the world at his feet. Although it was published anonymously, Tieck will inevitably have known that it was by a Göttingen student who had just gone down in extraordinary circumstances, and when he learned that the author was none other than the author of Der Genius, he will have hastened to read it, for at the time Grosse was a huge, if baneful, influence on him. In 1792, after reading Der Genius, which was in course of publication in Halle, he wrote his own shorter essay on the sublime, Über das Erhabene (1792-93?), about which he subsequently kept quiet, the implication being that he was not particularly proud of it. Vying with the brilliant student he knew Grosse to have been, he produced what is, in English terms, an undergraduate essay on the sublime. Both men most likely gave papers on the sublime to the Göttingen staff/student Thursday Society.78 Given his reaction of terrified delight to Der Genius, it might be supposed that Tieck’s Über das Erhabene would focus on what Grosse calls angenehmes Grauen, yet it does not: whereas Grosse was mostly concerned with the Scottish and Irish eighteenth-century writers on the sublime, in other words, with the sublime in the Gothic context, Tieck is more concerned with ‘Longinus’ and classical writers.79 That said, he too sees the sublime as an aesthetic category, and argues that ‘The Gothic and the sublime being close partners, the aesthetic mode can be seen to justify all manner of frightfulness in the novel,’80 which is immediately applicable to his own novel Abdallah with its original Gothic sub-title das furchtbare Opfer. If Tieck was, in his own mind, competing with Grosse in producing his own Über das Erhabene, it has to be said that his essay is the weaker of the two. Both men are, of course, theorizing their response(s) to Die Räuber, in which Schiller first introduces the ‘erhabener Bösewicht’, a concept he was later to theorize and place in context. Abdallah is ‘auch eine Probe auf die Wirksamkeit des Schauerlichen und des Erhabenen, wie er es zugleich theoretisch durchdachte’ (apart from anything else, a test of the effectiveness of the terrible and the sublime, which he was theorizing at the same time).81 The emphasis in the preface is on what Grosse calls angenehmes Schrecken, that is, on the pleasurable terror with which 78 79

80 81

Cf. ‘Die gelehrte Gesellschaft’ (1797) [Schriften, Bd 15, 223-244]. Tieck’s Über das Erhabene remained unpublished until Edwin H. Zeydel published it in PMLA, 50 (1935), 537ff. That text has been superseded by the one in Tieck’s Schriften 1789-1794, ed. Achim Hölter (Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1991), 1137-1170. Roger Paulin, Ludwig Tieck. A Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 22. Tieck, Schriften 1789-1794, 991.

226 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective we react to the sublime. It is in the preface to Abdallah that Tieck makes his most fundamental criticism of Gothic as genre and craze: Das Gebiet des Abenteuerlichen und Schrecklichen wird erschöpft, um dem Leser eine langweilige Stunde zu verkürzen, der die Natur und das gewöhnliche Leben ganz aus den Augen verliert, um seine Nerven in eine fieberhafte Spannung zu versetzen; - ohne Erweiterung seiner Begriffe kömmt er endlich von seiner Wanderung zurück, matter, abgespannter und seelenloser, als nach dem langweiligsten Tage. (The realm of the fantastic and the terrible is drained for the sake of cutting short a boring hour for the reader, who loses sight of reality and ordinary life for the sake of getting his nerves into a febrile state of excitement - without having broadened his perceptions in any way he eventually returns from his trip more listless, exhausted and apathetic than after the most boring day.)

A slight Rittergeschichte, Adalbert und Emma, first appeared in the volume Ritter, Pfaffen und Geister, ed. Hugo Lenz [F. E. Rambach] (Leipzig: Barth, 1793). Köpke commented on the way in which Tieck ‘den Sagenton Veit Weber’s anstimmt’ (adopts the tone of Veit Weber’s Sagen der Vorzeit),82 but it is simply the sort of piece written by many of the popular writers Tieck spent ten years reading and imitating. His most considerable Gothic work is Abdallah (1795), which was followed in 1795-96 by the novels Peter Lebrecht and William Lovell, both of which have Gothic features, and by the satirical sketch, Fermer der Geniale. So well versed in Gothic, so brilliant linguistically, and so acutely self-aware was the young Tieck that he was able to write ‘in Gothic’ in someone else’s style, while at the same time implying that it was so much piffle, for he was an outstanding piffler, able, simultaneously, to ape, exploit and guy the popular fictional modes and models of the time. The Straußfedern (1795-96) squibs include spoofs of Der Genius showing that by this time he was well over Grosse’s novel. Karl von Berneck (1797), is a tragedy based on Schloß Berneck (Franken) and, in literary terms, on the Ritterstück Tieck described it as ‘der Pendant zum Abdallah’ (a companion piece to Abdallah).

IV Abdallah (1795), an extended Oriental (Gothic) tale of terror modelled on Beckford’s Vathek. An Arabian Tale (1786), points to the continuing influence of the Oriental tale in the late eighteenth century, as indeed did 82

Köpke, I, 153.

Grosse & Tieck 227

Grosse’s first work, Helim, oder Über die Seelenwanderung (1789), an exercise in popular philosophy in dialogue form that borrows from Johann Georg Schlosser’s Über die Seelen-Wanderung (1781). The transmigration in question points forward to Grosse’s own successive transformations, each more colourful than the one before, which obscured his ‘real’ identity, so that the time soon came when he found it well-nigh impossible to write in propria persona. Tieck’s nightmare obsession with the implications of living in time, and more especially with the idea that we never return to the past save with regret, belongs in the same context. Vathek appeared in two separate German versions within two years of its publication in French and English: Der Thurm von Samarah (tr. by Georg Schatz ‘from the Arabic’, 1788) and Vathek, eine arabische Erzählung (tr. by Georg Römer from Beckford’s French, 1788), and continued to be reprinted in German into the twentieth century. Given the impact of D’Aulnoy’s fairytales on the spatial imagery of Vathek - the tower and the cavern come straight from D’Aulnoy (e.g. ‘The Ram’), and Eblis is reminiscent of the underworld in ‘The Beneficent Frog’, which lies ten thousand steps down from the ‘black plain’, while the Giaour in its ‘horrible chasm’ is imaginatively related to the Fairy Lioness in the same tale - it is appropriate that Vathek was composed in French. Gothic appears at its most imaginative in Vathek with its partly subterranean setting and its exotic eighteenthcentury orientalizing mode,83 the literary equivalent of the artistic and decorative chinoiserie of the time. The two are linked, for, as Robert Irwin has said, ‘The oriental and the Gothic were closely allied in the eighteenthcentury revolt against classical canons in literature.’84 Oriental here means fairytale, which was part of that revolt. Beckford is a harbinger of the fantastic as well as a founding father of Gothic. In a short, cogent essay that deserves to be remembered Frederick S. Frank has isolated four characteristics of Beckford’s orientalized Gothic: (i) ‘the pattern of the demonic quest or perverse pilgrimage’, (ii) the notion of (Vathek’s) ‘heroic’ villainy, (iii) ‘the preference of the characters for diminishing enclosures and [...] forms of architectural sequestration [...] such [...] as towers, grottos, caverns, contracting corridors and subterranean theatres of hellish anguish’, and (iv) ‘the evocation of a hypothetically malignant cosmos, an ontologically unreliable and ambiguously deceiving Gothic universe in which all moral norms are inverted or twisted, where disorder is far more likely than order, and where universal darkness can bury 83

84

See Henry Weber, Tales of the East; Comprising the Most Popular Romances of Oriental Origin, and the Best Imitations by European Authors, 3 vols (Edinburgh: Ballantyne; London: Longman, 1812). Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nights. A Companion (London: Allen Lane, 1994), 253.

228 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective all without warning and at any moment’.85 This analysis of the Gothicity of Vathek helps to explain its appeal for Tieck. Beckford, like Heinrich von Kleist after him, portrays a world governed by chance and chaos. Vathek is a quest-novel, Gothic above all in the sense that the hero perversely quests for that from which his very nature precludes him. Both Vathek’s ascent into his fairytale Faustian tower and his subsequent descent into Eblis are signs of his perverted aspirations: he goes first to the Devil, which is what Eblis means, and then to Hell, which it represents. His ‘linear descent’ ‘psychologically, from wish-fulfilment to frustration; and metaphysically, from a vision of humanity as unlimited potentiality to humanity as finite actuality in an alien world’86 - is tragic. What makes Beckford so important in the context of Tieck’s work is the fact that he uses his Gothic novel to confront precisely what so concerned the young Tieck, ‘the moral ambiguities of an inexplicable universe’.87 His characters, it has been well said, are not free; they merely toy with a dream of freedom,88 for at issue throughout Vathek is ‘the contradiction between the illusion of man’s freedom and the reality of his imprisonment in a necessitarian universe’.89 The tower and the underworld, both of them, ironically, fairytale locations taken from D’Aulnoy,90 represent this imprisonment. Here too is a contradiction that profoundly troubled the young Tieck, whose childhood moral certainties had been swept away by the torrent of his teenage Gothic reading, but also the young Grosse, who wrote on the first page of Der Genius: Das Gewebe, an dem meine Schicksale fortgleiten mußten, kann vielleicht itzt zerrissen seyn; aber auch nur vielleicht. - Indem ich es ahnde: ich sey nun frey, nahet sich vielleicht dem verlohrenen Ende ein anderes wieder, um sich mit ihm sanft zu vereinigen. Bald gehe ich ihm dann wieder nach und übergebe willig mein Bewußtseyn einem hellen Strome der sich in einer ängstlichen Ferne verliehrt. (The web controlling my destiny may now be destroyed, but this is no more than a possibility. Even as I fancy myself free, another entanglement may be

85

86 87 88 89 90

F. S. Frank, ‘The Gothic Vathek: The Problem of Genre Resolved’, in Vathek and the Escape from Time. Bicentenary Revaluations, ed. K.W. Graham (New York: AMS Press, 1990), 157. Frank, ‘The Gothic Vathek’, 168. Frank, ‘The Gothic Vathek’, 158. Frank, ‘The Gothic Vathek’, 158f. K. W. Graham, ‘Beckford’s Vathek: A Study in Ironic Dissonance’, Criticism, 14 (1972), 252. See Amy DeGraff, The Tower and the Well. A Psychological Interpretation of the Fairy Tales of Madame d’Aulnoy (Birmingham, AL: Summa, 1984), passim.

Grosse & Tieck 229 approaching which will link up with the earlier one. Soon I shall find myself carried along again and shall willingly surrender my individual consciousness to a clear stream leading to a dreadful future.)

These lines show that Grosse too shared Beckford’s view of the illusion of human freedom, and at the same time indicate why Tieck was so struck by Der Genius, which portrays the web of unfreedom by which he and Grosse both felt so oppressed. In Vathek, the conventional romance’s ‘pattern of achievement and selffulfilment’91 is reversed, and Gothic, as the night-side of romance and fairytale, is shown to be ‘a region of total ontological distress, where the mythology of the imaginative self as an agent of control gives way to the nightmare of a supreme and malignant „otherness“ which cannot be escaped or transcended ‘.92 Gothic having been spawned in an age of postrational, revolutionary change, the early Gothic novelists portray an irrationally determined universe.93 It is not just that the Gothic romance ‘is a genre that in its historical development, as well as in individual texts, moves from a stable modality of clearly defined conventions and forms toward an unstable and deliberately indeterminate modality’,94 but that ‘characters in Gothic fiction are forced to ask their questions and seek their answers in a sort of intellectual vacuum without the support of stable value systems to affirm any answers their quest might lead them to’.95 It was his awareness of just this vacuum that so upset the young Tieck and led him to out-Gothick Gothic in his overwritten horror-novel Abdallah.96 Abdallah; oder, Das furchtbare Opfer, the full, original title of which so clearly evokes both the oriental (fairy)tale and the Gothic tale, was begun in 1790 while Tieck was still at school, and was published anonymously in 1795, when he was twenty-two. It is indebted not only to Schiller and Grosse for the conspiracy against Abdallah, and, more generally, to Vathek and Der Genius for its philosophy, but also to Jean-Paul Bignon’s Les Avantures d’Abdalla, fils d’Hanif (1712-14) for its manner, and thence to that important link between Gothic and fairytale, the Arabian Nights, which was Bignon’s starting-point. It derives its Orientalism largely from the Arabian Nights, and its mixture of Orientalism and Gothic from Vathek, written when Beckford was twenty-one. Judging by Abdallah, the young Tieck must have read Vathek shortly after its appearance. It left its mark on Abdallah in 91 92 93 94 95 96

Frank, ‘The Gothic Vathek’, 167 Frank, ‘The Gothic Vathek’, 169. See Frank, ‘The Gothic Vathek’, 160. G. R. Thompson, quoted from Frank, ‘The Gothic Vathek’, 170. Frank, ‘The Gothic Vathek’, 158. See Paulin, 59.

230 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective both a general and a particular way. Roger Paulin has written of Tieck’s tale as ‘all too ambitious to prove that Werther or Beckford’s Vathek, if jumbled and made more strident, can provide the right combination of brooding and monstrous incident’,97 while Trainer noted that the magic ring with its mysterious hieroglyphic characters is reminiscent of the strange sabre brought by the Indian to Vathek.98 There is also a considerable debt to The Arabian Nights, which clearly caught and held the attention of the voracious young reader, even if its imagery did not become a lifelong feature of his mental world, as that of the Arabian Nights Entertainments did in the case of De Quincey.99 Voss’s translation of the Arabian Nights from Galland’s French, Tausend und eine Nacht (6 vols, 1781-5)100 appeared at exactly the right time to attract the attention of Tieck, although the fact that he, like Musäus, came to have a famously low opinion of Voss may mean that he read the Tausend und eine Nacht in French,101 unless, that is, he knew the old German translation from Galland’s French, Die Tausend und Eine Nacht, tr. August Bohse (ps. Talander), 6 vols, 1730), which was widely read earlier in the century. The point is immaterial. Both the subterranean cavern into which Abdallah has to descend and the magic ring he is given by Omar to use in an emergency it is Aladdin’s magic lamp by another name - derive from the Arabian Nights,102 while the mysterious inscription on the ring is reminiscent of the uncouth characters on a sabre in the Arabian Nights and in Vathek, for Beckford too had borrowed from the Arabian Nights. A quest-novel, Abdallah is self-evidently a German Vathek. Like Beckford’s, it is a work in which a young man’s reading of his own life as nightmare appears in oriental garb, but as the febrile, unduly gloomy first novel of a lost and confused young man it is also, in some ways, a novel of a very different kind: Abdallah, an oriental ‘Gothick’ tale of moral seduction and nihilistic despair, of gripping improbabilities in subterranean regions, bespeaks sensation, the quest for horror, the perverse joy in sweeping aside every scale of values. It [...] is all too ambitious to prove that Werther or [...] Vathek, if jumbled and made more

97 98 99 100 101 102

Paulin, 51. Trainer, 80f. See Bridgwater, De Quincey’s Gothic Masquerade, 11-15. See Katharina Mommsen, Goethe und 1001 Nacht (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1960). The Arabian Nights left its mark on the German Gothic novel, for instance on Ernst Theodor Jünger’s Carolo Carolini, der Räuberhauptmann (1800). Andersen’s The Tinder-Box, a retelling of a Scandinavian folktale, Aanden i Lyset (The Spirit in the Candle), also made use of Aladdin and his Wonderful Lamp.

Grosse & Tieck 231 strident, can provide the right combination of brooding and monstrous incident.103

The monster of destruction, Mondal (cf. daimon, evil genius) ‘der Schreckliche’ (the terrible one), ‘der Verworfene’ (the depraved one), to whom Omar is made to swear allegiance, is the Devil in fancy dress, the counterpart of Beckford’s Giaour. The gruesome tale ends with the dying agonies of the by then mad Abdallah,104 whose mind is first poisoned105 and then broken by Omar’s nihilistic philosophy. Both Omar and Abdallah represent the young author, for Abdallah, like both Vathek and Der Genius, is in part veiled autobiography and an exercise in fantasy, although the type of imagination at work is very different. Vathek, however tragic it ultimately is, is an elegant work that shows a young writer enjoying giving his exuberant imagination free rein. Abdallah, by contrast, shows an equally young writer whose imagination is haunted by all the trashy tales he has been reading, from the horrid images of which he is unable to clear his mind, so that the language of Abdallah is laboured and outworn. Trainer has written of the ‘horrific compounds, morbid similes and unaesthetic contemplation of physical decay’ deployed by Tieck.106 Indeed, Abdallah is less a finished work than part of a work in progress, that work, spread over several publications, being Tieck’s attempt to break the hold on his imagination of Grosse’s Gothic imagery. Intrinsically it is what Gundolf implied it to be, so much Bockmist. A work of maudlin self-analysis, the novel amounts to the Confessions of a Gothoholic. Tieck’s attempt to unburden himself has a necessary corollary, that he is doing so at the reader’s expense: he only obtained the longed-for release by dumping his morbid lucubrations on the reader. Maybe Abdallah had to be written, but in terms of Tieck’s reputation, it would have been better unpublished or destroyed. That rare thing, a literary Schauerroman, it is relentlessly gruesome and negative. The supernatural is flogged like the proverbial dead horse. There is no respite, with the result that, as Tieck himself came to recognize, ‘das Gespenstische und Wilde [...] übersättigt endlich’ (the horrors eventually become too much 103 104

105 106

Paulin, 51. ‘Insanity’ was a preoccupation of the young Tieck, partly because he was conscious of having come so close to it in the aftermath of Der Genius, but also as a way in which fate intervenes in the life of some. Schiller and Coleridge, wearing moral-trumpeters’ hats, comment on the poisonous effect of Gothic Trainer, 88. Compare the stream of morbid compound nouns beginning with ‘Todes’ or ‘Todten’, ‘Schreck’ or ‘Schreckens’. Further analysis is to be found in Trainer’s article ‘Tieck, Rambach and the Corruption of Young Genius’ (German Life and Letters, XVI/1 (1962), 27-35.

232 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective of a good thing).While this state of satiety had to be reached before the mind could move on, it has to be said that, if Gothic appears at its most imaginative in Vathek, it is at its most depressing in Abdallah. Tieck pointed out in 1795, in the foreword to Peter Lebrecht, that ‘horridness’ in Jane Austen’s sense is a characteristic of the whole German early Romantic phenomenon known as the Sturm und Drang, which in some ways corresponds to English-language early (Gothic) Romanticism. At the turn of the eighteenth century German readers expected to have their hair made to stand on end and were happy so long as the events served up to them were as ghastly as they were ghostly: Der Leser ist zufrieden, wenn es ihm nur recht schauerlich und grauerlich zumute wird. Riesen, Zwerge, Gespenster, Hexen, etwas Mord und Totschlag, Mondschein und Sonnenuntergang, dies mit Liebe und Empfindsamkeit versüßlicht, um es glatter hinterzubringen, sind ungefähr die Ingredienzen, aus denen das ganze Heer der neusten Erzählungen, vom Petermännchen bis zur Burg Otranto, vom Genius bis zum Hechelkrämer, besteht. Der Marquis von Grosse hat dem Geschmack aller Lesegesellschaften eine andere Richtung gegeben, aber sie haben sich zugleich an seinem spanischen Winde den Magen verdorben; mit Herrn Spieß had man sich gewöhnt, überall und nirgends zu sein; und keine Erzählung darf jetzt mehr Anspruch machen, gelesen zu werden, wenn der Leser nicht vorhersieht, daß ihm wenigstens die Haare dabei bergan stehen werden. (The reader is content so long as what is served up to him is as ghastly as it is ghostly. Giants, dwarfs, spectres, witches, a modicum of murder and manslaughter, moonlight and sunsets, all this made palatable by an admixture of love and sentimentality, are roughly speaking the ingredients of all the latest stories, from Wee Peter to the Castle of Otranto, from Horrid Mysteries to The Faultfinder [Spieß, Der Mäusefallen- und Hechelkrämer]. Marquis von Grosse changed the taste of the reading societies [lending libraries], but they could not stomach his Spanish braggadocio; with Herr Spieß we got used to being everywhere and nowhere; and nowadays no tale can expect to be read unless the reader can be confident that it will make his hair stand on end.)

Peter Lebrecht, rightly subtitled ‘Eine Geschichte ohne Abenteuerlichkeiten’ (an unfashionable tale),107 is peppered with ironic, knowing references to the modishly Gothic and the Gothically modish, but these are part of the author’s clowning, which owes more to Sterne than to any Gothic sevenday-wonders. These belong to the past, whereas Peter Lebrecht as a whole belongs to the future, and therefore, it may be thought, to fairytale rather than Gothic. All the references to popular novels of the day, in which the only ‘adventures’ in Peter Lebrecht are to be found (hence the subtitle)- to 107

‘Abenteuerlichkeiten’ (adventures) here means fantastic features.

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Spieß, Das Petermännchen (1791), Der Mäusefallen- und Hechelkrämer (1793), Der alte Überall und Nirgends (1792); Grosse, Der Genius (1794-96); Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1764); Cramer, Das Turnier zu Nordhausen (1795), Die Löwenritter (1794), Der kluge Mann (1795), Der braune Robert (1794); Rambach, Der große Churfürst von Rathenau (1795), Aylo und Dschandina oder die Pyramiden (1793-94); Zschokke, Die schwarzen Brüder (1791-95), Kuno von Kyborg nahm die Silberlocke des Enthaupteten und ward Zerstörer des heiligen Vehmgerichts (1795); Schiller, Der Geisterseher (1787-89) - may seem to show that Tieck is still labouring under the spell of works like these, and of course references which place Spieß and Cramer in the frame with Goethe and Cervantes will have offended some readers and left others wondering whether Tieck was, finally, unhinged. The difference between Witz (wit) and Aberwitz (witlessness, lunacy) is at the best of times fine-drawn.The truth is that while Tieck, in 1795-9, is still a literarily modish young man, he is ready to move on from Abdallah and Grosse. In Peter Lebrecht this is shown negatively, by the change of tone. In William Lovell, written as it were as a sequel to Peter Lebrecht, we then see him actively moving on. Peter Lebrecht, a work without the adventures of adventurers, and without purpose, consists of a series of autobiographical sketches that show Tieck turning his back on hectic literary life à la mode. The references to Gothic titles are at once nostalgic and dismissive. Lebrecht’s name - live right - speaks for itself. The novel embodies a rousseauistic epiphany, a series of back-to-life moments. It is also that very rare thing, a witty German novel. If Tieck’s imagination was fired, and he was in that sense turned into a writer, by his almost manic reading of Gothic tales, it was only when he had escaped from the imaginative pull of Schauerromantik, which can be seen happening in William Lovell, that he finally came into his own. Gothicism, though close to his heart at the time, was not his own in literary terms, so that his early total immersion in Gothic fiction made it much more difficult for him to find his own voice, and may in that sense be adjudged a negative experience that bore little fruit. William Lovell, planned as far back as 1792, written in 1793-95, and published in 1795-9, shows that Tieck had long wanted to move on from Gothic, but was initially unable to do so. In works like Die eiserne Maske and Abdallah he merely exploited Der Genius in an uncritical way, but William Lovell marks a real step forward, for it is Der Genius become reflective, no longer hounding the reader from one frisson to the next, but showing through the varied perspectives of letters both the situation and its explanation, the illusion and the hard reality, the exaltion of feeling and its manipulation. Der Genius and the novels, good or bad, which share its pattern, [like] Mrs Radcliffe’s, generally treat the reader to a host of concluding explanations for the moments when he was on the edge of his chair

234 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective [...] Tieck’s novel has succeeded in freeing itself from the grip of incident, as it stands back from its characters.108

Lovell, far from being saved from tragic knowledge by the explained supernatural, is left facing an abyss of despair as Tieck moves from the Gothic mode to the Romantic. William Lovell portrays ‘the disorientation and disintegration of the human mind under the influence of an overcharged imagination’.109 The horror in William Lovell derives, as it also does in Hoffmann’s Die Elixiere des Teufels and its English-language double, from the demonstration of ‘the dissolution of personality [...] the seduction and destruction of a human soul’.110 Thanks to Nicolai’s Gothic frontispiece with its atmosphere of mystery and terror, William Lovell was mistaken by the critic of the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung (4/1797, 197) for ‘the translation of a mediocre English original [of the Gothic variety]’, whereas its machinations of a secret society controlled by a mysterious figure and his emissaries are straight out of Grosse’s Der Genius. The irony is that had William Lovell been the English novel for which it was mistaken, it would most likely have been taken for the translation of a mediocre German novel of the Gothic kind. As it is, William Lovell is a miscellaneous novel of several kinds. Technically an epistolary novel, it appears, from the start, to be a Reiseroman. However, sincethe journey leads not so much out into the world, as into the secret world of the mind, it is really a Bildungsroman. In the second volume it then becomes a post-Grossian Bundesroman (Andrea Cosimo has the cold, piercing eye of Schiller’s Armenian, Grosse’s stranger and Radcliffe’s Schedoni, while Rosaline points back to Grosse’s Rosalia) with elements of the Kriminalroman. Lovell, who has long worn blinkers in order not to be able to see the abyss along the edge of which he has been walking, wants, but is afraid, to be himself again. When he finds himself, he discovers that he is and thereby becomes - a secret murderer. As if all this were not enough, it is also, very much, a novel about its author’s changing attitude towards Grosse’s Der Genius as we sense Tieck first coming to terms with Grosse’s monstrous novel and then struggling to move on from it. Lovell’s ‘sense of some kind of dark fate, of something menacing that beckons from the future’111 is Romantic rather than Gothic. When all is said and done William Lovell is a Romantic novel.

108 109 110 111

Paulin, 55. Blackall, 158. Blackall, 152 (of William Lovell). Blackall, 152.

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Tieck’s famous library sold in 1849112 included, in addition to The Adventures of Caleb Williams, a book, Miscellaneous Pieces of Ancient English Poetry (1764), that was presented to Tieck by Godwin in 1817 when Crabb Robinson introduced the two men, between whom there proved to be, in Paulin’s words, ‘no basis for more than pleasantries between these two, surprisingly related, writers’.113 One of Tieck’s many translators, Mme L. Davésiés de Pontès, was later to refer to William Lovell as ‘a novel in the Godwin style, infinitely inferior [...] to Caleb Williams’.114 Perhaps the German critic who saw William Lovell as the ‘translation of a modiocre English original’ (ALZ, 1797/4, 197) was voicing a similar perception. Up to the critical point at which they diverge Caleb Williams and William Lovell have much in common. Werther is a presence in both these novels of flight and pursuit in which the edge of the abyss is a central image. Gothic reality is generated internally in the form of obsessive thoughts, so that both Caleb Williams and William Lovell are about the self-haunting of the protagonist, his pursuit of self, his attempts to get away from himself as murderer. However, notwithstanding many similar perceptions and the presence of similar Gothic machinery, these two novels written at the same time have different centres of gravity. Godwin’s real concern is society, Tieck’s is the individual. Tieck’s novel is a study of individual psychology, something Godwin’s novel merely includes. Tieck being far less socially and politically oriented than Godwin, his novel lacks Godwin’s Jacobinical social criticism. Lovell, haunted by the sense of a dark fate awaiting him which becomes reality in the course of his journey, is effectively imprisoned within his state of mind. The last of Tiecks’s Gothic works proper is the satirical sketch ‘Fermer, der Geniale’, which appeared in Straußfedern (VI, 3) in 1796. It is linked to Peter Lebrecht in that it references a number of partly identical fashionable Gothic texts. The title may appear to suggest (Fermer Farmer; -roder = cultivator) that this may be a pen-and-ink sketch of the genial Wackenroder, but there is more of Tieck here, the very literary young man who, on his return to Berlin from Göttingen, defined and at the same time alienated or lampooned every passing mood by relating it to a literary model, which at this time meant mostly ‘Gothic’ ones. Fermer-Tieck mocks himself when he says ‘Meine Phantasie läuft mit meinem Kopfe davon’ (My imagination is running away with me) and in having Louise say that she took his letters for so many Stilübungen. The author having announced him (‘Gottlob!’), Nanette places herself by reference to Theodor Gottlob Cramer’s latest work, Das 112 113 114

See Catalogue de la bibliothèque célèbre de M. Ludwig Tieck (Berlin, 1849). Paulin, 210. Quoted from Zeydel, 178. Mme Davésiés de Pontès’ comment appeared in the context of her notes in Poets and Poetry of Germany, 2 vols (London: ???, 1858),

236 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Turnier von Nordhausen (1795); in the context of the story it needs to be put together with Fermer’s duel - mockingly described in terms of the Ritterroman as a feud - that never was. Here too are the obligatory references to Goethe’s ‘licentious’ Stella and Schiller’s ‘Jacobinical’ Die Räuber, the two works that gave German drama its bad name in Britain. The reference to Krokodilbrut from Die Räuber is followed by one to Veit Weber’s Männerschwur und Weibertreue, in which Tieck manages to make Weber’s ‘Weibertreue’ sound like something from Iffland. Some of the other favourites of Tieck’s now past (hence the satire) youth follow in the form of references to Schlenkert’s Friedrich mit der gebißnen Wange, a pretty dire Ritterroman, discussed in the next chapter. The best-known Ritterromane to be written in dialogue form are by Weber and Schlenkert. The titles with which the sketch ends invoke Spieß, Rambach, and Wackenroder in turn: Löwenhelm der Bärenstarke (cf. Spieß, Löwenritter, 1794), Die Eroberung von Teltow, ein brandenburgsch-vaterländisches Schauspiel (cf. Rambach, Der grosse Kurfürst von Rathenau, 1795, and Die unsichtbaren Sichtbaren (cf. Wackenroder, Die Unsichtbaren, 1794). This is, of course, a tale with a moral, for the writer who uses other writers’ voices as Tieck was still doing, is liable to find either that he has no voice of his own, or that he has mislaid that voice (cf. Ryno: ‘sein eigener Ton, seine eigene Stimme war ihm fremd [Fermer  Fremder]--geworden’). Roger Paulin has rightly emphasized that the ‘fairytale’ Der Runenberg (1802), involving the subterranean world, the uncanny and an almost Manichaean horror of life, does not parallel ‘Goethe’s descent to a mythical matriarchal realm in the second part of Faust’. Nor is Tieck’s concern what Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert terms the Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft.Der Runenberg involves, rather, a ‘descent into terror, the „Nachtseite“ [dark side] of nature’115 and the Romantic imagination. That the Tieck-like central figure is named Christian and that the statuesque beauty he discovers near the top of the Runic Mountain gives him the mysterious runic tablet with the words ‘Nimm dieses zu meinem Angedenken!’ (Take this in remembrance of me) shows that the tale is about the meaning of life. Even before this turning point in Christian’s life we read that ‘In seinem Innern hatte sich ein Abgrund [...] aufgetan’ (A chasm had opened up in his mind), and after that fatal meeting ‘[fiel es] wie eine dunkele Nacht [...] in sein Inneres hinein’ (Darkness flooded into his mind), the dark night of the soul. Once aware of it, Christian will never forget the ‘schreckliches Geklüft’ (terrible chasm). It is after Christian has been left the devil’s purse of folktale by ‘der Fremde’ (the stranger) that his life begins to fall apart as his mind 115

Paulin, 142f.

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slowly descends into insanity: growing all too aware of the omnipresence of death, he experiences fear of life, which alienates him from family and self. He obeys the call of the ‘Waldweib’ (the majestic beauty in old age), and heads for the ‘alter verfallener Schacht’ (dilapidated mine-shaft) that stands both for what remains of his young dream andfor the insanity to which he has been reduced by the devil in the form of his fear of life. Der Runenberg is, then, a Romantic study of the ‘Nachtseite’ of the mind (the subconscious), a Gothic fairytale of a uniquely Tieckian kind, and accordingly a ‘Pendant’ to Abdallah. There are enough autobiographical echoes in the tale to show that Der Runenberg too is a confused young man’s reading of his own life as nightmare, and, like William Lovell, it involves ajourney into the secret world of the mind. The tale is Gothic not so much in the sense that it ends in a dark ambiguity, it being unclear whether Christian has ascended to a higher form of consciousness or has descended into insanity, the threat of which had dogged the early Tieck’s footsteps,116 as in the sense that it turns on the fear of death that underlies the whole Gothic genre. Der Runenberg is neither fairytale nor realized nightmare, but an uncanny combination of the two.

V There remain Tieck’s two versions of that Gothic fairytale par excellence, the Bluebeard tale. His Die Freunde (1797) revealed a ‘faery’ otherworld at once enchanting and horrifying, but enchantment, save in the sense of the reader being held spellbound by horror, is missing from the Bluebeard corpus, to which Tieck made a distinguished contribution. With its scimitar raised aloft like the sword of Damocles, forbidden chamber, corpses hanging from hooks as in some nightmare butcher’s shop, dismembered bodies lying around, and blood, blood everywhere, Bluebeard is indeed the stuff of nightmares [...] the most stunning piece of evidence that folktales can be seen as the legitimate precursors of cinematic horror, another genre notorious for trading on collective fears and fantasies. Stories like ‘Bluebeard’ prefigure the gothic plot of modern horror117

The Gothic tale as such, which is the real precursor of the modern horror film and horror story, goes straight back to folktales like Bluebeard. Most of the texts in the Bluebeard canon are not fairytales at all, and those that are, 116 117

Donald Haase, in The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales, ed. Jack Zipes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).524 Tatar, The Classic Fairy Tales (New York & London: Norton, 1999), 138, 140.

238 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective are distinctly Gothic. The common gothic motif of the woman (as it usually is) abducted by some fiendish count to his castle with its subterraneous chamber of horrors goes back to Perrault’s La Barbe bleue and is replicated in Bluebeard tales like the Grimms’ Das Mordschloß, in which the butcher claims to be (but is not) a count. Whether any of the Grimms’ storytellers were in any way influenced by the popular (Gothic) literature of the time (1808-12) is not known. Both Tieck’s Die sieben Weiber des Blaubart and the Grimms’ Blaubart118 derive, one directly and the other indirectly, from Perrault’s La Barbe bleue (1695), the model on which so many subsequent changes were rung. In the oral versions that preceded La Barbe bleue the heroine feels it to be her duty to open the forbidden door, and resuscitates her sisters by putting their body parts together again, a motif copied by Spieß in Das Petermännchen. Perrault weakened his work by seeming to prescribe and thus limit the meaning of this tale of transgression against patriarchal command, and by blaming the victim for the villain’s villainy. The wife’s motivation in using the phallic enchanted key, which stands for its absent owner, for the key too has a blue Bart (bit),119 to gain entry to the forbidden chamber reflects her motivation in marrying Bluebeard for his money, but more fundamental is the fact that La Barbe bleue echoes the story of the Fall. It is this, when combined with its actual Gothic paraphernalia, that makes it an archetypal Gothic tale. In giving his wife the keys of his castle, Bluebeard is acting the part of the serpent (and his bride the part of the victim held by the serpent’s unwavering, mesmeric gaze), and therefore of the devil, in the story of the Fall. Frederick the Great, in a remarkable passage in his anti-clerical satire Commentaires apostoliques et théologiques sur les saintes prophéties de l’auteur sacré de Barbe-bleue (1779), was right to argue that the man with the blue beard was none other than the Devil.120 The myth of the Devil is related to that of the serpent and the monster/guardian at the door, and to the Gothic symbolism of closing off and of setting fixed limits where there should be none. Tieck’s first treatment of the Bluebeard story was a play, Ritter Blaubart, which appeared in his Volksmärchen herausgegeben von Peter Lebrecht (1797). It is set in a fantastic, fairy-tale version of medieval Germany, a pastiche of the pseudo-medieval German past of Veit Weber. Bluebeard is a knight, Hugo von Wolfsbrünn. In outline Tieck follows Perrault’s tale fairly closely, 118 119 120

The Grimms’ Blaubart is discussed in Chapter 14, in the context of context of parallels between their tales and Gothic. And, being made of iron, would even have had a bluish tinge. The whole passage is reprinted in M. P. Davies’s admirable The Tale of Bluebeard in German Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 68. The ‘blue bit’ also points to patriarchy.

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although his treatment is more literary and more knowing, an evolution that is continued in his second text, Die sieben Weiber des Blaubart (1797). Originally entitled Der Blaubart, it appeared in Phantasus as ‘Ein Mährchen in 5 Akten’, and might equally well have been called a Ritterdrama. Dedicated to Peter Lebrecht, Tieck’s alter ego and fictional author of Ritter Blaubart, Bluebeard is again a knight, this time named Peter Berner, who is presented, and thereby subverted, as that abomination, the unheroic hero of a chivalric tale. His name, Berner (literally, native of Berne), points to Berne with its famous sixteenth-century Kindlifresserbrunnen (Fountain of the Child-Eating Ogre). In fairytales the cannibal usually takes the form of the Kindlifresser or child-eater. In a way that reflects his reading of Gothic the author claims that his tale is based on actual historical documents rather than mere legend, and the narrator frequently intervenes, like some proto-Brechtian agent of Verfremdung, to address the reader and voice his own theoretical concerns: the most original feature of Tieck’s second Bluebeard text is the inclusion of not a little literary theory and the deconstruction of much contemporary thinking about literature.121 The Bluebeard tales are more Gothic than many Gothic texts. That they are Gothic in the old sense of barbaric, is clear. Gothic in terms of eighteenth-century Gothic are, in Das Mordschloß, the Castle of Murder as such, which, as in much Gothic, is the hero of the piece; abduction/seduction (reiten, to ride or mount, is ambiguous) by the so-called count (whose identity is spurious), and his abandonment of his bride, which, happening on the day following their arrival at the ‘count’s’ castle, represents the breakdown of pre-existent order; prohibition and transgression; the nightmare of anxiety; the monstrous and macabre; Bluebeard as the Devil, the diabolical temptation and fall of Eve in Eden; the monster bridegroom; the subterranean chamber or cellar, the forbidden chamber, the chamber of horrors (which in Fitchers Vogel is described as a regular butchery); the labyrinth of mistrust and deviousness; the fatal loss of control that leads to the opening of the door, and the horror caused by awareness of Bluebeard’s sadism and his wife’s vulnerability. Gothic in the modern literary sense are the implicit idea of a precursor text that is being edited, and the generic and hermeneutic instability of the text, whose meaning is far from clear, for there are many different ‘Bluebeard’ texts with different implications and meanings.

121

See Davies, 101, 103ff.

240 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective

VI To refer to all Tieck’s work before William Lovell as rubbish was always to overstate the case. If Gundolf had been open-minded about the late eighteenth-century popular novel, he might have expressed himself differently. The evidence on which our judgment must be based consists of Abdallah, a few short pieces (Ryno, Fermer) that are more interesting in terms of reception history than of literary history, a handful of Gothic fairytales, of which Der blonde Eckbert and Der Runenberg are the weightiest, and Über das Erhabene, which by comparison with Grosse’s essay of the same title, is curiously reticent on what ought to have been its subject, the Gothic aesthetics of pleasurable terror. As it is, Tieck’s aim is not clear; he goes back to square one in the person of ‘Longinus’, and never really gets to what might, with advantage, have been the point. If he had been satisfied with the essay, he would have acknowledged it; as it is, his silence speaks for itself. Otherwise there is Peter Lebrecht, which amounts to little more than a prelude to William Lovell. Not a Gothic novel as such, but an attempt to escape from the imaginative pull of the genre, William Lovell shows Tieck trying to steer a course between Scylla and Charybdis in the form of late eighteenth-century literary conservatism and the plagiaristic antics of the majority of Gothic Schmierer. As an attempt to show the destructive psychological effect of a Gothically overloaded imagination running out of control it is a gloss on Gothic rather than a positive contribution to the genre. Tieck spent much of the 1790s trying first to be, and then not to be a Gothic writer, trying to get away from the for him baneful influence of German Gothic. Overwritten and overwhelmingly negative though it is, Abdallah is important historically as the only halfway literary-quality Schauerroman; as such it stands beside Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas, which is, by the same token, the only quality Räuberroman, and Hauff’s post-Gothic Ritterroman, Lichtenstein. It is, however, Der blonde Eckbert and Der Runenberg that arguably represent Tieck’s most significant contribution not only to the fairytale but also to the Gothic mode. When all is said and done, it is better to be remembered for one or two brilliant short works than for a number of longer ones infirm alike of purpose and execution. * By way of postscript there remains the vampire-tale Wake Not the Dead, first published in English in Popular Tales and Romances of the Northern Nations (3 vols, 1823), which was subsequently attributed to Tieck. No German original has been found. Tieck’s authorship of the tale having been disputed,

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Ernst Raupach was put forward as the author of the tale, presumably on the strength of his comedy Laßt die Toten ruhen! (1826), which, whatever else it is, is clearly not the original of Wake Not the Dead. The attribution of Wake Not the Dead to Tieck was not only unsound; it was also unfortunate, for a critic, writing in the Monthly Review (4[1826], 136), may well have had it in mind when he dismissed Tieck as ‘a complete exemplar of all the most extravagant horror-mongers who infest the literature of Germany’. My own view is that Wake Not the Dead is not by Tieck, and that it is most likely not a translation at all, just one of the many early Gothic tales masquerading as ‘From the German’. It appears to belong to the same category as The Mysterious Stranger (see Chapter 10).

6 HEINRICH VON KLEIST We have already seen that Sade, writing of the ‘modern novel’ in 1800, argued that it was necessary to call hell to the rescue and to find in the world of nightmare images adequate to the history of man in the postRevolutionary era.1 One of the first men to discover nightmare images adequate to the Age of Terror was Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811), who, three years later, wrote to his half-sister that ‘Die Hölle gab mir meine halben Talente’.2 We are in the realm of what is now called Gothic, with which Kleist was first linked in 1828 when a reviewer rather loosely termed Die Familie Schroffenstein a ‘Schauerstück, ein bißchen zu reich an gotischen Greueln und Schreckensszenen’ (A Gothic piece with rather too many horrors and too much terribilità).3 Over a century later, in 1948, Emil Staiger, pointing out4 that the build-up of suspense in Das Bettelweib von Locarno creates a mood of terror akin to that of Gothic terror/horror literature, once again placed Kleist in the Gothic context. Then, ten years later, Karl S. Guthke showed5 that M. G. Lewis was indebted to Kleist. There the matter of Kleist’s relationship to the Gothic convention rested until 1984, when Peter K. Jansen6 revealed Kleist’s indebtedness to Lewis. My aim in the following pages is to place the evidence first adduced by Jansen and Guthke in a wider context, and, on the basis of further evidence and a perspective resulting from my current preoccupation with the Gothic, to examine the whole question of Kleist’s relationship with the Gothic novel in English and German, a subject from which Kleist scholarship has shied away in the mistaken belief that canonical literature cannot be indebted to literature 1 2 3

4

5 6

D. A. F. de Sade, Idée sur les Romans, ed. Octave Uzanne (Paris: Edouard Rouveyre, 1878), 32-33. See letter to Ulrike of 5 October 1803: Kleist, Sämtliche Briefe, ed. Dieter Heimböckel (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1999), 329. See the review of the 1828 Hanover production in the Dresdner Abendzeitung, quoted from Hans Zigelski, Heinrich von Kleist im Spiegelkritik des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zu den Aufführungen der Meiniger (Diss. Erlangen, 1932), 38. Emil Staiger, ‘Kleist: Das Bettelweib von Locarns’, in his Meisterwerke deutscher Spracheaus dem neunzehntenJahrhundert, 2nd (expanded) edn (Zürich: Atlantis, 1948, reprinted in Heinrich von Kleists Lebensspuren, ed. W. Müller-Seidel (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1967), 113-29. Guthke, Englische Vorromantik, 102-20. Peter K. Jansen, ‘„Monk Lewis“ und Heinrich von Kleist’, Kleist-Jahrbuch, 1984, 2554. I am indebted to Jansen both in general and, more specifically, for drawing my attention to the parallels acknowledged in footnotes 39-45.

244 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective outside the canon. That this is far from the case was clearly stated by Kleist in the short essay entitled ‘Ein Satz aus der höheren Kritik’ that underpins my essay.

I Kleist’s Knowledge of Gothic Heinrich von Kleist passes for an idiosyncratic, atypical, and in formal terms somewhat ‘classical’ type of Romantic, but his Romanticism is black, having significant and still largely unexplored connexions with schwarze Romantik in the form of Gothic.It is no chance that a number of artists and writers with whom he has an affinity (Piranesi,7 C. D. Friedrich, Goya, Hoffmann, Tieck, the author of the Nachtwachen, Schopenhauer, Dostoevsky) have been linked with Gothic. Perhaps the closest affinity is with Francisco Goya, darkest and most enigmatic of painters, who in the aftermath of illness in 1792 and 1819 takes Gothic commonplaces such as murder, rape, robbery and shipwreck, and turns them into paradigms of human existence. Kleist does much the same. Of course his work is in significant ways the very opposite of Gothic. His taut, tightly controlled style is well above the range of the typical Gothic writer, and he generally eschews the sensational which quickly came to dominate the sub-literary lower reaches of Gothic as M. G. Lewis’s successors strained for ever grislier effect, although works like Die Marquise von O., Das Erdbeben in Chili and Penthesilea include shocking, sensational events. Preoccupied as he is with the discrepancy between fantasy and fact, and with the demons, images and words in his head, Kleist is obsessed with such things, hence the nightmare images of his work. In an early letter to his aunt and guardian, Auguste Helene von Massow, dated 13-18 March 1793, Kleist, who came to find God incomprehensible, if not indeed identifiable with a malign agency at work in the world, presents her (and today’s reader) with the image of a human being howling like a wolf in the wilderness, alone with his apparently haunted consciousness. The man, a bandit, can, with the advantage of hindsight, be construed as Kleist’s Other, a projection of his self into the future, while the static nature of the image shows the experience to be a dreamlike, autoscopic one: it is a nightmare image par excellence. In asking whether this is a robber or his 7

On Kleist and Piranesi, see Gerhart von Graevenitz, ‘Die Gewalt des Ähnlichen. Concettismus in Piranesis Carceri und in Kleists Erdbeben in Chili’, in Gewagte Experimente und kühne Konstellationen. Kleists Werk zwischen Klassizismus und Romantik, ed. Christine Lubkoll & Günter Oesterle (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2001), 63-92.

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victim, the fifteen-year-old writer is inviting the reader to come to a false conclusion, for the truth is that this is the creature who, in his work, will prey on its victims like a wolf, and is on one memorably horrid occasion found, with the rest of the pack, tearing the body of its would-be lover to pieces. Kleist’s feral Raubhündin Penthesilea invites comparison not only with the Bluthund (in the figurative sense of bloodthirsty murderer) of Gothic writers like F. C. Schlenkert, which recurs at the end of Das Erdbeben in Chili,8 but with Plautus’s famous tag ‘Lupus est homo homini, non homo, quom qualis sit non novit’, often quoted as ‘Homo homini lupus’,9 which Schopenhauer was to make the centrestone of his philosophy: die Hauptquelle der ernstlichsten Übel, die den Menschen treffen, [ist] der Mensch selbst: homo homini lupus. Wer dies Letztere recht ins Auge faßt, erblickt die Welt als eine Hölle, welche die des Dante dadurch übertrifft, daß Einer der Teufel des Andern ist. (The chief source of the most serious evils besetting man is man himself, who preys on his fellow-men like awolf. Anyone who is mindful of this will see the world as a hell which surpasses that of Dante in that one man is of necessity another man’s devil.)

In likening men and women out of control to the wolf Kleist is anticipating Schopenhauer. We have only to read on in his letter to find him describing the terrible way in which the man began to scream. Kleist and his companion draw their swords to defend themselves against the bandito, whose only reaction is to go on screaming, an extraordinary and extraordinarily suggestive emblem of life, worthy of Goya and, a century later, of Kubin, showing that at fifteen Kleist was imaginatively ready to become a writer. The way in which the bandito’s screaming, like that later depicted in Edvard Munch’s The Scream, is frozen in time is precisely nightmare-like. He is obsessed by the idea of Raub/Raublust/ Raubsucht/Raubmord (robbery, rape, rapacity and, murder), in other words with what Schopenhauer was to term the predatoriness of mankind. The predatory, lupine nature of man is a motif of Kleist’s work, compare the ‘satanische Rotte’ (satanical pack) at the end of Das Erdbeben in Chili, and the ‘sich untereinander selbst bekämpfenden Rotte’10 (pack fighting among 8 9 10

In fairytale, which is frequently invoked in Kleist’s work, the Devil may take the form of a dog. Asinaria, I: 495, quoted from The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, ed. Elizabeth Knowles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 578. Kleist uses ‘Rotte’ (as opposed to ‘Rudel’), but otherwise appears to make no distinction between wolf and dog. His main point is that humans are pack animals, and that in packs they tend to revert to innately predatory behaviour.

246 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective them-selves) at the beginning of Die Marquise von O.11 This obsession will have manifold origins, ranging from the way in which life robbed him of one parent after another at too early an age, the seven years of which he was robbed by the army, the omnipresence of robbers and of Raubritterschlösser (robber-barons’ castles) on the roads he was forever wandering (in 1807 he found himself incarcerated in just such a Raubritterschloß in the form of Fort de Joux), to say nothing of the roving French army, which he described as a Räubergesindel (rapacious rabble). He was throughout his life imprisoned in the military-aristocratic caste into which he had the misfortune to be born. It is tragic that he was to waste seven years in the army; in one of his earliest letters he writes of ‘die Zeit, die wir [...] so unmoralisch töten’ (the time that we waste so immorally),12 which is a recognition of the way in which life the peculiar circumstances of his caste and personal psychology - has caused him to waste so much time, but also a disguised self-criticism. His suicide, in which, tragically, he enacted the role of Raubmörder, was a final desperate effort to break out of the prison of his life, but it was the ex-Guards officer who pulled the trigger, robbing the poet of his life. In 1799 he left the Potsdamer Regiment Garde in order to devote his time to university studies. Even during his time in Potsdam he had been, in his own words, ‘mehr Student als Soldat’ (more student than soldier).13 His main interests at this time were in what he termed ‘höhere Theologie’ (higher theology), meaning pure mathematics, physics and metaphysics. In late 1803, motivated by the prospect not of glory but of death, he twice tried to join a French-officered foreign legion in the army with which Napoleon was preparing to invade England, his application being turned down on the grounds that he was not known personally to the French War Minister and was in any case not French. Soon after, in another attempt to bring about his own death, he is found planning to assassinate Napoleon. With the exception of well-known facts like these, the ‘biographical truth’ of Kleist’s life is difficult, and at times impossible, to get at;14 this applies above all to the detailed facts of his early reading and its impact on his troubled consciousness. He edits out the inner events of his life in order to keep critics and would-be biographers at a distance. Many writers are reticent about their Quellenheimlichkeiten (the secrets of their sources), but it is ironical

11 12 13 14

Cf. Käthchen, Act II, Sc. 8, where Kunigunde refers to Freiburg as a wolf, see Kleist, Sämtliche Werke (Munich: Droemer, 1952), 399, 729, 682. Letter of 25 Feb. 1795 to Ulrike: Sämtliche Briefe, 19). Letter to Christian Ernst Martini of 19 March 1799: Sämtliche Briefe, 28. See Thomas Wichmann, Heinrich von Kleist (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1988), 2, and Heinrich von Kleists Lebensspuren, ed. Helmut Sembdner (Frankfurt a. M.: Insel, 1984).

Heinrich von Kleist 247

that so little is known about the ‘Dichter der absoluten Subjektivitat’ (poet of absolute subjectivity).15 Although there is scant evidence on which to base a judgment, what little we know of Kleist’s early reading suggests that while he did not exactly share the extravagant early sub-literary tastes of Tieck and Hoffmann, he was mildly obsessed with what he called ‘Scharteken’, which may reasonably be supposed to reflect his early reading. We shall see that, in addition to the Schauerroman in the form of The Monk, he knew the Ritterroman (Schlenkert) and the Bundesroman/Vehmgerichtroman (Naubert), and probably knew the Räuberroman (Vulpius) and the Geisterseherroman (Schiller). Whether he knew Beckford’s Vathek is not known, but his remark, in a letter to Wilhelmine, that ‘wir dünken uns frei, und der Zufall führt uns allgewaltig an tausend feingesponnenen Fäden fort’ (we fancy we are free, but all-powerful chance holds us captive by a thousand fine-spun threads)16 suggests that he may have known it. While Kleist’s metaphor does not occur in Beckford, the underlying view of life is similar. Frederick S. Frank, in a short, cogent essay, isolated four characteristics of Beckford’s orientalized Gothic, of which one is ‘the evocation of a hypothetically malignant cosmos, an ontologically unreliable and ambiguously deceiving Gothic universe in which all moral norms are inverted or twisted, where disorder is far more likely than order, and where universal darkness can bury all without warning and at any moment’.17 There is thus a parallel between Beckford and Kleist, both of whom portray a world governed by chance and chaos. The fact that he wrote to his fiancée on 14 September 1800 that, the work of Goethe, Schiller and Wieland being banned, the lending library in Würzburg contained nothing but ‘Rittergeschichten, lauter Rittergeschichten, rechts die Rittergeschichten mit Gespenstern, links ohne Gespenster, nach Belieben’ (chivalric romances, nothing but chivalric romances, on the right chivalric romancres with ghosts, on the left those without, the choice is yours)18 shows his awareness of the Ritterroman variety of Gothic during his period of self-discovery in 1800-01. In another letter to his fiancée, dated 11 January 1801, he dismissed the genre, which was to leave its mark on his work, as ‘abentheuerlich’ (far-fetched).19 It was probably in 1800-01 that he read and was impressed by Friedrich von Oertel’s translation of M. G. Lewis’s The Monk (Der Mönch, 1797-98). He, who became a friend of Zschokke, referred both to Abällino, der große Bandit 15 16 17 18 19

Wichmann, 2. Sämtliche Briefe, 222. F. S. Frank, ‘The Gothic Vathek’, 157. Sämtliche Briefe, 126. Sämtliche Briefe, 187.

248 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective (1795) and to a performance of it that he attended on 30 August 1800 and left during the second act as ‘erbärmlich’ (pathetic).20 There is no reason to think that he knew Lewis’s Gothic romance Abällino, the Bravo of Venice, but his early reading is known to have included Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen (1772), a Ritterdrama which inspired the idea and the setting of the secrettribunal scene in Das Käthchen von Heilbronn, Friedrich Christian Schlenkert’s Friedrich mit der gebißnen Wange (1786-88), which he read before 1793,21 and Benedicte Naubert’s Hermann von Unna (1788), by whose depiction of a meeting of the Vehmgericht he was impressed, and which may possibly have put into his mind the family feud theme that was to form the basis of Die Familie Schroffenstein. We shall see presently that Naubert’s famous Gothic novel influenced Das Käthchen von Heilbronn in several ways. He may also have known Naubert’s Alf von Dülmen (1791), which turns, like Michael Kohlhaas, on the criminal pursuit of private vengeance. In March 1803 Kleist took elocution lessons with a tutor at the University of Leipzig, who turns out to be Heinrich August Kerndörffer (1769-1846),22 a Gothic novelist specializing in Räuberromane who went on to become a prolific miscellaneous writer; his later output includes a book on cryptography. Best known for Matthias Klostermayr, der sogenannte Bayerische Hiesel (1800), in 1803 Kerndörffer had just published Lorenzo, der kluge Mann im Walde, oder das Banditenmädchen, ein Seitenstück zu Rinaldo Rinaldini (1801-03) and was working on Karlo Orsini, Räuber, ein Zeitgenosse Rinaldo Rinaldinis (1803-04), all of them well below Kleist’s literary level and unlikely to have interested him, although he probably knew Vulpius’s Rinaldo Rinaldini. Kerndörffer is also known for his imitations of Walpole’s Otranto (Der Schreckensthurm am See [date not recorded], with ‘das öde und entlegene Schloß Otranto) and Radcliffe’s The Italian (Die Ruinen der Geisterburg, 1805). Kleist went to Kerndörffer because he thought that learning to declaim his work would help him to hone his style and publicize his work. Letters to Marie von Kleist and Ernst von Pfuel dated 20 July and late July/early August 1805 respectively show that he knew Young’s Night Thoughts and thought of them as having ‘death on every page’.23 He associated Caspar David Friedrich’s Der Mönch am Meer (Monk by the Sea) with Night Thoughts. It goes without saying that he knew Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774: The Sorrows of Werter, tr. Daniel Malthus, 1779), the work which, with Young’s Night Thoughts (1742-45: tr. Ebert, Klagen oder Nachtgedanken über Leben, Tod und Unsterblichkeit, 1760-71), established the Gothic mood in Germany. The 20 21 22 23

Sämtliche Briefe, 95. Mentioned in his letter to Aunt Massow on 13-18 March 1793. Sämtliche Briefe, 322. Sämtliche Briefe, 354.

Heinrich von Kleist 249

most important European novel of the immediate pre-Gothic period, Goethe’s Werther, though not a Gothic novel as such, has obvious Gothic period features, including the leitmotif of the ruined arch that found its way into the work of Caspar David Friedrich, the graveyard atmospherics that reflect Young’s Night Thoughts, the idea of transgression, the view of the universe as an all-consuming, devouring monster,24 and so on. Hoffmann, in a letter dated 19 February 1795,25 referred to the impact of a once famous Gothic work that Kleist may also have known, when he wrote ‘Meine neue Lectüre ist [...] der Genius von Grosse [...] Unbemerkt entschlüpfen die Ideen aus dem Buche und eigne treten an ihre Stelle’ (I am now reading Grosse’s Der Genius. Imperceptibly ideas from the book vanish and are replaced by my own). Whether Kleist read Grosse’s sensational novel which, like his own future work, was known for its involved technique and for ‘hounding the reader from one frisson to the next’,26 is not clear, but the chances are that he did, for he is known to have read a novel deriving from it, Die Geschichte des Herrn William Lovell (1795-96), in which Ludwig Tieck came to terms with Gothic à la Grosse, finally managing to escape from that once so heady influence. William Lovell came complete with a frontispiece linking it to Gothic fiction and a text that linked it to Der Genius: in this novel with a ‘complicated plot of a sensational nature’27 deriving from multi-stranded horror novels there is ‘a secret society controlled by a mysterious figure and his emissaries, minded to acquaint Lovell with every lust, but also every disillusionment, before leading him to destruction’.28 The radical subjectivism of William Lovell evidently appealed to Kleist,29 who has rightly been called ‘das Paradebeispiel eines „überspannten“ Romantikers, eine Art Inkarnation des Ba[l]der aus Tiecks William Lovell’ (the perfect example of an extreme Romantic, a sort of incarnation of Balder in Tieck’s William Lovell).30 Now in a brief essay entitled ‘Ein Satz aus der höheren Kritik’ (1811) Kleist voices the idea that ‘der Gedanke zu unsern vollkommensten Kunstwerken [...] bei der Lektüre schlechter, der Vergessenheit ganz übergebener Broschüren und Scharteken entstanden ist’ (the starting point 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Goethe, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (Tübingen: Wunderlich, 1976), 90 (letter of 15 August). E. T. A. Hoffmann, Briefwechsel, ed. Friedrich Schnapp, 3 vols (Munich: Winkler, 1967-69), I, 53. Paulin, 55. Blackall, 152. Paulin, 52. On the impact on Kleist of his reading of William Lovell, see Peter Struck, Kleist’s Wahrheitskrise und ihre frühromantische Quelle (Diss. Hannover, 1985). Wichmann, 65.

250 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective for our most consummate works of art is [sometimes] to be found in longforgotten chapbooks and trashy novels).31 It is probably no chance that he did not risk speculation by voicing such an idea until the year of his death, for it applies not only to writers of his own generation like Tieck, Lewis, Shelley, and De Quincey, but also, and above all, to Kleist himself, whose characteristic favourite word for literary trash is ‘Scharteke’, a term that he applied to his own Die Familie Schroffenstein (‘eine elende Scharteke’ [a botched work]).32 He is known as a consummate stylist whose originality lies, in Thomas Wichmann’s words, ‘weniger in der Erfindung als in der Bearbeitung von Stoffen’ (less in the invention than in the treatment of his subjects),33 so that his view may be applied to his own literary practice, especially in his period of self-discovery in 1800-01. He may well have felt, in retrospect, that too much of his own first work (Schroffenstein) took its starting point from another writer’s work (Lewis’s The Monk). While we do not know which works he labelled ‘Scharteken’ in his own mind, it seems likely that Schlenkert’s less than gripping Friedrich mit der gebißnen Wange, which is discussed presently, was one, and that The Monk (as analysed by A. W. Schlegel) and Zschokke’s Abällino were others. It was probably his awareness of being, imaginatively, held captive by Schlenkert’s unimaginative, aesthetically worthless novel, that prompted another revealing comment on ‘Scharteken’ that is discussed presently.

II In his admirably detailed and measured article on Lewis and Kleist, Jansen raised the question whether The Monk was not a major imaginative and liberating experience for Kleist, who seems to have spent some of his earliest works in trying to come to terms with it. Writing of The Monk as a ‘Kleist möglicherweise vertrauten Text’ (a text that Kleist may have known),34 he left readers of his article in little doubt that Kleist was familiar with Lewis’s novel, and was indeed for a time preoccupied with it. We shall see that, Scharteke or not, The Monk contributed to Kleist’s discovery of his literary self and philosophy of life, and thereby to the genesis of his work. 31 32 33

34

Kleist, SWB, ed. Helmut Sembdner, 4th edn (Munich:Hanser, 1965), 347. Quoted from Hilda Meldrum Brown, Heinrich von Kleist: The Ambiguity of Art and the Necessity of Form (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 224. See also Wichmann, 63. Wichmann, 45. Cf. Kleist’s statement in a letter of 14 February 1808 to Heinrich Joseph von Collin, that ‘in der Kunst kommt es überall auf die Form an, und Alles, was eine Gestalt hat, ist meine Sache’ (Briefe [Reclam], 420). Jansen, 25.

Heinrich von Kleist 251

What makes The Monk historically important is the fact that in it Lewis created a new, fully Romantic type of Gothic fiction in which supernatural occurrences no longer turn out to have rational explanations à la Schiller and Radcliffe and their respective schools, but symbolize the precariousness of human existence in the face of forces that are at best inscrutable, andoften appear downright evil.35 This positively ‘Kleistian’ view of life will surely have commended itself to him, and may well be the reason why he was so impressed by The Monk, which he might have been expected to deprecate, and which he very likely did deprecate while at the same time being impressed by it malgré soi; it was the same with Friedrich mit der gebißnen Wange. Where he came across The Monk is not known, but he may have read and been intrigued by A. W. Schlegel’s lengthy and largely hostile review in the Jenaische allgemeine Literaturzeitung (1798, No. 157), which described it as being ‘aus schlechten deutschen [Romanen] zusammengeborgt und nachgeahmt’ (borrowed from and written in imitation of second-rate German novels) and condemned it as a sign of ‘die tiefste Barbarei der Einbildungskraft und des Geschmacks’ (the most profound barbarism of the imagination and of taste).36 Whatever or whoever it was that led him to read The Monk, his reading of it was evidently a factor in his self-discovery as a writer in 180001. His silence on the subject masks some degree of spasmodic preoccupation with the Gothic from 1792 onwards to the end of his life, for Jansen shows both Das Erdbeben in Chili (1806) and its continuation, Der Findling (1810-11), to be influenced by The Monk. To Lewis belongs some of the credit normally given to Kleist for discovering the terrors of the post-classical, post-Enlightenment, postrevolutionary world. Kleist and Lewis (one born in 1775, the other in 1777) both illustrate the metaphysics of schwarze Romantik. Kleist’s view of the world goes further, for he is a thinker in a way Lewis is not, but the Gothic starting-point is what he transcends as he shows humans powerless in the face of a chaotic,37 unstable, irrational, incomprehensible world that 35

36

37

See Hilary Brown, 119, to whom my wording is indebted; Karl S. Guthke, ‘Die Herkunft des weltliterarischen Typus der „Femme Fatale“ aus der deutschen Volkssage,’ Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, 6 (1956), 294ff; Guthke, Englische Vorromantik, 33f; Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), 192-95. See A. W. Schlegel, Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Eduard Böcking, 12 Vols (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1846-7), XI, 269-74, and A. W. Schlegel, Vorlesungen über schöne Literatur und Kunst, ed. J. Minor (Heilbronn: Henninger, 1884), II: 36. See James Gleick, Chaos (New York: Penguin, 1988). The ‘Zufall’ by which Kleist’s world is dominated can be equated with ‘chaos’ in today’s terminology. With his grounding in pure mathematics, physics and metaphysics, and preocccupation with chance, Kleist would have appreciated chaos theory.

252 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective threatens to engulf and annihilate them. In Das Erdbeben in Chili for example the very base and basis of life is suddenly destroyed so that what had been taken for granted as terra firma suddenly turns into an abyss - the very abyss towards which Kleist saw his life as moving - that becomes an emblem of life. It is at this point that Piranesi’s architecture of the abyss may be invoked. The fact that it had, in its first edition, ruffled so many clerical feathers will have been an added recommendation to the young Kleist, but The Monk would hardly have impressed him if it had not conveyed, as it were, a protoKleistian view of life: ‘Im Monk ist der Mensch in seiner ganzen Gebrechlichkeit und einsamen Hilflosigkeit vor einem problematischen Transzendenten dargestellt’ (In The Monk humanity is seen in all its frailty and lonely helplessness when confronting a problematical Absolute).38 ‘Great Heaven! how frail thy creature man is made!’ Lewis quotes from Matthew Prior in an epigraph to Chapter 11 of The Monk, and in Chapter 2 he has Ambrosio (who embodies it) speak of the ‘frailty of mankind’. In a letter to Ulrike of 5 October 1803 Kleist referred to humanity as ‘ein so hülfloses Ding’. This human frailty is central to his view of life in the form of ‘die Gebrechlichkeit der Welt’,39 which is virtually a translation of Lewis’s words, for in the context ‘Welt (world) is tantamount to ‘mankind’. If this, Kleist’s most famous phrase, encapsulating his whole philosophy, comes from Lewis, as seems to be the case,40 this is testimony enough to the impact of the English writer. There were, then, ideas and passages in The Monk, often crassly expressed, that probably struck Kleist as crying out to be developed in an artistically more sophisticated context. There was much that is likely to have claimed and held his attention, much that chimed with his own anticlerical and philosophical views, and especially with his views on human frailty, and on superstition and credulity. Jeronimo and Josephe in Das Erdbeben in Chili are both damnably credulous, as is Piachi in Der Findling. Credulity/gullibility being a major theme of the German early Gothic novel of the ghost-seer kind (Schiller’s Der Geisterseher, Tschink’s Geschichte eines Geistersehers, Kahlert’s Der Geisterbanner), it would, but for Kleist’s reticence, be surprising that there 38 39

40

Guthke, Englische Vorromantik, 23. At the end of Die Marquise von O. Kleist writes of the ‘ gebrechliche Einrichtung der Welt’. In Penthesilea the spectator hears of ‘die Welt [...], die gebrechliche’ (lines 2854f.), and the High Priestess ends by deploring the frailty of mankind: ‘Wie gebrechlich ist der Mensch’, she says with Matthew Prior. See Kleist, Sämtliche Werke, 716, 360, 366; M. G. Lewis, The Monk, 3 vols (London: Gibbings, 1913), III: 127, II: 40; Kleist, Sämtliche Briefe, 329. Notwithstanding Sembdner 2, 15-16 and 143.

Heinrich von Kleist 253

is no evidence that he knew Der Geisterseher. The presence of a Russian officer in Schiller’s work and in Die Marquise von O., suggestive though it is, does not constitute such evidence, nor does the fact that Der Geisterseher is said (in the sub-title) to be taken from among the papers of Count O., for such abbreviations are commonplace in the fiction of the time. However, it would be far more surprising if Kleist, who was a great admirer of Schiller, was interested in the psychology of superstition and obsessed by its ‘horrors’,41 did not know and admire Der Geisterseher, which was both a huge popular success and, as the model for a major subset of German Gothic. Given that The Monk,which evidently remained in his mind, on and off, for the rest of his life, contained ideas that served to provoke his own, Kleist may have used it in a way not altogether dissimilar to the way in which Lewis proceeded to use Die Familie Schroffenstein in Mistrust,42 save that whereas Die Familie Schroffenstein gave Lewis the makings of Mistrust, which is a rifacimento in novel form of Kleist’s tragedy, The Monk provided Kleist with a framework for Die Familie Schroffenstein and Das Erdbeben in Chili, together with the starting-point for Die Familie Schroffenstein, Das Erdbeben in Chili and Der Findling. More important, it seems to have provoked him into finding his voice as a writer, all that was ever needed, for he had arguably reached imaginative maturity back in 1793, long before he started writing more than letters. Aspects of The Monk were intensified by Kleist in Die Familie Schroffenstein, which was in its turn intensified by Lewis in Mistrust. As dramatists both men are occupied with intensity, but they are concerned with it in different ways: with Lewis it is a matter of racheting up the emotional impact, whereas with Kleist it is the ‘philosophical’ impact, the implication of the text, that is enhanced. If Kleist had come across The Monk a few years later, he would surely have seen it for what it was and is, but at this creatively early period he appears to have been content to use his reactions to it as the basis for Die Familie Ghonorez (the early version of Die Familie Schroffenstein which avoids all the printer’s errors of the supposedly final text), Das Erdbeben in Chili, and Der Findling (the original foundling is Lewis’s Ambrosio), just as he later used Friedrich mit der gebißnen Wange and his own mixed reaction to it to set the equivocal tone of Das Käthchen von Heilbronn. The use in Die Familie Ghonorez of a string of names taken from The Monk (Raymond, Elvira, Mother St Ursula, Antonia Alonzo and Agnes, and the province of Murcia),43 suggests 41 42

43

See the letter to his fiancée of 15 August 1801. On the indebtedness of Kleist to Lewis, see Peter K. Jansen, ‘„Monk Lewis“ und Heinrich von Kleist’, Kleist-Jahrbuch, 1984, 25-54; on Lewis’s indebtedness to Kleist, see Guthke, Englische Vorromantik, 102-20. The point, made in Jansen, 39, was first made in Hermann Davidts, Die novellistische

254 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective that this was a recently read novel by which he was impressed, while the parallels between names in Die Familie Ghonorez and Das Erdbeben in Chili show both works to go back to The Monk. Whether Kleist retained so many of Lewis’s names in Die Familie Ghonorez because, Lewis having given him a starting point, he was impatient to get on, is a matter for speculation; the fact that he changed the names in question when he came to write Die Familie Schroffenstein suggests that initially he used the names to keep Lewis’s text in mind as he produced his own. Die Familie Schroffenstein is, after all, his first work, written by way of reaction to aspects of The Monk. Naturally he also reacted against other aspects of it. The lubricity with which Lewis described a rape, for instance, is not to the taste of Kleist, who in Die Marquise von O. merely alludes to a rape that ‘must have’ happened, although later, in describing Nicolo’s assault on the unconscious Elvire in Der Findling, he does not hesitate to echo Ambrosio’s assault on the initially unconscious Antonia.44 Jansen shows Das Erdbeben in Chili and Der Findling to contain features and motifs that go back to The Monk, the main action of Lewis’s novel being reflected in Der Findling and the secondary action in Das Erdbeben in Chili.45 The ‘earthquakes’ that accompany the appearances of Satan in The Monk may have put Kleist in mind of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which provided the real inspiration. The ‘Spanish’ background of The Monk, which is found again in Das Erdbeben in Chili, reflects the late 18th-century view of the Spanish Inquisition. Abolished in 1808, reintroduced in 1814, finally abolished in 1834, it was still in existence when Das Erdbeben in Chili first appeared in 1807. This underlies the anti-clericalism of Lewis and Kleist, who both see the world as held in chains by superstition. Such anticlericalism, which accompanies the abolition of the monasteries in France in 1789 and the secularization of monasteries and convents in Prussian Silesia in Kleist’s lifetime, takes various forms: anti-religious, anti-Catholic, antiJesuit, opposition to Spanish Catholic extremism as manifested in the Spanish Inquisition. The Klostergeschichte (convent/monastery tale) as such can be seen as a subset of the Gothic novel in England and Germany alike; English literature has no special name for it, but anti-clericalism is rife in the Gothic novel. In Germany the genre goes back to F. M. Klinger’s Die Geschichte vom Goldenen Hahn: Ein Beytrag zur Kirchen-Historie (1785), which marked the beginning of the sensational anti-clerical novel of ‘bedroom banditry’, of which Laurette, eine Szene aus der sterbenden Klosterwelt (1784), J. F.

44 45

Kunst Heinrichs von Kleist (Berlin: Literarhistorische Gesellschaft, 1913), 88. The name Antonia recurs in Die heilige Cäcilie. Jansen, 52. Jansen, 39.

Heinrich von Kleist 255

E. Albrecht’s Pater Theodor: Ein Fragment bey Aufhebung eines Klosters (1786) and Veit Weber’s Die Betfahrt des Bruders Gramsalbus (1793) are samples. In French there is Diderot’s La Religieuse (written in 1760, not published until 1796), which derives from Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (1754) and inspired many subsequent popular novels. In English, William Henry Ireland’s The Abbess (1799, translated as Die Priorin. Frei nach dem Englischen der Anna Radcliffe [1824], falsely and quite implausibly attributed to Ann Radcliffe) is a shocking case in point; there are many others. Kleist, while sharing Lewis’s anti-clericalism, is more concerned with the frail, fallible constitution of the world than with its clerical manifestations. The way in which Jeronimo ‘in einer verschwiegenen Nacht den Klostergarten zum Schauplatze seines vollen Glückes gemacht [hatte]’ (one night had made the secluded garden of the convent the scene of his attainment of his desire)46 is copied from The Monk, in which Don Raymond sacrifices Agnes to his passion in the garden of St Clare’s convent. The blind bigotry and ruthless intolerance of Ambrosio’s opening sermon in The Monk finds its parallel in the archbishop’s order in Das Erdbeben in Chili that Josephe should be treated in the harshest possible way. Ambrosio’s later ‘Mercy would here be criminal’47 is paralleled by the way in which Kleist’s Dominican terms it ‘gottlos’ (godless)48 that Josephe and Jeronimo’s punishment is commuted from death by fire to the more ‘merciful’ decapitation.49 In the Dominican church in Santiago, as in the church in Madrid during Ambrosio’s sermon, every single seat is taken, the fact being elaborated in almost identical words in the two works: in the Capuchin church in Madrid ‘Knaben hiengen sich an die Flügel der Cherubim; St Franz und St Marcus trugen je einen Zuhörer auf ihren Schultern, und die heilige Agatha fand sich auf einmal mit Zwillingen beladen’ (Boys were clinging to the wings of cherubims; St Francis and St Mark bore each a spectator on their shoulders; and St Agatha found herself under the necessity of carrying two),50 while in the Domicican church in Santiago ‘an den Wänden hoch, in den Rahmen der Gemälde, hingen Knaben, und hielten mit erwartungsvollen Blicken ihre Mützen in der Hand’ (high up on the walls, on the frames of paintings, boys were sitting expectantly, cap in hand).51 Kleist’s Abbess is based on Lewis’s Mother St Ursula.52 Kleist’s 46 47 48 49 50 51

Sämtliche Werke, 717. Lewis, The Monk, I, 4. Kleist, Sämtliche Werke, 727. Jansen, 41. Lewis, Der Mönch, tr. Oertel, I, 5. Jansen, 47-48. Lewis is quoted from Der Mönch, tr. Friedrich von Oertel, 3 vols (Leipzig: publisher unknown, 1797), II, 155.

256 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective report on the earthquake includes obvious echoes of Lewis’s description of the fire that destroyed the convent,53 a motif that Lewis took over from his at that time unpublished translation of Benedicte Naubert’s Elisabeth, Erbin von Toggenburg (Feudal Tyrants). The way in which, in The Monk, the mob tears the Prioress limb from limb is the type of gratuitous violence by which Kleist was obsessed. Similar violence is found in Das Erdbeben in Chili, Penthesilea and elsewhere. In Der Findling Nicolo replaces the dead lover whom Elvire has idolized in the same way as Ambrosio (the original ‘Findling’) idolized the picture of the Madonna (Matilda); both icons turn into devil-figures. The father in Der Findling, on the other hand, who refuses absolution before being hanged in order to be free to pursue his revenge in hell, goes way beyond Lewis in his implacability. There remains the important issue of style, for, despite the fact that Lewis was by this time already an experienced ‘improver’ of other writers’ work, his own discourse is not infrequently crude and wordy in comparison with Kleist’s much tauter style. Now in Ein Satz aus der höheren Kritik Kleist contrasts the perfect and the flawed work of art: In einem trefflichen Kunstwerk ist das Schöne so rein enthalten, daß es jedem gesunden Auffassungsvermögen [...] in die Sinne springt; im Mittelmäßigen hingegen ist es mit soviel Zufälligem oder wohl gar Widersprechendem vermischt, daß ein weit schärferes Urteil, eine zartere Empfindung und eine geübtere und lebhaftere Imagination, kurz, mehr Genie dazu gehört, um es davon zu säubern. (In a perfect work of art beauty is present in so pure a form that anyone of sound perception cannot fail to be struck by it [...] in a work of indifferent quality, on the other hand, it tends to be intermixed with so much that is accidental or contradictory that it takes a far keener judgment and an altogether finer sensitivity and livelier imagination, in a word, more native genius, to rid it of these things.)

It does not require genius to imagine that Kleist, who was adept at avoiding the accidental and inconsistent, may have in mind his own ability to purge and thereby enhance the flawed materials of a work like The Monk, or, in more general terms, his ability to improve on Friedrich mit der gebißnen Wange. Readers of Der Findling who notice that the way in which Nicolo seeks to revive the unconscious Elvire ‘mit heißen Küssen auf Brust und Lippen’ (with passionate kisses on breasts and lips)54 derives from Ambrosio’s infamous onslaught on the virtue of the sleeping Antonia, will also notice 52 53 54

Jansen, 42. Jansen, 43-44. Sämtliche Werke, 778.

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what Jansen has rightly called ‘der Unterschied zwischen Lewis’ geschwätziger Lüsternheit und der lakonischen Sachlichkeit, mit der Kleist den Vorgang wiedergibt’ (the difference between Lewis’s wordy lasciviousness and the laconic, matter-of-fact way in which Kleist reports the event).55 What Michael Hamburger saw as ‘gruesome crudities reminiscent of some of the minor Jacobean dramatists’ in Die Familie Schroffenstein may reflect Kleist’s reading of Lewis, in the first edition of whose The Monk they are endemic. York Powell, in writing of Lewis’s ‘crude, Surrey-side imaginings’, was to liken him to Webster,56 thus completing the triangle.

III Turning now to the other side of this interrelationship, Die Familie Schroffenstein (1803) was reworked by Lewis for the Gothic market in England as the first of his Romantic Tales (1808), Mistrust; or Blanche and Osbright; a feudal Romance.57 Mistrust is a constant theme in Kleist’s letters, plays and stories, and trust a well-nigh impossible ideal. Lewis was following his normal recipe when he wrote that the idea of Mistrust was ‘suggested by a Tragedy, from which I have borrowed a great part of the plot, and one of the most striking scenes. I have also occasionally inserted in my Narrative such speeches as pleased me.’58 The fact that the debt to Kleist is not specified may mean that Lewis knew Schroffenstein (which was published anonymously in Leipzig in 1803) as an anonymous work containing rather more than what has recently been called ‘some sensationalist traces [of the Gothic mode]’.59 These include the confusion of identity caused by the way in which Agnes and Ottokar change into one another’s clothes in the familiar Gothic cave, resulting in both of them being murdered by mistake, another fact that probably means that Kleist knew Naubert’s Alf von Dülmen as well as her Hermann von Unna. In its own day Die Familie Schroffenstein was regarded, judging by a review of the Hanover 1828 production in the Dresdner Abendzeitung, as a ‘Schauerstück, ein bißchen zu reich an gotischen 55 56 57

58 59

Jansen, 52. The Pageant, 1896, 121. York Powell was Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford from 1894 to 1904. Fred Bridgham, ‘Kleist’s Familie Schroffenstein and „Monk“ Lewis’s Mistrust’, in The Novel in Anglo-German Context, Ed. Susanne Stark (Amsterdam & Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000), 84, makes the reasonable assumption that Ludwig Wieland (son of C. M. Wieland) may have sent Schroffenstein to Lewis on its publication in 1803. Lewis, Romantic Tales (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1808), Vol. I,viii-ix. Bridgham, 85. It is possible, however, that Ludwig Wieland named Kleist as the author of Die Familie Schroffenstein.

258 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Greueln und Schreckensszenen (a horror-piece, a bit too full of Gothic horrors and terror scenes).60 That the reviewer exaggerated will become clear presently. With his customary nonchalance Lewis understates his indebtedness to Schroffenstein: he has borrowed a good deal more than ‘a great part of the plot’ from Kleist. Mistrust is in fact a rifacimento and further Gothification of Die Familie Schroffenstein (1803),61 which, with its wealth of sub-plots and ‘chains of false motivations’,62 was already Gothic enough in the original. In dubbing Mistrust a ‘Feudal Romance’, Lewis was associating it in his mind with Feudal Tyrants, this being shown by the way in which he introduces the name Orrenburg (derived from Torrenburg in Feudal Tyrants, his rewrite of Naubert’s Elisabeth Erbin von Toggenburg). Kleist’s tragedy and Lewis’s romance, both based on the story of Romeo and Juliet (Hamburger described Schroffenstein as ‘a barbarous variation on the Romeo and Juliet theme’,63 while Frank describes Mistrust as ‘a Gothic imagination’s reconstruction of Romeo and Juliet’)64 trace the feud between two noble houses to its conclusion. Lewis has a feud between two different families, which in the event proves no less effective than that between two branches of the same family in Kleist. Frank describes Mistrust as ‘the story [in Romantic Tales] which seems the most conventionally Gothic and which bears the closest resemblance to the repellent excitement of The Monk’.This is largely explicable by Mistrust being a deliberately gothified adaptation of a work (Die Familie Schroffenstein) influenced by The Monk. Given Kleist’s and Lewis’s respective reputations, the expectation must be that Lewis’s work fell short of Kleist’s. This is, however, not the case, for Lewis at times arguably makes more effective use of Kleist’s material, although he has to change the complexion of Schroffenstein to do so. While Kleist, in Die Familie Ghonorez, in effect identified with Lewis by taking over so many names from The Monk, Lewis, when he came to write Mistrust, not only distanced himself from Kleist by changing the names of the characters in Die Familie Schroffenstein, but, more significantly, exaggerated the ‘leading traits’65 of the characters. This is part of a process of

60 61 62 63 64 65

Quoted from Hilda Meldrum Brown, Heinrich von Kleist. The Ambiguity of Art and the Necessity of Form (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 240. See Louis F. Peck, A Life of Mattthew G. Lewis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961), 140-41]. Hilda Brown, 225. Michael Hamburger, Reason and Energy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957), 122. Frank, The First Gothics, 214. Peck, 141.

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intensification and sensationalization by emphasizing the Gothic elements in Kleist’s drama, turning into a full-blown Gothic melodrama what was in Kleist’s hands less a Schauerstück than a tragedy with Gothic elements, in the process ignoring the fact that Kleist, if he had wanted to play to the Gothic gallery, would have done so himself. Such considerations count for little in Gothic-period rifacimenti. Guthke notes that the scenes in Mistrust that were closest to Kleist’s original also involved Gothic elements: in jeder [dieser Szenen] machen sich Elemente geltend, die den Kenner des englischen ‘gotischen’ Romans und Dramas bekannt anmuten: in der ersten Szene die romantische Liebe der Kinder verfeindeter Eltern vor einer ‘Höhle’, die schon lange eine beliebte Kulisse des Schauerdramas war; in der zweiten die leidenschaftliche Darstellung der mittelalterlichen Familienfehde; in der dritten der bei Lewis noch stärker profilierte ‘villain’ der Schauerliteratur und in der letzten obskurer Zauber und Beschwörungsformeln. Tatsächlich steht denn auch Mistrust mehr als jede andere Bearbeitung aus dem Deutschen motivisch in der unmittelbaren Nähe des traditionellen Schauerdramas und romans.66 (in each of these scenes features appear which strike readers of the English Gothic novel and drama as familiar: in the first scene the romantic love of the children of feuding parents in the setting of a ‘cavern’, which had long been a favourite background in Gothic drama; in the second the passionate depiction of the typical family feud of the middle ages; in the third the typical Gothic villain, who is more clearly profiled by Lewis, and in the last such scene obscure sorcery and spells. More than any other [of these] adaptations from the German Mistrust is close to the traditional Gothic drama and novel.)

In Die Familie Schroffenstein the medieval time-setting and background were not particularly significant in themselves, but Lewis missed no opportunity to emphasize the ‘medieval/Gothic’ element, and by the same token brought out the Gothic histrionics of landscape, of which the letters in particular, but also Das Käthchen von Heilbronn, show Kleist to have been fully aware:67 Die typisch ‘gotische’, mit dem ‘Pathos des Furchtbaren’ gestaltete unheimliche Landschaft der einsamen Wildnis fügt Lewis als Ouvertüre zu der Szene in der Hexenküche hinzu: Sturm, Donner, Blitz, zerschmetterte Bäume, wildbewegter Bergwald, heulende Wölfe, dunkle Nacht, ein einziger schwacher Lichtschein in der Ferne: all das ist seit Ann Radcliffe im gotischen Roman als Stimmungskulisse vorgebildet.68 66 67 68

Guthke, Englische Vorromantik, 103-04. Cf. Hilda Brown, 36 (on Kleist’s use of the phrase ‘schauerlich schön’ [terribly beautiful]) and 324-25. Guthke, 111.

260 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective (The typically Gothic uncanny landscape of the lonely wilderness, invested as it is with the whole emotional gamut of the terrible, Lewis prefaces to the scene in the witches’ kitchen: a storm, thunder, lightning, storm-rent trees, a violently agitated mountain forest, howling wolves, pitch-black night, [and] a single speck of light in the distance: from Anne Radcliffe onwards such things belong to the essential atmosphere of the Gothic novel.)

The episodes in Mistrust are highly Gothic, none more so than the scene in the opening chapter in which Lewis’s Rudiger (Kleist’s Rupert) ‘in a paroxysm of grief and rage plunges into the open grave, rips open the coffin and holds the dead child aloft’,69 so that With involuntary horror the friars started back, and then as if changed to stone by a Gorgon’s head, they remained gazing upon the dreadful countenance which presented itself before them. Count Rudiger’s stature was colossal; the grave in which he stood scarcely rose above his knees. His eyes blazed; his mouth foamed; his coal-black hair stood erect, in which he twisted his hands, and tearing out whole handfuls by the roots, he strewed them on the coffin, which stood beside his feet. (Romantic Tales, I, 20f)

Lewis has greatly intensified Act I, Scene I of Die Familie Schroffenstein, turning Rupert (Rudiger) into ‘the [...] conscience-stung villain’ of Gothic romance,70 a veritable Gothic Monster. Kleist’s ending, often criticized for its weakness, Lewis rightly rejected. Kleist’s Act V is replaced by a crescendo of thrills sustained through four chapters. At one point [...] the story seems to veer dangerously toward an incongruously happy ending. A timely assassination and a suicide prevent this, however, and the leading characters are variously consigned to convent, pilgrimage, and grave.71

As a result of such changes Lewis’s text is more melodramatic than Kleist’s, more Gothic; it has greater emotional impact and popular appeal. Lévy sums up the difference between the two texts: ‘tandis que le drame allemand, sous ses dehors spectaculaires et excessifs, véhiculait des themes et une philosophie qui en rachetaient la forme médiocre, le roman de Lewis se donnait pour fin ce qui, pour Kleist, n’était que moyen’ (whereas the German play, beneath its spectacular and extravagant exterior, conveyed themes and a philosophy which redeemed the undistinguished form, Lewis’s novel took for its end what in Kleist had merely been the means to an

69 70 71

Peck, 141. Guthke, Englische Vorromantik, 111. Guthke quotes in English, without naming his source. Peck, 140-41.

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end).72 In other words, Lewis has turned a botched play (as Kleist saw it) with Gothic trimmings into a full-blown Gothic novel. He follows Kleist in concentrating on the horror of his episodes rather than on any moral to be drawn from them, for he implicitly agrees that there would be no point in preaching trust to those incapable of practising it, whereas with Lewis the horror is gratuitous, an end in itself. Kleist is, of course, far more of a conscious stylist than Lewis, to say nothing of being a profounder, more sensitive and more thoughtful writer. In giving Kleist’s work even greater intensity, Lewis changed it into a popular novel complete with sensational elements of which Kleist would have disapproved: they were, after all, there for the taking in Schroffenstein had he wished to take them.

IV With its atrocities and horror scenes, its revenge theme, and its crucial Gothic cave-scene, to say nothing of cross-dressing, Die Familie Schroffenstein is merely the first of Kleist’s dramatic works to bear the imprint of the popular Gothic mode. Then there are the confusions of identity in Amphitryon and Das Käthchen von Heilbronn, the grand ‘historical’ (in fact it is in part ahistorical) secret-tribunal scene in the latter work and the nightmare horrors of Penthesilea. Gothic fairytale as well as Gothic horror informs Penthesilea, of which Hilda Brown has written that Unlike emotions aroused in many ‘gothic’ novels, for example, M. G. Lewis’s infamous and wildly popular The Monk, Kleist’s portrayal of such terror is never gratuitous, since its main vehicle, the heroine in all her frenzied confusion, is simultaneously presented in appealingly human terms. In Kleist’s day [...] a full-scale assault on the human emotions of fear and terror was reserved for the ‘gothic’ novel, but that belonged to the realm of ‘Trivialliteratur’.73

Penthesilea, which turns on loss of control, shares the motif of cannibalism with Gerstenberg’s Ugolino (1768), with Hoffmann’s Nachtstücke, with the Gothic novel at its worst (e.g. I. F. Arnold’s Der schwarze Jonas [1805]), and with fairytale, in which it is commonplace.74 What is not commonplace is that in Kleist’s hands Beauty becomes the Beast. Brown writes, apropos 72 73 74

Lévy, 380. Hilda Brown, 299. For woman as leader of the wild hunt, cannibal woman, and man-eating woman, see Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk Literature (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1955), E.501.1.8, H.46.1, and G.11.6.

262 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Scene XV of Penthesilea, of ‘[Kleist’s] conception of the heroic [as inspiring terror and pleasure] which is not completely removed from the sphere of the [Gothic] hero villain’.75 This is absolutely true, and yet it is to have said too little, for the idea of sadistic heroism with its attendant contradictions is thoroughly Gothic, and when Penthesilea is reduced to female werewolf or Raubhündin it is not her humanity, let alone her femininity, on which the reader or spectator focusses, butthe bestiality of the moment, the ultimate in Gothic loss of control, a striking instance of lycanthropy. Croce’s point remains of course: Penthesilea [...] filled with the sole desire to subdue and bind to herself Achilles whom she loves, when she sees that she does not succeed in subduing him, murders him in her raging madness and lacerates with dagger and tooth the corpse of the man she both hates and loves. Kleist did not write this, as might have been the case with other authors saturated with literature, out of love of the lecherous, the cruel and the horrible, for the original source of his inspiration sprang from the vague yearning after an extremely high ideal and from his despair at not having been able to achieve it.76

However, if there is a clear distinction to be made in this respect between Kleist and, say, I. F. Arnold, there is gratuitous sadism à la Lewis in Das Erdbeben in Chili, when Pedrillo smashes a live infant against a pillar of the church. It may seem a far cry from the horror of Penthesilea to the benign fairytale atmosphere of Das Käthchen von Heilbronn, but both Penthesilea and Käthchen, though planned as opposites, have a fairytale dimension, as has the fictional work. The Raubhündin Penthesilea has a benign counterpart in Käthchen von Heilbronn with her dreamy, doglike devotion.77 On 7 June 1808, in a letter to his publisher, Kleist described Das Käthchen von Heilbronn (written in 1808, printed in 1810, first performed at the Theater an der Wien in Vienna on 1719 March 1810), as ‘ein Stück, das mehr in die romantische Gattung schlägt, als die übrigen (a play closer than the others to Romantic idiom).78 The Märchen, the Romantic idiom par excellence, is closely linked with Gothic, the building blocks or ‘functions’ of the two forms being strikingly similar.79 The ending of Das Käthchen von Heilbronn is pure fairytale. Is not Käthchen 75 76 77

78 79

Hilda Brown, 307. Quoted from Praz, The Romantic Agony, 272 n. 6. See Ruth Klüger, ‘Die andere Hündin — Käthchen’, Kleist-Jahrbuch, 1992, 103-15. Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, for his part, is likened to a Jagdhund, see Sämtliche Werke, 533). Kleist, Sämtliche Briefe, 424. See H. Dorner-Bachmann, Erzählstruktur und Texttheorie (Hildesheim & New York: Olms, 1979, passim.

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the Cinderella of Perrault’s tale? Is not Kunigunde von Thurneck the false bride of fairytale? The stories, for their part, often starting, like fairytale, with ‘a baffling situation, a problem to be solved, a secret to be uncovered’80 are, in effect, black fairytales. Michael Kohlhaas is a case in point, and Der Zweikampf, like Das Käthchen von Heilbronn, has a fairytale ending. Das Käthchen von Heilbronn opens magnificently, if ahistorically, with a session of the ‘hohes, heimliches Gericht’ (august secret tribunal) in an underground cavern. In Das Käthchen von Heilbronn. Großes romantisches Ritterschauspiel in fünf Aufzügen. Nebst einem Vorspiel in einem Aufzuge, genannt: Das heimliche Gericht (Budapest: Hartleben, 1822), the first stage version of the play, the first scene of Act One was turned into a Prologue entitled ‘Das heimliche Gericht’. When Die Familie Schroffenstein appeared in Zürich, in 1802, it was reviewed by Ludwig Ferdinand Huber, who made his name with Das heimliche Gericht, a Gothic secret-tribunal play which first appeared in Schiller’s Thalia in 1790. Kleist may well have known Huber’s rather feeble play, but he acquired his knowledge of the heilige Vehme from Goethe’s Götz and, more especially, from Naubert’s Hermann von Unna, eine Geschichte aus den Zeiten der Vehmegerichte (1788),81 the work which more than any other established the Gothic ‘secret-tribunal’ novel in Germany and Britain. Kleist was evidently an early admirer of Hermann von Unna, which left its mark on Das Käthchen von Heilbronn. Like Naubert’s Ida Münster, who, not knowing she is the daughter of Graf Eberhard von Württemberg, is brought up in a stonemason’s family, Kleist’s Käthchen, as an unrecognized daughter of the Emperor, is brought up by a humble armourer. In both works it is established that the lovers are equals by birth. As if to signal Kleist’s indebtedness to Naubert, his Graf Wetter, like Naubert’s Ida Münster, is summoned before the Vehmgericht on a charge of sorcery. The underground setting Kleist owes to Goethe: the ahistorical idea of the secret tribunal meeting in a dimly lit underground vault goes back to Götz von Berlichingen, whence it was transplanted to works by other writers, mutating on the way to a meeting in a cavern, thus assimilating the secret tribunal to the robber band or confederacy of free-booting nobles. Hilda Brown has rightly noted that the pictures in Wetter vom Strahl’s ancestral gallery appear (in Act II, Sc. 1) to have ‘formed into a court or tribunal similar to the „Vehmgericht“.’82 The ancestral gallery as such is a feature of the Gothic tale/ghost story.83 It was the first stage version that was so 80 81 82 83

D. Dyer, The Stories of Kleist (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1977), 153. And maybe of Alf von Deulmen. Hilda Brown, 329. Cf. Gespensterbuch, ed. Apel and Laun, selected by Robert Stockhammer (Frankfurt a. M. & Leipzig: Insel, 1992), 73-119 (= Apel’s ‘Die Bilder der Ahnen’).

264 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective successful on the German-language stage and which so delighted Hoffmann, who designed a strikingly Gothic effect for the 1811 Bamberg production in the form of a castle that burned down and fell in ruins before the spectators’ very eyes.84 When Das Käthchen von Heilbronn was first published it was termed ‘ein großes historisches Ritterschauspiel’, a designation that served to link it with the Gothic ‘chivalric’ and ‘secret-tribunal’ conventions, to which Kleist had recourse in planning this, his most popular play, and, more specifically, with Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen and Schlenkert’s Friedrich mit der gebißnen Wange. Friedrich Christian Schlenkert (1757-1826)85 studied law at Leipzig university under Benedicte Naubert’s brother Heinrich Michael Hebenstreit, who at the time was preparing his gothically suggestive De interrogatione testium in secreto (1780).86 Schlenkert began writing in 1779, lost his civil service job because of the ill repute of his writings, and ended up teaching German at the Forestry Academy (Forstliche Hochschule) in Tharandt outside Dresden, which Kleist knew for its striking landscape and old Ritterburg. He was and is best known for Friedrich mit der gebißnen Wange. Eine dialogisirte Geschichte, a Ritterroman written, like not a little of the fiction of the period, in the form of dialogue, which appears to have given Kleist his starting-point for Das Käthchen von Heilbronn. The powerful attraction old, ruined castles held for Kleist, as for Tieck, is partly down to the fact that they reminded him of the Wartburg, home of ‘Friedrich mit der gebißnen Wange’ (Friedrich I) and the other Landgrafen of Thüringen. The image of Friedrich shackled in an adversary’s castle became part of his imaginative memory, especially when he was himself imprisoned in Fort de Joux, initially in a dank dungeon;87 identifying with Friedrich probably renewed the nostalgic appeal of Schlenkert’s novel. Confined, confining spaces are part of the iconography-cum-cartography that Kleist shares with schwarze Romantik and with fairytale.88 Schlenkert’s other novels include Graf Wiprecht von Groitzsch (1789-95), Rudolf von Habsburg (1792-94) and Die Bürger und Bergknappen von Freyberg. Ein Seitenstück zu Friedrich mit der gebißnen Wange (1799), and he also wrote Ritterdramen including the programmatically titled

84 85 86 87 88

Hewett-Thayer, 47-48. Schlenkert’s work was collected in his Historisch-dramatische Werke, ed. H. E. Maukisch, 6 Vols (Leipzig: Melzer, 1840-41). He occupied the chair in the history of German law, which meant that his sister had unparalleled access to accurate history of the Vehmgericht. See letter of 17 February 1807. See Linda Dietrick, Prisons and Idylls: Studies in Heinrich von Kleist’s Fictional World (Frankfurt a. M.: Lang, 1985), 204-10. The most influential writer of fairytales in Kleist’s lifetime was Mme d’Aulnoy.

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Kein Faustrecht mehr (1798); his depiction of the old German virtues (see his Altdeutsche Geschichten romantischen Inhalts of 1790) will, if he knew them, have appealed to Kleist, who, notwithstanding the fact that being born into the Prussian military-aristocratic caste was a disaster for him, was very much the Prussian patriot; it was his Prussian aristocratic persona that drove him to distraction by making it so difficult for him to become a writer and survive as a human being. Schlenkert’s Herrmanns Schlachten (1808) may conceivably have been one of the factors that came together to prompt him to write Die Hermannsschlacht (1808-09), which, with its simplistic clash between characters representing good and evil, and its happy ending, is, like Das Käthchen von Heilbronn, redolent both of Gothic (in the form of the Ritterroman) and of fairytale. Schlenkert’s Friedrich mit der gebißnen Wange, eine dialogisirte Geschichte, first appeared in 4 volumes (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1785-88),89 and was reprinted in the 1840s.The volumes or parts are divided into three ‘periods’ per volume. The periods, which simulate acts, are sub-divided into unnumbered scene-like episodes, each of which starts with a list of the characters involved. This is, then, a play-like ‘dialogisierter Ritterroman’ in the manner of the time, which popular novelists like Weber and Schlenkert adopted in a mistaken attempt to vie with the more prestigious drama.90 It features a plethora of figures, some of them stereotypes (the fatherly Markgraf, the unscrupulous robber-baron, the shifty politician, the greedy man of the church). The central figure is Friedrich der Freidige,91 Friedrich I (1257-1323), Landgraf of Thüringen and Markgraf of Meissen. The novel aspires to be a romantic dramatization of the German middle ages in the form of episodes in the life of its hero, but is defeated in this aim by the dryness of Schlenkert’s style and, in that sense, lack of control over his material: Schlenkert has here set himself a task for which he is not competent. As a chivalric romance set in the middle ages, Friedrich mit der gebißnen Wange inevitably has some Gothic features such as a deep dungeon beneath a tower, Friedrich’s imprisonment in shackles, a tarring-andfeathering, murder, abduction, the threat of torture, and so on, but these are part and parcel of the Gothic middle ages, rather than of any elaborate late eighteenth-century Gothicism. It probably appealed to Kleist in his early teens - he discussed it with his aunt - because it showed his class at work in the distant past. It is diametrically opposed to the works that Kleist went on 89

90 91

Vol. I in 1785; I and II in 1786; I, II and III in 1787; I, II, III and IV in 1788. Another edition in 4 vols (Tübingen: Balz & Schramm, 1788-89) is available in Oxford (Taylorian, Vet. Ger. II. B. 40-43). Kurt Schreinert, Benedikte Naubert, 22, termed it a ‘Halbroman’. Freidig = brave, fearless.

266 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective to write, being too wordy, too diffuse, too full of the accidental and the insignificant masquerading as significant. Heiderich’s trenchant criticism of another novel by Schlenkert is applicable to this one: ‘Schlenkert is utterly pedestrian [...] his awkward use of the cumbersome dialogue form defeats his purpose’; he rightly berates Schlenkert for his ‘stilted language [and] lack of imagination’.92 In stylistic terms Friedrich mit der gebißnen Wange could only, and did, encourage Kleist to do better. Relevant here is his comment on ‘Scharteken’, of which this is certainly one, and how they can serve to inspire vastly superior works, of which Das Käthchen von Heilbronn and Prinz Friedrich von Homburg are examples. Friedrich Wetter Graf vom Strahl in Das Käthchen von Heilbronn was named after Markgraf Friedrich93 as a tribute to a work that Kleist read at an impressionable age, and which had stuck in his mind, not least because he admired its fatherly hero-figure.94 Markgraf Friedrich was a more straightforward, and therefore in dramatic terms less interesting, figure thanStrahl or Homburg. Wetter vom Strahl’s bitten cheek (another fairytale motif) represents the starting-point for Achilles’ mutilation in Penthesilea, while Kleist’s Kunigunde von Thurneck owes her given name to Schlenkert’s Kunigunde von Isenburg, a scheming, manipulative character. Kleist also follows Schlenkert in having the Emperor appear on stage in Das Käthchen von Heilbronn. Much of the action in Friedrich mit der gebißnen Wange is set in romantic castles like the Wartburg (in which Friedrich I died),95 to which Kleist was attached, but - unlike in Naubert’s Elisabeth Erbin von Toggenburg - none of the castles is important in its own right as a Gothic edifice or portal to a Gothic world. The work includes a meeting, outdoors (III: 267-74), of the Landgericht that Kleist may well have called to mind when writing Michael Kohlhaas. Kleistian motifs in Friedrich mit der gebißnen Wange (passim) include ‘Verwirrung’ (confusion)(‘Verwirrung des Verstandes’, ‘Verwirrung in den Gesichtszügen’, ‘eine Stadt in Verwirrung bringen’ [mental confusion, confusion betrayed by the look on someone’s face, reducing a town to confusion]) and ‘Bluthund’in the figurative sense of bloodthirsty murderer (cf. the ‘sieben Bluthunde’ at the bloody end of Das Erdbeben in Chili).96

92 93 94 95 96

Heiderich, The German Novel of 1800 , 269-71. The work is, of course, Friedrich mit der gebißnen Wange, in which there is no character actually named Friedrich Wetter, Graf vom Strahl. Kleist lost his father at the age of eleven and his mother five years later. When Kleist visited the site of the Wartburg in 1793 he saw only two towers and the remains of an old house; the Wartburg was rebuilt in 1847. Both the number seven and the hell-hound feature in fairytale.

Heinrich von Kleist 267

Kleist criticism has been loath to believe him serious in his Gothic romanticism in Das Käthchen von Heilbronn, but this needs to be seen together with the general tendency to play down his Gothic links, which has its origins in the tendency to regard the Gothic with less than objectivity, which in turn stems from a failure to distinguish between literary and sub-literary Gothic. The situation in (P. B.) Shelley criticism is much the same. Kleist’s description of his play has been taken to mean that, in appearing to assume the Gothic Romantic mode, he was writing to a formula aimed at the popular end of the market rather than exploring issues which concerned him deeply. The question that arises is whether the assumption of this style is deliberate or mocking and parodistic97

However, the question that really arises is whether Kleist, taking Schlenkert’s ‘Scharteke’ Friedrich mit der gebißnen Wange as his starting-point, was not perhaps both being entirely serious (after all he needed the money which only a popular success could bring him) and at the same time mocking himself for being reduced to taking the popular, Gothic convention so seriously for financial reasons. Far from not being serious, Kleist was entirely serious in his implied self-criticism, in other words, in implicitly blaming himself for his nostalgic memory of Friedrich mit der gebißnen Wange. Badly written it undoubtedly was, but it had caught his imagination and served to inspire a superior work. In Käthchen he was therefore doing much more than ‘consciously compromis[ing] with the taste of his public’.98 The Gothic picturesque, much in evidence in his letters, is also present here in the form of the landscape through which father and daughter make their way, and Wetter vom Strahl’s castle inevitably has features that serve to tie it loosely to Gothic convention via Young and Caspar David Friedrich. We have seen that Die Familie Schroffenstein was, on publication, perceived to be a Schauerstück, and have surmised that the very presence in Das Käthchen von Heilbronn of Graf Wetter vom Strahl, reminiscent of a figure from Kleist’s earliest Gothic reading, represents his acknowledgment of a debt of which he was evidently somewhat ashamed. So far as the stories are concerned, Emil Staiger, writing about Das Bettelweib von Locarno,99 which he described as a ‘Schauermär’ (Gothic tale or fable) and compared with the Moritat (bloody ballad), showed, once for all, how Kleist, by means of the masterly build up of suspense, creates a mood of terror akin to that of Gothic terror/horror literature. In a general way Staiger’s analysis applies to 97 98 99

Hilda Brown, 320-21. Michael Hamburger, Reason and Energy, 144. Emil Staiger, 113-29.

268 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Kleist’s work as a whole, some of which is, in this respect, close to Gothic’s parent, Märchen. Das Bettelweib von Locarno for instance is reminiscent of a tale by J. H. Jung-Stilling that was subsequently collected by the Grimm brothers as ‘Die alte Bettelfrau’. Kleist’s is the grimmer version. Like many Gothic novels of the time, Kleist’s most substantial and masterly story, Michael Kohlhaas (1804-10), is said to be ‘taken from an old chronicle’, which in this case can be identified as the Märckische Chronic of Peter Hafftitz (c.1525-c.1601) that Kleist came across in a work entitled Diplomatische und curieuse Nachlese der Historie von Ober-Sachsen und angrenzenden Ländern (edited by Christian Schöttgen and Georg Christoph Kreysig, 1731). Here he found the story of one Hans Kohlhase, an honest man and in his modest way a pillar of society, who, finding himself in an increasingly desperate position as the result of an illegal act by a petty aristocratic bully, which he could not afford to ignore, turned outlaw, and from 1522 to 1540 waged a private war against Saxony, for which he paid with his life. Kleist’s tale turns on right and wrong, truth and untruth, trust and mistrust, against a background of unjust justice and clashing jurisdictions (Saxon, Brandenburg, and Imperial), a good illustration of the sort of situation that the Vehmgericht system was designed to overcome. It was doubly unfortunate for Michael Kohlhaas that Wenzel von Tronka lived on the boundary between Saxony and Brandenburg and had friends and relatives in high places. Almost every aspect of Gothic is to be found in Michael Kohlhaas. Kohlhaas, ‘einer der rechtschaffensten zugleich und entsetzlichsten Menschen seiner Zeit’ (one of the most law-abiding and at the same time law-breaking men of his time)100 is by definition a Gothic hero-villain. Kleist uses the word entsetzlich to mean not only terrible, but also outside the law, beyond the pale of the law. It is precisely his offended sense of justice that turns Kohlhaas into an outlaw and multiple murderer. In literary historical terms Kleist’s narrative, like so many Gothic novels in both German and English, goes back to Die Räuber, which was a major influence on the Gothic Räuberroman, a type with which Michael Kohlhaas has not a little in common. Given that the Räuberroman involves only criminal elements of his class, and that his preoccupation with the idea of robbery goes way beyond petty felony, the absence of any references to the Räuberroman in Kleist’s letters is hardly surprising. More to the point, and relevant to Michael Kohlhaas, is the fact that he took a keen interest in Raubritter (robber barons), rarely passing a Raubritterschloß (robber-baron’s castle) without comment. Michael Kohlhaas is, among other things, an exceptionally literate and accomplished Räuberroman, for it turns on the idea 100

Sämtliche Werke, 597.

Heinrich von Kleist 269

of bare-faced robbery, features three robbers (Wenzel von Tronka, Kohlhaas, Nagelschmidt), the first of whom is a boorish Raubritter, while the two last-named turn captains of banditti who meet the same fate as those in real life and in the Räuberroman. More specifically, Kohlhaas turns bandit for the same reason as Angelo Duca, the real-life Italian capo di banda on whom Vulpius based his Rinaldo Rinaldini in the novel that made such a stir when it appeared in 1798. Finding no justice in the law, Kohlhaas, like Rinaldini, steps outside the pale of the law in order to seek it in outlawry. If Kleist read Rinaldo Rinaldini, as he may well have done, he would have sympathized with the unresolved conflict between thought and action in Vulpius’s Gothic hero-villain. The story of the horse-dealer Kohlhaas begins with the Gothic peripeteia or sudden turn for the worse which accelerates into worse still, swiftly spiralling out of control. The underlying cause is one man’s abuse of power leading to another’s disempowerment, loss of control over his life, and eventually loss of his life. Kohlhaas’s literal transgression in crossing Wenzel von Tronka’s territory without an (illegal) pass means that he is initially guiltless, unfortunate in being in the wrong place at the wrong time. In the first instance it is Wenzel von Tronka who is implicitly the ‘Raubhund’ (thieving devil; literally, predatory dog, cf. Penthesilea) that Kohlhaas is called. His castle of Tronkenburg is rightly described as that familiar Gothic abomination, a ‘Raubnest’ or den of thieves. However, Kohlhaas, initially innocent, comes, like his persecutor, to take the law into his own hands, ending by becoming worse than Wenzel von Tronka and his henchmen. Motivated by a transgressive and ultimately Satanic desire for revenge at any cost, he sets fire to the Tronkenburg and forms an armed band partly from Tronkenburg retainers, thereby proclaiming his own outlawry. Once he has become an outlaw and a Gothic Räuberhauptmann, the end is inevitable, but Kleist’s inexorably detailed text, which is dry, though not in the unproductive manner of Schlenkert, puts all the emphasis on the way in which one action or reaction or misinterpretation inevitably leads to another. Kohlhaas becomes as much an ‘entsetzlicher Mensch’ (terrible person) and ‘Mordbrenner’ (arsonist and murderer) as Schiller’s Karl Moor, to whom Kleist is alluding when describing him as such. Notwithstanding their authors’ hatred of superstition, both texts turn on that centrestone of Gothic, the Fall of Man and the Gothic quest for lost innocence. The conflagrations as first the Tronkenburg and then Wittenberg are put to the torch (the latter three times, a fairytale motif that is deeply embedded in the structure of the text) parallel the earthquakes in Santiago. Like these, the burning buildings stand for the world as seen by Kleist. To Luther, Kohlhaas rightly speaks of his ‘war’ against ‘the community of mankind’, for

270 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective it is the world as such with which he, like his creator, is increasingly at odds. The whole text illustrates, on every level, the ‘Gebrechlichkeit der Welt’ and the futility of seeking good through evil means. Kohlhaas, as the ‘Avenging Angel’ (he is named after the archangel Michael, whose representative he claims to be) is guilty not only of a series of monstrous acts of private vengeance, for which there was an obvious literary precedent in a work most likely known to Kleist, Naubert’s Gothic romance Alf von Dülmen (1791), but also of hubris. It is ironical and tragic that the man who bears the name of the guardian of mankind against the Devil turns, implicitly, into a devilfigure. Kohlhaas’s rebellion is duplicated by a more obvious criminal, Nagelschmidt, who recruits his own band of banditti when Kohlhaas’s is disbanded at Lützen, and there are many other Gothic motifs, including the use of an assumed name and the appearance of Kohlhaas’s dead wife Lisbeth in the form of a gypsy fortune-teller, but these are overshadowed by the dialectic of power and powerlessness, the rampant nepotism, the political and legal chaos and corruption caused by the venality of the competing jurisdictions. Here, surely, was a case for the intervention of that most Gothic of all institutions, the Vehmgericht or secret tribunal which was constituted to deal with the likes of Wenzel von Tronka. The Gothic labyrinth is present throughout the narrative with its endless paragraphs detailing the web of deceit and double-dealing, the endless ramifications and complications. Then, finally, after the return of the two black horses (cf. Rev. VI, 5: ‘And I beheld a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand’), restored to health, comes the final act of violence in the form of Kohlhaas’s beheading. Like Schiller’s Der Geisterseher, Michael Kohlhaas is both Gothic and more than Gothic. From peripeteia to execution it is Gothic in much of its detail and, in the sense of barbaric, in its welter of gruesome sub-events; but, lest it be said that the real nature of the text and the extraordinary literary quality of its labyrinthine narrative begin where the Gothic leaves off, labyrinthine narrative is itself an important feature of German Gothic.

V Reed was right to warn against seeing Kleist as a ‘representative of total loss of control’,101 for his work is nothing if not rigidly controlled; but in terms of theme it is another matter, for it is precisely total loss of control towards 101

Reed, in Germany, 531.

Heinrich von Kleist 271

which his stories point, and which, more than any other single factor, justifies one in calling them Gothic. What is Michael Kohlhaas if not a Schauermärchen on the danger of loss of control? The world, as experienced and depicted by Kleist, is, typically, if unpredictably, beyond control. Why otherwise did Kleist take Werther’s way out? Instability is a major feature of his world and another of its most Gothic features. As horrid in content as it is terrible in theme, it is informed by a mostly bleak, black vision and view of the world in which the focus is on death, and horror and terror loom large. Of course there are positive moments, moments when love and trust prevail, but they are outnumbered by others of blackest tragedy. In linking Kleist with Gothic I have been aware of the danger of being thought to belittle him by association with a literary kind contemned by those trapped in the box of canonical convention, but my aim has simply been to show that his work has an additional dimension which shows that he is less of a loner (the very embodiment of the Romantic-Gothic ‘Wanderer’ as he walks back and forth across wartime Europe, trying to find himself, or was he trying to get away from himself?), and that his work is broader and more of its time than has been thought. More work on the Gothic-Romantic interface is still needed, for the line between Gothic and Romantic is getting finer all the time as Gothic colonises ever more Romantic ground, but Kleist’s literary roots are in Gothic. His work is as much a part of schwarze Romantik (dark Romanticism) as that of the early Tieck (who under the influence of too much ‘black’ reading suffered a personal crisis not so far removed from Kleist’s so-called Kant-crisis), or Grosse, or Hoffmann, or the author of the nihilistic Nachtwachen des Bonaventura in which the judge, like many of Kleist’s characters, is partpuppet, part-automaton. Kleist’s dark world invites comparison with the Nachtwachen des Bonaventura (long thought to be by F. G. Wetzel, a Dresden friend and collaborator of Kleist, who would himself have been a more likely candidate) and with painterly tenebrismo. A scientist by training, Kleist attended lectures, in Carl Adolf von Carlowitz’s house in Dresden,102 on the ‘Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft’ (night-side of the natural sciences) by Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert, whose Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Wissenschaft (1808) was written and published while Kleist was in Dresden. Gothic motifs and features are found throughout Kleist’s work. The hugely symbolical earthquakes in Das Erdbeben in Chili, which result in mass death and live burial, have their figurative equivalent in the other stories, in 102

Carlowitz was the financial backer of the art journal Phöbus, of which Kleist was coeditor.

272 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective which the Gothic peripeteia is the rule as upheaval, instability and unforeseen, frequently bizarre events mark the breakdown of the once rational world in the aftermath of the French Revolution. In the postrevolutionary dispensation order gives way to chaos as a hard-edged nightmare unreality becomes the new reality. Kleistian characters find themselves, for the most part, cut off by an invisible barrier from the rational world, which suddenly becomes inaccessible, and are therefore at the mercy of their own emotions, which are often confused, but are also potentially, and exceptionally, the key to meaning and order. The typically Kleistian motifs of transgression, the reversal of fortune (which Gothic took from fairytale, as witness Das Erdbeben in Chili) and the problem of interpretation belong to Gothic, as do the elaborately fallible legal systems that fail to deliver justice in Michael Kohlhaas, the atmosphere of impending violence in Die Verlobung in St Domingo, the bestiality of Penthesilea, and the bloodbath at the end of Das Erdbeben in Chili. Imprisonment is a leitmotif of Kleist’s work, one of many linking it with Gothic and fairytale; in the highly influential tales of Mme D’Aulnoy, for instance, imprisonment, mostly in a tower, figures prominently.103 In Kleist’s case the prison is ultimately that of his life with its impossible constraints. Die Marquise von O.104 with its Gothic hero-villain was written in Fort de Joux and in Châlons-sur-Marne, to which he was transferred before being released. Ruins are everywhere: burning fortress, ruined cathedral, city reduced to rubble, thereby rendering life literally baseless to those who used to live there.The ruins of Santiago are the ultimate, amorphous Gothic edifice, portal to an underworld dominated by death. Identity is often questionable, and cross-dressing does not save lovers from dying in or near a Gothic cavern. The characters who inhabit this broken, burning, desperate world whose laws seem to exclude justice include the outlaw, the rapist, the Doppelgänger, banditti, and corrupt clergy. What takes place includes multiple live burial as a result of the untold violence of nature (including human nature), rape, lynching, the smashing of skulls, plague, and a living body reduced to putrefaction before being burned at the stake. The labyrinth, which includes the legal labyrinth that faces Michael Kohlhaas, takes the form of a web of deceit, misunderstanding and misinterpretation, a network of deception and self-deception that marks the breakdown in the communication between human beings which ought to be present, but no longer is; it is replaced by mistrust, which ought not to be present, but is, thus illustrating Sedgwick’s view of Gothic. In her discussion of ‘The 103 104

Mme D’Aulnoy too was at one time imprisoned. The anonymous, abbreviated title is common in Gothic fiction from the 1780 onwards.

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Structure of Gothic Convention’ she writes of ‘The fires, earthquake and insurrections that restore the prisoners of tyranny to their „natural“ freedom’,105 which is immediately applicable to Monçada’s escape from the Inquisition in Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), and to Kleist’s Das Erdbeben in Chili (1807, 1810), for the earthquake that frees Josephe and Jeronimo saves them from one death only to precipitate them into another. There is a close parallel here with what happens in Melmoth: ‘Monçada is able to escape from the Inquisition in the chaos caused by a literal fire; though [...] in the event he has only crossed the threshold from one subterranean prison into yet another.’106 Sedgwick’s statement that, in Gothic, the self is ‘massively blocked off from something to which it ought normally to have access’107 is illustrated in Kleist. Casesin point are truth, trust and justice. All these Gothic motifs are merely bricks used in the construction of a story; they are held in place by the mortar of an eloquent, gothically implacable syntax, in which every clause and sub-clause is, as it were, a further nail in someone’s coffin. It is not only the content of Kleist’s work that connects with Gothic. So too do the wealth of sub-plots reminiscent of Grosse’s Der Genius, the chains of false motivations, and the way in which the convoluted syntax, intended to bring absolute clarity, thanks to human frailty ironically brings attendant opportunities for misinterpretation108 that are reminiscent of the work of the painter Caspar David Friedrich, which Kleist so admired and understood so profoundly. He wrote about Friedrich’s work with such insight because he shared Friedrich’s patriotism109 and sense of right and wrong, but also his pessimistic vision. When he wrote, of Friedrich’s Der Mönch am Meer (1808-10), ‘so ward ich selbst der Kapuziner’ (I became that monk),110 he showed how deeply he shared Friedrich’s black vision. Der Mönch am Meer depicts Kleist’s view of life as well as Friedrich’s. Kleist will inevitably have applied to his own work 105 106 107 108

109

110

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 13. Sedgwick, 23. Sedgwick, 12-13. One such opportunity is provided by ambiguous symbolism. The chain placed around the neck of Prinz Friedrich von Homburg has negative as well as positive connotations. The wreath denotes death as well as victory. Is the image of the ‘ringförmige Welt’ in Über das Marionettentheater (Sämtliche Werke, 885) a symbol of completion, or does it stand for the weary sorrowful circle of life? Kleist’s Die Hermannsschlacht used to be read aloud in Friedrich’s circle of friends. I would argue that Die Hermannsschlacht has much more in common with the work of Friedrich, who worked around it in 1810, than with that of Brecht (see Hilda Brown, 347). In ‘Empfindungen vor Friedrichs Seelandschaft’, Berliner Abendblätter, 12. Blatt, 13 Oct. 1810, 47-48.

274 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective the ideas that he attributes to Friedrich, notably the idea that a work such as Der Mönch am Meer, instead of evoking longing and loss by allowing us entrance into its spectacle, simply repeats the experience of exclusion, keeping us out of the landscape by being merely a closed artistic image of it to which the spectator is denied entry. Kleist spent his short adult life trying, unsuccessfully, to make sense of the post-Enlightenment world. In his works he ‘makes sense’ in the literal sense of laboriously creating sense by syntactical means, but these aesthetically admirable syntactical constructs are built on sand, they do not (as his suicide showed) make sense of life outside the work in question: the meaning he creates does not, for him, extend beyond its immediate expression and framework. It would be easy to conclude that Kleist’s work shows how the writer can accommodate much of Gothic convention without thereby becoming a Gothic writer, but the literary quality of his work no more excludes him from the Gothic canon than the quality of Die Räuber or Der Geisterseher excludes them. Gothic is a kind, not a quality. The presence in his work of so many scattered Gothic motifs does not of itself make him a Gothic writer, but when to these we add the darkness of his vision, the structural complexity of his work, and the opportunities for misinterpretation that it affords the reader, the case becomes more convincing. If Gothic is indeed a code for the exploration of the deep structures of the self, then Kleist is arguably not merely a Gothic writer, but, with Hoffmann, one of the most important German Gothic writers. It is time to add his distinction as a Gothic writer to his many other distinctions.

7 BONAVENTURA The key images of literary Gothic, which constitute a pictorial code that still partly defines it, are foreshadowed in the poetry and painting of postRenaissance Europe. In German poetry of the seventeenth century the seemingly never-ending Thirty Years War, combined as it was with metaphysical doubt and a prevailing sense of human insignificance and despair, put the emphasis on Night, omnipresent Death, and the vanity of all earthly things,1 the ‘Nichtigkeit des Irdischen’ that is arguably the gist of Nachtwachen. In English poetry the Gothic state of mind originates, via the cult of Spenser and Milton, in the second quarter of the eighteenth century (Parnell, Young, Blair, and Gray), although the most interesting models are found not among the motley melancholy crew of the graveyard poets and their immediate predecessors, but among painters from Caravaggio onwards. Dubbed the ‘Bravo of painting’,2 Caravaggio (1569-1609), the contemporary of Spenser (c.1552-1599), Shakespeare (1564-1616) and Webster (c.1578-c.1632), revelled, like them, in the night-side of nature,3 and while he may not be as important in the present context as that other socalled Bravo of painting, Salvator Rosa (1615-1673), from whom the landscape of the Gothic novel à la Radcliffe and Alexis derives, his dramatic use of shade4 and near-black backgrounds (tenebrismo) anticipates the evocation of darkness by the graveyard school and the emphasis on darkness, dark deeds by bande nere, and the terrors of the dark of the Gothic novelists. Tenebrismo, which in literary terms led to the Night Piece is a basic feature of Gothic: Shadows [...] were among the foremost characteristics of Gothic works. They marked the limits necessary to the constitution of an enlightened world and delineated the limitations of neoclassical perceptions. Darkness, metaphorically, threatened the light of reason with what it did not know. Gloom cast perceptions of formal order and unified design into obscurity; its uncertainty generated both a sense of mystery and passions and emotions alien to reason. Night gave free reign to imagination’s unnatural and

1 2 3 4

The post-Copernican overthrow of geocentric cosmology contributed to a sense of the ‘Nichtigkeit des Irdischen’. William Gaunt, Bandits in a Landscape (London: The Studio, 1937), ch. 2. 23 of the 140 quotations in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations involving the word night are from Shakespeare. It was continued by the caravaggisti or tenebristi, a group of young Italian and Spanish painters in early seventeenth-century Naples.

276 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective marvellous creatures, while ruins testified to a temporality that exceeded rational understanding and human finitude.5

Night in all its guises - night thoughts, night-watches, nocturns, nocturnes (notturni), nocturnal tales, nightmares (including Fuseli’s Nightmares), night pieces (the Nachtstücke of Tieck and Hoffmann), the night-side of nature (of the natural sciences, of the mind, of the imagination), and so on - is the realm of Romanticism and more especially of Gothic Romanticism. Scheherazade’s ‘Arabian nights’ are nocturnal tales, in telling each of which she puts her life on the line. Night, which the ancient Greeks regarded as having given birth to death, fear and deceit, is where we meet night’s black agents and, more tellingly, ourselves and our fears, Death’s shadow at the dooor.6 Köpke was to dub Tieck’s Abdallah and William Lovell ‘Nachtstücke’, and the term can be applied to Nachtwachen too, but it was Hoffmann who made the genre his own. The Gothic text is by definition a kind of night-piece in the sense that it is the night-side of life on which it focusses, the black or blackguardly aspect of human nature as depicted in Hogarth’s ‘Night’ that it reveals. The Grausnacht (night with its terrors) is a Gothic commonplace. The colour black is associated with King Death, with the Devil (Mr Blackman) who has his hand in many a Gothic plot, and with the diabolical crimes and conspiracies with which the bande nere (criminal fraternities) and secret societies of the time are associated. There were ‘black knights’ before there was a Ritterroman (cf. Gleich’s Der schwarze Ritter), but here, as elsewhere, the Bundesromane of the time are more important, for the secret society of whatever ilk operates in and out of darkness. Marianne Thalmann has written, in her eminently readable and still very useful Der Trivialroman des 18. Jahrhunderts und der romantische Roman,7 of ‘Der Erlebniswert der Nacht’ (the experiential value of night), taking her examples from once well-known novels that feature outfits like ‘Die schwarzen Brüder’ (The Black Brethren) and the ‘Bund der schwarzen Richter’ (Order of Black Judges). Banditti in priestly or monkish black are commonplace, as are trial scenes in which the courtroom, draped in black, leaves little room for hope on the part of those who have fallen foul of the Church Militant or the heilige Vehme. In Gothic terms the ‘night-piece’ as such dates from Thomas Parnell’s ‘A Night Piece on Death’ (1772), but the story begins with Young’s Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality (1742-45: Klagen oder Nachtgedanken über Leben, Tod und Unsterblichkeit, tr. Johann Arnold Ebert, 5 vols, 1760-71), which was hugely 5 6 7

Bottting, Gothic, 32. The phrase is Edmund Blunden’s. Berlin: Ebering, 1923, 37-42.

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popular in Germany in the pre-Gothic period. In the seventeenth century night is associated with the terrors of religion, but by the late eighteenth century it is the terrors and horrors of the road that take over the mind as night falls. The association of night with fear is memorably illustrated in Smollett’s Fathom, and in Grimm’s tales, the young man who sets out to discover the meaning of fear finds it at night, which is the sphere of the Devil and all kinds of devilry. The credulous, superstitious High Gothic generation (1785-1815) takes the figments of its collective imagination very seriously. The creatures that accompany night thoughts were painted first by Fuseli and then by Goya. The key images are Fuseli’s The Nightmare (1781) and Goya’s El sueño de la razon produce monstruos (The sleep of reason produces monsters, 1797-8); appropriately, sueño means both ‘sleep’ and ‘dream’, for we are in the realm of nightmare or incubus. The Nightmare was one of the images employed in exhibitions of phantasmagoriana at the turn of the eighteenth century. The Nightmare, first version exhibited in 1782, as Fuseli’s friend Beckford was beginning to write his Vathek, was widely circulated as a print; Goethe saw a copy at the Leipzig Fair in 1783, and Fuseli’s Schwarzkunststudien predate the various Gothic necromancer novels. From Fuseli’s Nightmare to Bonaventura’s Nachtwachen (Night Watches) is but a short step, especially if undertaken via Mercier de Compiègne’s littleknown but important Les nuits de la conciergerie (1795), which records the night-thoughts of the prisoners in that most Gothic of institutions, the conciergerie on the Quai de l’Horloge in Paris, which was used as a holding prison or ‘entrance to Hell’ for those facing execution during the Terror. Those who spent their final night there included Danton, Robespierre and Marie Antoinette. Ever since it appeared in 1804 the Nachtwachen of ‘Bonaventura’ has been the centre of controversy first about the identity of the author and then about the nature, meaning and quality of the text, which is in reality the Gothic text par excellence in today’s terms. The identification of the anonymous author as August Klingemann, notwithstanding Ruth Haag’s important discovery in 1987, seems to be explicable only in a way that has not been proposed before. If Klingemann, a writer whose chief characteristic is, by general agreement, his unoriginality, is the author of this highly original text, he can be so only by dint of having copied the work of a writer, identified in the course of this chapter, who is now also entered in the Bonaventura stakes, as a rank outsider, for the first time.

278 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective

I Die Nachtwachen des Bonaventura (Penig [now part of Jena]: F[erdinand] Dienemann & Co., 1805 [1804]), is an anonymous satirical/satyric novel with Gothic elements, published by a small publisher specializing in ‘the secondary works of established romantics, their mediocre imitators, and gothic and horrific tales for popular consumption’.8 Brilliant, fascinating, enigmatic, Die Nachtwachen des Bonaventurais a novel in Friedrich Schlegel’s idiosyncratic sense (‘Der Roman ist ein romantisches Buch’: the novel is a Romantic book [sc. romance]): it is an extraordinary Romantic work, at once satyric and satirical, ironic and comic. Among other things it is a collage of interlinked arabesques, a serial nightmare, a showpiece consisting of a series of Nachtstücke (night-pieces) tailing off into a Schwanzstück (tail-piece), a ‘collection of apocalyptic visions combined with gruesomely nihilistic reflections’,9 to say nothing of being a considerable challenge to the reader, who, like Tieck’s William Lovell, is left treading the edge of an abyss. In the reader’s case it is that of misapprehension, for which the text amply provides by means of puns and other lexical and logical devil’s bridges designed, like all those elaborate instances in the early German Gothic novel à la Schiller of the supposed supernatural subsequently explained, to gull the gullible, to say nothing of the narratorial, generic and hermeneutic instability of the subversive, self-subverting text which takes nothing seriously except its own refusal to take anything seriously. Credulity is a primary manifestation of the irrationalism of the post-Enlightenment age. Nachtwachen has always been regarded as quirky, and therefore, despite the fact that most of its material is the common intellectual property of the age, as nothing if not original. August Klingemann, assuming that he really is the author, is in reality indebted for his basic aperçu to Goethe and for his basic formula to the work of a little-known contemporary who is identified presently. Nachtwachen has always been controversial both as regards the identity of the anonymous author hiding behind the narrator, and, more recently, as regards the literary kind and quality of the text. The fact that it is very much a Gothic novel, albeit a highly unconventional one, accounts for the latter part of the controversy, for critics of canonical mainstream literature tend to ignore Gothic as subliterary. The generic instability of Nachtwachen is in reality one of its most important Gothic features in today’s sense. Like the work of Juvenal, with which on one level it can be compared,10 it consists of sixteen 8 9 10

Gillespie, x i. Blackall, 209. See Rita Terras, ‘Juvenal und die satirische Struktur der Nachtwachen von Bonaventura,’ GQ 52 (1979), 18-31.

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satires inveighing against the vices and follies of the age; but the Nachtwachen at least is no mere exercise in rhetorical indignation. The night-hours that the narrator-night-watchman, self-proclaimed sonof-the-Devil Kreuzgang announces amount to a travesty of the canonical hours. He is himself the priest-cum-devil of whom he writes, each half of his split personality, like most of the paired aspects of this peculiarly schizoid work, cancelling each other out, leaving nothing. The basic theme of the work is indeed Nothing, the Nothingness that is all that is left of life when it has been stripped of its hitherto established belief systems and their concomitant moral values. Kreuzgang, whose name (cloister) is the nodal point at which a number of connotations meet, and is therefore ambivalently meaningful., cf. Kreuzung (crossing [literal and figurative]), Kreuzweg (literally, cross-roads; figuratively stations of the cross), ein Kreuz schlagen, to cross onself), etc., is a night-watchman by night and a distressed poet by day,11 to say nothing of all his other parts, which include the dying man, the madman and the traditional figure of the Hanswurst (fool, clown; in modern, Brechtian terms, on-stage commentator), but he is a Hanswurst who mocks (his own) Hanswurstigkeit and, withit, the Wurstigkeit of life. He certainly scares those sleeping uneasily when, in the Sixth Night Watch, he decides to celebrate Silvesternacht (the night of New Year’s Eve) by announcing not the first hour of the New Year, but the onset of eternity. The account of the chaotic scene that follows with wigs flying and villains denouncing themselves in the hope of obtaining a temporal sentence rather than an eternal one, is a comic high-point of the novel, but for BonaventuraKreuzgang chaos is nothing if not a weighty matter. He may choose to clown, but only because he has seen to the bottom of the abyss of nothingness perceived by Werther. His clowning is deadly serious. Kreuzgang is a Teufelskerl (devil of a fellow)12 who claims to have sprung from the union [Kreuzung] of a Teufelsbeschwörer (a man credited with conjuring up the Devil, so common at the time that there was a Bund der Teufelsbeschwörer) and a Gypsy woman, or of the Devil and a recently beatified nun, who thus becomes the Devil’s grandmother.13 He is, to put it mildly, a 11

12 13

Cf. Hogarth’s The Distressed Poet (1736) and the then well-known case of Thomas Chatterton, who died in 1770. The famous painting of The Death of Chatterton by Henry Wallis dates from 1856. On Bonaventura and Hogarth, see Gerald Gillespie, ‘„Night-Piece“ and „Tail-Piece“: Bonaventura’s Relation to Hogarth’, Arcadia, 8/3 (1973), 284-295. The fact that some of the words prefixed with Teufels- have positive meaning (Teufelskerl, Teufelsweib) accords well with the ambivalence of the text. Compare the young acrobat in Rilke’s Fifth Elegy, said to be ‘der Sohn eines Nackens und einer Nonne’ (son of a neck and a nun). The reference, at the beginning of the seventh night watch, to ‘einer kanonisierten Heilige’ is unclear. If

280 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective strange creature to have been dreamt up by a writer hiding behind the name of the Seraphic Doctor, and the most untrustworthy narrator possible, the proverbial slippery customer (and schlüpfrig to boot). In symbolical terms the Devil stands not only for the evil by which Gothic writers are obsessed(Devil = the accuser; Satan = the adversary/Enemy), but also, this becoming more important as the late eighteenth century slips into the past, for the diabolical uncertainty and insecurity that are at the heart of the genre noir. By definition a figure of many parts, the Devil is a master of disguise and the Gothic art of the masquerade. As the ‘father of lies’, he is the patron of the counterfeit. In the Memoiren des Teufels (1825-6) that he pretends to be editing, Wilhelm Hauff has the Devil himself warn readers that his socalled memoirs are ‘gänzlich unecht und falsch’ (wholly counterfeit and false).14 Readers of the Nachtwachen, too, must understand that they may be confronted by a tissue of lies,15 for if the Devil is the ‘father of lies’, it follows, in one way or another, that the nightwatchman-narrator of Nachtwachen, Kreuzgang, who claims to be the son of the Devil, may himself be lying at any given time. The situation is typical of the Nachtwachen, in which the reader struggles to get a handle on the truth of the matter in hand. Before becoming further embroiled in this work of the Devil, it is worth remembering that Johann Kaspar Lavater’s Predigten über die Existenz des Teufels [Sermons on the Existence of the Devil] (1775) was followed by Count (Friedrich) Stolberg’s Jamben (1784), in which Lucifer is celebrated as the Light-Bearer who brought truth and enlightenment to humanity. Twenty years later Shelley, a would-be Teufelsbeschwörer, concentrated on German and chemistry at Eton in order to learn how to conjure up the Devil, tried to do so, but, to his chagrin, failed; his ‘Essay on the Devil and Devils’ did not appear until 1819. That the Devil (replacing God) looms large in it is both the most newfangled and the most old-fashioned aspect of the Nachtwachen, partly because God and Devil are related concepts that belong together like Yin and Yang, each concept making most sense by way of contrast with the other, and partly because we have the word of the Devil’s historian, Gustav Roskoff, for it that ‘Der Glaube an den Teufel und die Furcht vor seiner Macht, wodurch die Menschheit jahrhundertelang so grausam geplagt

14 15

Kreuzgang’s mother has turned from Gypsy to Nun, ‘beatified’ would make more sense than Gillespie’s ‘canonized’, which could only refer to an event that took place a long time ago. For that to make sense, Kreuzgang would have to be what he is not, an Eternal Jew figure. To protect the sacrament of marriage, early Christian writers refer to the Devil’s wife or leman as ‘des Teufels Großmutter“. Hauff, Aus den Memoiren des Satan, Part 2 [1826], ‘Vorspiel’. It is as if he is saying, with the Brecht of ‘Vom Armen B. B. that ‘In mir habt ihr einen, auf den könnt ihr nicht bauen’ (In me you’ve got a man you can’t rely on).

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worden war, erschien gegen den Ausgang des 18. Jahrhunderts einem grossen Theile der Gelehrten und Ungelehrten als lächerlicher „Aberglaube“‘ (Belief in the Devil and fear of his power, by which mankind had for centuries been so cruelly plagued, had by the turn of the eighteenth century, for educated and uneducated alike, come to seem an absurd superstition),16 although this did not, of course, prevent the Devil from becoming a familiar and influential personage in the Gothic novel. The Nachtwachen belongs together with other Gothic Nachtstücke and diableries of various kinds and has its place alongside the nightmare visions of Goya, which include The Madhouse (c.1816) in which, ‘Wrapped up in their own delusions, [the mad] assume powerful identities [...] all power [being] levelled and equated with delusion.’17 The Jacobinical idea of levelling does not only bring the powerful down to the level of the powerless; it also reduces the sane to the level of the insane.

II The identity of the anonymous author has never been established with certainty, none of the various theories having won unreserved acceptance.18 The text, which betrays the pervasive influence of the most widely read German novelist at the turn of the century, Jean Paul, but not his authorship,19 may reasonably be supposed to be the work of a friend of his, or, failing that, of someone with a good knowledge of the work gained, say, in the course of reviewing it. As early as 14 January 1805 Jean Paul wrote to his friend P. E. Thieriot: die Nachtwachen von Bonaventura [...] ist eine treffliche Nachahmung meines Gianozza; doch mit zu viel Reminiszensen und Licenzen zugleich. Es verräth und benimmt viele Kraft dem Leser. - Selten les’ ich in neueren Zeiten etwas sehr Gutes oder sehr Schlechtes, ohne daß mir meine Bescheidenheit sagt: hier bist du denn wieder nachgeahmt.20

16 17 18 19 20

Gustav Roskoff, Geschichte des Teufels (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1869, repr. Nördlingen: Greno, 1987), 526. Janis Tomlinson, Francisco Goya y Lucientes 1746-1828 (London: Phaidon, 1994), 23133. Some of the names put forward were impossible. I.F. Arnold could barely write, let alone be the author of Nachtwachen. Notwithstanding Max Rouché, ‘Bonaventure ne serait-il pas Jean Paul lui-même?’, Etudes Germaniques, 24 (1969), 329-345. Jean Paul, Briefe 1804-1808, ed. E. Berend (Berlin: Aufbau, 1961), 20.

282 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective (the Nachtwachen of Bonaventura [...] is an admirable imitation of my [early work], but both too close and not close enough to it. These days I seldom read anything particularly good or particularly bad without finding my modest self saying: here you are being copied again.)

In the same letter he went on to describe the Nachtwachen as ‘unglaublich schwach’ (extremely weak), making it clear that for him it constituted the ‘sehr Schlechtes’ (particularly bad work) in question. He suspected the ‘Großwürdenträger der Philosophie (panjandrum of philosophy), as he liked to call his favourite enemy, Schelling, of having a hand in it, but the idea has long since been discredited. Although he used Bonaventura as a nom de plume when contributing to the Musenalmanach, Schelling is no longer thought to have written the Nachtwachen, nor indeed would he have had time to write it, even at the speed with which he wrote. The author of this supremely original book is currently thought to be one of the most unoriginal writers of the time, August Klingemann (1777-1831),21 who knew some of the other writers whose names have been mooted as possible authors of the Nachtwachen, including Schelling and Brentano, and, though not a friend of Jean Paul, knew some of his works well, having reviewed them in the Zeitung für die elegante Welt, the Leipzig journal founded by Karl Spazier, who ran it from 1801 to 1805, using his position to defend Goethe and the Romantics against attacks by the likes of (Garlieb) Merkel and Kotzebue. Klingemann studied law at Jena, in 1798-180l, under Fichte, Schelling and A.W. Schlegel, but went down without taking a degree. He was evidently impressed by Schelling’s Fichtean Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie, which was published in 1795, when its author was just twenty. Apart from four early novels, Wildgraf Eckard von der Wölpe (Braunschweig, 1795) and Die Asseburg (Braunschweig, 1796-97),22 which are Gothic in English but dialogic Ritterromane in German terms, Die Ruinen im Schwarzwald (2 vols, 1798-99),23 which is a Gothic novel (Schauerroman in old German terminology), and a fourth, Romano (Braunschweig, 1800), which is not Gothic, Klingemann is essentially a dramatist. His novels, like those of many ‘popular’ novelists of the Gothic ilk, are largely written in dialogue form. His Faust, a weak Goethe-imitation, appeared in 1815. Das Vehmgericht. Ein dramatisches Gemälde (1820) is a belated dramatization of Veit Weber’s by then long-since forgotten Die heilige Vehme. Wolfgang Paulsen, whose judgments are sounder than most, has described him as a ‘frustrierter Intellektueller’ (frustrated intellectual), which puts him in the same boat as Carl Grosse, who became a 21 22 23

See Joseph Kürschner, E. A. F. Klingemann (ADB., vol 16, 1882). Asseburg is the name of the ruins of a mountain fortress near Wolfenbüttel, first mentioned in 743, which was destroyed in 1492 and subsequently rebuilt. Müller-Fraureuth, Die Ritter- und Räuberromane, 76.

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Gothic novelist faute de mieux when he had blown his chance of becoming an academic ten years earlier. So far as his supposed authorship of Nachtwachen is concerned there are two possible scenarios: either Klingemann - if he is Bonaventura - wrote Nachtwachen with his intellectual hat on, before going on, because he was more critic than creative writer, to become a copier of other mens’ work; or, as I believe to have been the case, he was all along a copier who chose to hide behind Schelling’s nom de plume precisely because he was conscious of being a dyed-in-the-wool Epigone. It can indeed be argued that Klingemann, as the most vampiric of novelists, is ideally qualified to be the author of this most vampiric of novels and that the Nachtwachen, as the ne plus ultra of vampiric novels, is the one and only kind of original novel he is qualfied to produce. Unoriginality is taken to the point where it becomes its own opposite. On the other hand, Paulsen’s idea that ‘Was heute noch zu uns spricht, ist weniger das, was man als „Nachtseite der Romantik“ zu verstehen pflegt, falls es die überhaupt gegeben hat,24 sondern der Prototyp des (sehr deutschen) ‘Aussteigers’ (what still appeals to us today is less what is generally called ‘the night side of Romanticism’, if such a thing ever existed, than the prototype of that very German thing, a drop-out)25 is controversial. Perspectives in such matters are generational. In my book Nachtwachen is not only very much of its early Romantic time, but also no less in advance of it. I see it as pointing forward first to Schopenhauer and Dostoevsky26 and then to Nietzsche, Kubin, Meidner, and coming further forward, to Sartre. In 1804 young Schopenhauer was recovering from a traumatic term spent at an ‘academy’ (private school) in Wimbledon run by a reactionary Georgian cleric;27 his Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, which appeared fifteen years later, in 1819, is a fully orchestrated, Buddhistic philisophy of nihilism into which some of Bonaventura’s aperçus would fit seamlessly. Ruth Haag’s discovery in Amsterdam, in 1987, of a handwritten list of Klingemann’s works28 which included Die Nachtwachen des Bonaventura, was at the time welcomed as just the kind of incontrovertible evidence that had long been needed to put an end to the controversy about the authorship of Nachtwachen 24

25 26 27 28

Die hat es gegeben, cf. Gothic Romanticism. Schiller’s Die Braut von Messina (1803), as read by Benno von Wiese, reflects the nihilistic strain in some of the most imaginative literature of the time. Nachtwachen, ed. Paulsen, 186.That the Night Side of Romanticism did indeed exist is proved, not least, by the evidence of Tieck’s Abdallah. See Rado Pribic, ‘Alienation in Nachtwachen by Bonaventura and Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground’, Germano-Slavica, 5 (1979), 19-28. See Patrick Bridgwater, Arthur Schopenhauer’s English Schooling (London & New York : Routledge, 1988). The hand said to be Klingemann’s.

284 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective and enable everyone to concentrate on its form and meaning. There is just one problem: that the attribution of Die Nachtwachen des Bonaventura to Klingemann is not convincing in the absence of evidence either that he was capable of producing a work of such quality and originality, or that the reason why he never admitted to being the author of Nachtwachen was the fact that even that was modelled on another writer’s work. We therefore need to take a critical look at two of his novels, written in 1798-1800, which may enable us to establish whether his claim to be Bonaventura is to be taken seriously.29 Die Ruinen im Schwarzwald (1798-99), the title of which betrays the Gothic mood of the time, while the subtitle proclaims it to be an Arabesk [of the Jean-Paulian kind], is a trivial Gothic novel (Schauerroman) of a rather intellectual, semi-autobiographical kind in which Klingemann, in the manner of Fichte, has an orphan ‘Lehren erteilen lassen, z. B. wie man zur Weisheit gelange, nämlich „durch Selbstbeherrschung, durch Absonderung deines reinen Ichs von allem, was Du nicht bist“‘ (teach others how to attain wisdom ‘by self-control and by detaching your pure Ego from everything you are not’).30 That alone makes it an odd sort of Schauerroman. What is extraordinary about this is that it reads exactly like the summary of a novel published a few years earlier, in 1790-91, written by the dark horse for the Bonaventura stakes who is identified presently. It is in Die Ruinen im Schwarzwald, written when Fichte was at his most influential while occupying the Chair of Philosophy at Jena from 1794 to 1799, that Klingemann canfirst be seen to have the interest in contemporary philosophy that might turn him into a plausible Bonaventura. if only he were up to it in literary terms. He would have had time, in 1803-4, to produce such a book, which Fichte’s lectures would have been more than capable of inspiring. In the Fourteenth Night Watch Kreuzgang dreams that he is ‘encompassed by „the great terrible Ego“ continually destroying itself and then being reborn, an endless cycle of [...] Fichtean monotony.’31 Insofar as the Nachtwachen involves not a little theatre and much theatricality, not to speak of coups de théatre including a nun being immured before Kreuzgang’s and the reader’s very eyes, Klingemann comes, somewhat ambiguously, into the frame. Fichteanism apart, his earliest novels ape the Gothic fashion of the time, to which they add nothing new.

29

30 31

The critical case for recognizing Klingemann as the author of the Nachtwachen, admirably made by Jost Schillemeit in his Bonaventura, der Verfasser der ‘Nachtwachen’ Bonaventura (Munich: Beck, 1973), was not accepted by all his colleagues. Müller-Fraureuth, Die Ritter- und Räuberromane, 76. Blackall, 218. See also Gillespie, 251, n.33.

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His next novel, Romano (1800), on the other hand, has rightly been noticed as ‘a genuine and ambitious attempt to write a [Romantic] novel in [Friedrich] Schlegel’s sense as understood by Klingemann’,32 and there’s the rub, for Schlegel, a great theorist of the novel,33 understood the [Romantic] novel to be a poetic form. His novel Lucinde, which Klingemann clearly knew, is ‘a fascinating experiment, in its use of arabesques, its combination of genres, its irony, and its self-reflexiveness.’34 These are features of Lucinde, and indeed of the Nachtwachen, but hardly of Romano, in which Klingemann initially appears to be out of his intellectual and artistic depth: Klingemann’s theorizing is rarely original and frequently little more than a pedestrian rendition of Schlegel’s thought [...] Klingemann did not always fully comprehend Schlegel’s concepts and [...] occasionally utilized them in simplistic fashion.

If there had been no more to Romano than this, there would have been no question of Klingemann being the author of Nachtwachen, but Romano also has its strengths, and Heiderich’s description of these in effect provides evidence that Klingemann might after all have had it in him, three years later, if he had managed to get up a sufficient head of steam, to write the Nachtwachen: It aspires to universality and progressiveness, mixes the genres, intersperses high and low elements, evinces a certain caprice, contains many digressions, and is structured in an ‘artistically arranged confusion’ [...] A cursory reading conveys a sense of confusion [...]of a multitude of apparently disconnected episodes [...] but a careful reading reveals narrative resolution (most stories are completed), pervasive thematic relationships, symbolically significant situations and objects, interconnections between all three, and a general structural design.35

Schillemeit had previously drawn attention to similarities between Romano and Nachtwachen,36 including the fact that Romano contains an inset Novelle in the form of the story from Dante of Paolo and Fransesca da Rimini which parallels that in Nachtwachen of the brothers and rivals in love Don Juan and Don Ponce. Then there is the case of Hans Sachs, who appears both at the beginning of the second volume of Romano and in the Nachtwachen, where 32 33 34 35 36

Heiderich, 234. See Blackall, 21- 43 (‘The Novel as Romantic Book’). Blackall, 43. Heiderich, 244. The phrase ‘artistically arranged confusion’ belings to Hans Eichner, Friedrich Schlegel (New York: Twayne, 1970), 64. J. Schillemeit, Bonaventura, 40, 56, 65f., 90, 100.

286 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective the presence of the sixteenth-century poet whose farces (Fastnachtsspiele) frequently involve a central clown figure shows that Bonaventura’s despair is peculiarly German, to say nothing of the Devil being, like Sachs and Faust, in some ways a sixteenth-century German figure, in the sense that his literary fame was established when Luther hurled an ink-pot at him. It is at the beginning of the 6th Night Watch that Bonaventura-Kreuzgang makes his most memorable and extreme statement: [ich] habe [...]stets eine besondere Vorliebe für die Tollheit gehabt und es zu einer absoluten Verworrenheit in mir zu bringen gesucht, eben um, wie unser Herrgott, erst ein gutes und vollständiges Chaos zu vollenden, aus welchem sich nachher gelegentlich, wenn es mir einfiele. eine leidliche Welt zusammenordnen ließe. Ja, es kommt mir zu Zeiten in überspannten Augenblicken wohl gar vor, als ob das Menschengeschlecht das Chaos selbst verpfuscht habe und mit dem Ordnen [...] voreilig gewesen sei, weshalb denn auch nichts an seinen gehörigen Platz zu stehen kommen könne und der Schöpfer baldmöglichst dazutun müsse, die Welt wie ein verunglücktes System auszustreichen und zu vernichten. (I have always had a particular predilection for folly and tried to bring it to the point of absolute confusion within myself, in order, like God, to perfect a fine and complete chaos, out of which, as and when I felt inspired, a tolerable world could later be cobbled together. Indeed, in over-excited moments it sometimes even seems to me that the human race has screwed up even chaos, and has been precipitate in establishing order, with the result that nothing is to be found in the right place and the Creator will soon have to cancel the world and destroy it as a botched system.)

Schillemeit quotes a long passage from Romano (I, 1 35-137) which is a on similar lines but stylistically different. If one is looking for equally nihilistic statements, Tieck’s Abdallah, rather than Klingemann’s Romano is the place to look, but Klingemann’s negative philosophy is very much of his time, when religion, reason and order have all broken down; elements of it can be found in Goethe (Werther), Schiller (Die Braut von Messina), Tieck (Abdallah), and so on. Werther chooses to die because he can see nothing but ‘die verzehrende Kraft, die in dem All der Natur verborgen liegt [...] Ich sehe nichts als ein ewig verschlingendes, ewig wiederkäuendes Ungeheuer’ (the ravening power that lies at the hidden heart of the entirety of nature [...] I see nothing but an eternally devouring, eternally regorging monster). Klingemann, like Werther, has looked into the abyss - the archaic, anarchic underworld of the mind, with, at bottom, nothing but biochemistry - and found it terrifying. The subconscious with its unplumbed, unfathomable depths, all of them depending on a bit of biochemistry, is utterly Gothic.

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His bibliography, on the other hand, shows that he belonged not to the vanguard but to the Fußvolk of literary history.37 The case against him remains what it has always been: that there is no satisfactory evidence that he had it in him to write Nachtwachen. Schillemeit’s examination of the subject, excellent though it was and is, is open to two objections. First, not a few of the comparisons of passages in Nachtwachen with others by Klingemann could just as well be made in respect of other writers, for the content of Nachtwachen is the intellectual/literary/critical Gemeingut of the time. And, second, the idea that such an extraordinarily unoriginal writer could, out of the blue, produce such an extraordinarily original work is incredible without explanation.. It is ironical but true that Klingemann would be a more plausible Bonaventura if it could be shown that he was, in the Nachtwachen, following a pre-existing model. The Nachtwachen remains what it has always been, one of the most original literary works of the whole Romantic era, whereas Klingemann, for his part, remains a writer who ‘Mit wirklichen poetischen Intentionen in die Dichtung eintrat’ but who ‘nicht über die Nachahmung hinauskam’ (started out with genuine poetic intentions, but never got past the stage of copying others).38 His unoriginality, it might be argued, is his hallmark and prime characteristic, so that, as things stand, one problem has been replaced by another. The case for Klingemann as author of Nachtwachen, made by Schillemeit in 1973 and seconded in different terms by Fleig in 1974, did not command general support until the discovery of the bio-/bibliographical sketch in Klingemann’s own hand. In other words, what proved persuasive was merely Klingemann’s implicit claim to the authorship of the book. That claim should, I suggest, be taken with a pinch of salt until it has been adequately tested against the evidence of Klingemann’s reputation for unoriginal work, his other novels, and the novel which may have provided him with a model, thereby enabling a minor, unoriginal writer to produce, as it were out the blue, a strikingly original novel. Was it because he knew that it was indebted to a novel by a man who died soon afterwards that he never publicly claimed Nachtwachen as his? The only way to settle the matter once and for all is to examine all the relevant evidence, a significant part of which has until now been missing from the equation.

37 38

See, however, Horst Fleig, Literarischer Vampirismus: Klingemanns ‘Nachtwachen von Bonaventura (Tübingen: Niemeyer,1985). See A. Salzer & Eduard von Tunk, Illustrierte Geschichte der deutschen Literatur in sechs Bänden, revised by C. Heinrich & Jutta Münster- Holzlar (Cologne: Zweiburgen, n.d.), III, 222.

288 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective

III In trying to pin down the identity of Bonaventura the quest has always been for a writer of the imaginative power and originality of a Jean Paul, Friedrich Schlegel, Tieck, Hoffmann, Schelling, or Büchner. Assessments of Klingemann may vary, but the idea that he is, artistically, in the same league as these men is incredible. From the beginning it was thought that the Nachtwachen, while not by Jean Paul himself, must be by someone well acquainted with his work and in tune with his manner, mannerisms and view of the age.39 Jean Paul was surely right to detect his own influence on the anonymous writer, and Gerald Gillespie has written of the ‘many thematic and structural analogies’ shared by the work of the two writers, listing some of them: Bonaventura’s predilection for speeches and first-person narrations, dramatization of a story by division into acts, ironic use of scientific and legal concepts or language, obsession with the theory of immortality, theme of human folly, ego fantasies, and so forth.40

These are only a few of the more obvious points. Others include the whole structural division of the novel, in this case into nights. Most of Jean Paul’s novels share a comparable structure, as, more literally, do Young’s Night Thoughts and the 1001 Nights, but the use of digressive arabesques appears to owe more to Friedrich Schlegel than to Jean Paul.41 Just as the late eighteenth-century novel concentrates on ‘Begebenheiten’ or ‘adventures’, and the German Gothic novel on episodes, the Nachtwachen consists of a series of night watches, each comprising a variable number of ‘arabesques’ that are both separate and not separate, for one of the morals of this circular sequence of seemingly immoral moral tales is that nothing can be taken for granted, but also that Nothing must not be taken for granted. This is very much a Friedrich-Schlegelian point of view. Like Schlegel’s Lucinde, the Nachtwachen both makes extensive use of the arabesque and foregrounds reflections on events rather than events themselves. Returning to Jean Paul, there is the ‘Erstes Blumenstück’ of the ‘Zweites Bändchen’ of the Blumen, Frucht- und Dornenstücke (1796-97), the ‘Rede des toten Christus vom 39 40 41

See Jean Paul, Grönländische Prozesse (2 vols, 1783-85) and Auswahl aus des Teufels Papieren (1789). Die Nachtwachen des Bonaventura, tr. & ed. by Gerland Gillespie (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1972), xi, xv. The third main section of Friedrich Schlegel’s Gespräch über die Poesie (1800) includes the ‘Brief über den Roman’ in which he speaks up for Jean Paul, whose arabesques, in his view, have the edge over Sterne’s.

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Weltgebäude herab, daß kein Gott sei’ (Proclamation of the dead Christ from the apex of the world-construct that there is no God), which gives one of the main reasons for the nihilism of the Nachtwachen. Others include the sleep of reason in the aftermath of the Aufklärung (cf. Goya’s etching El sueño de la razon produce monstruos (The sleep of reason produces monsters, 1797-8). Jean Paul is constantly called to mind by puns and other minor echoes of his work, and the ‘sense of being surrounded by things beyond one’s comprehension and forces beyond one’s control’42 goes back to his Grönländische Prozesse oder Satirische Skizzen ((1783-4) and to the Auswahl aus des Teufels Papieren (1789) which is where, in the figurative sense, the Nachwachen originates. In many ways the turn of the eighteenth century points forward to the turn of the nineteenth, both having been seen as marked by Spätzeitlichkeit or ‘décadence’ in Nietzsche’s sense, but while it was arguably Nietzsche who forced modern European intellectuals to face up to the consequences of their own lack of belief now that the ‘old God’ ‘was’ (=seemed; Nietzsche makes extensive use of poetic licence, using formulations that are deliberately zugespitzt) no longer credible. The chaotic, confused process starts with the Nachtwachen, in swathes of which the concept of ‘God’ is replaced by that of the ‘Devil’. In the first vigil the priest, ‘glühend vor Zorn’ (incandescent with rage), which in the reader’s mind’s eye makes him look like the Krampus or Devil-figure of Austrian popular superstition who comes to life every Advent, as he stands with raised crucifix, as though to drive out the Devil with the words anathema sit, doing, as Brecht’s Dead Soldier was to do a century later, what he has been programmed to do, but in attempting to convert the freethinker, he is himself, from the freethinker’s point of view, playing the part of the Devil. A step-change has taken place in the history of the world and human perceptions of it. In the distempered modern world all the old seeming certainties have gone, unless it is that, nach wie vor, the human animal needs some kind of metaphorical crutch. With the violent end of the stable, rational, Christian, conservative world of the ancien régime order has given way to chaos, reason to unreason, tragedy to farce; anticipating Schopenhauer, the idea of a paradise on earth is giving way to the idea of Hell on earth, while in the background are Tartarus and the Inferno or Fegefeuer, to which the narrator does not fail to refer. Whichever way one looks, everything has turned into Nothing. It is Nothing, the ‘Nichtigkeit des Irdischen’ of the German Baroque,43 that is left, leaving the reader to wonder whether time is still moving forword. But of course it is, 42 43

Blackall, 69. Both the Thirty Years War and the fifteen-year-long Napoleonic Wars were profoundly unsettling for those caught up in them.

290 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective for whatever has become of God and the Devil, Death remains the bottom line of Life, a fact that, whoever he is, the young author of the Nachtwachen is loth to accept. The nihilism of the Nachtwachen is reminiscent, in terms of the literature of the time, of Tieck’s Abdallah44 (1795) and Der Runenberg (1802), both of which involve the dark, ‘subterranean’ (subconscious) inner world and reveal an ‘almost Manichaean’ horror of life: ‘it seems impossible to reconcile matter and spirit, creator and creation, except as ascribing a force for evil to the one and human impotence to the other.’45That said, the author of the Nachtwachen may yet turn out to be Kammergerichtrat Hoffmann, who was to use the (twelve) night-watches format in his Der goldene Topf, is pre-occupied with man’s loss of control over reality and the extent to which the human mind is merely a machine (computer) running on a short-lived biochemical battery,46 and has the requisite wacky brilliance for the part. The way in which, in the Nachtwachen, fantasy and reality undercut one another and cancel each other out supports the idea that Hoffmann could be the author. He was, of course, one of many writers of the time who were attached to the 1001 Nacht, which is, with Straparola’s Nights and Young’s Night Thoughts, the best known work divided into nights. Here, as in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, the motif of (the raising of) buried treasure, first drafted in 1810, comes from the 1001 Nacht. At the beginning of the First Night Watch the narrator, Kreuzgang, likens himself to ‘der Prinz im Märchen in der bezauberten Stadt, wo eine böse Macht jedes lebende Wesen in Stein verwandelt hatte’ (the prince in the fairytale, in the enchanted city where an evil power had turned every living being to stone). This is a reference to a tale in The Arabian Nights, ‘Abdullah bin Fazil and his Brothers’, in which every person in an idolatrous (Bonaventura suppresses the epithet that explains all) city is found to be turned to stone, including an old woman who was hanging out her washing when petrifaction struck the city. In the background is Pompeii, excavation of which had begun on a small scale in 1748.47 When Kreuzgang adds ‘oder wie ein einzig Übriggebliebener nach einer allgemeinen Pest oder Sündflut’ (or like a lone survivor after a universal plague or flood’), readers of the time will have thought of the

44 45 46

47

Begun in 1791/2, publushed in 1795. Schiller’s Die Braut von Messina (1803), too, shares in the sudden deep pessimism of the opening years of the nineteenth century. Paulin, 142f. Cf. Kreuzgang’s words in the Third Night Watch: ‘von dem ich anfangs zweifelhaft blieb, ob es ein Mensch oder eine mechanische Figur sei’ (initially I could not make out whether it was a human being or an automaton). Large-scale excavations were to be undertaken by Murat in 1808-15.

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Apocalypse, and therefore of the Fall; modern readers are more likely to think of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826). The priest is likened to ‘ein wilder Höllenbreughel’ (a wild Hell Bruegel) in the phrase that Veit Weber used of himself when he explained in 1793 that he was obliged to depict the Middle Ages ‘in des Höllenbreughels Manier’ (in the manner of Hell Bruegel).48 It was, of course because his view of the Middle Ages became increasingly dark that he compared himself to Pieter Bruegel the Younger, who painted the underworld, the seamy side (Nachtseite) of late medieval life. There then follow references to Dante’s Inferno, and to Jean Paul’s Auswahl aus des Teufels Papieren (1787), which describes what Bonaventura, with Jean Paul in mind, calls ‘die schwache Manier des modernen Teufels’. For early nineteenth-century readers ‘Der Tod des Dichters’ points to Chatterton, the very incarnation of the Gothic myth of the found manuscript, while ‘Macbeths Hexen’ means Fuseli’s (Füßli’s) Three Witches (1783). The reference to ‘die mechanische Todesmaschine’ applies to the Guillotine, but by extension also to Gothic contraptions like the Eiserne Jungfrau (Iron Maiden) of Nuremberg49 and the so-called sword-mill (derived from die Mühle der Justiz) in Naubert’s Gothic Alf von Dülmen (1791). Associated torture devices like the Trillhaus and the spanischer Mantel are found in Nachtwachen.50 Such references, and there are others scattered throughout the novel, show that the world of the Nachtwachen overlaps with that of the Gothic novel at many points. This is the subject of section V below. The starting-point for the arabesque tale of the Spanish brothers, Don Juan and Don Ponce, in the Fifth Night Watch, was Goethe’s operetta Claudine von Villa Bella (1775), which is one of the works that led to the Räuberroman or bandito novel. The Tenth Night Watch, which involves a beggar being frozen to death, and sees Bürger’s Lenore being given a ride-by part, climaxes with a nun, an Ursulinernonne51 who has given birth to a child, being immured by - for good measure - Freemasons. It is a scene that is more Gothic than Gothic. The description of the nun 48 49

50

51

Quoted from Pantenius, 24. A mediaeval instrument of torture used in Germnay for traitors, heretics, parricides, etc. It was a box big enough to admit a man, with folding doors, the whole studded with sharp iron spikes. When the doors were closed on him these spikes were forced into the body of the victim, and he was left to die. (Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable).It is to be seen in Nuremberg. The Trillhaus or Triller was a cage in which criminals were forced to stand while it was revolved. The spanischer Mantel or wooden straitjacket is related to the spanische Stiefel into which the victim’s legs were forced to the detriment of their knees and ankles. Is this an allusion to the Ursulinerkloster in Erfurt, or a reference to T.F.K. Arnold’s Die doppelte Ursulinernonne (1800)?

292 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective being buried alive may go back to Lewis’s description of the fate of Agnes, yet ‘Bonaventura’ is more coldly factual than Lewis. What in The Monk was a tawdry piece of sensationalism has in the course of less than a decade become a mere part of a radically disordered world. In the last watch Kreuzgang’s unconscious with its abysmal depths is compared to Bluebeard’s chamber of horrors.

IV So fas as the authorship of the Nachtwachen is concerned, there is another, in some ways more obvious candidate than Klingemann or Hoffmann in the person of the satirical/Gothic novelist and translator Friedrich von Oertel (1764-1807),52 who is known these days as the first and best translator of M. G. Lewis’s The Monk (1796), first translated by Oertel as Der Mönch. Aus dem Englischen übersetzt (Leipzig: [Beygang?], 1797-98), which appeared without any fanfare - no baroque sub-title of the sort that Oertel was to deploy in his next novel, no lurid or tantalizing advertisement or woodcut illustrations, no heaping of Pelion upon Ossa, just a straight, honest, business-like translation. It was via Oertel’s translation of the first edition that The Monk was denounced by A. W. Schlegel, who, in a magisterial review in the Jenaische allgemeine Literaturzeitung (1798, No. 157), described it as being ‘aus schlechten deutschen [Romanen] zusammengeborgt und nachgeahmt’ (borrowed from and written in imitation of second-rate German novels). It was, of course, Lewis’s novel, not Oertel’s translation, that was being denounced. Mathilde von Villanegas oder der weibliche Faust (1799) was an anonymous rehash of Oertel’s translation, of which the anonymous Die blutende Gestalt mit Dolch und Lampe (1799), was an abridged piracy. While he cannot be blamed for these developments, Oertel can take some of the credit for the impact on Heinrich von Kleist of Lewis’s novel. It was probably in 1800-01 that he read and was much impressed by Oertel’s translation of The Monk. What induced Oertel to translate an exceptionally ‘horrid’ English sensational novel is not known; it is a surprising choice, for he is a thoughtful member of the landed gentry in English terms, an intellectual and friend of Jean Paul (1763-1825), whom he met while studying at Leipzig. university in the mid 1780s. His twin sister Mimi (Wilhelmine Henriette von Oertel) was on friendly terms with the Schillers,53 which may mean that he 52 53

On Oertel, see Hadley, The German Novel in 1790, 223ff. See Schiller’s letter to Charlotte Schiller and Caroline von Beulwitz of 29 July 1790. Mimi was one of the ‘Frauengestalten Weimar-Jena’.

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moved to Jena after going down from Leipzig, although it is with Leipzig, where most of his books were published, that he is associated. An interesting writer who has so far been overlooked, he is the author of a number of publications, one of which is central to the Nachtwachen: 1790:

Weiber machten ihn weiser, und - glücklich (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1790, novel). 1790-91: Kilbur, ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des sittlichen Gangs menschlicher Natur, 2 vols [411pp. and 465pp.] (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1790-91, novel).54 1792: Rhapsodien über das Gute, Schöne und Wahre (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1792) 1793: Ueber Humanität. Ein Gegenstück zu des Präsidenten von Kotzebues Schrift vom Abel (Leipzig: Voss & Leo, 1793). There is a satirical reference to Kotzebue in the Fourth Night Watch of the Nachtwachen. 1793: Karl Flor, Marquis de Fleurange (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1793, a novel which, like many Gothic novels, seems to have disappeared without trace). 1794: Denkwürdigkeiten des ehemaligen Nachtwächters Robert von Zwäzen derzeitigen Satrapen im Lande Caramania. Ein Beytrag zu den Geister und Ordensgeschichten dieses Jahrhunderts. (Ein Opus posthumum des nunmehr vestorbenen Schulmeisters zu Zwäzen Theophilus Speck, zu seiner Zeit gewesnen unbekannten Obern einer geheimen Gesellschaft, wie auch verschiedener gelehrten Societäten Mitglieds)[Modern Zwätzen, formerly a village, now part of Jena] (2 vols, Schneeberg: Arnold, 1794-95, satirical/satyric novel), noticed, but not reviewed, in NadB, 1796, 328f.).55 What Kosch calls Jean Pauls Briefwechsel mit seinen Freunden Emanuel Osmund, Friedrich von Oertel und Paul Thieriot, 2 vols (Munich: Fleischmann,1863-65) was actually entitled Denkwürdigkeiten aus dem Leben von Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, the key word of the title taken from Oertel’s novel. 1797-98: Der Mönch (translation of Lewis’s The Monk ) (Leipzig: [ Beygang], 1797-98). 1798-99: Erzählungen aus Canterbury (Leipzig: Beygang, 1798-99, part translation ofHarriet & Sophia Lee’scelebrated, partly Gothic Canterbury Tales, 1797[-1805]) 54 55

Locations: Wissenschaftliche Bibliothek der Stadt Erfurt, Sign. Lg. 6860, and Staatsbibliothek Marburg, Sign. Yw. 3291. Available online as a Google eBook

294 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective 1799:

1799: 1800:

1802:

1804:

Die beiden Emilien (Leipzig: Beygang & Ackermann, 1799, translation of Sophia Lee’s The Two Emilys, a ‘Romantic tale with touches of the terror-novel’ [Summers] which appeared in 1798 in the second volume of The Canterbury Tales Graf Ferdinand Fathom (Leipzig & Sorau: Beygang & Ackermann), translation of Smollett’s proto-Gothic novel The Adventures of Ferdinand Fathom, 1753) Das Grab (publisher unknown), 1800, translation of Miss Pilkington’s anonymous epistolary Gothic novel The Subterranean Cavern, or Memoirs of Antoinette de Montflorance (Minerva Press) 1798, ascribed to Radcliffe , most likely by the German publisher). Abenteuer Joseph Andrews (Meissen: Erbstein, 1802), a new translation of Fielding’s Joseph Andrews. The National Library of Scotland attributes its copy of the 1775 translation of Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, Abenteuer Josephs Andrews, 2 vols (Berlin: Himburg, 1775) to Friedrich von Oertel who was, however only eleven years old at the time and had no contact with Himburg. Spinalba oder Offenbarungen aus dem Rosenkreuzerorden (Leipzig: Beygang, 1804, translation of Regnault-Warin’s Spinalba, ou les Révélations de la Rose-Croix, 4 vols, 1803.

Weiber machten ihn weiser, und - glücklich (1790) combines a genially satirical consideration of local lending libraries and their attempts to improve the obstinately low-brow tastes of their users56 with a personal take on the lives of Karl Philipp Moritz and Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling. Moritz, who attended university in Erfurt, which with its Catholic Cathedral and Ursulinenkloster is the most likely of the supposed settings of the Nachtwachen, and in 1787, two years before Schiller’s Der Geisterseher, published Fragmente aus dem Tagebuch eines Geistersehers, was a brilliant eccentric, best known for his autobiographical novel Anton Reiser (1785-90), while Jung-Stilling was celebrated for a long series of pietistic autobiographical novels. Both men were known for their ‘soul-searching’ in these early psychological novels. Kilbur, ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des sittlichen Gangs menschlicher Natur, 2 vols (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1790-91)57 is a novel of uncommon quality, a fictionalized autobiography narrated by ‘Kilbur’, in which the author is at pains to distance his work from the popular novel: Kilbur, he writes, far from being intended to titillate, is meant to be morally useful. Michael Hadley has 56 57

For details, see Hadley, The German Novel in 1790, 25, 28. My discussion of Kilbur is much indebted to Hadley’s The German Novel in 1790, 223230, but also 9, 15, 20, 49, 62.

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already made the point that in Kilbur Oertel is ‘in striking accord with [Christian Friedrich von] Blankenburg’s [perfectibilist] Versuch über den Roman’ (1775), in which the novel is regarded as a tool to be used in the effort to perfect humanity, or at least to bring it closer to perfection. Oertel’s concern here is the nature of human development and the meaning and extent of human perfectibility in the spiritual context. He is therefore concerned with ‘die innere Wahrheit [...] welche man in sich selbst, im eignen Herzen findet’ (the inner truth which is to be found in one’s self, in one’s own heart [or, in Fichtean terms, the Ego]) (Kilbur I, 239) and the development of the inner man, from which it follows that Kilbur is an Entwicklungsroman or Bildungsroman: ‘Oertel enunciates a concept of Bildung which is representative of the fully developed (i.e. secularized) Bildungsroman’.58 In the background are the philosophy of Fichte (just two years older than Oertel) and the belief in human perfectibility that at this time is associated with Illuminism. Indeed, Oertel’s novel may be compared with Die Ruinen im Schwarzwald, in which, in the manner of Fichte, Klingemann had an orphan teach others how to attain wisdom ‘by selfcontrol and by detaching your pure Ego from everything you are not’. Implicit in Oertel’s idea of human development is the contemporary belief in what at the time was known as Fichtisieren. Although his explicit insistence (Kilbur, I, 330f.) that truth is his sole deity could with advantage have come earlier, it is clear from the start that while his concern is moral and his point of view partly humanistic and partly psychological, his tone is religious. Much of his material is taken over from Weiber machten ihn weiser, und glücklich into Kilbur, in which he applied to himself the method developed in the earlier novel with reference to two admired contemporaries, the ‘strikingly religious tone’59 of Kilbur being a reflection of Jung-Stilling’s thought. All this is implicit in the title of the novel, Kilbur, ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des sittlichen Gangs menschlicher Natur. Unlike Benedicte Naubert, whose prime concern is historical truth, Oertel is a Godwinian ideas-man whose allegiance is to ‘inner’ (psychological in today’s terminology) truth. He reserves the right to include any thought that comes to mind (Kilbur, II, 110f.), which is fine in his case, but far from fine in many novels of the Gothic complex. Digressions à la Sterne and Jean Paul are therefore acceptable. The Preface to the second volume includes a summary of Oertel’s view of human development which suggests, in the present context, that he is a possible candidate for the position of Bonaventura, though not as yet a serious one, partly because of his orthodoxly religious tone, but 58 59

Hadley, The German Novel in 1790, 225. Hadley, The German Novel in 1790, 227.

296 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective mainly because Nachtwachen is based not on Blankenberg’s ethical view of the novel but on Friedrich Schlegel’s aesthetic one. Kilbur is about the attainment of self-knowledge, which for Oertel is the means through which to attain to ‘the good, the true and the beautiful’ (Kilbur, II, 440), about which he had already written. Kilbur was clearly written to trace his own path to self-knowledge and to show others that it is possible, if one is undeterred by difficulties by the way in the form of grief, sorrow and despair, to attain the goal. Implicit in all this is the idea that ‘Nur der Mensch ist schätzbar, der eignes Gepräg hat’ (Only the person whose individuality is fully developed is valuable (I, 24). His view of life is Fichtean in the sense that he teaches in Kilbur that the Ego has to know itself before it can posit and come to terms with the Non-Ego in the sense of the world outside of mind. It is a novel that deserves to be far better known, but not one that could be said to feed into Nachtwachen, for Kilbur is to Kreuzgang as optimist is to pessimist. Not until 1794 does Oertel provide a model for Nachtwachen, and then it is a formal rather than a philosophical one. His next novel is Karl Flor, Marquis de Fleurange (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1793), but having failed to trace a copy or even a review, I have no choice but to pass on to what is Oertel’s most important novel in the present context. Before consolidating his position as one of the outstanding translators of British Gothic novels,60 he produced his most intriguing work in the form of an extremely rare, long-forgotten Gothified satirical/satyric novel, Denkwürdigkeiten des ehemaligen Nachtwächters Robert von Zwäzen (1794), the baroque subtitle and hero of which, Schulmeister Theophilus Speck, is reminiscent of Jean Paul’s Schulmeisterlein Wutz (Wutz [pig] Speck [bacon fat]), as well as involving a dig at Carl Grosse, self-proclained Marquis von Grosse, whose Der Genius had, in the previous two years, been causing such a stir, and who fraudulently claimed membership of most learned societies under the sun.61 The inspiration for Denkwürdigkeiten des ehemaligen Nachtwächters Robert von Zwäzen came, in a general way, from Jean Paul, and in a more particular way from Moritz, whose Fragmente aud dem Tagebuch eines Geistersehers (1787) helped to provide a structural model. The full title of Oertel’s novel, Denkwürdigkeiten des ehemaligen Nachtwächters Robert von Zwäzen derzeitigen Satrapen im Lande Caramania. Ein Beytrag zu den Geister und Ordensgeschichten dieses Jahrhunderts. (Ein Opus posthumum des nunmehr vestorbenen Schulmeisters zu Zwäzen Theophilus Speck, zu seiner Zeit gewesnen unbekannten Obern einer geheimen Gesellschaft, wie auch verschiedener gelehrten Societäten Mitglieds) 60 61

A fact not noticed by Garside, Raven and Schöwerling in their admirable The English Niovel 1770-1829, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). The baroque title of the novel refers to Robert as a one-time satrap in Caramania, ie. Karamania, a province in Turkish Asia Minor, not Caramanie in France.

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(Memoirs ofone-time Night Watchman Robert of Zwäzen, formerly Satrap in the Land of Caramania. A Contribution to the Ghost and Secret-Society Stories of the Present Century. [A Posthumous Work by the Lately Deceased Schoolmaster of Zwäzen, Theophilus Speck, in his day the unknown Grand Master of a Secret Society and Member of Numerous Learned Societies]), shows him making great play with the Gothic ploy of the fictitious editor, who in this case borrows the voice of his friend Jean Paul. As the fictional editor of the fictional biography of a fictional author he hides at three removes from his text. Denkwürdigkeiten des ehemaligen Nachtwächters Robert von Zwäzenderzeitigen Satrapen im Lande Caramania. (Schneeberg: Arnold, 1794)62 clearly impressed the future author of Die Nachtwachen des Bonaventura (1805 [1804]), which was published by an otherwise little known publishing house in Penig, which, like Zwätzen, is a former village long since incorporated into Jena. Schneeberg (between Zwickau and Schwarzenberg) is another small town in Saxony affording shelter to another obscure publisher, who, like F. Dienemann & Co. of Penig, is in the nature of things more or less obliged to publish work by minor writers or minor works of fiction such as Gothic novels and their translations. The Denkwürdigkeiten des ehemaligen Nachtwächters Robert von Zwäzen, which is set in Jena, as the Nachwachen may also be, although Erfurt has been thought to have a stronger claim, is the work of a writer who is potentially equal to the role of Bonaventura. Oertel is precisely the friend, admirer and imitator of Jean Paul who has so long been sought, although there is no reason to think that Jean Paul would have regarded his work as weak, and it is unlikely that Oertelhimself reworked his Denkwürdigkeiten into the Nachtwachen, for his novels, while clearly the work of an enlightened and humane man, contain no sign of the tortured intelligence and desperate pessimism that underlies Nachtwachen. Oertel is, however, a young éminence grise whose work was, in those days in which literary ‘borrowing’ was so rife, liable to be hijacked by a less gifted writer. More specifically, his Denkwürdigkeiten des ehemaligen Nachtwächters Robert von Zwäzen appears to have attracted the attention of August Klingemann, who studied at Jena, and to have led to his taking over its memoirs-of-a-nightwatchman’ formula, which would explain why he did not make his authorship known even after Oertel’s early death in 1807. What is Die Nachtwachen des Bonaventura if not precisely the satirical ‘Denkwürdigkeiten [eines] ehemaligen Nachtwächters’? A ‘reviewer’ of Denkwürdigkeiten, who supposed it to be ‘ein satyrischer Roman’ (NADB, 23/2 [1796], 329), no more knew how to take it than did reviewers of 62

Denkwürdigkeiten des ehemaligen Nachtwächters Robert von Zwäzen derzeitigen Satrapen im Lande Caramania. (Schneeberg: Arnold, 1794) is available online as a Google eBook.

298 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Nachtwachen when it appeared eight years later, but the epithet ‘satyrisch’, the sum total of his critical analysis, which appropriately means both satirical and satyric, applies equally well to the Denkwürdigkeiten and to the Nachtwachen. Die Nachtwachen des Bonaventurais closely connected with, and was probably inspired by, the work that did more than any other to create the Gothic mood, Young’s Night Thoughts,63 for the thoughts of a nightwatchman are by definition night thoughts. It is hard to over-estimate the influence in Germany of the Night Thoughts at the turn of the century. All the anonymous author had to do was to take the word Nachtgedanken literally and wait for inspiration in the figure of the Night-Watchman. So far as the wakeful citizens are concerned, of whom the dying freethinker-poet is the most significant, there is also Mercier de Compiègne’s little-known but important Les nuits de la conciergerie (1795), which is devoted to the nightthoughts of condemned criminals facing their last night of life and therefore their own night-watches. Notwithstanding what has been said about Juvenal, structurally the Nachtwachen with its sixteen night-watches (fifteen plus a ‘tailpiece’) or vigils is modelled on the Night Thoughts with its nine nights. The subject of both the Night Thoughts and the Nachtwachen is the experience of life as nothingness which had loomed so large in the poetry of the Thirty Years War and now resurfaced during the Napoleonic Wars. This is the unvoiced, nihilistic central theme on which the night-watches are variations. The watches are linked by a number of leitmotifs, notably the figures of the madman and the devil, the idea of masquerading, and the leitmotif of nothingness. The world is seen, in a way that both echoes German baroque writing and anticipates nineteenth-century Russian nihilism and midtwentieth-century French existentialism, as an ‘absurd empty playground of fools and masks’,64 but Die Nachtwachen des Bonaventura is above all a brilliantly wayward analysis of where the human animal can be seen to be standing in the wake of the Aufklärung and the French Revolution; it is a monument to Gothic Romanticism and one of the most imaginative pieces of Gothic writing. As such it fits into Oertel’s bibliography much more readily than into Klingemann’s. One thing, in my view, stands out from the darkness surrounding Nachtwachen, namely that Oertel’s Denkwürdigkeiten des ehemaligen Nachtwächters Robert von Zwäzen almost certainly led to Nachtwachen, either directly in that Oertel went on to write Nachtwachen, or, this being much more likely, indirectly in that Klingemann wrote Nachtwachen, which, farfrom being his 63

64

Regnault-Warin, in another Gothic novel, Le Cimetière de la Madeleine (1800), uses, as Oertel will have known, a narrative structure of vigils similar to that used by Young in Night Thoughts. Quoted from Blackall, 217.

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own implausibly original work, would thereby fall into place as just another of his copied works. However, even if Klingemann is confirmed as the author of Nachtwachen, some of the credit for this ingenious work will belong to Friedrich von Oertel. If to Oertel’s memoirs-of-a-nightwatchman formula we add Young’s Nachtdedanken, Goethe’s view of the abyss, Tieck’s early nihilism, and Moritz’s Tagebuch eines Geistersehers, all that would be needed to enable Nachtwachen is an over-excited critical intelligence. I suggest that Klingemann came across Oertel’s Denkwürdigkeiten, which gave him the basic model for his own nightwatchman-book, and that this gave him the mental excitement he needed. There is no question of Nachtwachen being indebted to Denkwürdigkeiten in detail.

V Nachtwachen is, apart from anything else, a masterful piece of Gothic mystery-mongering that has mystified its readers for more than two centuries. This ‘geheimnisvolles Werkchen’ deserves to have classic Gothic status. As a ‘poetic book’ in Friedrich Schlegel’s sense, it is less a ‘novel’ than a fantasy’, of which Gothic is a subset. Now, in a Schwanzstück to the present essay, we need to return to its status as a ‘Gothic book’ The urban inscape of Nachtwachen is Gothic-apocalyptic: beneath portentous, livid, storm-torn skies that rain down fire, the desolate streets of the town with its decaying woodwork, dying inhabitants and deathly silence are shrouded in darkness. The fire, which appears to be the literal harbinger of the Fegefeuer (literally, sweeping fire; normal meaning, purgatory) to come, prefigures the apocalyptic imagery of Germany’s later urban Expressionism. The memorable image of the frozen raven crashing to earth is found again, a century later, in a poem written shortly before his death by Georg Heym: Raben und Krähen Habe ich ausgesandt, Und sie stoben im Grauen Über das ziehende Land. Aber sie fielen wie Steine Zur Nacht mir traurigem Laut Und hielten im eisernen Schnabel Die Kränze von Stroh und Kraut.65

65

Georg Heym, from the final version of ‘Mit den fahrenden Schiffen’ (November 1911), in his Dichtungen und Schriften, ed. Karl Ludwig Schneider, Vol.I Lyrik (Hamburg & Munich: Ellermann, 1964), 458.

300 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective (Ravens and crows I send out [to search for you]. From ashen skies they scour the empty lands passing below, then nightly fall from the sky like stones, iron beaks clutching wreaths of straw and leaves.)

Very much of its post-rational, post-revolutionary, post-Christian, postKantian Gothic-Romantic era, its form and content alike reflecting the confusion of the time, Nachtwachen includes a plethora of Gothic motifs, among them the verkehrte Welt (upside down world [compare the topsy-turvy world of fairytale]), the imagery of horror and terror, the dislocation of rationality and perception (including the dislocation of the very concept of reality), the unhealthy (in Goethe’s terms) emphasis on life as progresssive dying, the idea of nothingness, madness, masking (Kreuzgang’s ‘abentheuerliche Vermummung’ [fancy disguise]) and masquerading, live burial, necromancy, the uncanny, unclear identity and multiple identities, multiple meanings and therefore indeterminate meaning, the ambiguous status of the narrative and its author, the author’s vampiric ‘borrowings’ the whole text is vampiric from beginning to end- and the central role of the diabolical, which adds the satyric to the satiric. The narrator’s indeterminate, theatrically symbolical name, Kreuzgang, is ambivalently meaningful. On the surface literary level it points to different ways in which the text can be read and understood, and, as a variation of Kreuzweg,66 which, figuratively, means Stations of the Cross (to which the series of vigils are thereby compared), it also alludes to the idea that all have their cross to bear. But this is not all, for, given the gothicity if the text, in the present context it also points to the literal Kreuzweg (crossroads) of Vehmgericht (secret-tribunal) lore, according to which the only way for the accused to discover where the secret tribunal assembled, was to repair, three quarters of an hour after midnight, to that part of the town where four streets meet, and where there was always to be found a person who would lead the accused, blindfold, before the judges whose sentence of death would normally be handed down and executed in a matter of minutes. The underlying preoccupation of Gothic is the naked human condition of mortality, the ultimate Gothic locus the oubliette or grave. The Nachtwachen, being about ‘der absolute Tod’ (absolute death),67 is by definition the ne plus ultra of Gothic. The idea of entropy, of chaos taking over a once vital system that is threatened by extinction and which in the young Bonaventura’s view does not deserve to survive points to Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), to which it may be regarded as a prequel, although it is unlikely that Mary Shelley knew it. 66 67

Compare the crossroads in the ‘second woodcut’ in the 4th Vigil. Nicely glossed by Eric Blackall as ‘True Nothingness, absolute Death in c ontrast to the progressive dying by which Life arises’ (Blackall, 215).

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Given the author’s penchant for ‘horrid’ (horrific, horrendous) Gothic motifs like the starvation of Gerstenberg’s Ugolino or the butchery of the Blaubart tales, and for the locations that go with them, it is not surprising that Nachtwachen includes a gruesome burial scene, torture devices like the Trillhaus and the spanischer Mantel, and the immurement of a nun. Bonaventura’s text may seem at first sight to lack the Gothic romance’s typical backdrop and grisly features in the form of ruinous, haunted medieval castles complete with dungeons and subterranean vaults and passages, convents with sadistic abbesses, and wild, existentially challenging picturesque landscapes, but these features are not so much absent as internalized, so that in terms of the history of the Gothic novel Nachtwachen is a decade in advance of its time The ruinous medieval edifice is present in the form of the narrator’s state of mind, which is very much of its age with its freethinker who has overcome the idea of God, but, quixotically, remains haunted by the medieval idea the Devil. Part of the Gothic townscape of Nachtwachen is the cathedral with its dark recesses, but also the garret, the dark medieval streets and the cemetery to which, metaphorically, all streets lead, which takes the place of the heilige Vehme. The townscape has become an inscape. We may not see much of the Ursuline convent and its sadistic abbess, but they are present in the narrator’s mind’s eye as he describes the immurement that could only be ordered by the Mother Superior or ‘wicked Abbess’. Entrapment, incarceration, immurement, live burial, and interment generally are all Gothic tropes. Marked by inherent instability and the destabilizing role of the subconscious in the generation of text, as in the Nachtwachen, Gothic is both historically and formally subversive. As the conventions of early Gothic are internalized, the emphasis comes to be on uncanny dream-experience, which includes the daydream and the creative trance, when Bonaventura, overexcited, is ‘carried away’ by the process of textual generation. The vigils and the interrelationship between them are dreamlike. The emphasis is therefore on the instability of the inner world and its constructs, so that Gothic becomes a code for the exploration of the deep structures of the self and its anxieties.68 Having to do with interior space and more especially with haunted consciousness, it comes to be about invasive, entrapping interiority and the nature and contradictions of subjectivity, which Kreuzgang embodies. In all this the Nachtwachen is both an exemplary Gothic text and a text that cannot be fully understood without recourse to Gothic. As a Gothic text it is the site of multiple meanings and therefore of indeterminate

68

Miles, Gothic Writing 1750-1820, 2nd edn, 3, 21.

302 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective meaning, to say nothing of being remarkably ‘modern’69 in its broken forms and flip (subversive, self-subverting) unoriginal nature. The subversion, including the self-subversion that is basic to Gothic, is ever present.Literary vampirism is intrinsic to the Gothic novel, and makes greater sense in that context than in the context of the unoriginality of which Klingemann must have been all too conscious. If conservative critics had recognized the significance of the vampirism of Nachtwachen in the Gothic context, the Gothic nature of the text would have been recognized before now. The opening of Nachtwachen is ominous, bringing with it the sudden turn for the worse, the loss of control that this involves, and the uncertainty, destabilization and anxiety that ensue from the suddden irruption of chaos into an existence previously ordered: eine von jenen unheimlichen Nächten, wo Licht und Finsternis schnell und seltsam miteinander abwechselten. Am Himmel flogen die Wolken, vom Winde getrieben, wie wunderliche Riesenbilder vorüber, und der Mond erschien und verschwand im raschen Wechsel. Unten in den Straßen herrschte Totenstille, nur hoch oben in der Luft hauste der Sturm, wie ein unsichtbarer Geist. (one of those uncanny nights when light and darkness change back and forth in swift and strange succession. Overhead in the heavens the clouds, driven by the wind, flew past like monster portents, and the moon appeared and disappeared in swift rotation. Down below on the streets deathly silence reigned, it was only in the heavens above that the storm raged like an invisible spirit.)

Gothic are the uncanny, the monstrous, the threatening, the unsettling, and the grotesque or macabre, especially in combination; in Nachtwachen, which also embodies the Gothic sense of blocked entrances and exits, of broken connexions and lost or eroded meaning(s), a lost past and the prospect of a lost future, they are present in profusion. There are many recipes for a Gothic novel, many mostly satirical lists of the parts that originally went to make up a Gothic whole. Not all of the features in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s list are to be found in the Nachtwachen, but it includes, in effect, much of the mental machinery of Bonaventura’s text,70 and she concludes that the self is ‘massively blocked off from something to which it ought normally to have access’, which has very wide applicability, and adds that ‘Of all the Gothic conventions dealing with the sudden, mysterious, seemingly arbitrary, but massive inaccessibility of those things that should normally be accessible, the difficulty the story has in getting itself told is of 69 70

It points forward to Alfred Kubin’s fantastic novel Die andere Seite (1909). Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, 9f.

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the most obvious structural significance.’71 As a collage in which an uneven, circular series of arabesques replaces the teleological narration of the preRomantic past, Nachtwachen is a notable example of such difficulty. While Nachtwachen is a Gothic Romantic novel, its means are those of the lyric, and the text would lend itself both to production by an experimental theatre company and to reconsideration vis-à-vis the work of Samuel Becket. I have already said that Gothic texts not only foreground the instability and impermanence of things, and, frequently, their own generic instability; they also tend to generate an often extreme uncertainty in the reader’s mind as to their meaning that mirrors the uncertainty generated in the protagonist’s mind regarding the significance of a life more than ever subject to violent, arbitrary change in an age suspended between revolution and reaction. All of this applies, par excellence, to Nachtwachen. Gothic texts are frequently marked by a ‘digressive complexity of structure’72 that serves to add hermeneutic to metaphysical instability. The Gothic novel comes to be marked by a multiform instability that may be authorial/narratorial (problem of identity), textual (problem of meaning), generic (problem of genre, crossgeneric form. The novel becomes a mixed form, no longer predictable, no longer distinguishable from autobiography, fairy tale, myth, drama, and poetry), or moral (Sade). Nachtwachen incorporates instability in all these guises. Gothic texts are characterized not only by their psychological complexity and instability, but also by their metafictionality and generic instability. Nachtwachen incorporates all forms of chaos, complexity, doubt and instability. There is a strong case for regarding it as the ne plus ultra of Gothic texts. Gothic having to do with the labyrinthine complexity of experience and the delicate balance between illusion and reality,73 the Gothic text has come to be seen as a ‘textual event in which boundaries between inside and outside, life and death, the spectral and the real, the illusory and the rational, disarmingly fade’.74 Reality and unreality are liable to be conflated or confused, and the reader is confronted, and likely to be thrown, by the consequent lack of markers or by a profusion of unreliable ones. Reality and fantasy become, especially in the case of Hoffmann, notably unstable concepts; this is one reason why Hoffmann was himself at one time thought to be Bonaventura. As a ‘blatantly fictional style’,75 Gothic goes out of its 71 72 73 74 75

Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions, 12, 13. Grevel Lindop, in the Introduction to his edition of Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), vii. See Snyder, Research Studies, 49 (1981), 130. Miles, Gothic Writing 1750-1829, 119. The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Hogle, 5.

304 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective way to draw attention not only to its own fictionality, but to its metafictionality and thus to its unreliability, so that it involves the idea of the counterfeit or fake, as well as that of literary vampirism which is fundamental to Nachtwachen. To instal a narrator who is by definition a liar was a stroke of genius, for it means that every attempted interpretation, being partial, will be wrong, as will the opposite interpretation. Gothicism challenges rationalism and rational perceptions and valuations: as a revolutionary form of the novel, the Gothic romance embodies the radical uncertainty generated by the collapse of the ancien régime and its attendant certainties and intellectual-aesthetic paradigms. It represents a challenge not only to the ancien régime of the novel, but to every reader’s preconceptions. Gothic involves a sense, and the reality, of disempowerment, privation, helplessness, abandonment and alienation, and therefore the sense of a ‘malign agency’ (traditionally identified with the Devil) at work. Gothicism involves the quest for metaphysical and moral absolutes in a world that offers teasing, shadowy semblances of an occult order but withholds final revelation and illumination’,76 and therefore involves the shocked discovery of the meanglessness and lack of security at the heart of a world hitherto deemed meaningful and secure. This is the situation that Nachtwachen seems to describe. I say ‘seems’ because this text involves not only what Sedgwick calls the difficulty the story has in getting itself told, but also the additional, and greater, difficulty that the text has in getting itself understood. Gillespie has analyzed Nachtwachen in detail, and managed to put a positive gloss on it, but the fact that Kreuzgang is by definition, as the son of the Devil, a thoroughly unreliable narrator who may all the time be lying, in my view means that the older, negative reading is safer. The crux of the matter is that Nachtwachen is both an exemplary Gothic text and a text that cannot be fully understood without recourse to Gothic. As a thoroughly slippery Gothic text whose lies may equally well be truths, and whose truths may equally well be lies, Nachtwachen represents a challenge in advance to the theory of general hermeneutics that Schleiermacher was to propound in 1819. The reading experience, unnerving when the reader is faced with a text whose meaning is so elusive, is part and parcel of the gothicism of the text. In Nachtwachen the Gothic text begins to challenge and subvert not only its own meaning, and with it the idea of the interpretable text, but the supposed meaning of existence, the very idea that existence has an a-priori, supradarwinistic meaning. It is therefore entirely appropriate that Nachtwachen

76

The Gothic Imagination, ed. Thompson, 6.

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ends with a tail-piece or coda that goes back to Hogarth’s last engraving, Tail-Piece. Finis or the End of the World.77

VI In the Schwanzstück (tail-piece) the preceding text is dubbed Des Teufels Taschenbuch (the Devil’s notebook) a sub-title that points back to Jean Paul, who in 1783 began work on what many drafts later became a satirical work with an eye-catching title, Auswahl aus des Teufels Papieren (1789), by one J. P. F. Hasus, an early pseudonym of Jean Paul Friedrich Richter. In the Auswahl aus des Teufels Papieren, which combines a plea for religious freedom with outspoken denunciation of the corruption of the ancien régime which had preserved Satan’s Miltonic status, the Devil is presented as the double of ‘the Jew Mendel’78 and the author ‘Hasus’, who are also doubles one of the other (Hasus ← [A]has[uer]us, the Wandering Jew) and of Jean Paul himself. When Friedrich Leopold Graf zu Stolberg-Stolberg,79 in 1784, celebrated Lucifer as the Light-Bearer who brought truth and enlightenment to humanity, the idea he propounded was less daring than it was intended to be. The real revolution came five years later when Jean Paul proceeded to strip away the aura of heroism and, with it, of well-nigh divine status accorded the Devil by Milton, thereby demythologizing the Devil to the point where he becamea mere projection of modern man. Bonaventura cannot resist the temptation for further satire when he has the Devil insist that it is his intention to act in accordance with ‘sächsischer Eleganz und Konduite’ (Saxon elegance and social norms), a dig that no doubt reflects the fact that for the last few years Klingemann had been writing for the Saxon Zeitung für die elegante Welt. By then it is, of course, too late, for this mockingly laudible intention is expressed in the Schwanzstück, a weak afterthought which, if its purpose was not simply to throw a last handful of sand in the eyes of the reader, shows Klingemann wanting to be associated with Jean Paul. In reality it once again shows him up for the literary vampire that he is.80 Otherwise it misfires, for the Schwanzstück contains not the Nothing of the main text, but, metaphorically speaking, just plain nothing. It is arguably a final attempt to cod the reader, so that an appropriate title for 77 78 79 80

Hogarth’s ‘new way of proceeding’, Modern Moral Subjects or ‘novels in paint’ can be compared with Blankenburg’s moralistic view of the novel. Mendel reappears in Kafka’s Der Verschollene. In his Jamben (1784). See Horst Fleig, Vampirismus: Klingemanns Nachtwachen von Bonaventura (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1985).

306 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective the present essay might have been ‘Klingemann and Bonaventura, or: the Empty Cod-Piece’ (Klingemanns Schwanzstück, oder: Wo bleibt denn der Schwanz?). The author’s metaphorical cod-piece is empty. Important though he is in the context of post-Enlightenment theology and philosophy, in the Gothic context Jean Paul’s Devil is less to the point than those of his lesser German and French imitators. It was left to Wilhelm Hauff to produce a picture of the Devil that noddedto suave Saxon standards: in his hands Satan becomes first Herr v. Natas and, then, as Hauff begins his fictional editing of Satan’s manuscript, a beer-swilling perpetual student or bemoostes Haus who is soon in trouble with Magnifizenz and his senate cronies, who accuse him of being a demagogue; he is almost sent down, but survives because of the depth of his pocket, and eventually leaves of his own accord after completing his doctorate, entitled de rebus diabolicis, in which he no doubt gave his examiners a devil of a time. Hauff’s Mitteilungen aus den Memoiren des Teufels,81 the first volume of which appeared anonymously in summer 1825, and the second under his own name in 1826, consists of a series of genial if light-weight, quasi-autobiographical fragments with Gothic trappings. His starting point is Jean Paul’s identification of the Devil with modern man. As the memoirs proceed that Hauff pretends to be editing, the Devil appears in other guises; under other names he teams up with his identical double, the Wandering Jew, visits Goethe, who fails to rumble him, and so on. Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire Infernal (2nd edn, 4 vols) also appeared in 1825-6, and the satanic series was as it were completed by the publication, in 1837-38, of Frédéric Soulié’s Les Mémoires du diable, ‘that astonishingly corrupt book’ (Thackeray),82 which is ‘primarily related to the blood-and-thunder school of English fiction [and] expecially Lewis’s [...] The Monk and Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer’.83 And, one might add, to the Nachtwachen. In the person of his literary Devil in his literary phase, Hauff pours scorn on ‘Klingemanns Teufel’ as depicted in his Goethe-imitation, Faust (1815), and although he does not refer to Nachtwachen, which at the time had not been connected with Klingemann, his remarks are applicable to Bonaventura’s text: Klingemanns Teufel! Glaubt man nicht, er habe ihn nur geschwind aus dem Puppenspiel von der Straße geholt, ihm die Glieder ausgereckt, bis er die

81 82 83

See Tymms, 368-70. Diary, 22 Feb. 1844, quoted from Praz, The Hero in Eclipse, 200. Rudwin,215ff.

Bonaventura 307 rechte Größe hatte, und ihn dann in die Szene gesetzt? Man begreift nicht, wie ein Mensch sich von einem solchen Ungetüm sollte verführen lassen!84 (Klingemann’s Devil! Don’t we have the impression that he simply took him straight from the nearest street puppet-play, stretched his limbs until he reached the right size, and then plonked him down on stage? How on earth is anyone supposed to be taken in by such a wooden miscreation?)

Is it plausible that a writer who could do no better that this was able, eleven years earlier, to write the Nachtwachen in which the Devil has a far more sophisticated role? Is Klingemann being overestimated by those who accept his self-identification as Bonaventura, or has he been underestimated by almost all his critics over the years? If Klingemann is indeed Bonaventura, he is so thanks to Oertel, hence his failure to claim authorship of Nachtwachen in Oertel’s lifetime, and to produce a more convincing Devil in his Faust.

VII The present chapter has shown that Nachtwachen is both an exemplary Gothic text and a text that cannot be fully understood without recourse to Gothic. It was modelled on Friedrich von Oertel’s Denkwürdigkeiten eines ehemaligen Nachtwächters, which, in combination with Fichte’s and Schelling’s lectures, provided the creative excitement that enable Klingemann to excel himself in the Nachtwachen. He was inspired by Oertel’s Denkwürdigkeiten in a way in which he was clearly not inspired by Goethe’s Faust a decade later. Oertel deserves the credit both for writing a remarkable novel that has gone unnoticed, and for inspiring Klingemann to turn his literary vampirism to such remarkable account in the Nachtwachen. Although he may also have known Mercier de Compiègne’s little-known but important Les nuits de la conciergerie (1795),85 in which the nights in question are those before a convicted felon’s death (the first night watch of Nachtwachen introduces the motif of the last hour of the dying poet who is a double of the narrator), it is reasonable to argue that without the model and the stimulus provided by Oertel’s Denkwürdigkeiten eines ehemaligen Nachtwächters Klingemann would not have been capable of writing Nachtwachen. In a way that typifies the reception of Nachtwachen my initial question (How did the unoriginal Klingemann 84 85

Hauff, Aus den Memoiren des Satan, Part 1, section XVI (‘Bemerkungen über das Diabolische in der deutschen Literatur’). Clause-François-Xavier Mercier de Compiègne’s little-known but important Les nuits de la conciergerie (1795) is available online as a Google eBook.

308 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective come to produce such an original work?), having been answered, has left us with another: if he is the author of Nachtwachen, why is his subsequent work so pedestrian? In imaginative terms he appears to be an Eintagsfliege.

8 E. T. A. HOFFMANN E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776-1822) studied Law at the University of Königsberg from 1792 to 1795, when he took up the first of many legal appointments that culminated in his appointment in 1816 as a judge of appeal of the Supreme Court. A competent lawyer and legal official, his heart was divided between writing and music. He was a gifted musician, conductor and composer, and was, to boot, no mean artist and stage designer. That the Doppelgänger would loom large in his fictional work was only to be expected.1 Unlike Naubert, Schiller, Grosse, and even Kleist, he is in both a literary and a psychological sense a Gothic writer through and through, but also far more than ‘just’ a Gothic writer, because with him the Gothic and the highly personal coincide. He is the author of the most considerable German Gothic novel, Die Elixiere des Teufels,2 which established the Gothic genre of the Doppelgängerroman, a number of classic Gothic tales such as Das Majorat, some of them collected as Das Grausen. Unheimliche Geschichten (1914), and of the notably Gothic Nachtstücke (1816). It was on the strength of one of the Nachtstücke, Der Sandmann, that Freud, in his classical study of das Unheimliche, enthroned Hoffmann as ‘the unrivalled master of the uncanny in literature’. In going on to write that ‘His novel Die Elixiere des Teufels [...] contains a whole mass of themes to which one is tempted to ascribe the uncanny effect of the narrative, but it is too obscure and intricate a story for us to venture upon a summary of it’, he also pointed to the reason why Hoffmann cannot be described as a Gothic writer tout court, for, however much it chimes with contemporary Gothic, his work is sui generis,3 too personal in its complexity to fit easily within the Gothic or any other category.Gothic, on the other hand, fits easily enough within the Hoffmannesque. A master of Gothic effects and Gothic rhetoric,4 he is 1 2

3

4

On ‘Hoffmann’s Chronic Dualisms’ see Webber, The Doppelgänger, 113-194. Christiane Zehl Romero’s statement (in ‘M. G. Lewis’ The Monk and E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Die Elixiere des Teufels - Two Versions of the Gothic’, Neophilologus, 63 [197], 575s) that ‘Die Elixiere cannot be counted among Hoffmann’s greatest achievements’ is unaccountable. In general, see Trautwein, Erlesene Angst. Stefan Sven Olof Bergstrom, Between Real and Unreal: A Thematic Study of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Die Serapionsbrüder (N.Y.: Lang, 2000); James T. McGlathery. E. T. A. Hoffmann (N.Y.: Twayne, 1997); Gerhard R. Kaiser, E. T. A. Hoffmann (Stuttgart: Metzler), 1988). Elizabeth Wright’s E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Rhetoric of Terror (London: Institute of Germanic Studies, 1978) is, as its subtitle makes clear, a study of aspects of language used for the evocation of fear. In the first chapter she compares the (different) ways

310 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective above all else an original genius whose manifold uncertainties derive from his brilliantly flawed mind, hence Scott’s negative (‘Goethean’) reaction to his work and De Quincey’s horrified reaction to Die Elixiere des Teufels. For both of them, as for Goethe, Hoffmann goes too far, is too close for comfort to the margin that separates creative neurosis from psychosis. It is no chance that of the main writers under discussion three - Tieck, Bonaventura and Hoffmann - had a brush with insanity. In Hoffmann’s case this left its mark in the form of Cyprian’s account of Serapion’s supposed insanity. Cyprian speaks of the very rationality of Serapion’s irrationality, and sees his ‘insanity’, in the Romantic manner, as a state of mind that affords greater insight into the depths of nature. It is at the very bottom of the abyss of which we have had glimpses that the meaning of life, death, is to be found.

I Like many young would-be writers of the time, Hoffmann read in his youth the ‘Gothic’ books (as we should now call them) that he had been forbidden to read. Like Tieck, he refers to some of them at arm’s distance in his fictional works, in Der Elementargeist for instance. There is an amusing parallel in this respect with a younger writer initially influenced by him, Willibald Alexis (pseudonym of Georg Wilhelm Häring, 1798-1871), who in his boyhood poisoned his imagination with the ‘schauderhaften Ritterromanen’ (chivalric penny dreadfuls) of the time, which he swallowed in such numbers largely because they were forbidden reading. Once they were no longer forbidden, such is teenage logic, he stopped reading them. Hoffmann, for his part, was attracted to the early Bundesromane of the time, particularly those involving charlatanic shenanigans and the occult or supposed occult, by which he was engrossed his whole life long. Among other such works he knew Schiller’s Die Räuber and, a major influence, Der Geisterseher, Grosse’s Der Genius (another major influence), Lewis’s The Monk, the work of Ann Radcliffe, Jean Paul’s Die unsichtbare Loge, Fouqué’s Ida Münster (a dramatization of Naubert’s Hermann von Unna, which, given his early partiality for the Bundesroman, he will also have known), John Polidori’s The Vampyr (which he, like Goethe, ascribed to Byron), Goethe’s Claudine von Villa Bella (for which he wrote a musical score), Kleist’s Das Bettelweib von Locarno and Michael Kohlhaas, and the celebrated Gespensterbuch of Apel and Laun, which he used as a sourcebook for his literary investigations of occult in which Hoffmann and Grosse make the reader’s flesh creep.

E.T.A. Hoffmann 311

phenomena.5 He knew the work of Karl Gottlob Cramer, whom he initially dubbed the first genius under the sun; by 1803 he is describing him, in his diary, as beneath all criticism.6 He seems to have acquired a prejudice against historical fiction as a result of reading ‘the hack work of certain German novelists, Veit Weber and his kind, of whom he speaks scathingly.’7 The Ritterroman was not for him, nor was Weber’s homiletic stance. One of the firstworks to impress the young Hoffmann and his friend Hippel was Wiegleb’s Natural Magic (20 vols, Unterricht in der natürlichen Magie, 1779-1805), which both fired his enthusiasm for the occult and first drew his attention to the Gothic devices of the author masquerading as supposed editor of another’s work and of the author (Johann Christian Wiegleb) hiding his work in what purports to be the work of another, the other in this case being Johann Nikolaus Martius. In his Gothic novel, Die Elixiere des Teufels, Hoffmann later posed as the editor of the posthumous papers of a certain Brother Medardus. Otherwise what he devoured in his youth was sensational fiction of the Bundesroman kind, which left its mark on his tales in the form of the agent or go-between who controls the lives of others - as Amanuel controls the life of Marquis Carlos in Der Genius - except that in Hoffmann’s tales such figures are agents not of human conspirators or revolutionaries, but of occult forces; psychologically speaking they are agents of his alter ego. The involved Russian-dolls technique of Der Genius left its mark on Hoffmann, who simplified it, leaving it to Poe to complete the process.8 Maturin, in his Melmoth the Wanderer (1820: Melmoth, 1821) went to the other extreme. In his youth Hoffmann greatly admired the work of Jean Paul, especially Die unsichtbare Loge (1793), an idiosyncratic but only marginally Gothic kind of Bundesroman in which the Masonic-type lodge in question is an underground organization akin to the Turmgesellschaft in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre; however, the novel, never completed, remains shrouded in mystery. The Bundesroman that left the greatest mark on his work was, of course, Carl Grosse’s Der Genius, what interested him being not so much the secret society in question as the way in which, through its emissary Amanuel, it controlled the protagonists’s mind. Mental control, brainwashing, and the way in which this was achieved through hypnosis (mesmerism it was called at the time) or telepathy, was his abiding concern. 5 6 7 8

Hewett-Thayer, 182. Quoted from Hewett-Thayer, 145. Hewett-Thayer, 365. On Hoffmann and Poe, see Palmer Cobb, The Influence of E. T. A. Hoffmann on the Tales of Edgar Allen Poe (Chapel Hill: North Carolina Press, 1908; repr. N.Y.: Hill/Franklin, 1974), and Thomas S. Hansen with Burton R. Pollin, The German Face of Edgar Allen Poe (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1995).

312 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective During his student days he wrote two novels that were not published, Cornaro. Memoiren des Grafen von S. and Der Geheimnisvolle, both of them inspired by Der Genius. That the brute power of Gerstenberg’s Greuelstück (horror play) Ugolino (1768) impressed him can be seen from a revolting story of necrophagy, Der Vampyr (or Eine Vampyrgeschichte, or Die Hyänen, 1821), which unwisely carried on where even Ugolino left off. The scene in question in Ugolino has Anselmo, who is starving to death in a ruined tower to which Count Ugolino and his sons have been consigned by a corrupt bishop, tempted to gnaw at his poisoned mother’s wizened paps. It is to such barbarous scenes that German literature owes its reputation for being excessively horrid. Hoffmann should have left such things to the likes of I. F. Arnold, author of the atrocious and vilely written Der Schwarze Jonas (1805, repr. Frankfurt [a. M.]: Excentric Club, 2000) who, unlike himself, had no reputation to lose. Hoffmann defends the introduction of the ‘horrid’ or just plain revolting into fiction, but not all readers will be convinced by his argument that such material may be rendered palatable by poetic tact, for, notwithstanding the fact that it is based on the ‘Story of a Ghoul’ in the Arabian Nights, Der Vampyr remains revolting. Later, in Bamberg, he read Lewis and Radcliffe, in German, for he had no English. C. F. Kunz, his friend and later publisher, opened a lending library, the Neues Lese-Institut, in Bamberg in 1812, of which Hoffmann had the run.9 It contained the work of Lewis - this is where he read The Monk - and Radcliffe too, for the ‘explained supernatural’ is a background mode in Die Elixiere des Teufels, in which Hoffmann explains some mysteries only to create others.10 On the other hand the explained supernatural may be part and parcel of his indebtedness to Schiller’s Der Geisterseher, which, as we shall see in Chapter 11, was Radclife’s model in this respect. In the opening section of Die Serapionsbrüder Hoffmann in effect referred to himself as a ‘Geisterseher’. It has become a truism that Die Elixiere des Teufels is modelled on The Monk,11 although this does not make it true. The Monk (1796) first appeared in German in 1797-98 (Der Mönch. Aus dem Englischen übersetzt, 1797-8). The translation was by Friedrich von Oertel. The fact that Hoffmann’s Die 9

10

11

See Wulf Segebrecht, ‘E. T. A. Hofffmann and English Literature,’ in Deutsche Romantik and English Romanticism, ed. Theodore G. Gish & Sandra G. Frieden (Munich: Fink, 1984), 52-66. Ralph Tymms, German Romantic Literature (London: Methuen, 1955), 283. Hoffmann may, of course, have got the explained supernatural from the same German sources (notably Schiller’s Der Geisterseher) as Radcliffe. Der Elementargeist (1821) throws light on the question of the influence of Schiller’s Der Geisterseher and M. G. Lewis’s The Monk.

E.T.A. Hoffmann 313

Elixiere des Teufels (1815-16) was, in a number of externals, modelled on The Monk, assumes greater significance in that in Hoffmann’s novel, which is the more important of the two, ‘Minderwertiges, Äußerliches und Billiges vertieft und verinnerlicht wurde’ (the inferior, the superficial and the downright feeble have been intensified and internalized).12 We have seen that much the same applies to Kleist’s Die Familie Schroffenstein, which also has its starting-point in The Monk. Montague Summers lists a few of the parallels that show Hoffmann borrowing details from Lewis, but they are mostly insignificant. Appropriating the name (Bruder Medardus) of a character in one of Naubert’s Volksmärchen (‘Die Fischer’, NVdD, Vol. III) with a keen eye for female beauty, which is there associated with the devil, Hoffmann presents his novel as having been edited from the posthumous papers of a certain Brother Medardus, a Capuchin friar. Medardus, whose sermons are similarly crowded, corresponds to Lewis’s renegade Ambrosio (‘Abbot of the Capuchins’), Euphemia to Matilda, and Aurelia to Antonia, but such minor parallels are misleading, for The Monk and Die Elixiere des Teufels are different types of novel: The Monk is a prototype and archetype of horror Gothic, whereas Die Elixiere des Teufels is Gothic novel and Bildungsroman in one, a type that is, otherwise, mostly associated with Jean Paul.13 However, Die Elixiere des Teufels is not only a tale of diabolical possession, which The Monk is too, but is, in addition, a Doppelgängerroman, which The Monk is not, although Ambrosio does have two faces. It is as a Doppelgängerroman that Die Elixiere des Teufels retains its disquieting power. The Monk derives from the German Sturm und Drang; whereas Hoffmann’s novel derives from Märchen and points forward to Kafka.These are huge differences. Lewis deserves, in the Anglo-German context, the ironic credit that belongs to those who produce a work that inspires another to produce a greater. The much bruited influence of The Monk on Die Elixiere des Teufels in reality amounted to little more than a walk-on role for Lewis. Hoffmann, like Tieck, delighted in Der Genius, which is the first novel to be mentioned in his letters.14 He read it in February 1795, projecting himself into it, and recorded the impression it made on him. In a letter dated 19

12

13 14

Herbert Koziol, ‘E. T. A. Hoffmanns Die Elixiere des Teufels and M. G. Lewis’ The Monk,’ GRM.26 (1938), 167-170. See also Wilhelm Horn, ‘Über das Komische im Schauerroman, E.T.A. Hofmanns Elixiere des Teufels und ihre Beziehungen zur englischen Literatur,’ Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprsachen und Literaturen, CXLVI (1923), 153-63. See Webber, The Doppelgänger, 184-193. E.T.A.Hoffmann, Briefwechsel, ed. Friedrich Schnapp, 3 vols (Munich: Winkler, 19679), I, 52ff.

314 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective February 179515 he wrote ‘Meine neue Lectüre ist [...] der Genius von Grosse [...] Unbemerkt entschlüpfen die Ideen aus dem Buche und eigne treten an ihre Stelle’ (I am now reading Grosse’s Der Genius. Imperceptibly ideas from the book vanish to be replaced by my own). In Der Elementargeist (1821) Viktorin clearly speaks for Hoffmann himself when he says ‘So machte auch der Genius von Grossse auf mich einen tiefen Eindruck, und ich darf mich auch jetzt dessen keineswegs schämen’ (Grosse’s Genius, for instance, much impressed me, and even now I am not ashamed to say so).16 What impressed him was, he says, the vividness (Lebendigkeit) of the narration,17 but seen in retrospect it is the involved narrative technique that he employs in some of his tales that has its source in Grosse.18 In the course of time he learned to take material similar to Grosse’s and refine it into something rather more concentrated, a process of distillation that Poe, starting from Hoffmann, was to perfect. Der Genius inspired the novel he wrote in 1795-96 and then apparently destroyed after it had been turned down by a publisher, Cornaro: Memoiren des Grafen Julius von S., the title of which reflected the impact of Grosse (the name of Graf von S. echoes that of Carlos’s friend, Graf S. in Der Genius), and Hoffmann’s most influentially Gothic work, the novel Die Elixiere des Teufels (1814-15), is reminiscent of Der Genius in respect of its ‘constant sense of characters being manipulated by powers outside their control’.19 This both explains the attraction and constitutes the legacy of Der Genius for Hoffmann Der Elementargeist, a tale lacking his usual originality and clarity, shows him running the whole gamut of Gothic and fairyale motifs and effects, the most important being the foreboding dream. Other Gothic features include the terrible in the form of das Ungeheure (the monstrous) and das Unheimliche (the uncanny), necromancy, the ruin in the forest, and creatures of the unconscious (salamander, teraphim; the incubus or chezim), and the blue flame that signals the presence of the demonic. Too unoriginal to be taken seriously, yet also as deadly serious as every Romantic dream, it embodies the clash of the real and the fantastic that is Hoffmann’s signature: it is rooted both in real, wartime events and in the ancient worlds of myth and legend. War, as das Ungeheure, is to the supernatural (das Unheimliche) as death is to love. It is at once a Gothic fairytale and a pastiche, and can also be 15 16 17 18

19

Hoffmann, Briefwechsel, ed. Schnapp, I, 53. Hoffmann, Der Elementargeist (Frankfurt a. M.: Insel, 1983), 36. Hewett-Thayer, 345. Cf. Hewett-Thayer, 154. On other, largely insignificant echoes of Der Genius in Hoffmann’s works, see Klaus Kanzog, ‘E. T. A. Hoffmann and Karl Grosse’s Genius,’ Mitteilungen der E. T. A. Hoffmann-Gesellschaft ,7 Heft (1960), 16-23. Blackall, 231.

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regarded as a throwaway variation on Der Magnetiseur, for the necromancer in question, the Irish Major, not only has his double in the text, but is also, in part, a double of the Danish Major in Der Magnetiseur. Hoffmann is not only copying himself; he is also copying Schiller, Grosse and, above all, Kahlert. The clichéed opening paragraphs of Der Elementargeist point back to Kahlert’s Der Geisterbanner, for Hoffmann’s military necromancer has a forerunner in Kahlert’s B—, a major in the service of the king of Denmark, and in Sergeant Volkert, who is the military necromancer in Kahlert’s text, from which Hoffmann also borrowed the ‘verfallenes Kellergewölbe’ (crumbling underground vault). It is implied that the supernatural events occur in a serial dream; they are not explained (as they are in Der Geisterbanner). Teufelsbeschwörungen (attempts to conjure up the Devil) are defined as ‘das kecke Rufen des eignen furchtbaren Geistes’ (the cheeky invocation of one’s own terrible side). Elementargeist is informed by Hoffmann’s dream of perfect love (Aurora, the Salamandrin, parallels Julia Marc), and by his knowledge that this is a will-o’-the -wisp. More generally, Der Elementargeist is indebted to Schiller’s Der Geisterseher (O’Malley is compared to Schiller’s Armenian) and Grosse’s Der Genius,20 while a further debt is to Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl (1813), which Hoffmann greatly admired: the bottomless pocket in the Irish Major’s greatcoat is borrowed from the Devil’s bottomless pocket in Chamisso’s tale, thereby identifying O’Malley with Satan.

II Gothic having to do with the labyrinthine complexity of ‘experience’ (understood as the effect of ‘reality’ on the mind) and the delicate balance between illusion and reality,21 the Gothic text has come to be seen as a ‘textual event in which boundaries between inside and outside, life and death, the spectral and the real, the illusory and the rational, disarmingly fade’.22 On this reading early nineteenth-century Gothic is by definition Hoffmannesque, for in it, as in early French fairytale, where the phantasmal also looms so large, reality and unreality are liable to be deliberately conflated or confused, with the result that the reader is confronted, and likely to be thrown, by the consequent lack of markers as reality and fantasy prove to be unstable concepts. This dislocation and the loss of control over 20 21 22

In Der Elementargeist (Frankfurt a. M.: Insel, 1983), 36, Hoffmann praises the vividness and technical skill demonstrated in the first book of Der Genius. See Snyder, Research Studies, 49 (1981), 130. Miles, Gothic Writing 1750-1829, 119.

316 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective reality it involves, which in the high Gothic period swiftly shifts from literal to figurative or metaphorical, lie at the heart of Gothic in general and of Hoffmann’s Gothic fantasias in particular. It is no wonder that he and Tieck were, in their different ways, engrossed by the idea of insanity, by which they were both threatened, which is discussed in the first section of Die Serapionsbrüder. At this time Bedlam (Bethlehem Hospital) in Moorfields, a mental hospital from the 14th century onwards, had over its entrance gateway statues of ‘Melancholy’ and ‘Madness’ by the elder Cibber, popularly known as the ‘Brainless Brothers’. Bedlam was known by reputation to Tieck as well as Hoffmann, and Schopenhauer, who was to write on madness in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (Vol. I, cap. 36; Vol. II, cap.32), refers to it in his English Diary of 1803. Two of Bonaventura’s Nachtwachen, in which the nightwatchman discusses his own madness, are set in the madhouse. The grim reality of the ‘madman’s lot was painted by Goya in Yard with Lunatics (1793-94) and The Madhouse (c. 1816). The German Romantics focus on the thin dividing line between creativity and insanity, and on the subject’s inability to distinguish between the ‘real’ and the ‘unreal’. While the mixing of history and fancy is a feature of the early historical novel à a Naubert, the blurring of the distinction between fact and fiction, real and fake or virtual reality, is a basic and ever more complex characteristic of Hoffmann’s work. Too imaginative for his own peace of mind, Hoffmann was puzzled and preoccupied by the fact that his inner world was so much more real to him than the outside world, the ‘reality’ of which gave him trouble throughout his life. One of the reasons why he was so interested in automata was that he knew the automaton, a creation that simulates life, being neither living nor dead, from the 1001 Nacht. Gothicism challenges rationalism and rational perceptions and valuations; as a revolutionary form of the novel, the Gothic romance embodies the radical uncertainty generated by the collapse of the ancien régime and its attendant certainties and intellectual-aesthetic paradigms which left the field clear for ingenious charlatans ready to cash in on the situation. This is the reason why credulity is a central theme of early Gothic, which represented a challenge to the ancien régime of the novel. To use a metaphor that - in English, though not in German - opens one of Hoffmann’s bestknown tales, the Gothic romance upset the apple-cart of the Richardsonian novel. The Gothic romance challenged the novel of the time in that it derived from fairytale and canbe described as a variety of Kunstmärchen. The Kunstmärchen as written by Hoffmann, Tieck and Lewis Carroll points forward to the world of Kafka, whose work parallels Hoffmann’s in many ways, but especially in terms of his attitude towards reality and of his fairytale world being overrun by demons. It was in Hoffmann’s use of

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Märchen, and therefore in the internalization, poeticization and subversion of reality in his work that Kafka was to be most interested. Hoffmann’s tales are generally known as Nachtstücke and Kafka’s as Halbschlaffantasien, but both terms apply to the work of both men. The uncanny serves to link the two men in that ‘What is experienced as the uncanny is an objectification of the subject’s anxieties, read into shapes external to himself’23 is an important agent of the loss of control that is central to Gothic. Hoffmann is an Augenmensch (visual person) who uses his eyes to control the world in which he lived, compare the way in which, in his last fairytale, Meister Floh, Peregrin is able to control events by means of Meister Floh’s magic microscopic eye-piece. Hoffmann believed in demons that work in and through the mind and in the mind’s ultimate ability to withstand them, as he himself was generally able to do, though not without difficulty, for he sometimes had to get his wife, who went to bed before him, to get up again and sit with him until such time as the spooks he had conjured up in his work had faded away into the back into his mind to the point of no longer scaring the wits out of him.24 Der Magnetiseur and Der unheimliche Gast, among other tales, illustrate his belief, deduced from the ‘evil eye’ of tradition, that the power of the hypnotist’s eye might derive from the Devil. He wrote in Der Sandmann25 that ‘nichts wunderlicher und toller sei, als das wirkliche Leben und daß dieses der Dichter doch nur, wie in eines matt geschliffnen Spiegels dunklem Widersachein, auffassen könnte’ (nothing is more singular and more fantastic than real life[...] all a writer can [...] do is present it as “in a glass darkly”,’ and accordingly grounded his fantasies in ‘reality’ in a way that was to be further developed by Kafka, who was keenly interested in the combination and interplay of reality and fantasy in Hoffmann and the Russian Hoffmannists, and more especially in the way in which the fantastic and the banal feed off one another and constantly 23 24

25

Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy. The Literature of Subversion (London & New York: Routledge, 1981, repr. 1995), 66f. There is another version of the same story, related by Hermann Hesse and printed on the back cover of the 1983 Insel edition of Der Elementargeist: ‘Man erzählt von dem Dichter der „Nachtstücke“, ihn haben zuweilen, wenn er spät nachts an seinen aufregenden Dichtungen schrieb, die selber geschaffenen Dämonen plötzlich mit solchem Grausen übermannt, daß er, flüchtig vor der eigenen Phantasie, sich die Augen habe zuhalten und die Arbeit unterbrechen müssen.’ (It is said of the author of the Nachtstücke that when he was writing away at his tales, late at night, he was sometimes suddenly overcome by such terror that, afraid of his own imagination and the demons it has unleashed, he had to hold his eyes shut and stop writing). The trouble is, as every child knows, that the nightmare exists in the mind, so that closing the eyes does not banish it. Hoffmann, Fantasie- und Nachtstücke (Munich: Winkler, 1960), 344.

318 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective throw one another into doubt.. Hoffmann makes creative use of doubt, challenging his readers to do as much with the doubt that he deliberately implants in their minds. The most serious doubt is, of course, that which surrounds the concept of reality, for both writers show how ‘unreality’ quietly seeps out from between the lines of the most mundane supposed ‘reality’, so that at any moment the material foreground of life may give way to the greater (more vivid, more imperative) ‘reality’ of the inner world. It is the inner world of the unconscious, which is at once deeply personal and bafflingly alien, that is truly uncanny.

III Most of the most notably Gothic of Hoffmann’s tales are to be found in two late collections, Nachtstücke (2 vols, 1817) and Die Serapionsbrüder (4 vols, 1819-21, and in a modern one, Das Grausen. Unheimliche Geschichten (1914). However, notwithstanding their late date (1821), it is three of his last tales, Der Elementargeist, Die Räuber and Der Vampyr, can usefully function as an introduction to his idiosyncratic variety of Gothic. In Der Elementargeist Viktorin (Hoffmann) talks to Albert (Hippel) of some of the works by which he was most impressed as a young writer, which include Schiller’s Der Geisterseher and Die Räuber, the most significant being Grosse’s Der Genius, of which Hoffmann had said surprisingly little in his earliest letters to Hippel. It is no doubt the distracting presence of such reminiscences in Hoffmann’s mind that accounts for the fact that Der Elementargeist is stagily Gothic, having some of the same kind of over-the-top Gothic features as, say, Schiller’s Die Jungfrau von Orleans: one of Hoffmann’s weaker productions; his heart was not in it, and the elaborate settings - midnight necromancy at a ruined castle in an impenetrable forest [...] the miraculously sudden appearances and disappearances and dissolutions (a shot is fired at the Major and he simply evaporates) - are in their crude and conventional sensationalism quite unworthy of Hoffmann’s imagination.26

Die Räuber is what its name implies it to be, a Schiller-imitation: ‘Die Räuber boldly appropriates much of Schiller’s plot and then remodels both characters and situation.’27

26 27

Hewett-Thayer, 176. Hewett-Thayer, 348.

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More striking than these two tales in which Hoffmann is merely doodling is another late tale, Der Vampyr (1821), which owes its existence to the 1001 Nacht. That the brute power of Gerstenberg’s Greuelstück (horror play) Ugolino (1768) impressed Hoffmann may be surmised from one of the most macabre of his ‘Night Pieces’, Der Vampyr (or Eine Vampyrgeschichte, or Die Hyänen, or Aurelia, or Cyprians Erzählung, 1821), which unwisely carried on where even Ugolino left off.28 Hoffmann defends the introduction of the horrible or revolting into fiction, but not all readers will be convinced by his argument that necrophagy can be rendered palatable by poetic restraint, for when all is said and done Der Vampyr remains revolting. The fact is that its core scene is copied from the ‘The Story of Sidi-Nouman’ in the Arabian Nights Entertainments. Der Vampyr appeared in Die Serapionsbrüder, IV(1821), and is included in Von denen Vampiren, ed. Dieter Sturm & Klaus Völker (Suhrkamp Taschenbuch, 1994, 22-36).29 The texts speak for themselves. After explaining that ‘goules’ of both sexes are wandering demons, which [...] sometimes go in the night into burying-grounds, and feed upon dead bodies that have been buried there’, Sidi Nonman goes on: ‘I was [appalled] to see my wife with this goule. They dug up a dead body w h i c h h a d b e e n buried that day, and the goule cut the flesh into several pieces, and they [ate] together by the grave-side’ [Galland]. This passage gave Hoffmann his starting point: Da gewahrte er im hellsten Mondesschimmer dicht vor sich einen Kreis furchtbar gespenstischer Gestalten. Alte halbnackte Weiber mit fliegendem Haar hatten sich niedergekauert auf dem Boden, und mitten in dem Kreise lag der Leichnam eines Menschen, an dem sie zehrtenmit Wolfesgier. - Aurelie war unter ihnen.30 (There [In the burying-ground], in the bright moonlight, he saw a circle of hideous spectral-looking creatures. Old women, half naked, were crouching down upon the ground, and in the midst of them lay the corpse of a man, which they were tearing at with wolfish apppetite. Aurelia was amongst them.)31

Hoffmann orchestrates Sidi Nonman’s story, this ‘gräßlich gespenstische Geschichte’ (this ghastly ghostly story) which Theodor (one of Hoffmannn’s

28 29 30 31

One of Fuseli’s little-known works, Ugolino im Hungerturm, illustrates the first Act of Ugolino. For a translation see Frayling, Vampyres, 190-207. E. T. A. Hoffmann, Die Serapions-Brüder (Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2008), 1133. Quoted from an anonymous Victorian translation in Frayling, 205.

320 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective personae) remembers having come acrossin ‘einem alten Buche’ (in an old book). The book is Die 1001 Nacht. The uncanny is the most significant aspect of the Gothic in Hoffmann, who was deeply interested in the unconscious and shared G. H. Schubert’s view that dreams, which speak its language, reveal more about reality than does the quotidian language of the conscious mind.32 It was on the strength of one of the notably Gothic Nachtstücke (1816), Der Sandmann (1816-17), that Freud, in his classical study of das Unheimliche, enthroned Hoffmann as ‘the unrivalled master of the uncanny in literature’ and Der Sandmann as the paradigm of the uncanny: The Gothic [...] provides the best-known examples of those strange and ghostly figures that Freud saw as examples of the ‘the Uncanny’ [...] for him what is quintessentially ‘uncanny’, as he reveals by analyzing a German Gothic tale, ‘The Sandman’ [...] is the deeply and internally familiar (the most infantile of our desires or fears) as it reappears to us in seemingly external, repellant and unfamiliar forms.33

It is the essence of the uncanny that it verges on the homely or cosy, but veers away from it in a disconcerting, scary way. Hoffmann, like Goya,34 reveals what is normally hidden, and may be better left so, and at the same time transforms the familiar into the alien and therefore alarming.35 The uncanny turns on the loss of control that is one of the key motifs of Gothic writing: So long as ‘reality’ is a certain, and thus controllable and controlled concept, it is heimlich; but once it gets mixed up with the unreal or supernatural, it becomes unheimlich. All this is basic, and is in Freud; but there is no need to stick to the Freudian analysis of Der Sandmann when there is an alternative that accords with Gothic convention. That fear underlies Gothic goes without saying, but to identify this with fear of castration is dogmatic and far-fetched. Der Sandmann (1816) derives from the idea of the ‘Sand Man’ throwing sand in the eyes of bold, wakeful children, causing their eyes to pop out, and is rooted in the uncanny from the point when Nathaniel loses the ability to distinguish between the real and the unreal. His suicide is the ultimate sign of his loss of control over life. He is 32 33 34 35

Cf. G. H. Schubert’s Preface to Die Symbolik des Traumes (1814, repr. Stuttgart: Belser Presse, 1968). Hogle, in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, 6. Am I the only viewer to discern a stylistic similarity between Hoffmann’s and Goya’s drawings? Marc Falkenberg, Rethinking the Uncanny in Hoffmann and Tieck (Oxford, Berne, etc.: Lang, 2005), is surely right to revive the idea, rejected by Freud, that uncertainty is the most important element in the uncanny.

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drawn to his death by an invisible ‘magnet’ mediated by the eyes. The idea that the tale involves a castration-complex is fanciful: what it describes is something much more fundamental to Hoffmann’s personal experience, the process of alienation, of losing one’s grip on reality. It is the eye that is the organ of control, not the one-eyed monster of Freudian dogma. Hoffmann’s idiosyncratic variety of Gothic turns on the uncanny, which involves the contemporary cult of ‘animal magnetism’ or ‘mesmerism’, meaning, in modern terms, hypnotism and telepathy, in which he took the keenest interest. It is the subject of one of his earliest stories, Der Magnetiseur (1813), which led to a related, shorter work that has been analysed by Wolfgang Trautwein with specific reference to the Gothic novel,36 Der unheimliche Gast (1819). ‘Unheimlich’ here means sinister, weird, and awful (in the sense of fearsome), or, in understated English, upsetting; but as the opposite of ‘heimlich’, which also means secret(ive), the very word pointing to the subconscious mind, the secrets of which can be read by the hypnotist, who in a way that is at the heart of the Gothic of the 1820s invades and acquires control over another’s mind. Hoffmann lived in the imagination, or, better, in ‘the refuge of his imagination’.37 That is where he felt heimlich, free from the stresses of his external life, so the idea that his self, in its fastness of the mind, could be taken over and controlled by another, was for him the most unsettling of ideas: it is no longer necessary to incarcerate the victim now that the ‘Magnetiseur’, like some supernatural parasite or latterday jinn, is potentially able to immure the victim in his own mind, maybe even controlling him/her from afar by means of telepathy. Hoffmann is keenly aware of the abusive/criminal possibilities of the new science of the mind. The opening tale is reminiscent of the famous scene in June 1816 when the Byron-Shelley party were gathered at the Villa Diodati: ‘The season was cold and rainy, and in the evenings we crowded around a blazing wood fire, and [...] amused ourselves with some German stories of ghosts.’38 The ghost stories were, of course, those contained in the Gespensterbuch edited by Laun and Apel, which Hoffmann admired to the point ofusing it as a source book in his investigations into the occult. Three years later Gespenster-Hoffmann (spooks-Hoffmann) opens Der unheimliche Gast in a similar way: ‘Der Sturm brauste durch die Lüfte, den heranziehenden Winter verkündigend, und trieb die schwarzen Wolken vor sich her, die [...] Ströme von Regen und Hagel hinabschleuderten’ (A storm roared through the air, presaging fast-approaching winter, and driving before it black clouds that pelted down[...] torrents of rain and hail). 36 37 38

Trautwein, Erlesene Angst, 155-83. Ronald Taylor, Hoffmann (London: Bowes & Bowes, 1965), 68. See P. B. Shelley’s ‘Preface’ to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

322 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Hoffmann remarks on the ‘einheimischer Kreis’ (canny [cosy] circle) of friends, and has the fire lit to counteract the weather, knowing that all too soon das Einheimische will give way to das Unheimliche as the tale turns from outer event to inner, profoundly upsetting those present. In other words, the comfortingly homely will give way to the disquietingly alien, the power of which the ending of the tale does nothing to disprove. Whereas in the Gothic novel the subject normally moves out of a secure (closed) space into a challengingly insecure (open) one, in Der unheimliche Gast the sinister guest, Graf von S-i, breaks in upon a cosily secure scene, destroying the pre-existing Geborgenheit (comforting sense of security).39 This is part of the internalization of Gothic in the early 19th century, as indeed is the wicked count himself who enters ‘bleichen Antlitzes, ernsten, festen Blicks’ (with sallow face and grave, unwavering gaze). In the Gothic of Schiller and Radcliffe and their imitators the outstanding characteristic of the villain (the Armenian, Schedoni, etc.) is the piercing eye that mesmerises his victim, sapping his courage. Hoffmann develops this characteristic and gives it a brilliant modern twist in making his villain a Magnetiseur or mesmerist (hypnotist), whose eye is once more the organ of control. Here too Der unheimliche Gast goes beyond the explained supernatural of the preceding Gothic novel, as Trautwein has pointed out. The explanation of the events in Hoffmann’s tale by reference to contemporary ‘magnetic’ theory serves not so much to explain them as to emphasize the uncanny nature of the proceedings, and the Gothic Geheimbundmotiv is also present in the form of the ‘unsichtbare Schule’ (invisible school) to which the Count and the Chevalier are said to belong.40 This is both a reference to the group of medical men in Strasbourg associated with the Marquis de Puységur, who used hypnotism to treat his patients, and an underlining of the power that ‘magnetism’ placed in the hands of practitioners, scrupulous and unscrupulous alike,41 particularly when they are said to be able to control their patients (victims) by means of telepathy or, in modern terms, of brainwashing or programming. The ‘delightful’ nature of the ‘horror’ of the Gothic novel is radically modified, so that what the tale conveys is no longer ‘delightful horror’, but a profound sense of unease, a matter not of Spaß (joking) but of deadly earnest. This does not mean that the story is somehow ‘defective’,42 just that it is typical of late Gothic. Angelika and Moritz are left 39 40 41

42

Trautwein, 173. Trautwein 176, 177.The ‘unsichtbare Schule’ echoes Jean Paul’s ‘unsichtbare Loge’. In the work of Mesmer hypnosis has a fraudulent dimension, see Maria M. Tatar, Spellbound. Studies on Mesmerism and Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 3-25, and, on Hoffmann, 121-151. Hewett-Thayer, 177.

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to enjoy their married bliss in accordance with the Gothic fairytale à la Radcliffe, but otherwise the age of fairytales, ‘wo das Hoffen noch geholfen hat’, has given way to a new age of Gothic science, profoundly unsettling features of which, raised by the tale, are left hanging in the air, where they remain to this day. The most characteristic ending of a Hoffmann tale is that in which the reader is left juggling with a hot potato. If Gothic involves a juggling with the sense of blocked entrances and exits, of broken connexions and lost or eroded meaning(s), a lost past and the threat of a lost future, its locus classicus is to be found in Das Majorat (1817: The Entail), Hoffmann’s most classically Gothic tale.43 It is a Nachtstück or literary nocturne, a black tale, the atmosphere and background of which are darkly Gothic. As in so many Gothic tales, the hero of the piece is arguably the ruinous castle, here of R..sitten, that is, Rossitten (meaning, originally, the seat of a Russian family), a place in the middle of the Baltic coast of what used to be East Prussia. Hoffmann elaborates in artistic form a tale that was popularly told of a local family. A ghost-seer story44 that would have been at home in the contemporary Gespensterbuch of Apel and Laun, it turns, as De Quincey noted, on the for him powerfully attractive idea of secret murder. De Quincey recognized the hand of the author of The Devil’s Elixir in the way in which the murderer in question began to scratch at the walled-up former doorway (through which he had precipitated his victim to his death in the abyss below) ‘as if under the influence of some deadly torment’. Hoffmann’s most striking Gothic image, this leads, in the present context, to Die Elixiere des Teufels as seen by De Quincey.

IV In his review of Gillies’s German Stories De Quincey’s words about Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl merge into a denunciation of Hoffmann’s Die Elixiere des Teufels: there are worse monsters ranging about in the pages of German fiction shadowless men, for example, thick as leaves in Vallombrosa - not the Asci [Ascii, shadowless ones] of the geographer, who are so only in relation to a vertical sun; but unfortunate people who are absolutely disinherited of their own shadows under any position of the sun, having been swindled out of 43 44

Neil Cornwell, in A Companion to the Gothic, ed. Punter, 32. See Kenneth Negus, ‘The allusions to Schiller’s „Der Geisterseher“, in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s „Das Majorat“: meaning and background’, German Quarterly, 32 (1959), 341-55.

324 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective them on one pretence or another. What became of these shadows, orwho pocketed them, was long a question with us, but at length we met with a novel which cleared this matter up. In that novel, one of the most interesting characters is the shadow of a pair of legs, which passes the window of a summer-house every evening, and is seen by reflection upon the opposite wall, at the very moment when the lady of the house is expecting her husband home to tea. She looks out of doors, and ascertains beyond a doubt that this shadow is wandering up and down without any owner: whence it appears that the shadowless bodies in this world of ours are compensated by the bodiless shadows. Pure logical entities, mere privations, absolute negations, have reality enough for German machinery: the ghost of an old parabola from the 16th century, or the apparition of a defunct cube-root, furnishes a sufficient mormo [a non-existent object of therefore baseless fear]. Physical or paraphysical; logical or paralogical; nay, even metaphysical or parametaphysical; nothing comes amiss to a German romancer.45

He has thus far been writing of Chamisso’s Gothic fairy tale in which the hero sells his shadow to the Devil in exchange for a bottomless purse that surely stands, in De Quincey’s mind, for the bottomless depths of the unconscious mind, to which opium seemed to promise access, and therefore for the opium itself, which, while offering a false paradise, kept him excluded from the actual paradise of real identity and real achievement. The purse proving a poor substitute for identity, Schlemihl becomes the accursed wanderer of the Bible (Cain), medieval legend (the Wandering Jew) and Gothic/fantasy; he gets rid of the purse, rejects the Devil and, with the aid of the seven-league boots of fairytale, dedicates himself to scientific research. De Quincey, while not missing an opportunity to mock German idealism, was attracted to the story because the man without a shadow was the natural other of himself, who sometimes felt himself to be a shadow without the man, and, more specifically and painfully, only a shadow of the writer he felt he should have been. When he imagines himself seeing himself in a glass darkly in the early Diary, what he sees is ‘a man in dim and shadowy perspective and (as it were) in a dream. He passes along in silence, and the hues of sorrow appear on his countenance’ (D 156). Schlemihl reversed and encrypted that situation, so that it was only natural that he identified with Schlemihl, who in his mind clearly represented his own Gothic self, his demonic or Satanic other, the ‘mighty phantom [...] which strides after me’ of Confessions (Works, 3: 232), by which he is haunted. Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte is a Gothic psychological study of its author’s attitude to his fragmented, Franco-German identity; in particular it is about 45

The Works of Thomas De Quincey, ed. Grevel Lindop, Vol. 6 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2000), 19.

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his attempt to come to terms with the past he has lost by fleeing his home country. Hoffmann’s story of the lost reflection, Die Abenteuer der Sylvesternacht, 4: Die Geschichte vom verlornen Spiegelbilde (1815), which makes use of it, is about Hoffmann’s attitude to his own past in the form of his enduring love for Julia Marc, the love that never was, of which the love scenes in Die Elixiere des Teufels, with which both Chamisso’s and Hoffmann’s tales are linked, are imaginary developments. The reference in ‘Gillies’s German Stories’ to ‘Hoffmann, that should have been persecuted by kings’46 refers, of course, to E. T. A. Hoffmann, whose ‘infernal stories we [= the De Quinceyan royal ‘we’, as in the opening ‘We remember’] will not [read]’. The following references to ‘a crazy German novelist’ with his ‘monstrous crudities’ also refer to Hoffmann, whose Die Elixiere des Teufels (The Devil’s Elixir [sic]),47 translated by Gillies and published in two volumes, in Edinburgh by Blackwood and London by Cadell in 1824, barely two years earlier, De Quincey was evidently unable to stomach. This is a pity, for it is a work which, had he given it a chance, might have been expected to impress him. As it is, the very idea of a ‘Devil’s elixir’ (of opium) will have made him shudder: it was because his addiction was tantamount to a compact with the Devil that he had identified with Milton’s Satan. Presumably he found too near the knuckle of his personal identity problem this Gothic early ‘psychological novel’ of one who is and yet is not. He must have known Gillies’s translation of Die Elixiere des Teufels, The Devil’s Elixir (sic), although he does not mention it (or indeed the German title) as such. This is all the more remarkable in that Blackwood’s Magazine (16 [1824], 55-67) carried a review of The Devil’s Elixir that is said to have profoundly impressed Poe. De Quincey must have known the review, always assuming he did not have a hand in it himself. It was the work of J. G. Lockhart,48 or was written by Lockhart with someone else, maybe De Quincey,49 it may be thought, who misspells Doppelgänger in the same way (doppel-ganger), and whose review of Walladmor follows much the same 46

47 48

49

For De Quincey the word ‘king’ involves self-reference. In childhood he played at being the king of an imaginary kingdom, and one of his reasons for his devotion to The Robbers was the fact that there the outcast (DQ’s ego) and the king (DQs superego) are invariably related Elixiere is plural. See M. C. Hildyard, Lockhart’s Literary Criticism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1931, 154), and the letter (in Mrs Oliphant, William Blackwood and His Sons (2 vols, London: William Blackwood, 1897, I, 208) in which Lockhart writes to Blackwood: ‘Do try to get the ‘Devil’s Elixir’ out of Gillies’s hands’. Cf. Strout, 39: ‘I am not sure that Miss Hildyard is right in ascribing the piece to Lockhart alone.’

326 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective pattern as that of The Devil’s Elixir. Early spellings of the word Doppelgänger (Doppeltgänger in Jean Paul and Hoffmann; doppel-ganger in English) throwing no light on the matter, there is no reason to suppose that De Quincey was much involved, for the view of Hoffmann in the review is that of Lockhart and Scott, not De Quincey, whose view exactly corresponded to that of the reviewer in the Literary Gazette (August 1824, 504), who in oneparagraph disapproval commended Gillies’s translation ‘to those who like this class of tale’, adding ‘we do not’. Unless I am much mistaken, De Quincey will have found Hoffmann’s Gothic masterpiece too disturbing for him to be able to devote close attention to it. The evidence suggests, indeed, that he backed away from it in horror. Much of the review consists, in the manner of the time, of chunks of Gillies’s translation. The main critical-descriptive part reads as follows: THE DEVIL’S ELIXIR is [...] our [...] favourite among the numerous works of a man of rare and singular genius [...] there is one particular idea on which this author, when in his horrible vein, is chiefly delighted to expatiate. This is the idea of [...] a doppel-ganger; that is to say, of a man’s being haunted by the visitations of another self - a double of his own personal appearance [...] The superior excellence of the Devil’s Elixir lies in the skill with which its author has contrived to mix up the horrible notion of the double-goer with ordinary human feelings of all kinds [...] the admirable art with which the author has married dreams to realities [...] the horrors of the Monk Medardus affect our sympathies [...] because this victim of everything that is fearful in the caprices of an insane imagination is depicted [...] as living among men, women, and scenes, in all of which we cannot help recognizing a certain aspect of life and nature, and occasionally even of homeliness.

In brief, Lockhart rightly sees the work as turning on the tension between das Heimliche and das Unheimliche, the ‘canny’ and the ‘no canny’. Freud was to add that ‘there is [in The Devil’s Elixir] a doubling, dividing and interchanging of the self’, and, to confound the reader further, ‘the constant recurrence of the same thing’50 that is a feature of nightmare. It is these that make the novel so demanding for the reader. Now in his review De Quincey went on, immediately after discussing Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl, to write of another case of double identity, which is in fact that of the Monk Medardus: Of this latter species of agency, we have an example in the Doppelgänger, or cases of double identity - where a man runs in a curricle, as it were, with a repetition or duplicate of himself: all the world is duped by the swindling facsimile; and even the poor injured man is not always able to distinguish

50

Freud, Art and Literature, 356.

E.T.A. Hoffmann 327 between his true and spurious identity, but is hoaxed, like other people, by his own rascally counterfeit. At this point of German phantasmagoria, we begin to find ourselves no longer under any laws of creation, but amidst the anarchy of chaos: the dreams of dyspeptic lunacy can go no further [...]

When he said that the English would not read the infernal stories of Hoffmann, meaning that he himself would not, he was thinking, in the first instance, of Die Elixiere des Teufels, and now, in the passage just quoted, he first sympathizes with Medardus to the point of identifying with him, only to make it clear that he finds this tale of radically confused identity distasteful because disturbing. Now Walter Scott, who in a letter dated 6 March 1823 asked his son Walter to send him ‘Der Teüfels Elixire’ (sic), was in 1827 invited by Gillies, founder of the newly-established Foreign Quarterly Review, to review Hoffmann. In the guise of a review article entitled ‘On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition; and particularly on the Works of Ernest Theodore William Hoffmann’, which barely mentions Die Elixiere des Teufels, Scott wrote a lay sermon denouncing the introduction of the supernatural into fiction: ‘They are not the visions of a poetical mind, they have scarcely even the seeming authenticity which the hallucinations of lunacy convey to the patient.’51 In short, Scott regarded Hoffmann’s imagination as operating ‘nearly on the verge of [...] insanity’. De Quincey shared this view of a writer whose ‘wildness’ and over-heated fancy they both deplore. In his review of Gillies, De Quincey in effect follows Scott’s thesis: that German (Romantic) fantasy goes too far and is in that sense anothere example of German overwriting. Scott’s view of Hoffmann corresponds to Goethe’s view of Romanticism as unhealthy. De Quincey, ever conservative, follows suit, but beneath the mask of Scottian moral disapproval there lurks profound apprehension. For the man so long in doubt about his own identity The Devil’s Elixir made profoundly uncomfortable reading De Quincey probably first read Die Elixiere des Teufels in 1821, when the German bookseller Johann Heinrich Bohte will have spoken of it as a remarkable novel of a kind likely to appeal to his English lodger, who was busy writing the Confessions. The two works are Gothic in some similar ways. Confessions is not merely a Gothic novel in fancy dress, but precisely the mix of Bildungsroman and Schauerroman that is so characteristic of Jean Paul and Hoffmann, and especially of Die Elixiere des Teufels, in which ‘the process of

51

See Sir Walter Scott on Novelists and Fiction, ed. Ioan Williams (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1968), 352. In his diary for 5 May 1827 Scott noted that he was ‘working away on those wild affairs of Hoffmann’.

328 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective self-formation is organized around stations of personal terror’.52 De Quincey is preoccupied with the occasions when his life was serially wrecked to the accompaniment of terror. Hoffmann’s novel can, of course, be read in various ways, but it involves, among other things, the ‘confessions’ of the self-confessed monk-murderer Medardus, who, it turns out, is not a murderer at all, written as a form of penance. Confessions, the writing of which must have proved a form of penance, for De Quincey was too proud to enjoy the kind of self-exposure the work involved, shows the man who, like Medardus, believed himself a murderer, in the grip of the ‘Devil’s elixir’ of opium. Both The Devil’s Elixir and Confessions are early studies of’the surfacing of the subconscious’.53 De Quincey could not have failed to read with subjective reference a novel involving ‘a profoundly traumatic, distorted version of a family romance’.54 The novel, as a whole, was too near the knuckle for one whose experience of family was essentially traumatic, and who will have recognized that in Die Elixiere des Teufels, as in his own life, the ‘process of selfformation is organized around stations of personal terror’ involving confrontations with his phantom self or Other. It was the death of his sister Elizabeth that marked what Jean Paul calls the birth of self-consciousness, which in De Quincey’s case meant not only the recognition that ‘immer zwei Ich in der Stube sind’ (there are always two of you present in the room at any given time) - the awareness of self as both subject and object - but the awareness of a threat to the existence of that ‘Ich’ (self). Phantoms there were many, but the ‘crowned phantom’ was Death, the ‘trial’ that is ‘moving subterraneously in [...] all men’s natures’ (13: 304). The word Doppeltgänger was first used by Jean Paul in Siebenkäs,55 the novel from which De Quincey borrowed the pseudonym X.Y.Z (cf. Siebenkäs, I, ii: ‘XYZ’),56 to denote autoscopic individuals (‘Leute, die sich selber sehen’) of the type found throughout Romanticism, but especially in the work of two of the German writers who most impressed De Quincey, Jean Paul himself and Hoffmann. Although De Quincey has much to say of Jean Paul and little of Hoffmann, it does not by any means follow that he is

52 53 54 55

56

Webber, The Doppelgänger, 184. Blackall, 235. Webber, 186. The word was first used by Jean Paul in 1796-7 and, in anglicized form, by Lockhart and De Quincey in 1824. The Shorter Oxford Dictionary is therefore wrong to date the first appearance of the word to 1895. X.Y.Z. was also used as a pseudonym by Emanuel Friedrich Wilhelm Ernst Follenius, who wrote the best-known continuation of Schiller’s unfinished Der Geisterseher, which De Quincey could also have known since it appeared in 1796.

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reacting to them in different ways, for what he describes at some length is Jean Paul’s style. Of Jean Paul’s ideas and images, which in some respects overlap with those of Hoffmann, he has nothing to say. In particular, he has nothing to say of Jean Paul’s play with the Doppelgänger. This is all the more remarkable in that De Quincey was, from an early age, aware of a phantom self, a second identity projected from his consciousness, to say nothing of the individual’s ‘two selves’, meaning the infant and the adult self, of which he writes in Suspira. This double or other was, in part, his might-have-been self, for he was haunted by ghostly might-have-beens: the person he might have been if his father and sister Elizabeth had not died early, if he had not run away from school, if he had not become addicted, if he had not run away from his viva at Oxford, if he had not run away from the philosophy of Kant and Fichte, if he had been able to deliver what he so richly promised, and so on. The ‘deadly pale visage’ of his second self that Medardus beholds at the end of The Devil’s Elixir cannot but have reminded De Quincey of his own guilty (Gothic, Satanic) Other. This is the ‘phantom of himself’ that he encountered sitting beneath ‘the gloomy archway’ of some past crisis and barring any further advance as he sought to retrace the past (PW, 1: 25). This phantom self he described as ‘a sham, that was either nobody at all, or oneself repeated once too often’ (11: 460f.). ‘Oneself repeated once too often’ must have been, in a nutshell, his reaction to The Devil’s Elixir. Elsewhere he wrote that ‘Any of us would be jealous of his own duplicate; and if I had a doppel-ganger who went about personating me, copying me, and pirating me, I might [...] attempt the crime of murder upon his carcase’ (11: 460f.). It is in relation to dreams that he writes of the double at most length, for it is there that the Doppelgänger comes into his own: The dreamer finds housed within himself - occupying,as it were, some separate chamber in his brain - holding, perhaps, from that station a secret and detestable commerce with his own heart - some horrid alien nature. What if it were his own nature repeated, - still, if the duality were distinctly perceptible, even that - even this mere numerical double of his own consciousness - might be a curse too mighty to be sustained. But how if the alien nature contradicts his own, fights with it, perplexes and confounds it? How, again, if not one alien nature, but two, but three, but four, but five, are introduced within what once he thought the inviolable sanctuary of himself? (13: 292)

From this it is but a small step to (or from) Medardus’s traumatic experience: ‘Mein eigenes Ich [...] in fremdartige Gestalten zerfließend [...] Ich konnte mich selbst nicht wiederfinden’) (My very self [...] dissolving into alien forms [...] I could not find myself again) (H 2 59). Here, surely, is the

330 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective reason for De Quincey’s reticence on the subject of The Devil’s Elixir. As Webber has said, the prior (in Hoffmann’s novel) ‘foresees how this fantasm [...] will lure Medardus to the abyss, casting identity into nonentity’.57 The abyss by which De Quincey was haunted is this very abyss of nonentity: ‘the abyss represents the threat of identity being ungrounded, cast into a void [...] the abyss of nonentity’.58 Nothing filled De Quincey with greater terror than the idea of his identity, problematical at the best of times, becoming permanently unstuck, like Schlemihl’s shadow, which for this reason held his attention.59 Hoffmann’s brilliant novel, which shows all too clearly what Webber calls ‘the damage, the psychosomatic mutilation done to those who fall into the abyss of nonentity’,60 must have filled with horror the man whose horror vacui reflects his fear of being discovered - as by Charles Lloyd to be a ‘non-ens’.61 After he had been drawn to the novel by its title pointing to the devil’s elixir to which he had all too frequent recourse, Die Elixiere des Teufels was simply too painful to dwell on. He is prepared, through a Dark Interpreter or shadow self, to shed an always deniable oblique light on his inner nature, and to be honest to that extent; but to be totally honest, to reveal all, is completely out of the question: the process would be unbearable, for he would lose his hard-won self-belief and, with it, the ability to carry on. Die Elixiere des Teufels, as a classic example of the mise en abyme in which structures or figures are reflected within one another, parallels De Quincey’s whole Gothic masquerade with its endless encapsulations (Russian dolls of the mind) and reflections. The mise en abyme, ‘token [...] at once of identity and projection into nonentity’62 is central to De Quincey’s work, the ‘abyme’ concretized in the ‘abîme’ imagery which ultimately stands both for the nonentity to which all revert in death, and for the nonentity in life of which De Quincey had a greater horror. The depth after depth of the unconscious, of which he is so aware, also involves the mise en abyme, as does Jean Paul’s idea of the endless image as in mirrors reflecting one another. The Doppelgänger and its concomitant mise en abyme, envisioned in Piranesi’s

57 58 59

60 61 62

Webber, 186. Webber, 189. The Devil’s Elixir and Peter Schlemihl came together in a Gothic melodrama or ‘musical romance’ by Edward Fitzball produced in April 1829, The Devil’s Elixir; or, The Shadowless Man (See The Hour of One. Six Gothic Melodramas, ed. Stephen Wischhusen [London: Gordon Fraser, 1975]). Webber, 189. Hoffmann too, in Die Serapionsbrüder (2008), 1579, uses the unusual and revealing word ‘Nonens’. Webber, 24.

E.T.A. Hoffmann 331

famous image of the aerial abyss,63 typify the work both of Jean Paul and Hoffmann and of De Quincey.

V Both R. P. Gillies’s translation of Hoffmann, The Devil’s Elixir (sic; it should have been Elixirs) and James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner were published in June 1824, The Devil’s Elixir by Blackwood in Edinburgh and Cadell in London, The Justified Sinner (anonymously) by Longmans. Given a series of remarkable similarities between these two extraordinary diabolocentric Gothic masterpieces in which the protagonist is haunted by the Devil as hallucinatory self-projection, readers will wonder whether Hogg was privy to his friend Gillies’ translation before publication. Being on the editorial board of Blackwood’s Magazine, he knew Gillies,and while he will not necessarily have seen The Devil’s Elixir before publication, he will surely have heard not a little of it in conversation with Gillies, De Quincey, J. G. Lockhart and other Blackwood’s colleagues/contributors who shared their interest in German literature, of whom there were several.64 Such accounts of the novel may well have given him the germ of an idea for The Justified Sinner, for while Hoffmann and Hogg are men from totally different backgrounds and with very different interests (psychology and religion respectively), whose protagonists are respectively a psychopath and a religious maniac, they are also men with similar mindsets who produce similarly complex novels illustrating ‘the terrifying effects of a personality split’.65 The Devil’s Elixir is far too challenging not to have been the subject of conversation at Blackwood’s, and The Justified Sinner is challenging in exactly the same way. Gillies was living in Edinburgh at the time, as was De Quincey, who knew both Hogg and Gillies. Like Scott, Lewis and Maturin, Gillies made a hobby of demonology, so that he was an appropriate translator for Die Elixiere des Teufels. The statement that Hoffmann is associated with ‘the portrayal of grotesque, bizarre forms of experience’, and thus with the Gothic: ‘Hypnotism, somnambulism and telepathy are the phenomena which fascinated him; delirium, persecution mania and schizophrenia are the mental states with which he invested his characters’,66 63 64 65 66

For the classicist ‘abyss’ denotes a world of endless depth or height. See A. L. Strout, ‘Writers on German Literature in Blackwood’s Magazine,’ The Library, 9 (1954), 35-44. Reinhard Heinritz and Silvia Mergenthal, ‘Hogg, Hoffmann, and Their Diabolical Elixirs’, Studies in Hogg and his World, 7 (1996), 49. Ronald Taylor, in the Introduction to his translation of The Devili’s Elixirs, vii.

332 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective applies above all to Die Elixiere des Teufels, which, like Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl, is both an autobiographical fantasia and an early example of psychological Gothic. Hoffmann’s title deploys the motif of the elixir of life which Gothic inherited from fairytale; it is a misleading title for a work that belongs in the Gothic category of ‘confessions’. Often referenced in unspecified terms in the Gothic context, Die Elixiere des Teufels has numerous Gothic aspects. It is linked with both earlier and later Gothic by the figment of a found manuscript. Ever since Walpole pretended that Otranto was ‘found in the library of an ancient Catholic family in the north of England’, and that he was merely its ‘translator’, English and German Gothic novelists and writers of tales had been taking part in a kind of literary game, ringing the changes on Walpole’s original ploy and later versions of it by Sophia Lee and others. In particular they repeatedly masqueraded as ‘editors’, describing their position vis-à-vis the text in a variety of ways. Hoffmann, for his part, poses as the ‘editor of an unpublished manuscript upon which he has chanced and to which he is therefore free to add his own glosses’.67 The Devil’s Elixirs accordingly opens with an ‘Editor’s Preface (From the posthumous papers of Brother Medardus, a Capuchin Friar)’.68 Wilhelm Meinhold, writing a generation later than Hoffmann, was to play a yet more elaborate game, listing supposed features of his ‘found’ text which he, as editor, claimed to have omitted. What Hoffmann chanced upon was in reality a tale, Die Fischer, by Benedicte Naubert featuring a Capuchin Friar, Brother Medardus, and his double (the Devil). A few common motifs suggest that Hoffmann knew The Castle of Otranto.69 His ‘Editor’s Preface’, which opens by focussing on ‘a Gothic building’, invites the reader to accompany Medardus ‘through gloomy cloisters and cells, through the lurid episodes of his passage through the world’ and to ‘bear the horror, the fear, the madness, the ludicrous perversity of his life’, shows straightaway that the reading experience is to be a distinctly Gothic one. The many ‘intercalated stories’, while not specifically Gothic, are a notable feature of the German Gothic novel à la Grosse, which typically comprises a highly convoluted set of narratives. Even Naubert, a rather more straightforward writer than Grosse, is known for narrative complexity of this kind. The element of mystification that is inherent in the text goes back to Hoffmann’s reading of Grosse. The novel includes a secret society on the lines of the Hell-Fire Club, which goes back to Grosse. The ‘old painter’ - Hoffmann also painted - can be compared 67 68 69

The Devil’s Elixirs, tr. Taylor, ix. To facilitate the comparison with Hogg, Hoffmann is here quoted in English. H. Koziol, ‘E. T. A. Hoffmanns ‘Die Elixiere des Teufels’ und M. G. Lewis’ ‘The Monk’’, Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, 26 (1938), 170.

E.T.A. Hoffmann 333

with the familiar spirit of Der Genius, and the reference to ‘families of robbers and murderers’ recalls the interest of Schiller, Tieck and others in the criminal mind, an interest which Hoffmann shared and which is explicable in terms both of his professional work as a district judge and of his awareness of possessing a ‘problematical’ personality that could have led him from creativity to criminality. Die Elixiere des Teufels is a study of the relationship between mind and ‘reality’. What count are less the obvious Gothic convolutions of the ‘editorial’ mind, and therefore of the text, than the relationship between ‘sanity’ and ‘insanity’. The emphasis is on madness and borderline states of mind/sanity. In the background are Hoffmann’s visits to the St Getreu mental asylum in Bamberg run by his friend Dr Marcus. He is engrossed by the complex relationship between so-called ‘sanity’ and so-called ‘insanity’, which includes both the creativity and the obsessive love (for Julia Marc) that marked his life. Hitzig spoke of Hoffmann’s ‘insane delight in insanity’. The novel shows just how close he came to being driven out of his mind by the never-ending conflict between his creative and professional selves. In a diary-entry dated 6 November 1809 he wrote, using the fairytale motif of the magic mirror, ‘I look at my self as through a multiplying- glass - the figures that surround me are aspects of myself, and I am annoyed at their actions.’70 The ‘hideously contorted face of the insane man, his memories of Medardus’ misdeeds [...] constitute a mirror in which Medardus sees himself.71 The ‘magic mirror’ in whose reflection the real self is revealed is familiar enough in story and legend; Schiller used it in the doomsday dreams of Franz Moor.’72 The experience of being confronted by ‘a horrible, distorted reflection’ of one’s self is utterly Gothic. The Doppelgänger as such, the ‘eerie wraith evoked [...] by the schizophrenic mind under the stress of guilt and persecution’, first appears in Gothic fiction not in Hogg’s Justified Sinner of 1824,73 but in Die Elixiere des Teufels (Part I, 1814; Part II, 1815; publication as a whole, 1816), which encapsulates the pathological Gothic. Like Das Fräulein von Scudéri, Die Elixiere des Teufels portrays ‘the history of one character, the fate of a dual personality at the mercy of uncontrollable 70 71

72 73

E. T. A. Hoffmann, Tagebücher, ed. Hans von Müller & F. Schnapp (Munich: Winkler, 1971), 107. See Linda Sue Singer Bayliss, Mirrors: Literary Reflections as Psychic Process (Diss. Michigan State, 1985; see Dissertation Abstracts International, 46 (1985), 416A (Michigan State University) comments on the use of mirrors in Lewis’s The Monk, Hoffmann’s Die Elixiere des Teufels and Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Hewett-Thayer, 267. Gonzalez, in The Handbook to Gothic Literature, 264.

334 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective impulses radiating from the realm of darkness’.74 This realm is Gothic. Hoffmann, who had no time for Veit Weber’s didacticism, illuminates a probematical area of supernatural darkness; at the end of his tale the light goes out and readers are left in the dark, no wiser than before and usually more precariously placed as a result of the (additional) doubts that have been implanted in their minds. Die Elixiere des Teufels turns on the most fundamental of Gothic experiences, loss of control, and with it the sense of being controlled by a devilish second self: the idea of the personality being split into two mutually antagonistic parts (305) and indeed being fragmented into a thousand parts (229). Freud, for whom Hoffmann was ‘the unrivalled master of the uncanny in literature’, wrote of Die Elixiere des Teufels in such a way as to suggest that he was only prevented by the difficulty of the text from taking it as his prime example of the uncanny. The way in which ‘the subject identifies himself with someone else, so that he is in doubt as to which his self is, or substitutes the extraneous self for his own’, is the very embodiment ofthe uncanny. The pursuit theme, and more especially the idea of a man, Medardus, being pursued and haunted by his double (‘it was [...] the spectre of my double haunting my imagination, [and] I could not rid myself of it’, 204), experiences paralysing fear (‘My soul was divided within itself, and I was in the grip of paralysing fear’, 124; ‘stricken with [...] terror’, 293). Medardus imagines himself being tried and sentenced by the Inquisition. The idea of a ‘sinister force’ is associated with that most Gothic of personages, the Devil, who is present as the ‘demon of deceit’. There are notable Gothic ‘forest’ episodes (106, 228), as when Medardus, mistaken for a captain of banditti, flees through the dark forest, pursued by his double. Here, as often in Gothic, the forest stands for the subconscious. The eerie/terrible is part of the uncanny which is so much in evidence: ‘The remoteness and silence of this spot, broken only by the dull roar of the nearby mountain torrent, could not but arouse a feeling of eerieness [‘grauenvolle Bilder aufzuregen’, literally: summoned up terrifying images], and the thought of my hideous double came back to me’ (293). Hoffmann’s tale of a renegade monk was prompted by Benedicte Naubert’s ‘Die Fischer’ (in her NVMdD, III), where there is a monk named Medardus, a painter who paints the Virgin, with whom (and a young nun who resembles her) he falls in love, and a Devil who represents the monk’s id. Hoffmann follows Naubert in making the Devil the other of the monk,75 but also, more significantly, of himself. The fact that M. G. Lewis was, in 74 75

Taylor, Hoffmann, 92. At one point Naubert writes of ‘mehrere Medardusse’ (several Medardusses).

E.T.A. Hoffmann 335

The Monk, indebted to the same tale is the reason why Hoffmann’s debt to Lewis’s novel has been overstated. However, a number of parallels between the two novels76 show that while indebted, like Lewis, to Naubert, Hoffmann was also indebted to Lewis for the development of his narrative. In both cases the protagonist is a monk. Both Father Ambrosio and Brother Medardus are of noble blood, which is to be understood metaphorically. Both are devoted to an iconic image that turns their heads, (the Virgin, St. Rosalia); both fall in love with a young woman (Matilda, Euphemia) who is the very image of the object of their devotion. Both become pathological sex-maniacs: possessed by the Devil, who appears in person in both tales; they commit murder and are subsequently filled with hatred for the woman whose beauty they blame for their fall. Both try to kill their lovers. While Die Elixiere des Teufels represents ‘a combination of the Bildungsroman with the Gothic Schauerroman, so that the process of selfformation is organized around stations of personal terror’,77 it is the Gothic element that is the more pervasive. As a Märchenroman, which it also is, it also combines Gothic tale and Kunstmärchen, but whereas the Kunstmärchen tends to be sinister in tone and tragic in outcome, Die Elixiere des Teufels, like Goethe’s Faust, is saved from outright tragedy by emotional sleight of hand in the form of its author’s disinclination to face up to tragedy, which might well have tipped him over into insanity. The Kunstmärchen in general is, and Tieck’s and Hoffmann’s fairy tales in particular are, set on the edge of chaos, that is, on the boundary between the rational and the irrational, the real and the fantastic, the ordinary and the extraordinary, the explicable and the inexplicable, the natural and the supernatural, the controllable and the uncontrollable. This is the boundary, too, between light and darkness, the world of single selves and the world of multiple selves, sanity and insanity, identity as certainty and identity as an abysmal void. In Die Serapionsbrüder Cyprian calls it a risky undertaking to let what is thoroughly fantastic spill over into everyday life so that serious people take on the appearance of fabulous spirits, leaving us in doubt as to their ‘real’ identity, as though that were not the identity of the moment. It being individual identity that is challenged by the uncanny combination of the mundane and the fantastic, it is a prolonged identity crisis that the monk Medardus, deputizing for his creator, undergoes.

76 77

See Koziol, 167ff. Webber, 184f.

336 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective

VI There are many parallels between Hoffmann’s The Devil’s Elixir (to give the novel the title by which Hogg will have known it) and Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner, not the least being the fact that in either case the protagonist’s double meets his death in a strangely similar setting. Roger Lewis has written of Confessions of a Justified Sinner that ‘When they [the hostile brothers] meet alone on a mountain top, all the trappings of high Romantic drama are present - storm clouds and a sunburst, waterfalls and a magical coloured misty light (gravity’s rainbow)’.78 It is, he adds, ‘a scene out of a Caspar David Friedrich painting’ - not a real one, of course, but the unpainted one in which all Friedrich’s favourite motifs would have been present. The scene in The Devil’s Elixir where Count Victor falls to his death is another version of sublime landscape, all the ingredients of which are present: terrifying walls of rock, the burning sun, the desolation of the high peak, the dense pine-forest (which in Friedrich spells death), the thunderous roar of a rushing mountain stream, magnified by the surrounding silence, and the fearful precipice with its unfathomable, deadly depths. The Devil’s Elixir and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, so different in their cultural backgrounds and preconceptions, both turn on doubles, doubling, and double-dealing: the questions ‘Who am I?’, ‘Which is the real me?’,’What is real?’ face the protagonist in both novels. However, while they both exemplify the ‘identifications and doublings of Romantic and Gothic writing’ and show their authors’ ‘fascination with deranged states and uncanny experiences’,79 there are major differences between them, for The Devil’s Elixir has nothing to do with the Scottish Romantic romance revival or with the painful self-hauntings of Scottish Calvinism, while The Justified Sinner could not be further removed from the world of Catholic monasticism, to which one of Hoffmann’s selves was attracted. The devil’s bridge of difference is, however, crossed by the paranoia that leads both protagonists to embark on a career of debauchery and murder. Both these novels of self-bedevilment encapsulating the paranoid Gothic show man as the victim of his own demons and phantasms, opening up the uncanny can of worms later analysed by Freud, who recognized Die Elixiere des Teufels as a novel ‘rich in masterly descriptions of pathological mental states’ and containing ‘a whole mass of themes to which one is tempted to ascribe the uncanny effect of the narrative’.80 One such mental state is the religious 78 79 80

Confessions of a Justified Sinner, ed. Roger Lewis (London: David Campbell [Everyman’s Library], 1992), xii, Botting, 111. Freud, Art and Literature, 355.

E.T.A. Hoffmann 337

mania of The Justified Sinner, which Freud, not surprisingly, seems not to have known, for in this particular form it is peculiar to Calvinism. Robert Wringhim Colwan’s mother, a frigid, hypocritical scold, belongs to the type of the ‘madwoman in the attic’. No less than Wuthering Heights, Confessions of a Justified Sinner is ‘laid in hell’ (D. G. Rossetti), the hell in its case being that of a Calvinism (cf. Colwan) so extreme as to become its own opposite, involuntary devil-worship. The devil is in Robert, ‘limb of Satan’ and ‘printer’s devil’ that he is. A devilish-looking youth dressed in black, whose fiendish glances his ‘half-brother’ George finds too appalling to withstand, fraught as they are with hideous malignity, meets his evil genius (the Devil) in the guise of Gil-Martin, and is ‘translated’ by him from fanatic to diabolist. The key concept in the novel is that of the evil genius, the id or shadow of a later generation. The ‘hostile brothers’ of Schiller’s Die Räuber and German early Romanticism here represent ‘two distinct natures in the same person’, for ‘Wringhim is the psychic focus. His brother and GilMartin, the Devil, exist tangentially in order to bring out aspects of his nature’,81 notably the diabolical, soul-destroying dogmatism in which he is trapped. A recent editor of The Justified Sinner rightly noted that ‘Virtually a century before it was clinicially diagnosed, Hogg’s book demonstrates the symptoms of schizophrenia’,82 and Heinritz and Mergenthal have commented that Hoffmann and Hogg both describe the personality disorders of their protagonists with ‘an astonishing degree of psychological sophistication’.83 Given the profound affinity of Hogg’s novel with Hoffmann’s, it is entirely possible that Hogg’s ‘demonstration’ of a psychological sophistication unusual at the time reflects Hoffmann’s observations as he was shown around the mental asylum of St Getreu in Bamberg by its medical director, his friend Dr Marcus, to say nothing of his many conversations with Dr Marcus and, later, in Berlin, with Dr Koreff. Hogg may have been advised by the philosopher of sleep, Robert Macnish, but Hoffmann is the obvious source of his psychological insight, which at the time was not easy to come by. Intent upon depriving the reader of any resort to easy certainty, Hogg reverses the reassuring narrative sequence of the typical Gothic novel by placing the ‘subjective’ account after the ‘objective’ one, so that seeming certainty gives way to manifest uncertainty, a doubly Gothic outcome. However, not only is the editor’s presumably objective ‘narrative’ followed by Robert’s subjective (and therefore, it may be thought, less reliable) 81 82 83

Parsons, 295. Confessions of a Justified Sinner, ed. Lewis, xx. Heinritz and Mergenthal, 52.

338 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective ‘private memoirs’; these are subverted by the way in which Robert, like Nietzsche two generations later, dwells on his own mendacity. The most Gothic feature of the split narrative is not so much its travesty of the Fall, or its diabolocentric nature, as the ever-increasing uncertainty which it serves to generate, for the doubtful reliability of these ‘private memoirs’ casts retrospective doubt on the reliability of the editor’s ‘narrative’, a narrative being by definition a story and thus a fiction or lie. Mendacity is at the very heart of this Janus-headed Gothic work which takes the reader on a journey into uncertainty presided over by the Devil, master of the lie and patron of the counterfeit.

VII A writer who has produced the outstanding Gothic novel in his language, a classic collection of Nachtstücke that includes one of the best Gothic tales (Das Majorat), as well as another tale that is widely accepted as the paradigm of the uncanny, and a body of work illustrating the mastery with which he deploys the rhetorical resources at his command in order to evoke fear, needs no special pleading, for he already has his honoured place in the Gothic pantheon. What is special about Hoffmann’s work, apart from its brilliant quality, is that it is, in a higher degree than the work of any other writer, both quintessentially Gothic and essentially idiosyncratic. The phantoms who inhabit his works, flitting from one to another, are in the first instance the creatures of his subconscious, but above and beyond this, they - like Goya’s horrid images - tap into readers’ collective unconscious. That he occasionally seems to go too far, offending some by his precarious balance between sanity and insanity, and others by occasionally (as in Der Vampyr/Die Hyänen) going beyond the bounds of what is accepted as human behaviour, goes with the creative territory he was obliged to occupy. Russian Hoffmannism84 speaks for itself, as does the influence of Hoffmann on Poe and Kafka.

84

See Charles E. Passage, The Russian Hoffmannists (The Hague: Mouton, 1963); Norman Ingham, E.T.A.Hoffmann in Russia, 1822-1845 (Würzburg Jal-Verlag, 1974. As Neil Cornwell has stressed, ‘Many subsequent works in the Gothic mode (by Nerval or Gogol; Poe or Dostoevskii; and indeed many others [including Odoevskii] would seem inconceivable without Hoffmann’ (The Gothic-Fantastic in NineteenthCentrury Russian Literature, ed. Neil Cornwell [Amsterdam & Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1999, 12. Odoevskii’s Prividenie (The Ghost) can be read as a reworking of Hoffmann’s Das Majorat.

9 ALEXIS & MEINHOLD Originally a copy of the medieval, modern Gothic is of its nature counterfeit, and Gothic diablerie comes into the frame too, for the Devil, as the ‘father of lies’, is the patron of counterfeiting and subversion; it is not the least Gothic of his roles. It is hardly surprising, then, that counterfeiting is an important theme and feature of some major Gothic novels and a legion of lesser ones. The counterfeit novel, which involves the Gothic notion of counterfeit (coining, forgery, falsification), goes back, in the Gothic context, to The Castle of Otranto, which falsely claimed to have been found in the library of an ancient catholic family in the north of England and to have been printed in Naples in 1529, and to Sophia Lee’s post-Otranto The Recess. From The Castle of Otranto onwards many Gothic novelists subvert their own work by casting doubt on its authenticity. Following the example of Walpole, who was himself following that of Voltaire, Sophia Lee poses as the editor of a supposedly incomplete manuscript in which the depredations of time have left ‘chasms’. The chasms in question, a form of recess, are, of course, purely imaginary. Equally Gothic is the way in which she plays with the reader when she writes in the Advertisement of ‘Not being permitted to publish the means which enriched me with the manuscript from whence the following tale is extracted’. In one way and another counterfeiting is the most important Gothic theme of The Recess. The first German Gothic novelist, Veit Weber, who took the name of a late fifteenth-century poet as his pseudonym, gives his novels a period flavour by writing them not in anything as specific and scholarly as Early New High German, but in the kind of archaistically coloured German first used by Wieland in ‘Gerton der Adelich’,1 which simulates the real language of the period. The emphasis in this chapter is on two little-known but important late Gothic novels, Willibald Alexis’s Walladmor and Wilhelm Meinhold’s Sidonia von Bork, die Klosterhexe (better known by its English title as Sidonia the Sorceress), which belong to the type of the sham translation and the sham historical document respectively, and on two other less substantial, but comparable, novels, one by Meinhold and the other by Wilhelm Hauff. The authors of Walladmor and Sidonia the Sorceress set out to deceive critics as well as readers. In thus cozening the reader they go further than Veit Weber, who was merely trying to give his historical fiction a veneer of historicity. 1

See Teutscher Merkur, 1777/1, 1ff. More elaborate is the language of Thomas Chatterton’s ‘Rowleian’ poems, written in 1768-9.

340 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Alexis is the author of Walladmor (1824; reworked in English by De Quincey, in a counter-hoax of the same title, 1825) and Schloß Avalon (1827), both of which purport to be by Scott. Hauff’s Lichtenstein (1826), another Scottimitation, seems at first sight to be a similar case, but proves to be gothically more interesting than that. Meinhold’s Maria Schweidler, die Bernsteinhexe (1843: Maria Schweidler, The Amber Witch, tr. Lucie Duff-Gordon, 1844) and Sidonia von Bork, die Klosterhexe (1847-48: Sidonia the Sorceress, tr. Jane Elgee [later Lady Wilde], 1849) both purport to be original documents of the late sixteenth/early seventeenth century. Wilhelm Meinhold is closer to Walpole in claiming to have found his texts, which are written, as it were ‘in the black letter’, in deliberately old-fashioned German pretending to be the language of the period. Other Gothic novelists heavily involved in counterfeiting are De Quincey, who described himself as a ‘coiner’, and whose Klosterheim (1832), seemingly a belated Gothic novel, is in reality something more modern and much more interesting,2 and the Shakespeare forger W.H. Ireland, whose The Abbess, which includes passages of counterfeit text, can be compared with the tale of the self-appointed abbess, Sidonia von Bork. The subversive idea of counterfeiting represents a mask behind which writers are free to indulge themselves, enabling them both to deconstruct the work of others, and to deconstruct their own work even as it is being constructed, often out of the work of others.

1. Willibald Alexis Willibald Alexis (pseudonym of Georg Wilhelm Häring, 1798-1871),3 grew up with Gothic in its German manifestations in the persons of Johann Andreas, Karl Gottlob Cramer, Karl Hildebrand, Karl Friedrich Kahlert, Laurids Kruse, Christian Heinrich Spieß, and the like. Born in Breslau in Prussian Lower Silesia (now Wroclaw in Poland), he later said that in his boyhood he had poisoned his imagination with the ‘schauderhaften Ritterromanen’ (chivalric penny dreadfuls) of the time. He began writing at about sixteen, one of his first works being a lurid revenge-tale, Die Vergeltung, the subtitle of which (‘Eine Sage der Vorzeit’) proclaimed him an admirer of 2 3

See my De Quincey’s Gothic Masquerade, 137-147. In this section I am indebted to the late L.H.C. Thomas’s ‘Walladmor: A PseudoTranslation of Sir Walter Scott,’ Modern Language Review, 46 (1951), 218-231. Thomas wrote his Leeds PhD on Walladmor, assembling in the process all the relevant material except that concerning J. H. Bohte. He includes (ibid., 220f.) a summary, in English, of the plot of Alexis’s novel. Alexis’s real name is Wilhelm Häring, not Ewald Hering (WTDQ, 4: 524).

Alexis & Meinhold 341

Veit Weber’s Sagen der Vorzeit;4 for good measure, in a conceit used by Weber himself, one of the characters in the tale is named Veit. He was twenty-five when he wrote his prank-novel Walladmor, the first of two such works. In 1825, one year after Walladmor, he published a short outlaw-novel, Die Geächteten. If I add that Alexis had enjoyed a classical education, was given to quoting classical tags, shared De Quincey’s interest in criminal psychology, and learned his irony from Jean Paul, it will be obvious that he has so much in common with De Quincey that the Opium-Eater’s decision to review and then rewrite his first novel is hardly surprising. While still at university in Berlin Alexis translated Scott’s The Lady of the Lake and The Lay of the Last Minstrel, and in 1823 published in the Wiener Jahrbücher der Literatur (22 [1823], 1-75)5 a long article, ‘The Romances of Walter Scott’, that showed him trying to come to terms with Scott’s novels, which were flooding the German market in translation, and led to his decision - a mistake in terms of his subsequent career as a writer - to make his first novel an imitation of Scott, published under Scott’s name.

I Walladmor. Frei nach dem Englischen des Walter Scott. Von W[illibald Alexi]s (Berlin: Herbig, 1824; 2nd edn, 1825), hastily written in summer 1823, is a high-spirited hoax designed to deceive the public and critics. Since 1815 most of Scott’s novels had been appearing in German in the same year as in English. In 1821, no fewer than five of them (including Waverley and all the most Gothic novels of the series) appeared in German, this marking the high tide of German enthusiasm for Scott and with it the end of German enthusiasm for the English Gothic novel à la Radcliffe, which had been transferred to Scott. Alexis’s hope was that Walladmor would, initially, be accepted as a ‘free translation’ of a new work by Scott. The hoax was to be revealed, in a knowing, literary version of the explained supernatural, in the third volume. It was not exactly a forgery’, for ‘[Alexis’s] unwillingness to repress an ironic tampering with the very processes of narrative illusion [...] ultimately made his Walladmor a spoof rather than a [...] forgery.’6 The 4

5 6

In 1806, the ‘whole of the works of [Veit] Weber’ were said to be in process of translation by J. Powell. Announced as ‘shortly to be published’, they failed to appear, and in 1823 Scott named Weber as still needing to be translated. He still is. In the same journal (15 [1821], 105-45) he had previously published a comparison of Scott and Byron. Frederick Burwick, ‘How to Translate a Waverley Novel: Sir Walter Scott, Willibald Alexis, and Thomas De Quincey’, The Wordsworth Circle (Spring 1994), 94.

342 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective distinction was, however, lost on Scott, who was not amused. That it was much more than a spoof, will become clear, but that ‘ironic tampering’ with a notional text meant that Walladmor was Gothic both in its ‘language’ and in its underlying critical design. The first volume appeared in December 1823, and the remaining two volumes shortly afterwards. By then some wellknown German critics had been fooled. Seen in retrospect, the words ‘Frei nach dem Englischen’ on the titlepage were, for those with eyes to see, an indication that the work was far from being a straight translation. They are found on the title-page of most of the many German imitations of Ann Radcliffe,7 some of which Alexis will have known, and are comparable to the words ‘From the German’ on the title-page of not a few English Gothic novels. Alexis’s Walladmor belongs to that popular Gothic genus, the sham translation, and more especially the sham translation of Scott, for it is one of a large number of novels which appeared in Germany between 1822 and 1827, purporting to be translations or adaptations of Scott, but which were in reality imitations falsely attributed to him. The others were by minor, long since forgotten writers of the day (F. P. E. Richter, K. H. L. Reinhardt, Heinrich Müller, August Schäfer).8 F. P. E. Richter is the pseudonym of Wilhelmine von Gersdorf, author of Meg Merrilies, die Zigeunerin (1817, an imitation of the recently translated Guy Mannering) and perpetrator of another novel, Jacobine oder die Ritter des Geheimnisses, which not only falsely purported to be ‘Ein historischer Roman, nach dem Englischen des Walter Scott’ (An historical novel, adapted from the English of Walter Scott), but was in reality an adaptation of an anonymous novel of the time, Jacobine von Holland, 1791). In 1823-24 Heinrich Müller published no less than five supposed ‘adaptations of Scott’; he was still producing Gothic fiction in 1831. Wilhelm Hauff, whose Lichtenstein (1826: The Banished, 1839) is briefly considered here, commented that at that time (1821) Scott’s works were, in Germany, nearly as well known as the Bible, and seemed to spring up overnight like mushrooms.9 Walladmor is primarily indebted to Guy Mannering and The Pirate. In his memoirs Alexis claimed to have based his novel on Waverley and Guy Mannering, which is disingenuous, for there is little of Waverley in it and not a little of The Pirate. Although he denied that he had known The Pirate before writing Walladmor, the plain fact of the matter is that he had himself reviewed it in the Wiener Jahrbücher for April/May/June 1823. Walladmor was 7 8

9

See Trainer, 24f. See Frederick Wilhelm Bachmann, Some German Imitators of Scott, Diss. Chicago, 1933. Also an imitation of Scott, although it did not pretend to be by him, was Wilhelm Hauff’s Lichtenstein (1826: The Banished, 1839). In Die Bücher und die Lesewelt (Freiburg: Herder, 1982), III: ‘Der große Unbekannte’.

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written immediately after this, in July-September. In it Alexis made considerable use of The Pirate. The steam-packet Halcyon, the wrecking of which opens the novel, takes its name from the frigate of the same name. The cast of the novel includes Gillie Godber (cf. Norna of the Fitful Head, but also Meg Merrilies of Guy Mannering),10 Captain le Harnois (cf. ‘jurycaptain’ Goffe), and Master Dulberry (cf. Triptolemus Yellowley), who was Alexis’s favourite - because most original (least Scott-like!) - character. If he had read The Devil’s Elixir, De Quincey would have recognized that Alexis had modelled Dulberry on the Irishman Ewson in Hoffmann’s novel. Bertram, whose name goes back, in part, to Guy Mannering, is the negative hero, Ginievra the negative heroine. There is in the novel the same paradigmatic pattern of doubling as in The Pirate.11 In order to achieve the three-volume format that was necessary if the work was to have any chance of passing as Scott’s, Alexis had to insert not a little unnecessary material, which tends to read like De Quincey’s digressions, and which De Quincey, with nice irony and equal assiduity, later removed. Though De Quincey came to lament his folly in agreeing to translate Walladmor against the clock, it was, in some ways, a happy chance that led him to do so, for seldom have two novelists from different countries had more in common than Thomas De Quincey, who knew as well as anyone the North Wales area in which Alexis chose to set his novel (without knowing the area himself, for he knew England, as De Quincey knew Germany, at second hand), and Wilhelm Häring. For both men the novel, in 1824, still meant the Gothic popular novel with which they grew up. ‘Gothic’ being the narrative language with which they grew up, for their first piece of extended fiction they both automatically had recourse to what they knew best, with the addition of a large dose of Romantic irony and not a little Gothic cross-generic shenanigans. To see Alexis’s Walladmor for what it really is, and get away from the elaborate smokescreen created by De Quincey, we need to take a closer look at the novel, the literary, as opposed to satiric, portion of which is, not surprisingly, given that the sham translation is a common Gothic form, Gothic. But then of course Scott is himself close to Gothic: The outmoded motifs and properties of Gothic romance were replaced by Scott in a manner that afforded similar excitement but added to it the colour and conviction of reality. The wicked Montoni, the scheming Schedoni, the

10 11

A writer friend of Alexis, Sophie Mai, thought Gillie Godber closer to Hogg’s spaewives than to anything in Scott. Marilyn Orr, ‘Repetition, Reversal and the Gothic: The Pirate and St. Ronan’s Well,’ English Studies in Canada, 26 (1990), 187-99.

344 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective savage banditti and spectres of Gothic romance, became in the works of Scott genuine outlaws, monks, highland chiefs, and phantoms of Scottish tradition. For the Salvator Rosa landscapes were substituted real mountains, forestvistas, valleys and caves, and the impregnable castles of Scotland.12

The text of Alexis’s Walladmor contains a number of references to other Gothic writings. Its starting-point seems to have been Alexis’s memory of Maturin’s Bertram and Vulpius’s Rinaldo Rinaldini. The opening shipwreck, which probably reminded De Quincey of the opening of one of his favourite Gothic novels, Mary Pilkington’s The Accusing Spirit (1802), is borrowed from Maturin’s overwrought drama which also furnished Alexis with the name of his centre of consciousness in the text, Bertram. In Walladmor, as in Bertram, the shipwreck is, in Coleridge’s words, ‘a mere supernatural effect without even a hint of any supernatural agency; a prodigy without any circumstance’.13 The opening is also reminiscent of Christian Vulpius’s once-famous ‘tale of the last century’, Rinaldo Rinaldini, which opens with the robber-captain sitting at the foot of a sheer cliff-face, talking to two other characters, one of whom is named Niccolo. Alexis later referred to himself as being ‘mit dem Rinaldo geboren’, in other words, as having grown up with Rinaldo Rinaldini.14 This helps to explain the fact that Walladmor is a sophisticated kind of Räuberroman. Here already are the names of Alexis’s two most important characters, linked in the text by being doublesone of the other. In Maturin’s tragedy the hero-villain Bertram is a robber; in Alexis’s novel he is a literary bandit and persifleur. Alexis’s robberleader Niklas belongs, in some respects, in the ‘sublime’ mould of the Gothic novel, but although his wild, stormy character reflects the stormy wildness of nature, he is not exactly the honourable robber who has performed the noble actions that prompt Vulpius’s Altaverde to argue, in the opening pages of the novel, that ‘Selbst der Teufel kann edel handeln’ (Even the devil is capable of acting nobly). References to the Vorzeit invoke Veit Weber’s famous Sagen der Vorzeit series of impassioned improbable tales. They are appropriate in that the style of the novel is straightaway closer to Veit Weber and company than to Scott - unless it be to the Scott of The House of Aspen, that ‘sort of a half-mad German tragedy’ that is a rifacimento of Veit Weber’s Die heilige Vehme. If Walladmor, as an imitation of Scott, belongs together with The Pirate, as a spaghetti-Gothic novel it belongs together with Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey (1818) and, to a lesser extent, with Eaton Stannard Barrett’s The Heroine (1813). 12 13 14

Varma, 175. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ch. 23. Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung, 13 Feb. 1834.

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The underground vault in which Bertram is held at the beginning of the novel is reminiscent of the lair of the banditti in Karl Friedrich Kahlert’s Der Geisterbanner, the English rewrite of which, The Necromancer; or, The Tale of the Black Forest, De Quincey probably had in mind when he wrote his lost tale of the Black Forest, The Curse; the curse as such features in his Walladmor. The Necromancer, a rifacimento made by fusing together Karl Friedrich Kahlert’s Der Geisterbanner, of which it purports to be a translation, and most of Schiller’s Der Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre, is an instance of the literary piracy around which Walladmor revolves. In Walladmor there are a number of references to Schiller. Niklas, as the ‘noble criminal’ (‘Welche Seelengröße leuchtet aus der Nacht seiner Sünden’ [What nobility of soul shines forth from the night of his sins] Vol. 3, I: 9) is of the legion of Gothic heroes based on Schiller’s Karl Moor in Die Räuber and ultimately on Milton’s Satan (cf. Old Nick), the hero-villain of Paradise Lost. The ‘ghostseers’ in the text go back to Der Geisterseher, and ‘Der Verbrecher’ (Niklas) to Der Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre, the first English translation of which appeared in the German Museum (II, 144ff.) in 1801. Niklas, the hero-villain, is one of two heroes in the novel, the other being the negative hero, Bertram; the two are related as lookalikes and in being, both of them, ‘robbers’ and personae of the author, Bertram representing Alexis as pseudo-Scott, while Niklas stands for Alexis as Gothic robber (of Scott). As a name, Walladmor is probably based on Cadwallader (featured in Peacock’s Headlong Hall in 1816) with the addition of the O. Engl. suffix mor (mountain). The falcon (Vol. 1, ch. 2) derives from the Ritterroman. The reference to ‘Miß Ratkliffs Romanen’ (sic: Vol. II, ch. 3), meaning the novels of Mrs Radcliffe, speaks for itself; the context is the ruined abbey or ‘verfallenes Raubnest’ (banditti-infested ruin) of Griffith ap Gauvon. What such detail means is that the young Alexis had recourse to his own reading when filling in the detail of his supposed Scottimitation, which is at the same time a knowing, sophisticated novel in the Räuberroman convention. In the novel there are a number of references to Salvator Rosa (16151673), with whose work De Quincey was also familiar (E 354f). We see the crags and cliffs that Rosa made his own, and the pirate ship moored in a cove beneath a perpendicular cliff surrounded by that Gothic castle is straight out of Rosa. The human and geographical wildness that we associate with Rosa, the picturesque landscapes with rocky settings and figures of witches, redcoats and brigands, are present in full measure in Alexis’s Walladmor, which, like Rosa’s own work, contains memories of his short-

346 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective lived bandit role.15 In his review De Quincey draws attention to a passage (Vol. II, ch. 4) where Bertram [...] is busy with the picturesque; wishing that Merlin or some other Welsh wizard would call up Salvator Rosa from his grave to sketch the fine composition arranged by the prodigious shadows of Snowdon - the moonlight and the armed men carousing by their pine-wood fire within the gloomy shades of the abbey.

The storm with which the German Walladmor opens reflects the stormy conditions encountered by Alexis when out boating the day before he began writing it. The opening episode was written in the public house Zum deutschen Hause in Greifswald. Otherwise, Walladmor was mostly written on the island of Rügen, which helps to explain its geographical vagaries. The novel opens with a highly Gothic bolt from the blue, in this case a shipwreck that leaves the dramatis personae at the mercy of the sea, making this less a tale of a tub than the tall story of a barrel - how is someone supposed to lie on a barrel in a choppy sea? Alexis is toying with the reader in a deconstructive way, suggesting, via the metaphor das schlägt dem Faß den Boden aus (that takes the biscuit, literally: that’s enough to knock the bottom out of the barrel), that his tale is an unlikely one, as characters representing Alexis (Bertram) and Scott (Malburne) engage in a life-and-death struggle in the sea, until they reach an accommodation and agree to take turns on the tub. The shipwreck is even repeated in the third volume, with melodramatic results that set in train the ending of the novel. Once on terra firma, Bertram finds himself in the hands of Gillie Godber, who is described as a witch, but also as a Medusa and (later) a Fury. In her capacity as witch, she goes back to similar Gothic figures in Scott, notably Meg Merrilies and Norna of the Fitful Head, and in the work of Salvator Rosa. Alexis is close to Scott in respect of the supernatural,16 except that this is mostly explained in the manner of Schiller and Radcliffe. Bertram finds himself not only in the hands of an apparent witch, but in a subterranean cavern or ‘recess’ with, for company, a skeleton seated on a chair. His situation is itself ‘no canny’(unheimlich), and he seeems to be paralyzed, powerless to move even when a door that is bolted on the inside opens from the outside, unless we suppose him to be dreaming and therefore subject to sleep paralysis, a farfetched, over-rational explanation. The Gothic cavern, a leitmotif of the novel, recurs in the form of the ‘Mörderhöhle’ (Walladmor Castle is

15 16

See, especially, Gaunt, Bandits in a Landscape, 29-33. See Parsons, Witchcraft and Demonology in Scott’s Fiction, passim.

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variously described as a ‘Mördergrube’ [den of murderers] and ‘Räuberhöhle’ [lair of robbers]). It is above all the spatialities of the novel that are Gothic.The precipitous cliffs, dizzying heights and yawning chasms that are much in evidence represent not only the insecurity and precarious balance of the world into which Bertram finds himself projected, but also the fine line between success and abject failure that Alexis is treading as he writes. The smugglers who play such a large part in the novel are, similarly, both figures from Scott and the pages of Gothic fiction and, at the same time, embodiments and continual reminders of Alexis’s ‘Schleichhandel’ (smuggling) and the fact that he, as author, is ‘auf dem Schleichweg’ (engaged in underhand business/smuggling), hence Bertram as ‘brother’ of Niklas: the author (or ‘translator’) as smuggler. It is Alexis’s self-depiction as a robber or smuggler that makes his Walladmor such a perfect choice, but also such a challenge, for De Quincey, whose subconscious feelings of guilt are conjured up by it. Those feelings explain the warmth of his reaction to Alexis’s novel. The idea of the writer as transgressor, and indeed as pirate and smuggler, was bound to appeal to De Quincey, bound to provoke an evasively idiosyncratic reaction. Walladmor Castle, a large, gothically shapeless pile perched on a beetling cliff above a raging sea, is described as a ‘gefeite(s), mit Geistersehern und allem Romanenapparat versehene(s) Schloß’ (an enchanted castle furnished with ghost-seers and the [Gothic] novelist’s whole bag of tricks). It is a typical Gothic castle, not least in possessing a memorably terrible and claustrophobic prison, subterranean passage, and so on; but this ‘wunderbar gebautes Schloß’ (prodigious castle) with its ‘Zauberturm’ (magic tower) is also the magic castle of folklore and superstition, home of Sir Morgan Walladmor, who represents the superstitious, Gothic world of the medieval ancestors he never tires of invoking. Equally Gothic is the ‘verfallene(s) Raubnest’ (robber-infested ruin) of Griffith ap Gauvon, a ruined abbey with the phantasmagorically shifting outline of Gothic convention and a tower that makes it a spectral double of Walladmor Castle. The Romantic/Gothic figures of the mysterious Stranger and the solitary Wanderer (wayfarer) are also present, as is the pariah who features in other work by both Alexis and De Quincey. Here too are the Gothic motifs of murder, revenge, incarceration and execution. The preliminary hearing of the ‘Inquisit’ (accused) and his trial belong in the context of the clash of law and lawlessness, initially invoked by the storm, that characterizes Gothic. The confusion of identities in the novel, including the question of the identity of the author, which is reflected in the novel as the question of the identity of several of the main characters, is wholly Gothic, as is the whole mystery

348 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective regarding the status of the manuscript. The novel is cross-generic in being, intentionally, a parody of Scott, and, intentionally or otherwise, a parody of a Gothic Räuberroman, whose means and motifs provide the individual trees in this vast Hercynian forest of a novel. In De Quincey’s hands it then becomes even more generically indeterminate, even the identity of the author being doubly uncertain. In short, Alexis’s Gothic masquerade anticipates De Quincey’s. De Quincey’s view of Alexis’s hoax novel is documented in two texts. His original review, headed ‘Walladmor: Sir Walter Scott’s German Novel’ (a punning title which managed to imply, by analogy with ‘German silver’, which is not silver at all, that the novel was ‘A cheap substitute for the real thing’ [L 273]), appeared in the London Magazine (10 [1824], 353-382). Then there is another piece, entitled ‘Walladmor. A Pseudo-Waverley Novel’ (14: 132-45), which originally appeared in Tait’s Magazine for September 1838 (559-63) as part of the ‘Autobiography of an English Opium-Eater. Recollections of Charles Lamb’. The makings of De Quincey’s Walladmor are there for all to see in his 1824 review of Alexis’s novel: all he needs to do is contrive a ‘better’ (which from Alexis’s point of view means worse) framework from which to hang his translations, which means, in effect, cutting out what he calls Alexis’s ‘rigmarole’, concentrating on altering and condensing the last two volumes (from the third volume he includes only the trial-scene). Alexis’s novel is itself episodic. When De Quincey has further concentrated on the tableaux translated in his review, the result is a novel that is episodic in the manner of Grosse’s Horrid Mysteries, which both Alexis and De Quincey may safely be assumed to have known, and which is a caricature of the novel at its most ‘Gothick’. Goldman is right to say that De Quincey has ‘conceived his story not so much as a narrative of events, or a study of characters, but as a sequence of romantic tableaux, elaborately put together in the manner of theatrical scenery’.17 Once the mixture has been given a further spin and has been further distanced by means of satire, Walladmor is there for the writing. In ‘translating’ Walladmor, De Quincey stretches the concept of rifacimento first to and then past the limit. It would have been less mystifying if he had inscribed it ‘altered from the German’, as Thomas Dibdin did with his version of Kotzebue’s The Will for the Deed in 1805, or, better, ‘Taken from the German’, a wording that was also used at the time. Alexis’s novel comprised 3 volumes totalling 883 pages, arranged in 26 chapters. De Quincey reduces this to 2 volumes totalling 542 pages, arranged in 21 chapters. He follows the original fairly closely in his first volume, which 17

Goldman, 97.

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includes most of the material in Alexis’s first volume, a good deal of which was to hand since it had been included in his review. His second volume represents a severely pruned and modified version of Alexis’s second and third volumes, written as De Quincey got hoist with his own petard. He excises the digressions on Welsh history that Alexis had inserted to bulk out his novel to Scott-like proportions, and changes the names of some of the characters to make them seem genuinely English, thereby turning a spoof into a forgery. Because of his respect for Scott, he omitted Alexis’s Malburne (= Scott), and did not present Bertram (= Alexis) as a budding author ‘der in die Welt läuft, um einen Scottischen Roman zu schreiben’ (going around trying to write a Scott novel). Alexis, who naturally regarded the ironical Bertram-Malburne relationship - the relationship between himself and Scott - as the core of the novel, thought the English translation must have been done by a friend of Scott, if indeed Scott himself did not have a hand in it. He could hardly recognize his original in the translation, because the element of ‘well-intentioned parody’ had been omitted altogether. Seen from Alexis’s point of view, De Quincey had taken one liberty too many. He had not produced a translation at all: in building an English hoax upon a German one, he had deconstructed the German hoax, substituting a ‘Gothick’ concoction of his own for Alexis’s pastiche of Scott. The process of encapsulation is typically Gothic: Alexis writes a novel amounting to a caricature of the typical Scott novel as he sees it. De Quincey then summarizes that novel (and there is a clear difference between Alexis’s Foreword, which puts all the emphasis on radical politics, and De Quincey’s reading of the novel, which foregrounds its Gothic elements), subjecting it to his own wit and preconceptions of various kinds, and then finally goes one step further in writing what is less a translation (or even a rifacimento) of a pseudo-Waverley novel, than a further refracted and ironized counterfeit of an original counterfeit. The more he ‘corrects’ Alexis’s novel, the more of a forgery his own novel automatically becomes. Both the process of literary ‘coining’ and the cross-generic product of it are Gothic in today’s terms, while much of the detailof bothnovels is Gothic in terms of their time. We are dealing not with one but with two writers who grew up with Gothic. Alexis, in 1823, has not yet outgrown it; De Quincey never will. Alexis’s Walladmor, while purporting to be a new novel by Scott, was less a pseudo-Waverley novel than a Räuberroman translated to Wales and attributed to Scott. In short, it was a Räuberroman masquerading as a Waverley novel. The padding, which often extends to whole chapters, was there for all to see, but so too were the motifs and machinery of Gothic and the style of German popular novels of the Räuberroman type. There were, it is true, echoes of Scott and his fixed ideas and character types, but the

350 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective discourse as such was not that of Scott. In De Quincey’s hands Walladmor becomes an avenger-novel motivated by Gillie Godber’s burning desire for revenge, a fact that immediately links it with his other Gothic works, and more especially with The Avenger. The wreck topos links it with The Household Wreck. The Masque and his appearances and disappearances resurface, in further developed form, in Klosterheim. The outcast theme, the descent/ abyss motif and the ‘dream’ connect the novel with Confessions, while the heights and depths of the Snowdonian landscape prefigure those of Suspira de Profundis. Two of De Quincey’s translations are also invoked, ‘The Fatal Marksman’ and ‘The Incognito, or Count Fitz-Hum’. The robber, murderer and stranger are familiar figures in De Quincey’s Gothic/autobiographical works. De Quincey’s summary of Alexis’s novel represents his idiosyncratic reading of an already idiosyncratic work. In making his own version of Walladmor, De Quincey excises much more than what he calls ‘the rubbish political, astrological, and diabolical’. He cuts out most of what might be deemed padding, but not all; the funeral of Le Harnois, a smokescreen and seeming digression, is retained because it is an important part of the ‘smuggling’ motif, which is in turn part of the ship metaphor, with which De Quincey makes brilliant play. Malburne (Scott) is deleted, as is the relationship between Bertram and Malburne, and Bertram (Alexis) is further diminished by losing his relationship with Ginievra, thus enabling the second shipwreck to be deleted too. In re-focusing the novel De Quincey plays down the ‘pseudo-Waverley’ element, concentrating instead on the underlying Gothic Romantic idea (Chatterton, Ireland, De Quincey) of the writer as ‘coiner’, which serves to link the novel with his own Gothic works. In rewriting the novel, De Quincey anglicizes, ‘improves’ and ‘corrects’ it, changingand upgrading its style, which is no longer that of the German popular novel, but is now closer to the style of Lee’s Kruitzner and De Quincey’s Klosterheim, which the motif of the stranger (a dissembler wearing a masque and with an ‘extraordinary talent for personating’) prefigures. De Quincey inserts a good deal of detail in support of his rewrite, but more important is the fact that, for stylistic reasons, he cuts some details that would have been in line with his re-focusing of the novel, showing that as he enhances the gothicity of the novel, his motivation is aesthetic and personal, not a matter of gothification for its own sake. He excises everything smacking of bad taste, coarseness, crassness, or ignorance. For Alexis’s mottoes he substitutes ones chosen to match his re-focusing of the novel. Alexis’s mottoes (copied and/or imitated from Percy, etc.) were in line with the ballad material favoured by Scott. De Quincey’s, by contrast, mostly come, like Ann Radcliffe’s, from Shakespeare and other older dramatists,

Alexis & Meinhold 351

thus underlining the even more episodic, dramatic nature of De Quincey’s novel, although Alexis’s novel, which De Quincey described as opening ‘with the following scena’, was already dramatically conceived; one of Alexis’s models, Vulpius’s Rinaldo Rinaldini, is, after all, a Gothic ‘tale’ in the quasidramatic form of tbe time. De Quincey emphasizes the element of drama, breaking chapters not at Alexis’s endings, but at dramatically suitable points, ending, for the most part, on a note of suspense. Nicholas (Niklas), a nobler character than in Alexis’s novel, is now closer to Schiller’s Karl Moor. Moreover De Quincey translates his hero into the identical twin of his Byronic antagonist, surrounds him with impersonators, has him accused of forging his ‘papers’, and while he is incarcerated, pictures him reading ‘the first volume of Walladmor, a novel, 2 vols [...] the second being not then finished,’ in Borgesian reinscription of periodical desire.18

Miss Walladmor, as she now becomes, no longer resembles the heroine of a German sentimental romance, and ‘Where Alexis has her whisper sweet words of encouragement to her parting lover, De Quincey has her perish in his arms.’19 Having ridiculed the pseudo-Scott’s evident lack of familiarity with Welsh countryside and customs, De Quincey set out to ‘outhoax the hoaxer’ by depicting the Welsh setting and political events ‘more accurately’. He not only much ‘improves’ (at the expense of Alexis, who had unwittingly imputed to Scott considerable ignorance of English manners and Welsh geography) the English and Welsh background; he takes advantage of his much greater experience as a writer to tighten up Alexis’s narrative in countless small ways that affect the quality of the novel, thereby making it his own in a qualitative stylistic sense. More significant than De Quincey’s deletions from Alexis’s text are his additions to it, which is where consideration of the greater or lesser gothicity of his Walladmor must begin. He develops the ship metaphor, which should be understood to include what Maturin calls the ‘plague-ship of German letters’; the shipwreck, which includes shipwrecked hopes and wrecked lives (throughout his works De Quincey has frequent recourse to the word wreck, always with subliminal reference to his own wrecked life) and piracy (hence the ‘derelict, wrecker and plundering vessel’) and pirating, which applies to both versions of the novel, as does the smuggler/smuggling complex, which involves the idea of Scott’s proofs being carried to Germany, but also the shipment of Alexis’s 18 19

Russett, 112. Burwick, The Wordsworth Circle, XXV/2 (Spring 1994), 96.

352 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective ‘pirated’ novel into Britain.It is steam - hot air - that enables the novel. The steam-packet Halcyon parallels the steam-press, with the aid of which Scott, entering into the fun, supposed Alexis’s novel to have been written by the Devil (cf. printer’s devil, but also devil in the sense of a ‘mischievously clever person’). De Quincey, who had a devil of a time of it in trying to produce copy for the printer, will have had his own take on this. The motif of the ‘strange ship’ carrying one supposed dead links with the legend of the Demon Frigate (Scott, Rokeby [1813], II: ix) or Phantom Ship/Flying Dutchman that spanned the century following its appearance as ‘Vanderdecken’s Message Home’ in Blackwood’s in 1821. In the German Walladmor, an involuted novel in which the text includes a metafictional account of its own genesis,Bertram was Alexis’s ‘focus’ in the text, while Niklasstood for Alexis as ‘robber’, ‘pirate’ and ‘smuggler’, but also as the devil (cf. Old Nick) in question. In the English version of the novel, by contrast, in which the involuted element is not present in the narrative, Bertram and Edward Nicholas represent De Quincey himself. Bertram’s upbringing in Germany represents the fact that De Quincey, like Alexis, grew up with the Gothic fiction that, at its most horrid, was popularly associated with Germany. Edward Nicholas, for his part, represents De Quincey as ‘robber’, ‘pirate’ and ‘smuggler’, although now it is Alexis, not Scott, who has been robbed, De Quincey who has smuggled a text of his own into Alexis’s Urtext. De Quincey hollows out Alexis’s novel in order to insert himself, parasitically, at its core, using Alexis’s text as so much material out of which to construct a neo-Gothic counter-text of his own devising. The writer as ghost-crab, then, inhabiting the house of another’s imagination, or as parasitic growth supported by a tree without which it could not exist. This points forward to a passage in Suspira de Profundis in which De Quincey wrote that ‘The whole course of this narrative resembles [...] a tree’s stem hung round and surmounted with some vagrant parasitical plant’,20 which in turn invokes the machinery for dreaming planted in that mighty palimpsest, the human brain. It is not the least of the ironies surrounding this text/counter-text that, whereas Alexis’s Walladmor is remembered, if at all, as an unfortunate prank that did its author’s subsequent literary career no good, De Quincey’s, which is the more truly parasitical of the two, still enjoys a kind of literary half-life. In an essay entitled ‘De Quincey as Gothic Parasite: The Dynamic of Supplementarity’,21 to which I am indebted, Jan B. Gordon has examined the ‘Gothic parasite’ theme, but unfortunately did so, so far as Walladmor is 20 21

De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings, ed. G. Lindop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 94. In Bicentenary Studies, 239-62.

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concerned, on the strength of De Quincey’s review-summary of Alexis’s novel rather than his own version of the novel, into the text of which De Quincey smuggles a reference to that other, better known and more successful example of the Gothic novelist as coiner, W. H. Ireland, forger of the Shakespeare manuscripts and other documents that fooled the general public and caused Boswell to salute the master-forger’s work. De Quincey develops the motif of the double or Doppelgänger, which he spreads into further corners of the text, and emphasizes those of the outcast and the labyrinth. At every opportunity he applies the concept of the sublime (to which Alexis did less than justice) to the Snowdonian rockscape, emphasizing not just the ‘tumultuous assemblage of mountains’ (WTDQ, 4: 303), but, more especially, ‘how majestically [the ruins] stand upon the naked peaks of the rocks; and how boldly the pointed [Gothic] arches rise into the air and throw themselves over the unfathomable chasms!’ (WTDQ, 4: 312). It is as though the very arches are tempted to suicide by the grandiose image of descent and fall that invokes the Fall. There is a similar description later in the text: ‘Dazzled by the grandeur of the spectacle, Bertram [...] overlooked the spacious ruins of the entire monastery, as its highest points silvered over by moonlight shot up from amidst the illimitable night of ravines, chasms and rocky peaks’ (WTDQ, 4: 362f). It is mostly the sublime of terror that is invoked. De Quincey draws attention less to the aweinspiring peaks than to the life-threatening ravines and chasms that complement them. Alexis’s references to Salvator Rosa are given additional point by this added emphasis on the sublime. De Quincey re-emphasizes the Gothic/fantastic nature of Walladmor Castle and its double, the ruined abbey of Griffith ap Gauvon, the description of which is enhanced by the addition of a reference to a ‘subterraneous church of vast dimensions, such as are sometimes found in the old monasteries below the ordinary chapel of the order’. The ‘vast dimensions’ of both edifices are emphasized, and a ‘faery’ element is added: Sir Morgan is presented as the ‘old dragon’ in the fairy-castle of Walladmor, so that he and Gillie Godber are as it were ghosts of the ogre/wicked count and witch/wicked stepmother of Gothic and fairytale convention. What De Quincey has in mind is not the dragon as a metaphor for the Devil, for he claimed to have ex(or)cised the devil and all his works, but the dragon as the symbol of Old Wales embodied in Sir Morgan and, by extension, the dragon as the embodiment of patriarchy that hunts down Edward Nicholas. In the final confrontation Miss Walladmor, the dragon’s traditional maiden-prey, is killed. Walladmor has many Gothic features. As a counterfeit copy of an existing counterfeit, the novel stands in the convention established by Walpole’s counterfeit medieval tale. The resultant generic instability is matched by the

354 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective spatial instability that is much in evidence in the novel, for instance in the phantasmagorically shifting appearance of the ruined abbey (tower) of Griffith ap Gauvon. The use of antiquated space (Gillie Godber’s cottage in aquarry, the ruined abbey and the antiquated castle) and claustrophobic or fear-inspiring spatialities (again, the abbey and castle, but more especially the extraordinary prison in the latter, the ne plus ultra of gothicism) correspond to and parallel the sublime, banditti-infested Snowdonian landscape with its spectral spaces. Both the landscape and the figures in it are haunted by their hidden secrets. The sense of loss analysed by Sedgwick is exemplified in the way in which Gillie Godber and Sir Morgan Walladmor are possessed by their lost sons, or the way in which Edward Nicholas (unlike Bertram, who is relatively incurious about his) is driven by his own past. The ghosts that flit in and out of the text are shades from the Gothic past with its belief in ghosts and from the literarily Gothic present, which, in the person of Walter Scott, is unable to shake off that belief; but at the same time they are reminders of the more solid and familiar ghosts by which the main figures in the novel are haunted. Nicholas embodies the in-between state of Gothic: he is very much alive in another identity, but, until the end, as good as dead (or reduced to nonentity) in his own. At the same time he stands in for Gillie Godber’s son, killed by Sir Morgan and thus abjected by him. Problematical identity is a feature, particularly, of late High Gothic, as exemplified in Francis Lathom’s Italian Mysteries (1820). Equally Gothic is the blurring of lines and values symbolized in the indistinct outline of the tower of Griffith ap Gauvon, or the way in which the gallows with their own dark secrets and abjected identities well up out of the mist. The line between law and lawlessness being deliberately blurred, the wicked deed is liable to take on the colouring of a noble one. Such instability, so characteristic of Gothic, is built into these two novels with their cross-generic status: Alexis’s text as Räuberroman and pseudo-Waverley novel, the two versions of Walladmor, both of them pretending to be something they are not, one somewhere between a Räuberroman and a Waverley novel, the other somewhere between that and a Gothic novel by De Quincey. Both involve, in different degrees, the combination of and tension between high and low culture, but the most significant Gothic feature of Alexis’s novel, and even more of De Quincey’s, is its ‘insistent artificiality’, the fact that it exaggerates and parades its own fictionality, and that ‘its representations and even its gothicism are [...] pointedly fake and counterfeit from the beginning’.22 Alexis’s work is populated by ghosts from

22

Hogle, Cambridge Companion, 14f.

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Scott; De Quincey’s, populated by ghosts of ghosts, is by definition the more Gothic.

II For any would-be historical novelist of the time Scott was both a model and a problem, so it is hardly surprising that for a time Alexis remained obsessed with the Great Unknown, as he calls him. Having written Walladmor (182324), he translated a novel that was, like Walladmor, in part a burlesque of Scott’s The Pirate, James Kirke Paulding’s Koningsmarke, the Long Finn (1823: Königsmark, der lange Finne [Berlin: Herbig, 1824]), and followed that up by writing a second Scott-pastiche of his own, Schloß Avalon (1827),23 of which Scott-scholarship appears not to know. He chose to translate Koningsmarke because he was himself in much the same position as Paulding, who, as ‘an outspoken critic of the Gothic-Byronic modes, remained undecided in his fiction, presenting on one page or in a chapter strictures against its excesses, while employing its methods and characters elsewhere’.24 In 1826-7 Alexis was on a satirical and emotional high, even planning to bring out an ‘English translation’ of Schloß Avalon before the original had appeared, to say nothing of planning a further instalment of the Walladmor hoax in the form of an article entitled ‘„Seltsames Abenteuer eines deutschen Reisenden in England“, Kritische Novelle vom Übersetzer des Walladmor’ (‘Strange Adventure of a German Traveller in England’, a Critical Afterthought by the Translator of Walladmor). On 5 July 1826 the publisher Brockhaus wrote to Alexis, trying to put the brakes on his enthusiasm.25 At the same time Alexis was beginning to look beyond the Gothic to the historical novel that was to be his proper mode. This ‘Abenteuer’ (adventure), reworked, became the Introduction to Schloß Avalon. If Alexis was by now ‘paying little more than lip service to a hoax diluted by repetition’, and wanting his work to be judged on its own merits,26 it is odd that he once again donned the emperor’s clothes. In doing so he will have had in mind both the success of his Walladmor and the continuing vogue for Scott-imitations in Germany. If Heinrich Müller could offload five Scott-imitations onto the market in the course of two years, he may have thought, surely he could get away with a 23 24 25 26

Cf. Catherine Smith’s The Castle of Arragon; or The Banditti of the Forest, 4 vols (London: Henry Colburn, 1809). Tymn, 215. Quoted from Lionel Thomas, Willibald Alexis. A Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1964), 38. Lionel Thomas, ‘Schloß Avalon’, German Life & Letters, X (1957), 97 (-105).

356 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective second one himself. If Walladmor had attracted less attention, he would have been less tempted by the idea of repeating that illusory ‘success’. Carried away by the notion of his own clevernes, he could not see where his own advantage lay. German booksellers and readers, who had been confused as to the identity of the author of Polidori’s The Vampyre (written 1816, published 1819), which was not only falsely attributed to Byron, but appeared, as ‘Der Vampir’, eine Erzählung aus dem Englischen des Lord Byron, in Byrons Sämtliche Werke (Stuttgart, 1839) and in its Leipzig 1874 reprint, were similarly confused by Schloß Avalon, frei nach dem Englischen des Walter Scott vom Übersetzer des Walladmor (Leipzig: Brockhaus) when it appeared in June 1827 with Scott’s name on the spine and with Alexis’s name encoded on the title-page. Alexis himself noted27 that the novel was included in a Viennese edition of the Waverley Novels, and that he had been assured by a bookseller in Teplitz that it was a genuine work by Scott. The edition of Scott’s Werke in seventy-five volumes published in Grätz by Kienreich in 1828-34 included Schloß Avalon, but not Walladmor, which had become known as the work of Alexis. De Quincey seems not to have known about Schloß Avalon. While it may simply be that he did not wish to be involved again, the more likely explanation is that he did not get to know about this second Scott-imitation, which was only once noticed in England (The Foreign Review, 1 (1828), 219223). By that time De Quincey, living mostly in Edinburgh, was no longer in touch with contemporary German literature in the way in which he had been in 1821. Schloß Avalon, set in 1682-89, revolves around the person of James II. It is preceded by a lengthy, rather whimsical Introduction, termed ‘Ein Abenteuer’, which shows the author initially wanting to relate the novel to Walladmor. This Introduction is somewhat self-congratulatory as Alexis puts into Scott’s mouth the idea that Walladmor was superior to Scott’s own work. The narrator refers to his time in England, describing his passage from Hamburg to Harwich in terms of the disastrous passage that opened Walladmor, which gives the misleading impression that Alexis had been to England. There is much play with Walladmor, with the way in which De Quincey ‘ruined’ Alexis’s work (the verb ‘verhunzen’ [to wreck] shows that he had strong feelings about this), and with Dousterwivel, who is a described as ‘der eigentliche Biograph des jungen Walladmor’ (the real biographer of the young Walladmor), who is now Sir Bertram. This harks back to Scott’s comment in the Introduction to The Betrothed (1825) which

27

Alexis, Erinnerungen, 281.

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played with steam-presses, printer’s devil’s and devils in general, in order to imply that Alexis was a charlatan. That Alexis’s whole procedure in Schloß Avalon is much more transparent is shown by the way in which, in the Introduction, he and Scott discuss possible titles for the novel. Suggestions from Alexis include ‘Die rieselnde Blutspur unter den Trümmern des westlichen Thurmes’ (The Trail of Blood among the Ruins of the West Tower) - the sort of baroque title favoured in the lower reaches of German Gothic - which would have suggested that this novel was as much a satirical Schauerroman as another pseudo-Waverley novel, which is not the case. Eventually Scott suggests ‘Schloß Avalon’, after the Isle of Avalon (Ynys Avallach), the final resting-place of King Arthur and home of Morgan le Fay. By this time Avalon had come to be seen as an Earthly Paradise (cf. its early alternative name, the Island of Apples) and a place of escape (cf. the world of the romance, which includes the Gothic novel) from the modern world. The title is in line with the folklore interests attested by Scott’s German books. When the Castle of Avalon is described as ‘ein verfallenes altes Schloß’ (a dipalidated old castle), the reader wonders whether what follows is, after all, to be another Gothic novel, but this proves not to be the case. The passage from Hamburg is uneventful, and the shipwreck that is described in Chapter 2 is just a shipwreck, no longer part of a grandiose metaphor. Alexis’s criticism of Jane Porter for turning the historical figures in her Duke Christian of Luneberg (1824: Herzog Christian von Braunschweig-Lüneberg, 1825) into so many bandit chiefs, which marks a turning point in the Introduction, signals his determination not to do likewise. More generally, the Introduction, which starts by showing Alexis cosying up to Scott, ends by showing him struggling to get away from him. The crux of the matter is that Schloß Avalon, although set in a potentially Gothic time of great uncertainty, is not Gothic. Alexis later wrote that whereas Walladmor was ‘ein Spiel’ (a sport), Schloß Avalon was ‘ein Werk’ (a [serious] work), which is true in the sense that whereas Walladmor was an ironical pastiche of Scott cast in the mould of the Gothic novel, Schloß Avalon was simply an historical novel somewhat in the manner of Scott. When it appeared in June 1827 Schloß Avalon showed that Alexis had by then also gone several steps further in learning from his study of Scott’s style: he did not, as before, merely expose the weaknesses of Scott’s novels, but [...] attempted to carry through actual betterments. He chose the subject matter which Scott had always avoided, the fall of the house of Stuart; he let the action extend over a long period of years in order to introduce the necessary historical perspective; and, finally, he made use of a second passive hero, while Scott employed regularly but one. Alexis made use, in this novel, of

358 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective several character types and situations that belonged to Scott’s stock, but [his] aim was [...] different: he wished to write a historical novel, rather than a novel of cultural history.28

Whether Schloß Avalon is, as Lionel Thomas argued, a ‘magnificent failure’29 standing comparison with those of Scott’s novels composed against a foreign background, such as Quentin Durward, or just a failure, may be debated, butthe bottom line is that Alexis, who here earns his spurs as an historical novelist, would have done better to write in his own right instead of posing as a translator and rival of Scott. Hermann Korff30 was surely right to insist that Scott, instead of selecting so broad a canvas, would have selected a period with one outstanding climax, towards which he would have driven his narrative. Alexis, instead, takes a slice of history containing a number of exciting events, and describes them in a series of Genrebilder that reflect the episodic nature of the German Gothic novel, as seen in Benedicte Naubert’s gothified histories. Unlike Walladmor, however, Schloß Avalon is not a Gothic novel.

III If Walladmor was a brilliant take on the discredited Räuberroman, Wilhelm Hauff’s Lichtenstein (1826), another Scott-imitation, is a deconstructed Ritterroman. Before writing Lichtenstein, Hauff published a novel, Der Mann im Mond (1825), under the name of Clauren, the pseudonym used by Karl Heun, who took him to court. In writing a spoof-Clauren novel, Hauff was following the example of Walladmor, which came out the previous year. Whereas Walladmor is a new kind of literary Räuberroman/Seeräuberroman, Lichtenstein is a modern take on the old Ritterroman with which Hauff grew up. He was reading Ritterromane by Cramer and Spieß by the age of eleven, as he reveals in the autobiographical fantasia Mitteilungen aus den Memoiren des Teufels,31 the first volume of which appeared anonymously in summer 1825, and the second under Hauff’s name in 1826. Clearly inspired by the title (rather than the content) of Jean Paul’s Auswahl aus des Teufels Papieren, Mitteilungen aus den Memoiren des Teufels consists of a series of quasiautobiographical fragments with Gothic trappings (the author as ‘editor’, 28 29 30 31

Price, 380. Thomas, ibid., 103. Hermann Korff, Scott und Alexis (Diss. Heidelberg, 1907). See Tymms, 368-70. The Mitteilungen, uneven though they are, are worth reading for the hilarious description of the German university students of the time, their dress, drinking habits and, above all, their hilarious jargon.

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Satan’s memoirs said to to be written in code, etc.), and, like Tieck’s Fermer der Geniale (1797), includes a number of passing references to the German Gothic novel. It is in the context of the Dandy’s Story (‘Geschichte des deutschen Stutzers’) that ‘Baron von Garnmacher’,32 who has already gone to the devil, refers to a number of Gothic novels by ‘Herren Spieß und Konsorten’ (Spieß and Co.) that he [Hauff] read at the age of eleven. Ich hatte in meinem eilften Jahre den größten Teil der Ritter- und Räuberromane meines Vaterlandes gelesen, Werke, von deren Vortrefflichkeit man in andern Ländern keinen Begriff hat, denn die erhabenen Namen Cramer und Spieß sind nie über den Rhein oder gar den Kanal gedrungen. (At the age of eleven I had read most of the Ritterromane and Räuberromane of my country, works of the excellence of which readers in other countries have no idea, for the names of the peerless Cramer and Spieß never made it across the Rhine, let alone the Channel.)

Mostly Ritterromane also read by the young Tieck, they include Vulpius’s Rinaldo Ronaldini, Spieß’s Der Alte Überall und Nirgends, as many novels by Carl Gottlob Cramer as he could get hold of, including Der Domschütz, Haspar a Spada, Adolf der Kühne Raubgraf von Dassel, Der deutsche Alcibiades and its sequel Hermann von Nordenschild, many Ritterromane by Fouqué, and Hoffmann’s Die Elixiere des Teufels. Like Alexis, Hauff also enjoyed the profuse but now forgotten work of (Johann Andreas) Karl Hildebrand (1764-1848), including Götz von Berlichingen, der furchtbare Ritter mit der eisernen Hand (1826). He knew Tieck and Alexis. Lichtenstein (1826: The Banished, 1839) is kind of post-Gothic Ritterroman. Like many of the works to which it is harking back, its starting-point in historical terms is Goethe’e Götz von Berlichingen, the hero of which is featured in the romance, as is Franz von Sickingen. The subtitle, ‘Romantische Sage aus der württembergischen Geschichte’ (A romantic tale of old Württemberg), both places the work historically and indicates that it is a work of faction. Veit Weber uses the word ‘Sage’ in the sense of fiction, to indicate that he is more concerned with telling a story, and with the moral of the story, than with historical truth. Used by Hauff, the word Sage points back to Veit Weber’s Sagen der Vorzeit, with which the romance is also linked by the partly archaistic diction which, in addition to adding a veneer of sham authenticity, serves to disguise Hauff’s literal borrowings from a number of early historical works. Sage also has the further advantage of linking this 32

Cf. Hauff, who is spinning the tale. ‘Garn’, like English ‘yarn’, is ambiguous, meaning not only a yarn-spinner, but also a spinner of yarn in the sense of a tall tale which is likely to trap or enmesh the reader.

360 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective romantic tale with fairytale, for fairytale it is, climaxing as it does in the wedding of the childhood sweethearts and ending, after the alarms and excursions of a second war, in wedded bliss. Lichtenstein is set in Swabia in 1519. It is a Romantic tale, a love story posing as a Ritterroman which in turn poses as a Scott-imitation, a Swabian Waverley. The ‘Translator’s Preface’ acknowledges Scott’s ‘magic, but goes on to claim that the ‘translator’ has been guided by historical truth alone’, which is not the case, for the work, like so many others of the time, is a mixture of fact and fiction, of real and imaginary figures. The non-historical Ritter Lichtenstein of the tale, who features first as the friend of Duke Ulrich of Württemberg and then as the father-in-law of the young hero, Georg von Sturmfeder, was inspired by the central figure in Franz van der Velde’s ‘Die Lichtensteiner’ (1821).33 Editors of Hauff’s novel have identified his main historical sources (Sattler, Thetinger, Pfaff and Stumphart) and have drawn attention to the seamless way in which the novel moves from original text by Hauff to passages of historical texts by others. It is accordingly a typical Gothic text whose authenticity is in doubt, a counterfeit text, and a text that includes pirated work by others. Lichtenstein has a number of Gothic features and motifs including revenge, murder, rapacious nobles and disgruntled peasants, the lowest cell of a prison (‘das tiefste Verließ’: commoners are routinely confined underground) with which Georg von Sturmfeder34 is threatened at the time of his arrest, spying and secrecy, robbery on a grand scale (masquerading as war), a multitude ofruined towers and castles, of which the Castle of Lichtenstein is the most memorable: getrennt durch eine weite Kluft von der übrigen Erde lag auf einem einzelnen, senkrecht aus der nächtlichen Tiefe aufsteigenden Felsen der Lichtenstein. Seine weißen Mauern, seine zackigten Felsen schimmerten im Mondlicht, es war, als schlummere das Schlößchen, abgeschieden von der Welt im tiefen Frieden der Einsamkeit. (separated from the surrounding land by a broad chasm, the castle of Lichtenstein stood on an isolated rock rising straightup out of the depths of darkness. Its white walls and jagged rocks gleamed in the moonlight; itwas as if the castle were slumbering, cut off from the world in the profound tranquillity of its isolation.)

33 34

Karl Franz van der Velde (1779-1824), a historical novelist, was known at the time as the ‘German Scott’. The anonymous English translator, in an excess of patriotic zeal, changes Georg to Albert.

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First seen at midnight, Lichtenstein combines the enchanted castle of fairytale, in which the bride awaits her groom, with the constant threat of death. Most notably Gothic is the cavern in which Duke Ulrich (like Otto von Wittelsbach at the end of Naubert’s Alf von Deulmen) takes refuge; it isboth one of the most memorable such caverns in Gothic fiction and itself a classically Romantic fiction. Hauff likens the cavern to ‘die erhabenen Hallen eines unterirdischen Palastes’ (the lofty halls of a subterranean palace) of an unnamed Oriental fairytale: in hohen, majestätisch gewölbten Bogen zog sich der Höhlengang hin und flimmerte und blitzte wie von tausend Kristallen und Diamanten [...] Glänzend weiße Felsen faßten die Wände ein, kühne Schwibbbogen, Wölbungen, über deren Kühnheit das irdische Auge staunte, bildeten das glänzende Kuppel [...] In grotesken Gestalten standen Felsen umher, und das aufgeregte Phantasie, das trunkene Auge glaubte bald eine Kapelle, bald große Altäre mit reicher Draperie und gotisch verzierte Kanzeln zu sehen. (the lofty and majestic vaulted arches running thewhole length of the cavern, sparkling and glittering like thousands of crystals and diamonds [...] Brilliant white rocks composed its walls; bold flying buttresses and arches, at the glory of which the eye could only marvel, formed the gleaming cupola [...] The surrounding rocks were thrown together in such happy confusion as to give the excited imagination full scope to disover in their grotesque shapes, here a chapel, there high altars ornamented with flowing drapery; pulpits of richly decorated in gothic style.)35

This underground palace, which puts Georg in mind of an Eastern fairytale he had heard in his childhood from a miner whose great grandfather was imprisoned in Palestine is reminiscent of the magnificent palace full of treasures ‘in the hollow of the mountain’ in ‘The Tale of Baba Abdalla’ in the Tausend und eine Nacht. In this underground palace Duke Ulrich lives like a trapped animal, liable to be discovered and captured or killed at any moment.36 The Räuberroman motif of the robbers’ den in a cave is reversed, for the robbers are in this case at large; it is their prey who is at bay. The mixture of fairytale and Gothic is striking. All these Gothic features and motifs are nostalgic reminders of Hauff’s early Gothic reading rather than features of a late Gothic Ritterroman, for Lichtenstein is a post-Gothic work, a love story posing as a Ritterroman which in turn poses as a Scott-imitation. It 35 36

The translations of this and the previous passage are modified from The Banished (II, 102f., 149ff.) to bring them closer to the original. There are parallels here with the Arabian Nights and Vathek, but also with Novalis, Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802), in which Graf von Hohenzollern (Der alte Bergmann) lives in such a magical underground grotto; but the contexts and implications are quite different.

362 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective can also be defined as a Märchenroman in that, like some of Naubert’s Gothified histories, it is a kind of fairytale-novel and includes a memorable fairytale, the tale of the Giant of Reissenstein, as well as motifs that are also found in Hauff’s fairytales.

2. Wilhelm Meinhold Wilhelm Meinhold (1797-1851), known to his contemporaries as ‘HexenMeinhold’, is the author of two outstanding counterfeit novels that are also examples of my last German subset of Gothic, the witch-novel, one of which (Maria Schweidler, die Bernsteinhexe) was so popular in Victorian England that it eventually reappeared as a World’s Classic in 1928, while the other (Sidonia von Bork, die Klosterhexe) was - in English, but not in German - a cult classic for half a century. Eccentric, opinionated, obstinate, short-tempered, credulous, and in all things ultra-conservative, a throwback to the sixteenth century, Meinhold believed in witchcraft as the ‘night side’ of the diabolocentric religion to which he was so attached. He lived almost all his life in the most obscure corner of a part of Germany which was proverbial as being in ‘the middle of nowhere’ - in a place, that is to say, like Pendle in Lancashire, where witchcraft was at that time still an accepted phenomenon among the peasantry, with whom Meinhold, for all his literary and clerical ambitions, had no choice but to identify. The fact that the last trial for witchcraft in Europe took place in Prussia in 1793 means that witchcraft was recent history in his neck of the woods.

I His reputation has always depended on two witch-romances, Maria Schweidler, die Bernsteinhexe (1843: Maria Schweidler, The Amber Witch, tr. Lucie Duff-Gordon, 1844.) and Sidonia von Bork, die Klosterhexe (1847-48: Sidonia the Sorceress, tr. Jane Elgee [later Lady Wilde], 1849), the former a long short story in the Novelle tradition, the latter a full-length ‘novel’, both of them ‘chronicle stories’ in the sense of purporting to be of the time in which they are set (they end in 1630 and 1620 respectively), their language a clever, if misconceived, counterfeit of the language of the period that will put English readers in mind of Thomas Chatterton and William Henry Ireland. In Maria Schweidler the two main characters, Pastor Schweidler and his daughter, are fictitious, while the background is historical, a combination that goes back to the the Gothified early historical novel à la Naubert. In Sidonia von Bork the

Alexis & Meinhold 363

main character is basically historical, with a generous admixture of fiction; of the others some are historical and the rest fictitious. In different ways and degrees these are both Gothic tales, the earlier one, with its somewhat improbable fairytale ending, being about the malicious persecution and trial for witchcraft of an innocent young woman whose only fault was that of being better than her neighbours. Maria Schweidler is, in modern terms, a Märchenroman using the apparatus of fairyale. Like the Grimms’ Marienkind (Mary’s Child), after whom she is presumably named, she is an innocent almost burned at the stake. Saved at the last minute by a young ‘prince’ on the proverbial fiery charger, she too is set for ‘Glück für das ganze Leben’ (a lifetime of happiness). Maria Schweidler, die Bernsteinhexe first appeared in German in 1843, the year of Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last of the Barons and five years before Ainsworth’s The Lancashire Witches, which seems to have been prompted by The Amber Witch. It was published at the expense of King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia, who soon came to the conclusion that Meinhold was a blackguard (‘Lump’) who had deceived him by not telling him that the whole work was an elaborate hoax aimed at the liberal theologian D. F. Strauß,37 who in 1847 was to publish an attack38 on the religious orthodoxy of Meinhold’s royal patron, but who took Meinhold’s machinations in surprisingly good part.39 This was, in theology, the epoch of David Friedrich Strauß and Ferdinand Christian Baur, who declared most of the works contained in the New Testament to have been written by others than those to whom they were attributed. This was anathema to the conservative Meinhold, who decided to confound them - the motivation is typical of the man - by showing that they could easily be taken in with regard to the authenticity of a work dealing with their own country and relatively recent times; after all, Alexis’s Walladmor, as Meinhold probably knew, for it was a well-known local novel, had fooled the critics. Maria Schweidler, written with the express intention of misleading Strauß in particular, was published in June 1843; on 15 January 1844 Meinhold, in great glee,40 proceeded to explain, in the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung, the trick he had played on the

37 38 39 40

In other words, The Amber Witch, like The Castle of Otranto, was ‘a sinister hoax rather than a naive genuine article’ (Clery, 53, on Otranto). D. F. Strauß, Der Romantiker auf dem Throne der Cäsaren (Mannheim: Bassermann, 1847). On the King’s changing attitude towards Meinhold, see Tagebücher von K. A. Varnhagen von Ense, I (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1861), 67f, 143f, 192f, 269, 273. See Joseph Jacob’s Introduction to Meinhold, The Amber Witch (London: David Nutt, 1895), x-xii.

364 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective critics. He was, however, hoist with his own petard, for not everyone believed him. With the exception of Veit Weber, whose archaism he copies,41 Meinhold’s literary predecessors are to be found in English literature rather than German. The obvious place to start is with Walter Scott, although his real model, and with it the source of his Gothicism, lies further back. His two witch-romances are closer to Scott than to German early historical novelists like Benedicte Naubert; this applies, particularly, to Sidonia the Sorceress. Meinhold may have had what seemed to him a compelling reason for faking seventeenth-century German in Maria Schweidler, but the reason was an ideological and dogmatic one where aesthetic reasoning was called for, and in the case of Sidonia von Bork, die Klosterhexe the original reason was no longer operative. He would have done well to ponder Scott’s argument in the General Preface to the Waverley novels, which he may safely be assumed to have read, ‘that, by rendering his language too ancient, and displaying his antiquarian knowledge too liberally, the ingenious author has raised up an obstacle to his own success.’ The argument is strikingly apt. That they are written in a pastiche of sixteenth/seventeenth-century German, and purport to be that which they are not, makes his two witchromances comparable to the work of Thomas Chatterton (1752-70), who claimed to have discovered his ‘Felix Farley’s Bristol Journey’ in a chest in St Mary Redcliffe, Bristol, and who wrote much of his best poetry in a pastiche of ‘Chaucerian’ English.42 Meinhold, who claimed to have discovered the manuscript of his Maria Schweidler under the choirstalls in the parish church at Koserow on Usedom, ‘forged’ his own work, as De Quincey had done. The way in which the old sexton tears pages out of the supposedly historical manuscript is reminiscent of the story of Chatterton’s mother tearing up old music folios for waste paper, and that of Chatterton himself selling purportedly ‘medieval’ poems and documents which he claimed to have found amongst old papers in the Church of St Mary Redcliffe. Meinhold seems to have known Püttmann’s Chatterton. Leben des Dichters, which included translations and came out in two volumes in 1840, at precisely the time when he was turning his story ‘Die Pfarrerstochter von Coserow’ (1838) into Die Bernsteinhexe (1843). Like Chatterton, he was disbelieved when he owned to his authorship. Both men had an axe to grind: Chatterton 41

42

He follows Weber’s example, but whereas Weber uses an admixture of archaic words, Meinhold uses Latin words and archaic linguistic forms. There is no influence in detail. Thomas Rowley, the fictitious 15th-century poet invented by Chatterton as a mask for himself, bears the name not only of two 17th-century actors, but of Old Rowley (Charles II) himself, so named after his favourite horse.

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sought to prove the ignorance of Horace Walpole, Meinhold that of contemporary liberal theologians. It was, however, to the work of Defoe, so relevant in the Gothic context, that reviewers of The Amber Witch repeatedly compared it. The first sentence of the first review, quoted in subsequent advertisements for the novel, ended: ‘If this little work [...] be a fiction, it is worthy, we can give no higher praise, of De Foe.’43 The reviewer went on: the whole cast of the story, be it real or imaginary, is [...] like De Foe [...] As in De Foe, every person is an actual individual, every place an actual place. There is not an abstract personage, not a mute, or a man merely designated by his trade, occupation, or office. Everybody is introduced by name, and though we never heard the name before, we seem almost to recognize an old acquaintance, so completely and instantaneously do his words and actions let us know all about him. We have not the slightest doubt, not merely of his existence, but of his being that one individual [...] So likewise there is no description of places, yet we have every locality with all its minute particulars at once before us. If there be a part of the world of which we were utterly ignorant, it is the coast of Pomerania, yet just as we know more about old London from De Foe’s ‘History of the Plague’, and of low London life from his ‘Colonel Jack’, than from pages of antiquarian lore, so from this little book, in which there is not a line of description, we think we know the Streckelberg, the way to it, its juniper-bushes, its caverns, and its sea-shore, [...] far better than if we had studied the best geographical treatise or local guide.44

William Morris’s early biographer, J.W. Mackail, went further and suggested that Meinhold might be called the German Defoe, only while Defoe took for his canvas the world of his own time, Meinhold went deliberately back to a distant age [...] Both writers produce the illusion of reality in their stories by an infinity of minute detail; and in both the illusion is so great that in The Amber Witch, as in Moll Flanders and the Journal of the Plague Year, the fictitious narrative may be, and was, taken as a transcript of actual occurrences. How far Meinhold may have been directly indebted for his method to German translations of Defoe there is no evidence. But in him the genius of Defoe was reincarnated.45

It was because his romances purported to be of the time in which they are set, and appeared ‘realistic’ in the sense of being packed with concrete, circumstantial detail, that Victorian reviewers compared Meinhold to Defoe. 43 44 45

The Quarterly Review, LXXIII (1844), 199. Ibid., 201f. Meinhold, The Amber Witch, ed. J. W. Mackail (London: O.U.P. [World’s Classics], 1928), vi.

366 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective They praised above all the ‘apparent genuineness, the singular truth and reality of the whole detail, the absolute life-like nature of every circumstance, of every action and every word, the succession of minute, quiet, unlaboured touches’.46 His two witch-romances are, like all Defoe’s best-known novels, and many Gothic novels, introduced by a fictitious editor behind whom the author hides. The manuscript of the Memoirs of a Cavalier, in which the ‘glorious King Gustavus Adolphus’ features in person, as he does in the most memorable episode in The Amber Witch, both episodes being set in the same year, 1630, was said to have been found among the editor’s father’s papers, just as the manuscript of Meinhold’s first romance was said to have been found in a pile of assorted papers in a corner of the ‘editor’s’ church. The long, old-style descriptive chapter headings, listing all the main events of the chapter, also parallel those in, say, Memoirs of a Cavalier. It is strange that a German mid-nineteenth-century romance purporting to be an original document of the seventeenth century, should employ a narrative form typical of the English early eighteenth century in general and of Defoe in particular. The obvious inference is that Meinhold is copying Defoe, ‘the only author known who has so plausibly circumstantiated his false historical records as to make them pass for genuine, even with literary men and critics.’47 When to this one adds ‘The Apparition of Mrs Veal’, The History and Reality of Apparitions, A System of Magic, and The Political History of the Devil, there is a prima facie case for including Defoe among the fathers of the Gothic romance. The case turns on the issue of counterfeiting. The Amber Witch and Sidonia the Sorceress both belong to what Scott, writing about Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, but maybe with Naubert’s secret-tribunal fictions in mind, called ‘that peculiar class of compositions which hovers between romance and history’.48 It is The Journal of the Plague Year (1722) that is most relevant in the present context, for Defoe there mixes fact with fiction, treating the fiction as fact, as Meinhold was to do after him. Both men believed in the truth of their factions. Professedly an authentic account of historical events, The Journal of the Plague Year immediately raises the question of its own status as a narrative, that is, the question whether it is history, fictional history, an historical novel, historical fiction, quasi-historical faction, a true narrative, an untrue narrative, a chronicle, or a chronicle novel. In fact it can be seen as most of these, although it is perhaps most sensibly regarded as an historical novel of a 46 47 48

The Quarterly Review, LXXIII (1844), 199. The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, ed. D. Masson, Vol, VI (London: A. & C. Black, 1897), 84. W. Scott, Miscellaneous Works, Vol. IV [Biographies II] (Edinburgh: A. & C. Black, 1870), 255.

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particular kind. Meinhold’s two witch-works, which present themselves as historical chronicles, are in reality novels in the ‘historical Gothic’ manner. The Journal of the Plague Year would have given Meinhold, if he knew it, a thought-provoking model in that, like his own work, it is a work of fiction masquerading as an historical record, the most extraordinary thing about it being the fact that it is fiction. In it Defoe produced ‘a tale that was indistinguishable from fact; and, moreover, it was more vivid, more credible, more persuasive than the records of genuine eye-witnesses’.49 The Journal of the Plague Year is ‘the most finished example of Defoe’s peculiar talent for telling fiction in the guise of truth - though here it was also truth in the guise of fiction’,50 the illusion of truth being achieved by ‘the accumulation not merely of authentic detail, or realistic detail, but also of irrelevant detail’.51 Like Defoe, Meinhold places his ‘eye-witness’ account in a framework of historical fact/published history; and, like Defoe, he relies largely on imagination to generate ‘fact’. He even parallels Defoe in his sometimes excessive particularity. How much of Defoe’s work Meinhold knew is unlikely to be established with certainty, but it is inconceivable that he did not know some of it. The major single works had been translated into German in 1723-82, and Meinhold’s most influential tutor at university, Ludwig Gotthard Kosegarten, shared the enthusiasm of the time for the English novel. Indeed, it can be argued that the popularity of the English novel in Germany in Meinhold’s early years, and more especially the Robinson Crusoe mania of the time, make it practically inconceivable that a lonely young culturestarved would-be writer with a keen interest in history did not read Robinson Crusoe and The Journal of the Plague Year, and maybe - given his near-obsessive concern with their subject-matter - the Memoirs of a Cavalier and The Political History of the Devil. However, whether or not Meinhold read some of Defoe’s work and found there the model or mechanics for his ‘chronicle tale’,52 the very fact that he was immediately perceived, and thereafter presented, as the equal of Defoe means that he was received in the UK as a quasi-English writer, an illusion strengthened by the translation of Maria Schweidler, in preparation for which Lucie Duff-Gordon immersed herself in English 49 50 51 52

Kenneth Hopkins, in his Introduction to Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (London: The Folio Society, 1960), 5. Ibid., 7. Ibid. Wolfgang Karrer & Eberhard Kreutzer [Daten der englischen und amerikanischen Literatur von 1700 bis 1890 (München: dtv, 2. Aufl., 1983), 49] rightly classify the Journal as a ‘chronikalische Erzählung’, though without mentioning Meinhold, who claimed to be the inventor of the genre.

368 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective seventeenth-century legal and historical texts, thereby lending her translation a verisimilitude that excelled that of the original.

II Maria Schweidler, The Amber Witch is ‘a masterpiece of supernatural terror’, but hardly a ‘ghost story’ as such.53 A witch-story, it can best be described as a quasi-historical romance with Gothic trimmings, or, better, as a Gothic fairytale, for the innocent teenage heroine of the tale, Maria Schweidler, is in the end saved as if by magic by a handsome young nobleman who comes galloping up, at the very last minute, on the proverbial fiery charger. Like the Grimms’ Marienkind (Mary’s Child) she is an innocent almost burned at the stake. Saved from death, she finds her fairytale consummation in a marriage destined to last forever, the ‘manuscript’ breaking off just before descending into mawkishness. By then the heroine has faced the Gothic world at its most barbarous. The tale incorporates the Gothic conceit or artifice of a supposed ‘fragment’ that begins and ends in mid-sentence. Toying with the Walpolian fiction of an ‘original manuscript’, some pages of which have been torn out by ‘the old sexton’, Meinhold claims to have ‘restored’ the central section of the manuscript, and to have omitted from it ‘well-known stories out of the Thirty Years’ War; for good measure in the manner of Defoe a bogus list of supposed ‘omissions’ is supplied, although it is Walpole who is implicitly invoked in the Preface, which is said to give ‘some account of the history of the manuscript’. The status and credibility of The Amber Witch, like those of The Castle of Otranto, are in question throughout. In claiming to have ‘imitated’ the language of the original ‘biographer’, Meinhold is indulging in the ever popular Gothic pastime of counterfeiting, in the history of which his two novels deserve to be remembered. The closest contemporary parallels are with De Quincey, who similarly ‘coined’ his own work, and with Alexis’s Walladmor. There is also the case of W. H. Ireland and his forged Shakespearian plays Vortigern and Rowena and Henry II. Meinhold’s Sidonia the Sorceress, which ends as it began, with the conceits of a fire which destroyed documents and a coffin held shut, as in fairytale, by a spell, has not a little in common with Ireland’s The Abbess. The Amber Witch includes most of the stock motifs of the Gothic repertoire. The Gothic peripeteia is much in evidence as Maria Schweidler’s peaceful, innocent, early teenage life is challenged by invasion and 53

Five Victorian Ghost Novels, ed. E. F. Bleiler (New York: Dover, 1971), publisher’s blurb.

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marauding mercenaries, the sacking of her village (with reports of a baby being bayonetted by the soldateska, and of a mother, in extreme hunger, eating her own child),54 the assault on Maria’s virtue by the Sheriff, her arrest, finding herself in the hands of a torturer who describes with evident relish the varieties of torture to be applied, the prospect of being condemned to death as a witch after her breasts had first been disfigured by red-hot tongs, and then being carried to death at the stake. Gothic cave/cavern, castle, dungeon, and torture-chamber are all present, as are the Devil (who is present both in the person of the unprincipled Sheriff and in the form of Meinhold’s diabolocentric theology), and the ‘real’ witch in the case in the person of Lizzie Kolken. While the pastoral idyll of Maria’s and her father’s life, and their naive religiosity, have more in common with The Vicar of Wakefield than with the run-of-the-mill Gothic novel, the terrors and horrors by which that naive idyll is disrupted are unblushingly Gothic. The combination of these two dramatically opposed forms of existence make ‘Gothic fairytale’ a not inappropriate description of the story. Maria Schweidler, die Bernsteinhexe was popular in Germany because it appealed to the historicism of the time. In England, the success of The Amber Witch was due, in large measure, to the quality of the translation, which both made it more accessible than the original and caused it to be perceived as English. Indeed, it was appropriate, in view of Meinhold’s decision to publish the work as an ‘edition’, and his subsequent difficulty in getting it accepted as his own, that Lucie Duff-Gordon’s brilliant translation was popularly supposed to be her own work, masquerading as a translation! From the 1840s to the 1920s Meinhold’s two Gothic romances between them enjoyed a success that ranged from the popular success of The Amber Witch with its innocent heroine, unjustly accused of witchcraft, supported throughout by a parson-father reminiscent of Goldsmith’s Dr Primrose,55 to the more problematical success of Sidonia the Sorceress, which was precisely the sort of novel to be considered ‘indecent’ by the average Victorian pater or mater familias, and which appealed to the Pre-Raphaelites all the more for this reason. In literary terms Sidonia is a memorable Avenger.

III Heinrich Zschokke’s early 4-act play Die Zauberin Sidonia (Berlin: Maurer, 1798), Die Zauberin Sidonia (The Sorceress Sidonia), which was once sufficiently 54 55

Kinderfresserinnen (female cannibals) are not uncommon in the Grimm brothers’ tales. Thanks to Herder († 1803), The Vicar of Wakefield became immensely popular, particularly in Meinhold’s part of Germany.

370 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective well known to be translated into Dutch (De toveres Sidonia [Amsterdam: Hendrik van Kesteren, 1799, repr. 1801]), is sometimes confused with Meinhold’s Sidonia von Bork, die Klosterhexe (Sidonia the Sorceres). Zschokke’s Sidonia, a young noble-woman from Calabria, is a runaway renegade nun who was rescued from the clutches of the church by her brother on his return from the Crusades. She narrowly escaped the clutches of a corrupt Abbot (Gregorius) and the threat of immurement. As it is, she is arrested on the orders of the Abbot and charged with bewitching Hugo by means of a love potion and, more ominously, of heresy. She is seized and tried before an ecclesiastical court whose procedures are reminiscent both of the Vehmgericht and of the Ketzergericht of the Inquisition, and escapes with her life after Gregorius’s corruption comes to light. In a double fairytale ending Hugo and his wife Iolande, and Sidonia and Cynthio, are united in love. The printed text of Die Zauberin Sidonia opens with remarks addressed to the reader in which Zschokke relates that he came across an anecdote that gave him his starting-point: ‘Ein schönes Mädchen soll einst einem italienischen Herzog einen Liebestrank beigebracht haben, und deswegen wie auch anderer gefährlichen Künste willen, als Hexe verbrannt worden seyn’ (A pretty girl is said to have given an Italian duke a love potion, and for this reason and by reason of various other black arts practised by her, to have been burned as a witch). He goes on to say that the celebrated Pomeranian witch, Sidonia von Bork, gave his sorceress nothing but her given name. Both statements are true, although they take liberties with the truth. When he says that the ‘pretty girl’ in question developed in his imagination into ‘ein großes majestätisches Weib’ (a tall, stately woman), this is tantamount to saying that his opening ‘anecdote’ got mixed up with the story of Sidonia von Bork and young Duke Ernst of Wolgast, for Sidonia von Bork was known and popularly remembered not only as ‘ein wunderschönes Mädchen’ (a marvel of beauty), but as a commanding figure, areal dominatrix. Similarly, when be went on to say of his own heroine, whose beauty was considered supernatural, that ‘Ich sah dies Weib fallen, ein Opfer der Roheit seines Jahrhunderts’ (I saw this woman fall victim to the barbarity of her century), this applies less to her than to Sidonia von Bork, who was burned at the stake. Zschokke’s heroine does not give a love potion to Hugo of Modena - he and his wife are both given a draught that induces the proverbial Gothic death-like state by his chancellor-cum doctor, Aldobrandini - and his Sidonia is saved from being burned as a witch at the instigation of the church in the form of a singularly corrupt Abbot, that stock figure in the German popular novel of the late 1780s and the 1790s, by a fairytale ending that points forward to the similar ending of Meinhold’s Maria Schweidler, die Bernsteinhexe. In other words, Zschokke’s Zauberin Sidonia

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has very little in common with the ‘pretty girl’ of the anecdote, which does, however, leaving aside the nationality of the enamoured duke, apply to Sidonia von Bork. Two things are therefore clear: that Zschokke knew of Sidonia von Bork, and that Die Zauberin Sidonia has very little to do with her. Whether Meinhold, for his part, knew Zschokke’s play is neither here nor there. He most likely came across the story in local history archives while collecting material for his first novel, Maria Schweidler,56 and probably wrote to Lady Wilde of Die Zauberin Sidonia, hence her choice of title (Sidonia the Sorceress) for her translation of Sidonia von Bork, die Klosterhexe. Zschokke’s title accounts for the mistaken notion, current at the time, that Sidonia the Sorceress was written by ‘a Swiss clergyman’. In failing to investigate the case of the Pomeranian witch Sidonia von Bork, Zschokke missed a story that was altogether more gripping than that of his pretty girl and alleged witch. It was therefore left to Meinhold to discover and fictionalize the case of the historical Sidonia von Bork (Borcke).57 Between 1620 and 1847 Sidonia von Borcke, originally the proud, crotchety, choleric daughter of an impoverished58 branch of an ancient Pomeranian family,59 given to swearing like a peasant when her ire was 56 57

58 59

See Josef Rysan, Wilhelm Meinhold’s Bernsteinhexe: A Study in Witchcraft and Cultural History (Diss. Chicago, 1948), 11f. for a list of Meinhold’s sources for Sidonia von Bork. There are three versions of Sidonia’s life, the historical, the fictionalized, and the mythical version that passed by word of mouth. It was not until the twentieth century that material documenting the history of the Borcke family, thereby enabling a biography of Sidonia von Borcke (1548-1620), who, found guilty of sorcery, witchcraft and murder by poisoning, was beheaded and her body burned on 19 August 1620, was published by Georg Sello in the form of Geschichtsquellen des burg- u. schloßgesessenen Geschlechts von Borcke (3 vols, 1901-10). The best part of a century then elapsed before Dirk Alvermann published, on the basis of materials in the Provincial Archives in Greifswald and the Polish State Archives in Stettin, an historical portrait of a woman who had long since transcended historical reality: Eine unruhige wunderseltsame Creatur - das Leben der Sidonia von Borcke (1998). Four years later WulfDietrich von Borcke gave Sidonia recognition as ‘eine Art Ahnfrau des Hauses’ in his Sidonia von Borcke. Die Hexe aus dem Kloster Marienfließ, 1548-1620 (Schwerin: Helms, 2002), which added to Alvermann’s biography further material, mostly of a literary and art-historical kind; his book usefully reproduces most of the paintings and prints of Sidonia. With the exception of the portrait of which Meinhold draws a verbal picture at the beginning of his book, which describes the now lost Stargordt-portrait (destroyed in 1945), all the portraits of Sidonia are imaginary, parts of the myth so powerfully reinforced by Rossetti and his Pre-Raphaelite brethren. Even after entering Marienfließ at the age of fifty-six she was still looking for a husband as the only possible way out of poverty. In Pomerania something ancient was described as ‘so old as de Borcken und de Düwel’ (as old as the Borcke family and the Devil). The Borcke family goes back at least to the twelfth century.

372 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective roused, as it frequently was, became, as the supposed ‘facts’ of her life were embroidered in the telling, a mythical figure, ‘eine unruhige, wunderseltsame Creatur’ (a queer, restless creature), a creature more of folklore and legend than of history. Many of the ‘facts’ about her had some basis in reality, although the central idea that she cast a spell of infertility on the whole Ducal house of Pommern-Wolgast, placed the spell in a padlock, and threw this into a river, is apocryphal. It was the death of all five sons of Philipp, first Duke, that got first the entourage of Duke Bogislaw XIV, and then local people generally, talking, hence the idea that she was responsible for single-handedly destroying the Ducal house of Pommern-Wolgast. The real Sidonia, whom poverty caused to enter the convent of Marienfließ in 1604, at the age of fifty-six, after falling out with her brother Ulrich, who referred to her as a ‘krumbruckige huren’ (bandy old whore),60 was no more a witch than were all those who were burned at the stake before and after her, but, given that she was found guilty of witchcraft after being denounced by a relative, Jost von Borcke, who wished, for reasons of his own, to be rid of her, her alleged witchly wickedness was, over the years and centuries, exaggerated by the Volksmund until she became a caricature of what she always was, a larger-than-life-sized figure, known for her beauty, the stately figure she cut, and her unprincipled malevolence.

IV Wilhelm Meinhold, in the mid-1840s, was not concerned to write a biography of Sidonia. What he produced, on the basis of his knowlege of antiquarian and local history sources, and popular lore, was a partial vie romancée, for his Sidonia von Bork, die Klosterhexe focusses on the early and late life of his Gothic heroine-villainess. He took the myth as his starting-point and further fictionalized history whenever it suited his book to do so. In a general way his work is reminiscent of that of an earlier didactic historian, Veit Weber, who also gave his material seeming authenticity by clothing it in spuriously archaistic language. Sidonia von Bork, as portrayed by Meinhold in his Gothic romance, was a member of an old Pomeranian noble family, who, having schemed to entice an aristocratic would-be husband, and alienated him by her infidelity, vowed to avenge herself on his family (the reigning ducal family of Pomerania), for which, and for many murders, she was eventually burned as a witch in 1620.61 60 61

She was lame, having broken a leg when falling off a cart. Meinhold’s sources included Scott’s Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (London: John Murray, 1830, repr. 1833 and 1884), which appeared in German (Briefe über

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Concerned as they were with literary values and history rather than with the history and literature of witchcraft in Pomerania (of all places), English reviewers of Sidonia von Bork compared Meinhold to Webster and the great Elizabethan/Jacobean dramatists. The Pre-Raphaelites, who developed such a passion for Sidonia, identified with the often dark world of late Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, Rossetti and Swinburne in particular being attracted by the tragic intensity of feeling and ‘Keatsian’ richness of language of the period. They were evidently struck by the revenge tragedy or ‘tragedy of blood’ with its on-stage violence, things which appealed to them in Sidonia the Sorceress, and particularly by the work of Webster, ‘a dramatist of genius so sombre, so heavily coloured, so macabre’.62 As a treatment of revenge Sidonia invites comparison with Webster’s The White Devil of 1612, and it was to Webster that York Powell, the then Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, compared Meinhold: Meinhold has the true Elizabethan power of shocking the reader’s soul with the repulsion and sympathy he can arouse by his presentment of depths of sin and abysses of dread. And this without Tourneur’s extravagance, without the mere sham and unreal taste for blood and bogeys that long haunted the childish Teutonic mind, and inspired the absurdities of the German romantic drama. This man is no Walpole with vapid, ill-begotten rococo invention; no Monk Lewis with crude, Surrey-side imaginings. He is of the true stock of Kyd and Webster and Shakespeare. He can mix you broad humour with horror, and banal incident with the most pitiful tragedy, so that the relief enables the catastrophes to tell the more surely and vividly.63

In the course of a long article Powell returns to the Elizabethan parallel, rightly arguing that Sidonia von Bork’s death comes as a relief, ‘when, not without the kind of dignity which Dekker or Webster can bestow upon the foulest criminal, Meinhold’s fearful heroine makes her last exit’.64 He sees Meinhold as a latterday Elizabethan, asking ‘Has such weird tragedy been written in Europe since the Elizabethan stage was silenced by the Puritan, as

62 63 64

Dämonologie und Hexerei, tr. G. N. Bärmann) in 1832 (repr. 1833), and W. G. Soldan’s Geschichte der Hexenprozesse (1843), both of which he read. He may have first come across Sidonia von Bork in Soldan’s Geschichte der Hexenprozesse (II: 104f.), but his main source was G. C. Horst’s Zauber-Bibliothek (6 vols, 1820-26), the work by which the late Romantic interest in the irrational in the form of witchcraft was initiated. He probably also knew Horst’s Dämonomagie (1818), which is mainly about witchcraft and the belief in it, a subject close to his heart. Walter Pater, Appreciations, (London: Macmillan & Co. [Library Edition], 1913), 108. The Pageant, 1896, 121. Ibid., 127f.

374 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective this of Sidonia ?’65 Lamb’s tribute to Webster - ‘To move a horror skilfully, to touch a soul to the quick, to lay upon fear as much as it can bear, to wean and weary a life till it is ready to drop, and then step in with mortal instruments to take its last forfeit, this only a Webster can do’66 - is applicable to the author of Sidonia. The comparison with Webster and the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists helps to explain the appeal of Sidonia the Sorceress to Rossetti, Morris and Swinburne, all three of them attached to the gory, Gothic world of that period, especially when presented in a work spectacular with word-painting. Posing, like Thomas Hogg and many a Gothic novelist from Walpole onwards, as an ‘editor’ introducing an ‘original document’, Meinhold hides behind the persona of ‘Dr Theodorus Plönnies’, whose concerns and hobbyhorses are, however, very much his own. There is no other Gothic novel with a narrator even remotely like Dr Plönnies, let alone one containing so much eccentric, diabolocentric theology. Sidonia the Sorceress includes motifs familiar from The Castle of Otranto (the destruction of the principality in Otranto, that of the duchy of Wolgast in Sidonia) and Beckford’s Vathek (the indecipherable inscription; being buried alive). Parallels between it and Sidonia the Sorceress show The Castle of Otranto to be a precursor of Meinhold’s Gothic romance, this being one of the obvious reasons for the appeal which Sidonia held for the Pre-Raphaelites, whose inner world is essentially Gothic, the influences on them (Dante, Malory, Webster, Ford, and so on) being also the main influences on late eighteenthcentury Gothic. Like Walpole, Meinhold was both eccentric and at heart an antiquarian. Like Walpole, he copies ‘the manners of an age which [he] love[s]’ (cf. Walpole’s letter to Thomas Warton of 16 March 1765), living more in the past than in the present because ‘one holds fast and surely what is past’ (as Walpole wrote in a letter of 5 January 1766 to George Montague), combining the painter’s love of historical spectacle with the antiquary’s abiding interest in the minutiae of history. What Walpole wrote to George Montague on 5 January 1766 (‘I almost think there is no wisdom comparable to that of exchanging what is called the realities of life for dreams. Old castles, old pictures, old histories [...] cannot disappoint one’) would surely have been underwritten by Meinhold, whose novels are set in the aftermath of the Reformation because it was at that time that the seeds of the rationalism were sown which he, like Walpole, detests. Just as the eighteenth century took The Castle of Otranto for an historical novel, so did the nineteenth take Meinhold’s two works at their author’s valuation as 65 66

Ibid., 128. The Dramatic Essays of Charles Lamb, ed. B. Matthews (London: Chatto & Windus, 1891), 214.

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‘chronicle novels’, but for all his talk of inventing the ‘chronicle story’ Meinhold actually inhabited an area inherited from the Gothic novelists of his early childhood. Sidonia the Sorceress belongs to what Scott called ‘that peculiar class of compositions which hovers between romance and history’, a class to which many Gothic romances and many early historical novels belong. It is a mixture of fact and fiction reminiscent of the early Gothic historical novel à la Sophia Lee and Benedicte Naubert, faction masquerading as historical fact. Meinhold craftily presents his life of Sidonia von Bork as that which it is not, his mendacious claim being compounded by not a little Gothic mystification and mumbo-jumbo. In some ways Sidonia the Sorceress is the Gothic novel to end all Gothic novels, but, just as it is an odd sort of novel, so too is it an odd sort of Gothic novel. Notwithstanding the admixture of fairytale motifs (the flax to be spun, the seven maidens), there is nothing remotely fairytale-like in this gory Gothic history. Sidonia includes many common Gothic motifs - the robber band with which Sidonia is at one time associated, the cave in the forest that acts as the robbers’ den, masquerading (Sidonia as self-appointed, sadistic ‘abbess’), cross-dressing (Sidonia as page, cf. The Recess) - and is Gothic in a variety of senses. A horror novel, full of barbaric, weird, macabre events, it depicts a dark Gothic world deriving from the ‘night side’ of the imagination. Here are a witchfinder, a memorable witch, death by witchcraft, an avenger-figure, a death-like state and the philtre by which it is brought about, the idea of entrapment, incarceration, torture, live burial and live burning, to say nothing of sadism (delectatio morbosa). In the novel the Devil appears in the guise of Sidonia’s familiar, the cat Chim, and is associated with the incubi which suffocate Sidonia’s victims. Given the time-setting of the novel, belief in the Devil is only to be expected; what is not, is the fact that the nineteenth-century author shares that belief. Sidonia the Sorceress shares features with other Gothic novels, notably M. G. Lewis’s The Monk (1796 [/1795]; German, 1797), Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya (1806; I have been unable to trace any German translation), and W. H. Ireland’s The Abbess (1799: Die Priorin, 1824). From Della Cruscan poet to Pomeranian peasant-pastor and would-be forger is a long way. Somewhere in-between comes the Shakespearian forger who, like Rosa Matilda, set out to out-do The Monk. Sidonia is not merely the ‘wicked witch’ of fairytale and the ‘wicked abbess’ (albeit a fraudulent one, for she is self-appointed) of Gothic convention. She is very much the Gothic villainess and femme fatale in the mould of Lewis’s Matilda, Dacre’s Victoria and, above all, of Ireland’s Mother Victoria Bracciano, sexual predator, ‘werewolf’ and ‘raging hyena’. Whether Lewis’s Matilda, frustrated lover turned novice turned sorceress,

376 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective was in any sense a model for Meinhold’s Sidonia, cannot be known for sure. Meinhold goes further than Lewis in making his protagonist a woman; he has a precursor here, though probably not a model, in Dacre’s Zofloya. Like Lewis, Meinhold refers to the Amadis de Gaul, which the historical Sidonia von Bork is said to have preferred to the Bible, although she is also said to have been illiterate. Like The Monk, Sidonia the Sorceress embodies a ‘mixture of the supernatural, the horrible and the carnal’,67 but so far as the carnal is concerned, it is tame by comparison with The Monk and its doubly lurid counterfeit, The Abbess. There are interesting parallels between Sidonia the Sorceress and The Abbess, which had been published in German in 1824, in a ‘free translation’ attributed to ‘Miss Anna Radcliff’. Both novels include the death-like slumber induced by the sorceress and the markedly erotic cruelty that is so characteristic of horror Gothic. Both end in a sensational auto-da-fé; Ireland’s is the more explicit and therefore the more shocking. Given their abbess-villainesses who both burn in the end, it is possible that Meinhold knew Ireland’s novel, although this is far more sexually explicit than Sidonia the Sorceress. Given Meinhold’s obsessive interest in literary forgery, Ireland’s reputation is likely to have come to his notice. What we see in the stream of the Gothic novel to which Meinhold belongs, is woman as predator.Like Dacre and Ireland, Meinhold gives his novel a female malefactor as protagonist. Like Lewis’s Matilda, Dacre’s Zofloya is finally revealed as ‘Satan’, that is, in Dacre’s case, as the evil principle in Victoria, who is led on from evil to worse not by a man, but by her lust for a man. The beginning of Meinhold’s novel shows that Sidonia was incurably vicious long before she was ‘jilted’ (in reality the fault was hers), and all the evidence suggests that, had she married Prince Ernst, she would have gone to the Devil in much the same way as Dacre’s Victoria. Her attitude, in dancing on the coffin in which her virtuous cousin is suffocating, is of a piece with the cold, contemptuous smile with which Victoria watches her mother die. Sidonia’s cruelty is remorseless; she is as pitiless as Victoria, as indifferent to others’ lives and suffering as the witchhunter Lüdecke, who let the dairy-mother die on the rack while he, having forgotten all about her, was carousing. Not for Meinhold, then, the mid-century domestication of the Gothic romance tradition, on the contrary, he goes back to the full-blooded Gothicism of his earliest childhood. More specifically, Sidonia the Sorceress is in the tradition of the Gothic of horror, its sexuality being of the ‘overt, predatory and deadly’68 kind that is reminiscent of the rampant sexuality of The Monk, Zofloya and 67 68

Back cover of the World’s Classics edition. Charlotte Dacre, Zofloya, ed. K. I. Michasiw (Oxford & New York: O.U.P., 1997), xv.

Alexis & Meinhold 377

The Abbess. Meinhold, whose heroine, like Lewis’s Matilda, is demonic, both more and less than human, has the same desire for le frisson historique and for sadistic sexual excitement as his Pre-Raphaelite readers, and, because it is part of his irrational response to rationalistic, positivistic religion, he is more concerned to express his personal belief in witchcraft than to condemn his witch-protagonist, whose end, when it comes, is, except for the smoke in the distance, invisible. These intertextualities do much to account for the positive reception of ‘William’ Meinhold’s work in England, where the parallels with Defoe, Scott, Webster, Walpole, Lewis and Ireland made him appear, if not exactly English, then at least a reassuringly familiar phenomenon. To the PreRaphaelites in particular, with their cult of the Gothic, his work was bound to appeal, although the extent of their passion for Sidonia could not have been foreseen. Sidonia the Sorceress achieved cult status among the members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Edmund Gosse, reviewing the last English edition in 1926, referred to the Pre-Raphaelite cult of the novel: This limited but intense appreciation gives an odd value to the book, which, without it, might continue to be unknown here, as it is in its native Germany, where it was never well recognized and is now forgotten [...] In [...] its English garb it enjoys a curious little continuity of fame, due to the zeal of Rossetti and his friends.69

Not even Horrid Mysteries enjoyed the particular kind of artistic succès d’estime which this now forgotten Gothic romance enjoyed in its day. Nor has any other German or Gothic novel ever been published in such sumptuous editions. Anyone reading Sidonia the Sorceress will understand why Gosse wrote that ‘it was the terrrifying, the horrible, the atrocious which alone appealed to Meinhold, who had a tincture in his veins of the Mrs Radcliffe sensationalism.’70 Unfair to Ann Radcliffe as it is, this is another way of pointing to the features that link Sidonia with the Gothic staple diet of the Pre-Raphaelites, a form of cultural imprinting which does much to explain the Gothic nature of their work and the way in which they fell, so passionately, for Sidonia. As well as taking them back to the boyhood reading they never outgrew, and to the idealized, fictionalized ‘middle ages’ in which they lived, the novel also brought them face to face with a woman whose combination of beauty and vice was grist to their brand of aestheticism. The parallels between Meinhold’s work and that of Gothic 69 70

Edmund Gosse, Leaves and Fruit (London: Heinemann, 1927), 195. Gosse, Leaves and Fruit, 195.

378 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective novelists like Lewis, Dacre and Ireland, will have commended him to the grown-up boys of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. To those long since used to the machinations of Lewis’s Matilda, Sidonia was a familar type; to those like Rossetti, Burne Jones, Morris and Swinburne, to say nothing of Pater and Wilde, inclined to see beauty as above the moral law, she was a positively inspiring figure. In fictionalizing and mythologizing the life of his female villain Meinhold incorporated both the trappings of the Gothic novel and a ‘key Romantic iconograph’71 in the form of the Medusa, with whom Sidonia is associated. Rossetti and his Pre-Raphaelite brethren were attracted to Meinhold’s Gothic romance not just by its many aesthetic qualities, but by its combination of the aesthetic and the amoral. It is a totally uncompromising book, a book by an extremist appealing to other extremists, a book by an eccentric that spoke powerfully to other eccentrics. For those revolted by Victorian morality the book was like a blast of fresh air, its heroine the very type of the Belle Dame sans Merci who looms so large in imaginative writing from Keats to Wilde and beyond. In effect a Pre-Raphaelite romance itself, it did much to give to the Pre-Raphaelite cult of female beauty the dark dimension that is half its appeal. Sidonia von Bork as seen and brought to life by Meinhold is the very personification of what Bram Dijkstra has termed the ‘fantasy of feminine evil in fin-de-siècle culture’. If Swinburne’s Pre-Raphaelite colleagues did not partake of his fetishistic image of feminine evil, they were all, in varying degrees, fascinated by it. It was, appropriately, in the neo-Gothic ‘nineties, when Burne-Jones’s portrait of her became a kind of icon (it hangs over my desk as I write) that she came into her own. She is the elder sister, alike, of Burne-Jones’s Lucretia Borgia, Morris’s Medea, Rossetti’s Sister Helen, Swinburne’s Catherine di Medici, and Wilde’s Salomé.

71

Jerome J. McGann, ‘The Beauty of the Medusa’, Studies in Romanticism, 2 (1972), 3.

Part II

10 THE VEHMGERICHT OR SECRET TRIBUNAL There being many kinds of ‘secret society’, ranging from the Inquisition (Ketzergericht) and similar secret tribunals including the Order of Assassins (founded in 1078 by the so-called Old Man of the Mountain), the Chambre Ardente (1535-1682), and the Star Chamber (c. 1461-1641), to the Society of Jesus, the masonic lodge, the Order of Knights Templar, the Order of Illuminists, the Order of the Rosy Cross, the political conspiracy or revolutionary cell, the Jacobinical Reading Society and other ‘democratic’ (revolutionary) societies, the robber band, the Society of Witches,1 and the Berliner Mittwochgesellschaft (Berlin Wednesday Society)2 among them,3 the Bundesroman or, to use today’s terminology, the Geheimbundroman, involves several kinds of novels, including the Illuminatenroman (Illuminati novel) and the Rosenkreuzerroman (Rosicrucian novel), both of which feature the Geheimbündelei (membership of [illegal] secret societies and their nefarious activities) of the time.4 In the present context by far the most significant of the various types of secret society featured in the Geheimbundroman (which thus becomes the Geheimgerichtroman or secret-tribunal novel) is the Freischöffenbund or Order of Free Judges of the Vehmgericht (now Femgericht, but I retain the old spelling as being less confusing in the Gothic context) or ‘Secret Tribunal’, which provided first German and then French and British Gothic novelists with a striking metaphor and an elaborate machinery for the terror that was their stock-in-trade. The Vehmgericht (Secret Tribunal) or heimliches Amt (Secret Office, cf. the Holy Office of the Inquisition) was an open-air court or tribunal, held in Germany chiefly from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, but originating earlier and lingering into late eighteenth-century decadence, for the suppression of crime, notably robbery and murder, at which the deathsentence, the only sentence available to the court, was carried out immediately after an admission or sentence of guilt, there being no 1 2

3 4

The term is taken from the Introduction to Montague Summers’ translation of the Malleus Maleficarum (London: The Pushkin Press, 1948, repr. 1951), xiv. Founded in 1783, also known as the Freunde der Aufklärung (Friends of the Enlightenment). The Göttingen Donnerstag Gesellschaft, on the other hand, was not a secret society but a staff/student reading/research society. There was even a Bund der Teufelsbeschwörer. On the Geheimbund, see Sierke, Schwärmer und Schwindler zu Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts Dülmen, Der Geheimbund der Illuminaten, and Ludz, Geheime Gesellschaften, which includes an essay by Rosemarie Nicolai-Haas on ‘Die Anfänge des deutschen Geheimbundromans’.

382 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective difference between the two. The proceedings of the Vehmgericht, like those of the Inquisition, were initiated by denunciation. The Freischöffenbund (order of free judges or jurymen) consisted of judges, assessors (jurymen), informants and executioners. Because the secret tribunal attached overriding significance to absolute secrecy, it is at times still difficult to distinguish reality from the myth in which it is shrouded.5 The Inquisition having been swept away by the Reformation in northern and central Germany, in German Gothic fiction it is largely replaced by the Secret Tribunal from which it was originally derived. The location, procedures and trappings of the Inquisition (as in Radcliffe’s The Italian and Ireland’s Gondez, the Monk) and the Secret Tribunal inevitably have much in common. The trashier the novel, the more lurid, explicit and ahistorical its portrayal of the procedures in question. In the Gothic context the Secret Tribunal sub-genre goes back, via Justus Möser’s essay on the Vehmgericht in his Osnabrückische Geschichte (Vol 1, 1768), and his ‘Von dem Faustrecht’ (1770), to the depiction of the Vehmgericht in the scene ‘In einem finstern engen Gewölb’ in Act V of Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen (1773), and, more especially, in Benedicte Naubert’s hugely influential Hermann von Unna (1788), one of the first of the German Gothic histories to be translated into English (Herman of Unna: A Series of Adventures of the Fifteenth Century [...], London: Robinson, 3 vols, 1794). Unna is in Westphalia, in the heart of Vehmgericht jurisdiction. It was the more or less simultaneous publication in English of Herman of Unna, together with the same author’s Alf von Dülmen (1791: Alf von Deulmen, tr. A. E. Booth, London: J. Bell, 2 vols, 1794) and their spin-offs that drew English readers’ attention to the existence of a sensational, hitherto unknown secret tribunal composed of more than 100,000 individuals held together by an invisible chain, known to each other, but indistinguishable to the rest of the world, whose sittings were covered with the most impenetrable secrecy; whose decrees were arbitrary and despotical, and were executed by assassins, whose steel seldom failed to reach the heart of the unfortunate victim.

The quotation comes from Baron de Bock’s Preface to Herman of Unna. The whole of the ‘Essay on the Secret Tribunal’ needs to be taken into account when assessing the effect of such revelations on a public already made twitchy by the Terror in Paris and the subsequent late Georgian witchhunt 5

The fact that Feme means not only Vehmgericht, but any kind of Geheimgericht (kangaroo court), while Fememord means lynching, reflects another fact, that Gothic portrayals served to vilify the Vehme.

The Vehmgericht or Secret Tribunal 383

for republicans and levellers (Pitt’s Terror), and on contemporary conspiracy theory, to which Naubert’s work and its many imitations in Gothic drama and fiction contributed.

I In a concise overview that avoids the layers of myth and misinformation by which the ‘secret tribunal’ is popularly surrounded The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia defines the Vehmgericht as a type of criminal tribunal in medieval Germany: The inability of the Holy Roman emperors to exercise effective central control over their lands and the extensive feudal warfare of the period brought increasing disorder. To control this lawlessness, there emerged in Westphalia near the end of the 12th cent. extra-legal but efficient criminal tribunals, the Vehmgerichte. [...] In the legal fragmentation of medieval Germany they represented the remnants of royal, as opposed to territorial, jurisdiction; they were supported by the Holy Roman emperor until the 16th cent. They combined old traditions with new legal forms and filled an important gap in German medieval criminal law. Operating where ordinary seignorial or territorial justice failed, they were strongest in Westphalia; in 1382, Holy Roman Emperor Wenceslaus granted them jurisdiction elsewhere in Germany [...] Originally public, they became increasingly secret after the 14th cent. and were operated by ‘holy bands’ sworn to secrecy on pain of death. [...] Despite apparently terroristic methods, the Vehmgerichte were less severe than tradition has made them. They were most powerful in the 15th cent. Thereafter increasing corruption and abuse, and the consolidated power of the petty princes, brought a general move against them, and in the 16th cent. the Vehmgerichte largely disappeared; they were entirely eliminated only in the 19th cent.6

The Vehmgericht was, then, a Freigericht, an independent open-air court of uncertain legality but undoubted power whose open (offenes Ding) sessions were open to the public, while its closed (heimliches Ding) sessions, though also held in the open, were not. Itwas based on the old Saxon free (open-air) court (Freies Feldgericht),7 and was, in effect, if not in law, the natural successor of the ‘Imperial Commissioners’ of Charlemagne’s time, who used to make their circuit of the empire once a year, or oftener if required, to deal with complaints against provincial governors and their officials, robberbarons, and the like, and to try capital offences, a right reserved to the Emperor. As such it was at odds with the Faustrechtsritter whose lawless 6 7

The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia (Columbia University Press, 2003). See Hütter, 162-70: ‘Von den Feldgerichten der alten Deutschen’.

384 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective power it challenged and sought to curb. Except in cases involving heresy, sorcery, and theft from churches, which were held in camera, the Imperial Commissioners’ proceedings, were held in public, and were summary, a matter of passing judgment on cases which had already been ‘tried’ in advance by two persons of ‘undoubted’ (because proven) probity, whose identity was concealed. In most of this the Vehmrichter (judges of the Vehmic tribunal) were simply following the old Imperial Commissioners. The Vehmgericht was essentially an Imperial Criminal Court, crime being understood as ‘alles, was wider Gott, Ehre und Recht geschehen’ (anything done contrary to God, Honour, and Justice). The crimes punishable by the Vehmgericht included theft, robbery, murder, grievous bodily harm, arson, apostasy, heresy (which came to include witchcraft), sacrilege, violations of the Ten Commandments, violation of divine authority, violation of princely authority, violation of the authority of the court, violation of pregnant women, slander, contumely, and sorcery of the malign kind (black magic). Until the Reformation, heresy and its concomitant sins were more properly a matter for the Inquisition, which was modelled on the heilige Vehme. In the middle ages, and indeed until 1900, the central German lands were subject to a mixture of local and Roman law known as Gemeines Recht (common law), administered by a variety of civil (imperial, provincial, municipal) and ecclesiastical jurisdictions. The Aulic Council or personal council (appeal court) of the Emperor; was a rather nebulous and inefficient body. There was no supreme (appellate) court as such until the Reichskammergericht was established in 1495 (the year that also saw the publication of the highly codified Malleus Maleficarum [Hammer of Witches]), and that was only as good as the imperial control of the time. After 1807 medieval ideas of trial and punishment were gradually replaced by the principles of the Code Napoléon; it was this French revision of English criminal procedure that substituted trial by jury in open court for the till then medieval system of summary trials and inquisitions in camera, thereby finally bringing the Vehmgerichte to an end. The whole Vehmgericht phenomenon can only be understood and judged if viewed against the chaotic background of the Holy Roman Empire of greater Germany in the later middle ages and the muddled nature of German medieval law and seignorial/territorial/free-state/district/municipal justice, for the Vehme was, for a long time, more effective, less corrupt and for the most part more equitable than many of the other, often competing jurisdictions of the time. That the latter were liable to be venal, biased and reliant on torture to obtain the confession required by closed minds, is amply shown by the witchcraft trials which were no fairer in the

The Vehmgericht or Secret Tribunal 385

German states than they were elsewhere in Europe.8 A product of anarchy, the Vehmgerichte were, in significant ways, simply a better organized, more efficient, and, on the whole, more impartial version of other systems of justice common at the time. Both the Vehmgericht and the Ketzergericht (Inquisition) relied on denunciations, and it was the Vehmgericht that was, in theory, better calculated to avoid malicious, ill-founded accusations of the kind that the Inquisition positively encouraged by the provision of a letterbox for denunzie secrete. The Vehme was designed to function where other forms of court were beginning to fail or had failed. The typical Vehmgericht was as good as its officers: so long as they were men of honour, the justice they dealt out, rough and ready as it was, was generally just. On the other hand, the system was by its very nature open to abuse if it fell locally into the hands of a cabal of the unscrupulous, when it had the potential to become a licence for extortion and murder, this being the scenario of choice for many Gothic novelists. Having originated on the ‘rote Erde’ (red earth) of Westphalia, so-called because of the Blutbann or Gerichtsbarkeit über Leben und Tod (authority to try capital offences, jurisdiction over life and death) that the Vehme first took in Westphalia back in the Carolingian mists of time, it was during the 13th and 14th centuries that the Vehmgericht system began to spread insidiously throughout the German lands to counter the prevailing anarchy. In 1382 the Vehme was officially allowed to spread beyond Westphalia by Emperor Wenzel (1361-1419), whose short-sighted, venal policy of ‘delegating’ (selling) his own responsibility for maintaining public peace led him to sanction the expansion of the Vehmgericht system, which subsequently became tarred with the same brush as its imperial patron, gaining it a name for arbitrary violence and the abuse of power that it had not previously had. By the end of the 14th century the whole of Germany was bristling with Freischöffen (assessors or jurymen, also known as Wissende, a term later borrowed by the Illuminati, whose name means the same thing), who were constantly on the look-out for crimes, ever ready to convene a session of the court to punish the guilty, or to carry out summary executions, for the Vehmgericht proved its efficiency not by the court sessions on which the Gothic novelists liked to elaborate in ahistorical long-windedness, but by the number of those found hanging from trees at a given time and place. Actions were believed to speak louder than words. By the early fifteenth century there were a thousand Freischöffen in Dortmund alone, and in Germany as a whole there were well over one hundred thousand and maybe 8

See Michael Kunze, Straße ins Feuer. Vom Leben und Sterben in der Zeit des Hexenwahns (Munich: Kindler, 1982: Highroad to the Stake. A Tale of Witchcraft, tr. William E. Yuill (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1987).

386 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective as many as two hundred thousand, so that by the end of the middle ages the heiligeVehme, which had eyes/spies everywhere, was not only a secret tribunal but had also become an early form of secret police. These numbers obviously reflect the fact that Freischöffen were in a powerful, privileged position: relatively safe from indictment themselves, for their word was sacrosanct and the penalty for breaking it unspeakable, they could indict others regardless of their social position, unless, of course, those others were protected by membership of the Bund. Freischöffen of any grade could, in theory, be called upon to face the justice of the court, but it was unusual for this to happen. Collectively the members of the court constituted the Freischöffenbund, an elite composed of the best and noblest men of the empire (as it expanded, the majority of princes, nobles and knights-gentlemen joined), which is accordingly the ‘secret society’ behind the ‘secret tribunals’ of the Gothic novelists. The operations of the Freischöffenbund were shrouded in the profoundest mystery, and even in 1788 it was unknown by what sign(s) and/or password(s) the ‘Wissende’ recognized one another, although the words Stock, Stein, Gras, Grein (stick, stone, grass, groan) were thought to be involved. The Emperor alone, thanks to Charlemagne, retained the right to grant protection to someone who had been sentenced by the court, but if the Emperor was not himself a member of the Freischöffenbund and thus privy to its secrets, details of the case could not be revealed to him, an extraordinary state of affairs which is best understood as underlining not so much the extra-legality of the Bund as the overriding importance it attached to secrecy. The sudden increase in power acquired by the Vehme at the turn of the fourteenth century served, in the long run, to bring about a decline in its power as the German princes gradually acquired territorial sovereignty in their states. The jurisdiction of the Vehmgericht, then, originally restricted to Westphalia, came to extend over the whole of Germany, and especially over the increasingly important cities, which at the time had no other court competent to try capital offences. Meetings were convened as required, on a Tuesday (German Dienstag comes from Dingestag [Gerichtstag or court day]), in the open air, and in daylight. The impenetrable darkness surrounding the Vehmic tribunals is responsible for the mistaken idea that sessions of the court were held after dark; on the contrary, they were normally held at dawn. Wigand is categoric as regards the meeting places of the secret tribunal: ‘genugsam bestätigt es sich, daß dieses Gericht nicht an verborgenen, unzugänglichen Orten oder in düsteren Gewölben hinter dicken Mauern seine Sitzungen abhielt. So etwas war dem Geiste der Zeit durchaus fremd’ (there is ample proof that this court did not meet in secret, inaccessible

The Vehmgericht or Secret Tribunal 387

places or in dark vaults behind thick walls, which would have been entirely contrary to the spirit of the time).9 He is writing, of course, about the Middle Ages. At the end of the Middle Ages the Vehmgerichte, as a medieval institution, ceased to exist in their age-old form. Rendered increasingly superfluous by the establishment in 1495 of the supreme court or court of appeal (Reichskammergericht), which was more effective than the Reichshofgericht out of which it grew, and by the increasing effectiveness of the various territorial jurisdictions, the Vehme slowly degenerated into a hole-and-corner affair that met in locations like those in which most of our novelists, for their own reasons, which had little or nothing to do with historical truth, choose to set it. The Vehme finally ceased to exist in 1807. Naubert writes in Hermann von Unna, without naming her source, who will however, have been one of her elder brothers, Heinrich Michael Hebenstreit, who at the time of his death in 1786 was professor of medieval law at Leipzig, that ‘there is no place, as a writer of these times informs us, in which the sessions of the secret tribunal might not be held, provided it were private and secure from surprises’ (HvU, I, 203). It is reasonable to suppose that she had access to her brother’s lecture notes; her brothers had taught her the Latin that she would need to read them. As regards the time of meetings of the court there is, again, both a rule and its exception. In Alf von Deulmen, Naubert writes: ‘The morning now began to dawn, and its rays must not profane the dark sittings of the bloody tribunal. The assembly dissolved like the clouds, but the sentence remained’, and adds a note to the effect that Charlemagne, the founder of the Vehmgericht system, ordained that the night only should be privy to the transactions of the bloody jurisdiction, and that [...] dawn should never be permitted to break in upon it. (AvD, II, 212f.) It is unfortunate that she does not name her source, for all the writers I have read quote documentary chapter and verse to the effect that court sessions were held in the half-light of dawn. It may well be that other meetings of the Freischöffenbund, as opposed to court sessions, were held in camera, and maybe at night. Naubert, in the same novel, writes that ‘At [midnight] the secret tribunal was accustomed to be employed in taking information against criminals, and forming plans of revenge [as opposed to executing them at that time of day]’ (AvD, II, 290). The court or ‘quarter-days’ were designated public holidays in order that the public might be present. Coxe quotes Schottelius10 as writing that when a meeting of the court is announced, ‘all the inhabitants of the place above twelve years of age repair to an open square, and sit down upon the ground, 9 10

Paul Wigand, Das Femgericht Westfalens (Aalen: Scientia, 1968), 228f. Justus Georg Schottelius (1612-1676).

388 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective while the members of the court range themselves round a table.’11 The ‘square’ or site of court meetings, known as the Malstätte (Mahlstatt, Mahlplatz)12 or Freistuhl or freier Stuhl, was normally a hill or other open space accessible to the public, the best known being the ‘Dortmunder Femlinde’. The owner of the site, known as the Stuhlherr, who was typically a prince or prince of the church, or other high-ranking nobleman, acted as patron of the court (and often indeed of a number of Freistühle in the area or territory concerned), and was responsible for appointing, for life, a number of Freigrafen. Supreme Stuhlherr, Grand Master of the Vehme or Grand Inquisitor and representative of the Emperor was the Archbishop of Cologne in his hereditary capacity of Duke of Westphalia. The typical Vehmgericht session involved a Stuhlherr (chairman), a commissioner or free count (Freigraf) acting as judge, and at least two free jurors (Freischöffen of knightly or noble status) acting as such; also present were up to twelve commoner-freemen, known as Freischöffen or Fronboten, who were responsible for carrying out the orders and sentences of the court. Rightly or wrongly historians are agreed that members of the bench were not masked, and apparently not cowled; whether the accused were blindfolded, is not clear. Nor is it clear how the tribunal was able to maintain the secrecy of its membership13 in open-court sessions, when every freeman was entitled to take his place beside the Freischöffen. Any German freeman of unblemished reputation could be a Freischöffe, but membership of the court was not open to Jews or other foreigners (which normally included citizens of another German principality), bastards, outlaws, women, clergymen, villains (in the feudal sense of vassals), or convicted criminals. New Freischöffen were appointed in a solemn ceremony. Hütter14 prints the lengthy oath sworn by all Freischöffen, which was the key to the success or failure of the system, for they were required to be strictly truthful at all times, to report to the court any crime or suspected crime of which they became aware, and to call for the court’s vengeance against the culprit. The identity of the free judges was unknown, or at least not made known, and members of the court were bound by the most fearsome oath to deliver up to it anyone who was accused of doing anything cognizable by the court. They were obliged to tell all they knew of the affair under consideration, and 11

12 13 14

William Coxe, A Letter on the Secret Tribunals of Westphalia, addressed to Elizabeth Countess of Pembroke (Salisbury: J. Easton and London: T. Cadell, jun. & W. Davies), 24f., quoting from Schottelius, De Singularibus quibusdam et Antiquis in Germania Juribus (1671), cap. 29. Cf. OHG mahal, court. Compare the secrecy surrounding membership of the Masonic fraternity. Hütter, Das Vehmgericht des Mittelalters, 93-5.

The Vehmgericht or Secret Tribunal 389

to put the accused to death once he had been sentenced; they were also required to kill on the spot anyone caught red-handed in the commission of a crime cognizable by the court, and might therefore be obliged to put to death their own nearest and dearest. To its victims the Freischöffenbund must have been indistinguishable from the Committee of Public Safety or the Order of Assassins: When in Bavaria, in Franconia, in Suabia, any one refused to appear before his regular judge, immediate recourse was had to one of the free tribunals of Westphalia, where sentence was passed, which was no sooner known to the order of free judges, than a hundred thousand assassins were set in motion, who had sworn not to spare their nearest relation, or their dearest friend 15

An accused person would find the summons of the secret tribunal nailed to his gate or door; notice of a meeting of the tribunal was given by nailing a notice to a tree. If the plaintiff did not appear, the accused was acquitted without further ado. If the accused failed to appear after being summoned three times,he was outlawed and the plaintiff was given the guilty verdict in writing. Included in this would be an exhortation to all Freischöffen to assist the plaintiff by ensuring that the court’s sentence was carried out. In other words, the accused, deemed guilty, was delivered over to the vengeance of that sinister invisible army of the free judges, which, in Bock’s words, ‘quitted not the pursuit till he was hunted to death’. In accordance with old Saxon law, the court provided that anyone caught bei handhafter Tat (in flagrante delicto) committing a crime cognizable by the court could be executed on the spot. This covered three different circumstances: when the offender was caught red-handed (hebende Hand), when he was caught in circumstances that clearly showed him to be the guilty party (blickender Schein), and when the guilty party admitted his guilt straightaway, condemning himself outright out of his own mouth (gichtiger Mund). Thus Naubert has Alf von Dülmen condemn himself ‘gichtigen Mundes’. Those accused of acts of violence could not be freed as a result of swearing their innocence. There was no appeal against the judgment of the court unless the jurors were equally divided, in which case an appeal to the Emperor or his Reichskammergericht, or even to the Pope, was possible, although it has to be said that none of these held out much hope of acquittal, for Papal power was regularlyabused, and Imperial power was frequently ineffective. The proceedings of the tribunal were held in the open (offenes Ding, which Palgrave rightly describes as a kind of Folkmoot) unless secrecy was deemed necessary, in which case the tribunal would convene in secret session as a 15

Bock, in Herman of Unna, xii.

390 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective heimliches Amt (heimliches Ding, heimliche Acht). The Secret Tribunal of the Gothic novelists was the heimliche Acht as such, which, for trying ‘secret’ crimes like magic, witchcraft and the administration of poison, was held in the open air, but not in public. Any intruder found to be present was killed on the spot, a detail that escaped the notice of some Gothic novelists. The session was opened by the chairman in a solemn ceremony. On a table in front of him he had a sword with, on top of it, a coil of rope or a willowwand; together they represented the imperial authority of the court and its power over life and death. No one was allowed to speak in court; the accused was only allowed to speak through his official representative (Vorsprecher = Fürsprecher, advocate), who was appointed by the judge. No one was allowed to leave the proceedings without permission.According to Turkius16 the judge and jurymen were fasting, bare-headed, without a robe, gloves or any species of arms, but most writers say that the Freischöffen were unarmed save for their official poniards, which they might be required to use; they were required to remain impassive throughout the proceedings. In open sessions of the court any number of freemen (die freien Dingpflichtigen der Grafschaft, the freemen of the county liable for jury service) could take their place, standing, beside the Freischöffen, but only as witnesses in the non-legal sense: they had no hand in the proceedings, and were there not so much to see justice being done, as to hope that what they were witnessing was justice. The proceedings of the court17 were highly formalized, but also short, sharp and to the point. The Vehmgericht involved a summary accusatorial (as opposed to inquisitional) procedure, whereby the accused was confronted with his alleged or presumed guilt, whereupon his name was entered in the Book of Blood, and he was asked, almost as an afterthought, how he pleaded. There was no elaborate common-law inquiry aimed at proving guilt or innocence, so that the procedure was closer to a summary court martial than to any other form of post-medieval court. Only a Freischöffe could appear as plaintiff. There was no provision for proving the truth. Truth is sworn, not proven. Presumptions are substituted for proofs. It is one man’s word against the other, and the word of a Freischöffe is regarded asincontrovertible. After the chairman had considered whether the accusation was a femvroge, that is, whether it fell within the remit of the court, the proceedings consisted merely of accusation or denunciation, the accused’s answer, and the sentence of the court. If the accused appeared and admitted the capital offence with which he was charged, the death sentence was pronounced and carried out 16 17

Coxe, 21. See Hütter, 87-92, and Wigand, 276-366.

The Vehmgericht or Secret Tribunal 391

immediately. If he denied the charge, he was questioned, although there was no possibility of his word equalling the tried and tested word of a Freischöffe. The Vehmgericht had at its disposal only two verdicts: acquittal (if the charge was a non-capital one) or death. If death, the sentence was carried out immediately, normally by hanging the condemned from the nearest roadside tree. Beside the hanged man one of the Freischöffen left his poniard bearing the letters SSGG that spelt death to the guilty and terror to the populace. In undefined exceptional circumstances justice might be meted out by some other means such as the poniard carried by all Wissende, which in such cases was used to attach the corpse to a tree, pour encourager les autres. The idea of a fatal dagger planted in the heart of the victim, as though he or she were a vampire, is validated by the dagger bearing the letters SSGG carried by the Wissende, while the fact that this has a later historical parallel in those carried by the Nazi party in uniform underlines the ‘old German’ nature of the court. The precise meaning of these four letters was revealed to new Freischöffen only after they had swornnot to reveal it, and there is no reason to think that it was ever revealed, which is hardly surprising, given that the penalty for doing so was for the culprit to have his tongue pulled out through the back of his neck. One document linked the letters with words, but the exact significance of the words has remained a mystery. Torture, which was against both the ethos and the modus operandi of the Vehmgericht, was not used. Coxe’s Letter to the Countess of Pembroke18 is inaccurate in this respect: The accused persons are brought to trial, without being permitted to have any communication with the witnesses against them; and without being allowed any counsel to defend them, except a servant of the magistracy: oftentimes persons of property are arrested, and tried for a capital crime, on the oath of one of their debtors, or any unknown signs and mysterious words, and the unfortunate prisoner is subjected to ordinary and extraordinary torture, against the nature of criminal justice [...] For the purpose of forcing confessions, torture is applied, and without any new witnesses, repeated, insomuch that several persons, found innocent of the crimes laid to their charge, have died from the consequences.19

The last point here is untrue. What is true, as Coxe must have known, is that torture was in general use, particularly in ecclesiastical courts and in the territorial and municipal courts influenced by them, to obtain the desired confession. It was not until 1532 that torture was banned except in cases where suspicion of guilt was particularly strong; it was banned altogether in 18 19

Coxe’s letter is described in the next section. Quoted from Lévy, 257f., who was quoting from the Critical Review, 19 (1797), 478.

392 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Prussia by 1754, and in most of the other German states during the later eighteenth century. Coxe, a churchman and historian of some note in his day, appears to have assumed that what was good enough for the civil and ecclesiastical courts of the day was also good enough for the Vehmic tribunal. In particular he seems to have assumed that since the Inquisition, which derived from the Vehme, used torture, this was also true of the Secret tribunal as such. Apparently unaware of the difference between accusatorial and inquisitional proceedings, he was in effect tarring the Vehme with the brush of the Inquisition. In historical terms the Vehmgericht has to be compared, on the one hand, with the Inquisition and, on the other, with the often dubious procedures of a variety of local courts, comparisons that work to its advantage. Friedrich von Thudicum claimed, in his Femgericht und Inquisition, (1889) that the Vehme (first mentioned in writing in 1211) derived from the Inquisition (dating from 1232), an historically absurd idea that was rejected by Theodor Lindner (Der angebliche Ursprung der Vemegerichte aus der Inquisition, 1890). Both institutions were active in the thirteenth century, but in practice they had little in common. The Vehmgerichte were established to act as an unofficial Imperial criminal court for trying heresy and other capital offences, thereby ridding the area of the vicious (ut haereses et alia vitia atque delicta capitalia inquirerent, et provinciam malis hominibus purgarent),20 but were, in practice, mostly concerned with crimina excepta of a worldly kind (murder, robbery, arson, and theft). The Inquisition, by contrast, was established (initially as the Ketzergericht der Dominikaner) solely to combat heresy. Whereas the Vehme existed to punish Faustrechtsritter and other lawbreakers, the Inquisition sought to combat the Devil and all his works; the Vehme involved an accusatorial system of justice, the Inquisition an inquisitional one. The sudden justice of the free judges was, when properly administered, fairer and more humane than the slow barbarism of the witchcraft and heresy trials, which involved the innocent being tortured until they confessed to all manner of imaginary crimes, in order to gratify the prejudice and barbarity of the commissioners. The procedures of the Vehmgericht being subject to detailed rules, it was when those rules came to be ignored that the court could be the instrument of arbitrary injustice for which the Gothic novelists largely mistook it. The most intemperate attack on the Vehme that I have seen came from a churchman, Dietrich Hermann Hegewisch (Übersicht der deutschen Kulturgeschichte bis zu Maximilian I, 1788),21 who spoke of the Vehmgericht as ‘jenes Ungeheuer von Criminalanstalt’, implying that it was, in 20 21

Biener, De Origine et Progressu Legum Juriumque Germanorum, Part 2 (Leipzig, 1790), quoted from Hütter, 2. See Hütter, 149-54.

The Vehmgericht or Secret Tribunal 393

his view, not only a criminal court but a ‘monstrous criminal institution’. Hegewisch, in 1788, the year of Hermann von Unna, describes the Vehmgericht as degenerating into a reign of terror, a state within a state, accountable to no one, a notion that appealed to Gothic novelists. Veit Weber in particular was strongly influenced by Hegewisch’s view of the Vehmgericht. In all this there is not a little that was grist to the mill of those who, for whatever reason, wished to vilify a system that was never perfect and eventually far from perfect. Abuse of the system eventually led to tighter control of the Vehmgerichte and then to their gradual abolition, but also to ahistorical flights of imagination by writers of fiction, who could rarely resist the temptation to further gothify (falsify) an already Gothic system. Palgrave’s balanced conclusionremains sound: The protocols of [the Vehmic Tribunals’] proceedings do not altogether realize the popular idea of their terrors and tyranny [...] if we examine the proceedings [...] we shall see that, in principle, it differs in no essential character from the summary jurisdiction exercised in the townships and hundreds of Anglo-Saxon England [...] in a truly barbarous age and country, their proceedings, however violent, were not without utility. Their severe and secret vengeance often deterred the rapacity of the noble robber, and protected the humble suppliant; the extent and even the abuse of their authority was in some measure justified in an empire divided into numerous independent jurisdictions, and not subjected to any paramount tribunal able to administer impartial justice to the oppressed. But as the times improved, the Vehmic tribunals degenerated [before falling into desuetude].

In brief, the justice handed out by the original Vehmgerichte was, by common consent, rough and ready, but effective. However, the system ended by being abused, and memories of its final degeneracy were, in the late eighteenth century, more real than those of the justice that had been meted out several centuries earlier.

II German and English Secret-Tribunal fictions are largely based on contemporary histories of the Vehmgericht by Bock, Hütter, Coxe, and Palgrave, whose accounts largely agree, and by Hegewisch, who foregrounds the unaccountability to outside authority of these courts, emphasizing the way in which some of them eventually degenerated into instruments of terror. In the Gothic period there are as many historical accounts of the Vehme as there are fictional works featuring it. In the following list of the

394 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective main works and dates histories are dated on the left, while fictional accounts are interleaved between the histories: 1768:

1770:

1773:

1786: 1787: 1788:

1788: 1788:

Justus Möser, Osnabrückische Geschichte mit Urkunden (1768 [repr. Berlin & Stettin: Nicolai, 1780], Vol. I, 248-55). Although Goethe had read law at the University of Leipzig, which he left in 1768, before Benedicte Naubert’s brother was appointed to the Chair of the History of Law, Möser was the source of his knowledge of the Vehmgericht. It is appropriate that the modern history of the Vehmgericht begins with one of the most respected of all German historians, whose work was admired by Goethe and used by Veit Weber, who refers to it in the notes to his Die heilige Vehme. Justus Möser, ‘Von dem Faustrecht’ (in Die Osnabrückischen Intelligenz-blätter nebst den nützlichen Beiträgen, April 1770). Faustrecht, the idea of the robber barons, that might is right, is one of the things the Vehme was designed to curb. Goethe, Götz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand, which depictsthe sort of community that Möser admired. Goethe’s legal-historical sources included Johann Philipp Datt, De pace publica (1698), the Corpus iuris Germanici publici ac privati hactenus ineditum e bibliotheca Senckenbergiana (1760), and Johann Stephan Pütter, Grundriß der Staatsveränderungen des teutschen Reichs (1764). Karl Meißner, ‘Über die westphälischen oder Fehmgerichte,’ in the Hannöverisches Magazin (1786), Nos 38, 39 and 40. N. Kindlinger, Münsterische Beiträge zur Geschichte Deutschlands, hauptsächlich Westphalens, 4 vols (Münster, 1787-93), see III, 141-222. [Jean Nicolas Etienne de Bock,] Oeuvres Diverses du Baron de Bock (Metz: Devilly; see 217-234 for the ‘Essai sur le tribunal secret’ which Bock addded to his French translation of Hermann von Unna (Metz: Lamort, 1791). Bock’s essay, which was largely based on Möser and Meißner, is important as one of the earliest on the subject, the one on which English Gothic writers mostly based their knowledge of the secret tribunal, and the account that achieved the widest circulation in literary circles in France, Britain, and Germany. Dietrich Hermann Hegewisch, Übersicht der deutschen Kulturgeschichte, to which Bock refers, gives a hostile account of the Vehmgericht that is important in literary terms. Naubert, Hermann von Unna (without the prefatory essay that was added to the English translation). The 1804 Dutch translation

The Vehmgericht or Secret Tribunal 395

attributed Hermann von Unna to Veit Weber, no doubt because of the success by then of his Die heilige Vehme. 1790: Huber, Das heimliche Gericht (a tragedy, first published in the second volume of Schiller’s Thalia; historical preface added in 1795). 1791: Naubert, Alf von Dülmen. 1791: Naubert, Hermann d’Unna, tr. Bock, includes his essay. 1791: Le Tribunal Secret, drame historique en 5 actes. Précédé d’une notice sur cet étrange établissement, traduit de l’allemand par Jean Nicolas Etienne de Bock (Metz: Lamort). This is Bock’s translation of Huber’s Das heimliche Gericht. 1792: J. N. Komareck, Ida, oder das Vehmgericht, another play deriving from Hermann von Unnavia Huber. 1792: [J. B. Durach,] Hellfried und Hulda. Ein Mährchen aus den gräuelvollen Tagen der Vorwelt, a novel which includes a secret tribunal scene in which the villainous Dietrich is tried by ‘Der Bund der Wissenden’ in a torch-lit cavern in a striking travesty of Vehmgericht practice. Durach is an interesting novelist, but the scene in question shows that Götz went to his head. 1793: Karl Hütter, Das Vehmgericht des Mittelalters. This is the first modern book-length study of the subject, full of detailed information, readable and reliable. 1793: J. B. Durach, Die Adelritter, ein Gräuelgemälde aus den Zeiten der Vehmgerichte (novel). 1794: C. P. Kopp, Über die Verfassung der heimlichen Gerichte in Westphalen, completed and edited by U. F. Kopp (repr. 1984), owned by Scott. Kopp, who died before completing his book, was a jurist. 1794: Naubert, Herman of Unna and Alf von Deulmen. These translations, which are by different hands, are prefaced by (different) versions of Bock’s essay. 1795: James Boaden, The Secret Tribunal (a 5-act play derived from Herman of Unna). 1795: anon., Der Richterbund der Verborgenen (novel). 1795-9: Zschokke, Kuno von Kyburg nahm die Silberlocke des Enthaupteten und ward Zerstörer des heimlichen Vehmgerichts (novel). 1796: William Coxe, A Letter on the Secret Tribunals of Westphalia, addressed to Elizabeth Countess of Pembroke (Salisbury: J. Easton and London: T. Cadell, jun. & W. Davies). William Coxe (1747-1828), author of Travels in Switzerland (1789), which Ann Radcliffe knew and used, was employed by Henry Herbert, tenth Earl of Pembroke (17341794) as tutor to his son George. A prolific Tory historian, Coxe became Archdeacon of Wiltshire. His booklet is dedicated to the

396 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective by then widowed Elizabeth Spencer Herbert, Countess of Pembroke (1737-1831), whose husband had commanded a cavalry brigade in Germany in 1760-61. Coxe’s starting-point in A Letter on the Secret Tribunals of Westphalia was his mistaken belief that the Secret Tribunal as depicted in Herman of Unna (1794), Alf von Deulmen (1794) and The Secret Tribunal (1795), ‘a subject which has lately much excited the curiosity of the Public’, was fabulous. His account stands out from most other material on the subject (other than Goethe, who used different sources) in being mostly based on the writings of fathers of the church. He refers to eight of these and quotes at some length from three: Aeneas Sylvius (Pope Pius II), De statu Europae sub Frederico Imperatore (1600); Henricus Turkius, Fasti Carolini (1704); and [Christian Friedrich] Pfeffel [von Kriegelstein], Histoire d’Allemagne (1754). Coxe quotes Aeneas Sylvius on the origin of the Vehmgericht: Charlemagne, having conquered the Saxons, settled in Westphalia, compelled them to relinquish the worship of idols, and to embrace the Christian religion. But as they frequently apostatised, and disregarded their oaths, with a view of preventing rebellion, through dread of punishment, he appointed secret Judges, whom he impowered to punish persons guilty of perjury, fraud, or any flagitious crime, without any previous citation, and without permitting them to make any defence. [...] in consequence of this appointment, many nobles and persons of inferior rank were found hung in the woods, without any previous accusation; this summary mode of proceeding struck terror into the Westphalians, and kept them in due obedience.

Right from the beginning these tribunals were swathed in the secrecy to which they owed so much of their power, of which the power to terrorize was from the outset an important aspect. Coxe quotes from Aimoin, De gestis Francorum (1603): The Judges and the Spies so totally concealed the whole process, and the proofs by which the condemned were found guilty, that, at the death of Charlemagne [in 814], they could not be induced, either by threats or promises, to reveal the institution.

In respect of the mode of proceeding, Coxe quotes at length from Henricus Turkius (Fasti Carolini, 1704), who includes some detail which is not found in later accounts. The Letter shows that Coxe lacked a knowledge of German.

The Vehmgericht or Secret Tribunal 397

1796: 1797: 1797: 1799: 1801: 1799: 1800:

1800:

1802:

1803: 1803:

1806:

22

Veit Weber, Die heilige Vehme. Heavily annotated, the footnotes indicate that his sources were Möser, Meißner, Kindlinger, and Kopp. Vulpius, Rinaldo Rinaldini (1797), in which the Freischöffenbund appears as the ‘black fraternity’, is discussed in Chapter 10. Die Ritter vom Siebengebürge (Weissenfels: Severin, 1797), a work whose attribution to Naubert is disputed. Scott, The House of Aspen, a dramatic rifacimento of Veit Weber’s Die heilige Vehme, not published until 1829. Bock, L’Histoire du tribunal secret, d’après les lois et les constitutions de l’Empire germanique (Mannheim: Fontaine, 1799; rev. edn, Metz: Behmer, 1801). Goethe, Gortz of Berlingen with the Iron Hand, tr. Rose Lawrence (d’Aguilar) (Liverpool, 1799). [Falsely attributed to Naubert] Les chevaliers des sept montagnes, ‘translation from the German’ by Bock, to which his essay is again prefaced, together with an addditional note stating that the secret tribunal was in 1800 still extant in Dortmund. P. Will, ‘An Historical Essay on the Secret Tribunals in Germany’, which appeared in the German Musum (I [1800], 43-47, 223-227), an unreliable work based on inadequate knowledge of the subject. Will was more Gothic impresario than anything else. anon., Die Rächenden, oder das Vehmgericht des 18. Jahrhunderts (novel), an unoriginal mix of Veit Weber’s Die heilige Vehme and Kahlert’s Der Geisterbanner, involving a charlatan and would-be sorcerer who is also the chief of a band of robbers. William Coxe, Ein Brief über die heimlichen Gerichte von Westphalen. Geschrieben an die Gräfinn Elisabeth von Pemroke. Aus dem Englischen übersetzt von L. F. Griesinger (Heilbron, 1803). The Secret Tribunal; or, The Court of Wincelaus, A Mysterious Tale, a crude Gothic bluebook which locates a local chapter of the Secret Tribunal at Wincelaus’s own court; it is not the re-issue of Herman of Unna for which it has been mistaken. Karl August de Lamotte, Ida Münsterin (play). Given that Benedicte Naubert wrote in January 1817 that ‘Fouqwet adoptirte schon vor 10 Jahren meine Ida Münsterinn’,22 Karl August de Lamotte is presumably a pseudonym of Fouqué, whose name is Karl de Lamotte F.; his father’s name is August.

Dorsch, 97, 197.

398 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective 1809: 1810: 1810:

1815: 1820: 1824: 1825: 1826: 1829: 1829: 1834:

Frederic Reynolds, The Edict of Charlemagne; or, The Free Knights (a horror play that apparently took its starting-point from Coxe). anon., Die gerechten Vehmrichter oder der unglückliche Holger von Daneburg (novel). Heinrich von Kleist, Das Käthchen von Heilbronn, a ‘großes historisches Ritterschauspiel’ that opens with a sitting of the ‘hohes, heimliches Gericht’ (august secret tribunal) in an underground cavern. Theodor Berck, Geschichte der westphälischen Femgerichte. August Klingemann, Das Vehmgericht. Ein dramatisches Gemälde, a dramatization of Veit Weber’s Die heilige Vehme. François-Adolphe Loeve-Veimars, Précis de l’histoire des Tribunaux secrets dans le nord de l’Allemagne, owned by Scott; Loeve-Veimars translated the whole of Hoffmann into French. Paul Wigand, Das Femgericht Westfalens, owned by Scott; new edn in 1893, still in print. Ludwig Tross, Sammlung merkwürdiger Urkunden für die Geschichte des Femgerichts, owned by Scott. Scott, Anne of Geierstein, to which was later added an introduction (dated 17 Sept 1831) quoting at length from the proofs of Francis Palgrave’s The Rise and Progress of the English Commonwealth (1832). Scott, The House of Aspen. anon. chapbook, The Secret Tribunal; or, The House of Aspen, a prose bastardization of Scott’s play and, as such, a belated attempt to cash in on the one-time popularity of the ‘secret tribunal’.

III As they copied and vied with one another the Gothic romancers inevitably took ever more ahistorical liberties with the Vehmgericht, which offered them an easy way to gothify history, an easy way to generate Gothic fiction, and, provided they outdid one another, a sure way in which to appeal to a public craving sensation. If it had not existed, writers would have had to invent it which is, often, what they did. In the wake of the Terror in France the terror popularly associated with the Vehmgericht appealed to writers and readers alike. More than a century later the Gothic romancers were taken to task for their part in the Femelüge, that is, for spreading lies about the heilige Vehme, which in the eyes of nationalist critics of the 1930s amounted to defamation of the German national character. The trouble started in 1923 when the German left-wing parties referred to a number of mysterious murders that

The Vehmgericht or Secret Tribunal 399

had taken place in north-east Germany as Fememorde, the implication being that the Schwarze Reichswehr was acting as a latterday Feme. In modern German Feme means not only the historical Vehmgericht but also Geheimgericht or kangaroo court, while Fememord means lynching, stringing someone up on the nearest lamppost (as opposed to the historical nearest tree). The idea of the court convening in dark caverns or subterraneous chambers appears to be apocryphal, the product of Goethe’s and other writers’ imaginations. Wigand comments: In den Händen der Dichter und Romanschreiber ist nun gar das Ganze so verunstaltet und die Phantasie des Volkes mit solchem Schauder und Abscheu erfüllt worden, daß es schwer hält, für eine wahre, geschichtliche Ansicht Glauben zu finden. Huber läßt in seinem Trauerspiel ‘Das heimliche Gericht’ mit pomphaft mystischen Zeremonien einen furchtbaren Bund geheimer Ordensbrüder sich um Mitternacht in unterirdischen Gewölben versammeln. Sie wollen dem Weltrichter vorgreifen, [...] und suchen demnach, nach Unfehlbarkeit ringend, über gewöhnliche Gerechtigkeitspflege hoch erhaben, das Schicksal auf der Erde zu vertreten. Nochweiter entfernt von der richtigen Auffassung des Fehmgerichts und dabei gleich fern von der Geschichte stehen andere, z. B. Veit Weber in seinen Sagen der Vorzeit, an die sich der Roman ‘Kuno von Kyburg’ und viele andere dramatische und erzählende Darstellungen reihen, Werke, die in dem Staube von Leihibibliotheken der Vergessenheit entgegen gehen.23 (In the hands of poets and novelists the whole thing was so distorted, and the popular imagination consequently filled with suchhorror and revulsion, that it became difficult for a true, historical account to gain credence. In his play Das heimliche Gericht Huber has a fearsome band of secret society members foregather at midnight, in subterranean vaults, with all the pomp and circumstance of a mystical rite. Struggling for infallibility, operating on a plane way above that of normal justice, they claim to be carrying out the will of God on earth. Even further removed from a proper conception of the Vehmgericht and thus from historical truth is a writer such as Veit Weber in his Sagen der Vorzeit, the example ofwhich was followed by [Zschokke’s] novel Kuno von Kyburg and many other dramatic and fictional accounts now gathering dust in lending libraries as they pass into oblivion.)

Wigand names Huber (1790), but the idea of the secret tribunal meeting in a dimly lit underground vault goes back to Goethe’s hugely influential Götz, whence it was transplanted to works by other writers, mutating on the way to a meeting in a cavern, thus assimilatingthe secret tribunal to the robber band or to confederacies of free-booting nobles, whereas in reality the robber band and the Faustrechtsritter of the time were alike the court’s natural quarry. 23

Wigand, 2.

400 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective It was not only Gothic novelists who took liberties with history in this respect. A case in point is Peter Will’s essay on the secret tribunals published in the German Museum.24 Will is not known for his accuracy. His opening paragraph suggests that his material comes from the third of Veit Weber’s Sagen der Vorzeit, which is Tugendspiegel, whereas in reality it is initially based on the sixth of the Sagen der Vorzeit, Die heilige Vehme, which opens with a number of lengthy footnotes in which Weber outlines the Vehmgericht system and details his sources. It is a pity Will did not follow Veit Weber’s example. Will writes ‘As no satisfactory account has hitherto been given of the nature and origin of this singular society, we have been led to suppose that a brief narrative of its institution and original tendency would, by no means, be displeasing.’ Given that an excellent book on the subject, Karl Hütter’s Das Vehmgericht des Mittelalters, appeared in 1793, Will is here demonstrating his own ignorance. The view of the Secret Tribunal in the first part of his article largely corresponds with that given in the first part of this chapter, although it includes some details that are not found elsewhere, the soundness of which is doubtful. More interesting, if no less unsound, is the second part of his account, in which Will describes the Vehme in its decadence: The original constitution of the secret tribunals did [...] not long continue in force, bastards and wretches of the most abandoned character being admitted.The number of free-knights allowed to every tribunal was originally limited to eleven, but in a short time in many amounted to fifty and more, who possessed not an inch of landed estate in Westphaly, and were induced by self-interest, ambition, thirst after vengeance, or other disgraceful motives, to join the association. The meeting places of the members of the secret tribunals degenerated into haunts of sanguinary banditti, who indiscriminately assassinated the innocent with the guilty. The masters of the chair being actuated by the most sordid avarice, they divided the free-counties into numerous smaller seats of justice, whereby the number of spies and secret informers [...] was increased to a most alarming degree, and numberless opportunities for fraud, imposition and extortion were presented. Although they were originally authorized to pronounce sentence only in criminal cases, they interfered in private and domestic affairs in order to encrease their fees, and contrived to lay even Counts and Princes under contribution to their avarice. They vowed, on their admission, in the most solemn and awful manner, to judge with incorruptible impartiality, to regard no person, and even to be deaf to the feelings of the heart, in framinng their decrees; but, on the contrary, they were swayed by selfishness, accessible to corruption, partial to their friends, prosecuted their enemies with the mostrancorous malice, and prostituted their function by rendering their authority subservient to the gratification of the most brutal lust. They were deaf to the lamentations of

24

Peter Will, ‘An Historical Essay on the Secret Tribunals in Germany’, The German Museum, I (1800), 43-47, 223-227.

The Vehmgericht or Secret Tribunal 401 calumniated innocence, assassinated their relations to inherit their estates, and were more dreadful to the virtuous than [to] the midnight ruffian. A free count frequently acted at once as witness and as judge; the spy, informer, witness, and judge were, in many instances, united in the same person; in short, the abuses which disgraced the secet tribunals rendered them areal curse to mankind.25

This is as sensational as it is suspect. Not only does Will fail to name a single source; his material comes mainly from Veit Weber’s Die heilige Vehme, and from Hegewisch, both of them writers with an axe to grind, and Weber probably also knew L. F. Huber’s play Das heimliche Gericht (1795), in which the Freischöffen are compared to banditti. For the most part Will’e essay consists not of historical fact, but of unscrupulous borrowing from unreliable sources, coupled with no less unscrupulous invention. The rest is ignorance and complacency. Washington Irving wrote to his sister from Baden-Baden in 1822 of ‘subterraneous chambers’ where the heilige Vehme held its meetings: Underneath the [grim old] castle we were shown subterraneous apartments that equalled the fabrications of novelists. There were chambers where the secret tribunal held its meetings, and where its victims were confined, and, if convicted, tortured and executed. This was a mysterious association that, some centuries since, held all Germany in awe. It was a kind of Inquisition that took cognizance of all kinds of offences. Its sittings were held in secret; all its movements were wrapped in mystery. Its members consisted of all ranks, from the highest to the lowest; all sworn to secrecy; all forbidden to make known their being members; and all sworn by the most imposing oaths to inflict the punishment decreed by the tribunal, without regard to any tie of kindred or affection. A man, therefore, once condemned by the tribunal had no chance of escape. He knew not where to fly, or in whom to confide; his bosom friend, his very brother might be a member of the terrible tribunal and [...] obliged to be his executioner. The subterraneous apartments of the old castle of Baden was one of the places where the secret tribunal was held. The place was worthy of the institution. You can imagine nothing more dismal than the cells and dungeons of which it was composed. There was one vaulted room, black with the smoke of tapers, in which the judges of the tribunal had held their sittings. Narrow winding passages through walls of prodigious thickness led to the dungeons of the prisoners and the places of torture. All these were completely shut [off] from the light of day, and the doors were formed of immense blocks of stone that turned heavily on their pivots, groaning as they moved. There was one great pitfall, down which, we were told, prisoners were precipitated after execution26

25 26

The German Museum, I (1800), 224f. P. M. Irving, The Life and Letters of Washington Irving (New York: Putnam, 1863), II, 111f.

402 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Although Irving is clearly describing what he was told by a guide, much of the account, insofar as it refers to the Vehmgericht, is apocryphal. It was more likely the victims of the local territorial court that were treated in this way. The Gothic novelists inevitably tend to portray the Secret Tribunal as a Gothic archetype, an alternative, ‘Gothic’ form of law and political power, ‘lurking beneath daylight forms and haunting them’,27 and therefore as meeting in holes and corners. Fictional portrayals of the Vehmgericht mostly set meetings of the court in a ruined chapel or underground vault or cavern. Hermann von Unna first goes in for Gothic mystification (the only way of discovering where the secret tribunal assembled, was to repair, three quarters of an hour after midnight, to that part of the town where four streets meet, and where was always to be found a person who would lead the accused blindfolded before the judges), and then repairs to a ruined abbey. Die heilige Vehme and Scott’s The House of Aspen have a ruined/subterranean chapel; Anne of Geierstein features a vault, but retains the altar; Rinaldo Rinaldini, in which Vulpius rightly says that ‘Justice does not hide herself in night and darkness’, has a chapel on a height, in which is a table surrounded by skeletons; Götz has a narrow vault, dimly illuminated; Das heimliche Gericht and Das Käthchen von Heilbronn set the court in an underground cavern. Of works that I have read (and it would be unwise to claim to have read the whole of any Gothic subset) only Die Ritter vom Siebengebürge features a regular salle d’audience. The ruined subterranean chapel is a peculiarly suitable setting for the activities of the heilige Vehme. To see it as operating, as it did in reality, out in the open, would in literary terms have been far less effective. It is ironical that in thus gothifying it, novelists and playwrights were falsifying a genuinely Gothic (medieval) form. Our novels are divided between those in which the Vehmgericht is used as Gothic metaphor and atmospheric background, and those in which this form of tribunal is seen as a monstrosity (Alf von Deulmen, Die heilige Vehme, The House of Aspen, Rinaldo Rinaldini).28 Veit Weber sees the Invisible Judges as ‘midnight murderers’, while Vulpius, referring to the ‘black fraternity’ as so many banditti, demonizes them by giving the ‘black man’ of the Secret Judges a superhuman strength that links him with the Devil (Mr Blackman). Goethe, Götz von Berlichingen On the strength of one short scene, ‘In einem finstern engen Gewolb’, Goethe’s Götz inspired subsequent German Vehmgericht fiction (including Heinrich von Kleist’s Käthchen von Heilbronn, which included, by way of 27 28

Duncan, 219, rightly sees ‘the apprehension of an alternative secret order’ as ‘quintessentially Gothic’. Freiding, open-air court; Unding, an absurdity.

The Vehmgericht or Secret Tribunal 403

preamble, a memorable session of the Vehmgericht). These in turn inspired English romances involving the Secret Tribunal. In Britain, Götz was a late flash in the pan which attracted little attention until translated by Scott in 1799, when, after being reviewed in half a dozen magazines, it ‘fell into virtually complete oblivion’.29 Unlike German ones, English-language Secret Tribunal fictions were inspired not by Götz but by Herman of Unna. Naubert, Hermann von Unna and Alf von Dülmen [Naubert’s Hermann von Unna and Alf von Dülmen were discussed in Chapter 3 together with Die Ritter vom Siebengebürge. Naubert is by far the best informed, and the most conscientious in terms of historical truth, of novelists incorporating the Vehmgericht in their work. Hermann von Unna and Alf von Dülmen gave German and English the genre of the Vehmgerichtroman or secret-tribunal novel, and, with it, much of the Gothic repertoire]. Huber, Das heimliche Gericht Ludwig Ferdinand Huber (1764-1804) was born in Paris. His father, Michel Huber, was Professor of French at Leipzig and therefore a colleague of Benedicte Naubert’s brother Heinrich Michael Hebenstreit. L. F. Huber, like his later wife Therese, was a translator from French. Das heimliche Gericht is the work translated by Baron de Bock as Le tribunal secret (Drame historique, 1791). It first appeared in the second number of Schiller’s Thalia in 1790, and was reprinted, with a new 28-page Preface, in Huber’s Schauspiele (1795). Huber was a friend of Schiller, whose Verbrecher aus Infamie (as the original title was) and Der Geisterseher also appeared in Thalia. The fact is, however, misleading, for Das heimliche Gericht is a weak, rambling, wordy piece. Its starting-point is to be found not in Schiller, but in Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen; like this, it is a Ritterstück, but with the emphasis much more on the Vehmgericht as such. Das heimliche Gericht was discussed in Chapter 2. Veit Weber, Die heilige Vehme The Vehmgericht, peripheral in Veit Weber’s Die Brüder des Bundes für Freyheit und Recht (1791-5), is central to his dramatic novel Die heilige Vehme (in Sagen der Vorzeit, vol 6, 1796), of which Scott’s The House of Aspen is a rifacimento made in 1799. By the second quarter of the 1790s Weber is no longer content to use the Vehme as Goethe had used it in Götz, for dramatic reasons. Partly as a result of reading Hegewisch he has now become highly critical of the secret tribunal and all its works.The printed text of Die heilige Vehme (1795) includes a lengthy note (1) on the history of what Weber calls 29

See Morgan & Hohlfeld, 84; Stockley, 130.

404 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective ‘diese Criminalanstalt’ (he employs the term first used by Hegewisch in 1788), a remark that might equally well be applied to the Inquisition and to the various medieval and post-medieval bodies involved in witchcraft trials.30 Initially Weber’s purpose was to reveal the real nature of the Westphalian secret tribunals to those who were not in a position to read contemporary accounts for themselves; now he is concerned to demonstrate their corruptibility. Die heilige Vehme leaves the reader in no doubt that he saw the Vehme as having degeneratedinto a criminal fraternity by 1438.Two years later Vulpius was to take a similar view of the ‘black fraternity’. Veit Weber’s Die heilige Vehme, and Scott’s The House of Aspen, for their part, were discussed in Chapter 2. Vulpius, Rinaldo Rinaldini One of the main reasons for the success of this once so celebrated work was the fact that it combined the Robbers à la Karl Moor with the ‘Black Judges in secret’ or ‘black fraternity’ of the Vehmgericht. By 1797, when Rinaldo Rinaldini appeared, the secret tribunal was very much in the air. Hegewisch, in 1788, had described the Vehme as a ‘Criminalanstalt’, and in 1790 Huber, had compared the free judges with banditti. Vulpius, whose Rinaldo Rinaldini is discussed in Chapter 10, went further, but in doing so lost sight of history. Other German Vehmgericht fictions The ‘heilige Vehme’ also features in other, untranslated German Gothic novels such as J. B. Durach’s Die Adelsritter, ein Gräuelgemälde aus den Zeiten der Vehmgericht, which appeared in 1793, the year that saw the publication of the first of several historical studies of the Vehmgericht to appear during the modern High Gothic period, Karl Hütter’s Das Vehmgericht des Mittelalters. The omnipresence of the ‘heilige Vehme’ in the German Gothic of the mid1790s is further indicated by the titles of two anonymous novels, Laterna Magica. Ein satyrisch-moralischer Roman ohne Vehme, Ritter und Pfaffen (1795) and Der Richterbund der Verborgenen (1795), and by further Vehmgericht novels in the form of Die Rächenden, oder das Vehmgericht des 18. Jahrhunderts (1802), and the anonymous Die gerechten Vehmrichter oder der unglückliche Holger von Daneburg (1810). Tymn mistakes James Powell’s Wolf, or The Tribunal of Blood (London: Hughes, 1806, repr. as Woman’s Revenge; or, the Tribunal of Blood in The Romancist in 1846)) for ‘a free and highly innovative translation [...] of Wächter’s Die Rächenden, oder Das Vehmgericht des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts’. Thus is doubly wrong, for Wolf, or the Tribunal of Blood is a translation of Veit Weber’s Wolf, which has nothing to do with the Vehmgericht (Wolf is the 30

See, for instance, Kunze, Highroad to the Stake.

The Vehmgericht or Secret Tribunal 405

name of a dog), and the anonymously published Die Rächenden, oder das Vehmgericht des 18. Jahrhunderts (1802), an opportunistic Mischmasch of Weber’s Die heilige Vehme and Kahlert’s Der Geisterbanner, is not by Weber. A play by Johann Nepomuk Komareck,31 Ida, oder das Vehmgericht (Leipzig: Köhler, n.d. [1792]), derives from Hermann von Unna in the sense that it is a dramatization of part of the first volume of Hermann von Unna, together with the ending of the second volume. It is devoted to the appearance before the secret tribunal of Ida Münsterin and her subsequent acquittal. Hermann plays a minor role. The play includes a few details that are not found elsewhere: the secretary of the court is named the Blutschreiber (he who writes in blood), the four streets in question are given symbolical names (Feuer [fire], Eisen [iron], ***, ***), and a skull takes its place on the judge’s table, this being an aspect of the court on which Gothic novelists liked to elaborate. Here too is an idea on which Scott elaborated: ‘Das Rachschwerdt hängt noch an einem dünnen Faden über meinem Haupte’ (the sword of vengeance is hanging by a fine thread over my head). Naubert wrote, in a letter to Friedrich Rochlitz, that Fouqué ‘adoptirte schon vor zehn Jahren meine Ida Münsterinn’ (wrote a piece involving my Ida Münsterin some ten years ago).32 Kleist’s Das Käthchen von Heilbronn (Ein großes historisches Ritterschauspiel, 1810) opens dramatically in an underground cavern decorated with the insignia of the Vehmgericht inspired by Götz. The fact that my copies of Huber’s Schauspiele and Komareck’s Ida, oder das Vehmgericht bear an old stamp, ‘Polizeimagistrat Tilsit’ (Watch Committee, Tilsit [ East Prussia]), shows that at one time the secret tribunal was regarded as of interest to the police.33 Perhaps local folk memories of the Schwertbrüder (Brüder des Ritterdienstes Christi) and the Deutscher Ritterorden (which had founded Tilsit) had left the police twitchy about such organizations. Early English Vehmgericht fictions In English fiction the ‘Secret Tribunal’ became as much a Gothic institution as the Spanish Inquisition itself.34 British fascination with the subject, which dates from the success of Herman of Unna and Alf von Deulmen, was further 31 32

33 34

Komareck, which means mosquito in Czech (komarek), sounds like a pseudonym (maybe of Johann Nepomuk Kalchberg). See Sich rettend aus der kalten Wirklichkeit. Die Briefe Benedikte Nauberts, ed. Nikolaus Dorsch (Frankfurt a.M., Bern & New York: Peter Lang, 1986), 97f. For Fouqué’s dramatic adaptation from Naubert, see his collection of apprentice pieces, Dramatische Spiele (1804), published under the pseudonym Pellegrin. The stamps may go back to 1923, the year of the Fememorde. The Star Chamber and the Chambre Ardente were similar institutions.

406 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective strengthened by the success of Vulpius’s Rinaldo Rinaldini, and, for those with access to it, by the fact that The German Museum included, in 1801 (I: 43), an ‘Essay on the Secret Tribunals’ by Peter Wil which will, alas, have misled its readers. Coxe’s Letter on the Secret Tribunals of Westphalia will also have been known to some readers. Early English Vehmgericht fictions include James Boaden, The Secret Tribunal (play based on Herman of Unna, June 1795); a rubbishy early Gothic anonymous bluebook, The Secret Tribunal: or, The Court of Winceslaus. A Mysterious Tale, published in London in 1803;35 and Frederic Reynolds, The Edict of Charlemagne; or, The Free Knights (horror play, 1809). Boaden, The Secret Tribunal Boaden’s 5-act play was derived from Herman of Unna. In addition to a secret passage, the tolling of a bell at midnight, a ruined and decaying Gothic chapel, two dark forest scenes, and a dungeon with grated windows, Boaden has included ‘a spacious vaulted court of justice underground’ that once again took the spectator back to Götz. Evans provides a mise-en-scène: Especially striking is the manner in which Ida Munster is summoned to appear before the court. She is alone in her chamber at night when her father, under order, enters and fixes to the door a great sheet bearing the words, ‘Ida Munster, Traitress! Appear Before the Secret Avengers of the Eternal!’ He falls swooning after performing the task imposed upon him as a member of the secret body. Later, the dismayed Ida asks how to reach the place of the tribunal; her father replies ... All accus’d, When the first quarter after midnight tolls, Go to the centre of the market place. Thence they are led before the secret judges. If guilty, they are never heard of more. The next scene shows Ida alone in the market place. A bell tolls midnight. A ‘dark, gigantic form’ approaches silently, identifies himself as the ‘Minister of Vengeance’, and leads her away.36

The trial scene in Act V of The Secret Tribunal features ‘a spacious Crypt, or vaulted Court of Justice, under ground, of Gothic Architecture’, in which the Vehmgericht is in session, surrounded by signs and portents such as ‘a luminous Cross of a deep Red’, and ‘an Eye, radiated with points of Fire’. The blood-red cross and the all-seeing eye [of God, cf. Masonic symbolism] ringed by fire are portentous symbols of the Secret Tribunal as the 35 36

Andrew Block, The English Novel, 1740-1850. A Catalogue (London: Dawsons, 1967), 211. Evans, 129.

The Vehmgericht or Secret Tribunal 407

instrument of justice and divine vengeance. A bell tolls incessantly during the trial scene, and the setting, the hooded figures, and the mystery enveloping the tribunal combine to show that the demands of drama have been placed before those of historical truth, of which Boaden was most likely unaware, and then, After Boaden had introduced the Secret Tribunal to the Gothic stage, several playwrights seized it, and apparently attempted to outdo one another in showing its horror. Unquestionably the most elaborate and terrifying exploitation of this institution was achieved by Frederic Reynolds [...] in The Edict of Charlemagne [...]. Compared with it, Scott’s [The House of Aspen] is mild.

It was, of course, only to the English ‘Gothic stage’ that Boaden introduced the Secret Tribunal, which had been introduced to the German stage in 1790 and to the French in 1791. Scott, Anne of Geierstein The Vehmgericht features (at length) in the Introduction and (more briefly) in Chapter 20 of Scott’s Anne of Geierstein (1829). This late novel is a secret tribute to one of Scott’s favourite novelists, Veit Weber, who borrowed his pseudonym from a late fifteenth-century folk-song writer associated with the struggle of the Swiss Confederates against the Duke of Burgundy, on which Anne of Geierstein is based. In the retrospective Introduction Scott quotes extensively from Francis Palgrave’s Rise and Progress of the English Commonwealth. Proofs and Illustrations (1832), on the subject of ‘the Vehmic tribunals’; in doing so he was, as antiquarian, invoking the authority of the father of British medieval history and, subconsciously, seeking to invest with Palgrave’s authority a novel in which, for a variety of reasons, he had not done justice to the secret tribunal. Palgrave’s work had not appeared when Scott wrote the novel, but so far as the Vehmgerichte were concerned, he had some idea (dimmed by time) of what was involved, having translated both Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen and Veit Weber’s Die heilige Vehme. That his interest did not end there is shown by his admiration for Naubert’s Herman of Unna and Alf von Deulmen, and by his library, which contained, in addition to Francis Palgrave’s The Rise and Progress of the English Commonwealth (1832), from which he quoted at disproportionate length in the Introduction to Anne of Geierstein, at least four books on the subject which, while indicating his abiding interest in the Vehme, are of limited relevance to his work, for in Götz of Berlichingen he was translating Goethe’s text, and when writing Anne of Geierstein he was away from his library.

408 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective It was his decision to ‘introduce the Invisible Tribunal of the Germans as part of the agency’ in Anne of Geierstein that unlocked the story. The prisoner who appears before this Secret Tribunal is told that ‘you would be safer if you were suspended by the hair over the abyss of Schaffhausen, or if you lay below an axe which a thread of silk alone kept back from the fall’. Scott had never seen the Alps, but, like Ann Radcliffe before him, relied for inspiration on Salvator Rosa’s pictures of the Apennines. For Swiss history he used Heinrich Zschokke’s Histoire de la lutte et de la déstruction des Républiques démocratiques de Schwyz. Away from his library when he wrote the novel, he relied on his memory of Götz and Die heilige Vehme. Insubsequently using Palgrave to add ballast, he was showing his awareness that in the novel he had not done justice to the secret tribunal that had excited his imagination as a young man, causing him to overate Veit Weber as a romancer. That said, Chapter 19 of Anne of Geierstein shows him to be still well acquainted with the Vehme and its role in Gothic fiction. The Black Priest (Count Albert of Geierstein) with his ‘cold, grey eye [like] that of the fabulous Gorgon’ and the ‘chilling effects of that freezing glance’ is a late clone of the ‘mysterious stranger’ of Schiller’s Der Geisterseher, Grosse’s Der Genius, Naubert’s Hermann von Unna, and Radcliffe’s The Italian. In referring to ‘this mysterious man’ and the ‘terrors which attend his presence’, Scott is integrating the secret tribunal into the Gothic framework. He follows what had long been the normal Gothic practice of setting the meeting of the tribunal in a torchlit subterranean vault which he further gothifies by likening it to ‘ancient subterranean chapels’, but Philipson’s entry into it - his pallet-bed is lowered down into the vault by ropes and pulleys - is a highly original mise-en-scène, a mixture of menace and pantomime. The scene that is revealed is a striking, dramatic one, in part historical and in part imaginatively extrapolated from the known facts, for the whole trial scene goes beyond any historical records in some of its detail. The black torches are an original touch, while the fact that the men are ‘muffled in black cloaks’, wearing their cowls drawn over their heads, so as to conceal their features, is an entirely plausible explanation for the fact that at Vehmgericht meetings the members of the court were unmasked and yet apparently unrecognized. On the judge’s table, which Scott identifies with an altar, are the sword and the rope, the former standing for the Cross and the idea of redemption, but also for the church militant - the poniard carried by every member of the court is as it were a scaled down version of that sword - and the rope symbolising the right of criminal jurisdiction and capital punishment. The accused is called the Strickkind (child of the rope). The measuring off and the singing in ‘the ancient German language’ are reminiscent of the old Saxon Feldgerichte as described by Hütter and Palgrave,

The Vehmgericht or Secret Tribunal 409

although the ritual words are different. The oath of office which Scott, on dubious authority, has the presiding judge (the Free Count, or chief of the Secret Tribunal) swear anew before every meeting of the court, is in fact the oath, administered by the Stuhlherr and sworn by every new Freischöffe.37 Scott’s version of the respect due to supposed officers of the court is wholly plausible: though everything about the institution, its proceedings and its officers, was preserved in as much obscurity as is now practised in freemasonry, yet the secret was not so absolutely well kept as to prevent certain individuals from being guessed or hinted at as men initiated and entrusted with high authority by the Vehme-gericht [sic] [...] When suchsuspicion attached to an individual, his secret power and supposed acquaintance with all guilt, however secret, which was committed within the society in which he was conversant, made him at once the dread and hatred of everyone who looked on him; and he enjoyed a high degree of personal respect on the same terms on which it would have been yielded to a powerful enchanter or a dreaded genie. In conversing with such a person, it was especially necessary to abstain from all questions alluding, however remotely, to the office which he bore in the Secret Tribunal; and, indeed, to testify the least curiosityupon a subject so solemn and mysterious was sure to occasion some misfortune to the inquisitive person.

Philipson is conscious that ‘these terrible and irresponsible judges were [...] governed by certain rules of right and wrong, which formed a check on the rigours of their extraordinary code’: the Vehmic Institution, [...] although its power consisted in a wide system of espionage, and the tyrannical application of force which acted upon it, was yet (so rude were the ideas of enforcing public law) accounted to confer a privilege on the country in which it was received, and only freemen were allowed to experience its influence. Serfs and peasants could neither have a place among the Free Judges, their assessors [the higher ranking, noble Freischöffen], or assistants [the lower-ranking Freischöffen or Frohnboten]; for there was in this assembly even some idea of trying the culprit by his peers.

Addressing the presiding judge, Philipson is not afraid to speak out against the secret nature of the proceedings in which he finds himself involved: No laws or judicial proceedings can be just or commendable which exist and operate by means of a secret combination. [... justice [can] only live and exist in the open air; and [...] when she [ceases] to be public, she [degenerates] into revenge and hatred. [...] a system, of which your own jurists have said, Non

37

See Hüter, 93-4, for the German.

410 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective frater a fratre, non hospes a hospite, tutus, [is] too much adverse to the laws of nature to be connected with or regulated by those of religion.

No doubt this is also the view of Scott, who writes that Such an institution could only prevail at a time when ordinary means of justice were excluded by the hand of power, and when, in order to bring the guilty to punishment, it required all the influence and authority of such a confederacy. In no other country than one exposed to every species of feudal tyranny, and desprived of every ordinary mode of obtaining justice or redress, could such a system have taken root and flourished.

The Vehme saw itself as an instrument of revenge, a way in which the Imperial power could avenge itself on those who had transgressed against it, but to describe the Court as the Avenger is to underline its Gothicity.

11 HUES OF VILLAINY In literary terms there are two kinds of bandit or criminal: the ‘noble’ or relatively good (Karl Moor and all his literary clones from Rinaldo Rinaldini downwards) and the ignoble or irretrieveably bad (Franz Moor), mostly in evidence in the trashier levels of Gothic, although this chapter includes an example of the type from the literary end of the spectrum and another from real life. In Schiller’s terminology Karl Moor represents the so-called ‘sublime criminal’. More charismatic than his brother, he is the more complex and more ambiguous character, for, while heinous atrocities have been committed in his name, he has a conscience and knows good from evil. Whether that constitutes sublimity is a matter for definition. Does fighting for a good cause (in tyrannos) redeem evil means? Franz is a moral monster, beyond redemption, a common-or-garden criminal for whom there is nothing to be said. Both brothers, who have clones galore in the Gothic novel, are, in their different ways, devil-figures, described as such by Schiller. Gothic is the domain of what at the time was variously called German diablerie and Gothic devilism, the terms reflecting the fact that German and Gothic were for a time more or less synonymous. Devilism and diablerie are shorthand terms for the ‘barbarous superstitions’ of Gothic.1 Interest in the ‘noble criminal’ was fired by Die Räuber, in his review of which Schiller likened Karl Moor to Milton’s Satan, prototype of the ‘heroic villain’ of the Gothic novel, celebrated by Edmund Burke for his sublimity and idolized by the Gothics for his resistance to patriarchal power: the hero of Paradise Lost (1667-1674) is none other than Satan [...] The ridiculous Devil of our [medieval] ancestors has become in Milton’s hands a giant and a hero [...] an epic, majestic figure [...] During the period of the Romantic revolt in all European countries Satanwas considered [...] a Prometheus of Christian mythology. He was hailed as the vindicator of reason, of freedom of thought, and ofunfettered humanity. [...] Satan was the great inspiration of the Romantic generation. The Fiend was the very fount and foundation of the Romantic movement.2

1 2

See Monthly Review, 32 (May 1765), 394. Maximilian Rudwin, The Devil in Legend and Literature (Chicago & London: The Open Court Company, 1931), 10, 15, 277.

412 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Mario Praz noted that Milton conferred upon the figure of Satan all the charm of an untamed rebel [...] Towards the end of the eighteenth century Milton’s Satan transfused with his own sinister charm the traditional type of generous outlaw or sublime criminal [...] Rebels in the grand manner, grandsons of Milton’s Satan and brothers of Schiller’s Robber, began to inhabit the picturesque, Gothicized backgrounds of the English ‘tales of terror’.3

Though Satan is in reality not the hero but the super-villain of Paradise Lost, the personification of that misbegotten concept, the ‘sublime’ of evil, he is the ultimate hero of the numerous Gothic novels and tales in which diabolical possession is an important motif. Indeed, in the last two decades of the eighteenth century and the first three of the nineteenth he was a cult figure and, as such, a kind of substitute for the God challenged by reason.4 In general terms the extraordinary anachronistic vogue of this ‘high personage’ goes back to the depiction of Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust (1770 onwards), but so far as the late eighteenth-century Gothic novel is concerned, it was started by a popular and influential romance by Veit Weber, Die Teufelsbeschwörung (1790), translated by Robert Huish as The Sorcerer (1795). Weber’s demoniac criminal magician is related both to Goethe’s Faust/Mephistopheles and to Schiller’s charlatan and would-be wizard in Der Geisterseher. In symbolical terms the Devil stands for the evil in human nature by which Gothic writers are obsessed (Devil = the accuser; Satan = the adversary/Enemy), and for the diabolical uncertainty that is at the heart of the genre noir. By definition a figure of many parts, the Devil is a master of disguise and the Gothic art of the masquerade. As the ‘father of lies’, he is the patron of the counterfeit., but also, inter alia, Gothic hero, implicit head or controller of the universal conspiracy described by Barruel, personal shadow or other, and, in the present context, captain of banditti, the very personification ofnervous eighteenth-century travellers’ fears. In the late eighteenth century banditophobia was a recognized state of mind. Banditti were such a reality of life for travellers that it is hardly surprising that they feature in the painting5 and novel of the time and, more especially, in the early Gothic novel. The historical reality of ‘robber barons’, ‘wild riders’, brigands, and bloodthirsty superannuated ex-mercenaries, to say nothing of bands of common larcenists masquerading as knife-grinders 3 4

5

Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, 57-60. That God and Devil belong together shown by the Jaweh of the Old Testament, who combines both, and, more esoterically, by the fact that the Romany word for God is devel. Smollett knew Fuseli, who illustrated Pickle.

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(Krefeld-Neuß), rag-and-bone men (Hesse-Waldeck), or whatever, far exceeded the darkest imaginings of the average Gothic novelist.6 Robber bands were a reality of the time, notably in the Rhineland, where there was an epidemic of brigandage during the Gothic 1790s, and Black Forest areas of Germany and in the Abruzzo, Calabria and much of the Italian South. Heine’s lines Den Rinaldo Rinaldini , Schinderhanno, Orlandini Und vor allem Carlo Moor Nahm ich mir als Muster vor.7 (Rinaldo Rinaldini, Schinderhannes, Orlandini, and above all Karl Moor, I took as my models)

reflect this. It is only the most lurid or supposedly ‘trivial’ Gothic novels that even begin to approach the everyday reality ofmurder, rape and robbery, and of legal systems that were, by later standards, completely inadequate. Ironically, such novels were criticized for being too ‘horrid’, for portraying horrors that ‘could not happen’ in real life. In the final section of this chapter I show that they could and did. While the Räuberroman goes back, in literary terms, to Schiller’s Die Räuber, some of the most celebrated Räuberromane reflect the impact of the exploits of real-life robbers on the popular imagination. The banditti8 in question include the ‘Stuttgarter Sonnenwirt’ Friedrich Schwan, robber, bandit chief, and murderer, who featured as Christian Wolf in Schiller’s Der Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre (1786) and helped to inspire Die Räuber; he was the real-life model for Wolf in the final section of The Necromancer, which Kahlert’s English translator purloined from Schiller. Other celebrated banditti of the time include Angelo Duca (1734-84), the Buxen (1736-79), Matthias Klostermayer (1738-71), and Johann Bückler (1777-1803). Kerndörffer’s novel Matthias Klostermayr, der sogenannte Bayerische Hiesel (1800) is based on the life and death of the well-known Bavarian poacher turned captain of banditti executed in Dillingen in 1771.9 Kahlert’s Der Geisterbanner 6

7

8 9

See C. MacFarlane, The Lives and Exploits of Banditti (London: Bull & Andrews, 1833). Küther, Räuber und Gauner in Deutschland, discusses banditti active in the Rhineland and in central and southern Germany in the mid to late eighteenth century. Heine’s lines come from the eighth of the ‘Traumbilder’ in his Junge Leiden (18171821). They show that he knew Rinaldo Rinaldini, Der schwarze Jonas, and Orlando Orlandini, as well as Die Räuber. ‘The banditti do you call them? I am sure we call them plain thieves in England’ (1602). For an account of this unremarkable novel, see Heiderich, 140ff. More generally, see

414 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective (1792: The Necromancer, 1794) is based on the activities of the Buxen, a secret society of robbers and Satanists who infested the Limburg area until their leaders were rounded up and executed in 1772, Wolf the robber chief being based, until the final section of the novel, on Abraham Nathan, one of the leaders of the Buxen. Vulpius’s famous Rinaldo Rinaldini der Räuberhauptmann (1799) is based on the Italian capo di banda Angelo Duca. I. F. Arnold’s Der schwarze Jonas (1805) is mainly based on the activities of Johann Bückler (1777-1803), known as ‘Schinderhannes’ or Knacker Johnny,10 another robber chief, who infested the Mittelrhein region with his accomplices, with twenty of whom he was executed at Mainz in 1803.11 However, the exploits, both real and fictional, of these men are put in the shade by those of Michele Pezza (1771-1806), known as Frà Diavolo, bandit, brigand, freedom-fighter, mercenary and terrorist - this being a matter of perspective - who was executed by the French in 1806, by which time the Räuberroman wasrunning out of steam. This chapter considers three bandits or, better, robbers, for one of them is not a bandit but a brigand. They are Ferdinand ‘Count’ Fathom, Rinaldo Rinaldini (with his string of noble aliases), and Michele Pezza (better known as Frà Diavolo). Fathom is included for two reasons: because his ‘adventures’, which date back to 1753, make Smollet’s novel potentially influential, which means that its Gothicity or Gothic potential needs to be examined, and because ‘Count’ Fathom is the embodiment of the ‘adventurer’ of the time, on whom ‘Marquis’ Carl ‘von’ Grosse, modelled himself. In Germany Fathom is, in the early years of Gothic, more influential than Otranto.

I Smollett’s Ferdinand Count Fathom, a thoroughly bad egg, has a good claim to recognition as the literary prototype, at the cusp of the early Gothic period, of the ignoble bandit/criminal. The Adventures of Ferdinand Count

10 11

K. T. Heigel, ‘Der bayerische Hiesel und die Hiesel-Litteratur,’ Westermsanns Monatshefte, 63 (1888), 122. Tieck’s early Gothic-related work begins with his completion of the last chapter of Matthias Klostermeyer oder der Bayersche Hiesel in the second volume of Rambach’s Thaten und Feinheiten renommirter Kraft- und Kniffgenies, 2 vols (Berlin: Himburg, 1790-1), II, 141-334). A predecessor of Brecht’s Mackie Messer or Mack the Knife. See: B. Becker, Aktenmäßige Geschichte der Räuberbanden an beiden Ufern des Rheins (new edn, 1896); his trial is reported in Derneue Pitaval, ed. Hitzig & Häring [Alexis], Vol. 6 (1852).

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Fathom (1753) is generally seen as an implicitly non-Gothic novel with important Gothic features subverted in a part-Gothic way by ironical, comic treatment, but it is, rather, a proto-Gothic romance, albeit one with its feet in the mud, for mid-eighteenth-century readers with their experience of life on the open road would have seen the novel as more ‘realistic’ than today’s reader does. Fathom, coming from ‘the purlieus of treachery and fraud’ and hiding within a doubly fictional identity, like a ghost crab within some convenient shell, is, of course, a prototypical villain, the pleb as aristo, the blackguard as count, the wicked count into which Gothic transmogrifies the fairy-tale ogre. An ‘execrable hypocrite’, a moral ogre in a downside-up world, he is more than an amusing stick with which to beat the Georgian gentleman or upstart aristocrat, more than and other than the Gothic neoElizabethan hero-villain, for, although he represents the villain-as-hero, and is thus a male precursor of Charlotte Dacre’s Victoria, he is also a profoundly unheroic figure. Which self-respecting hero would first see the light of the world in one country and complete his entry into it in another? It is, to say the least, a somewhat slippery entrance onto the stage of life. Scott’s description of him as an ‘incarnate fiend’, while accurate enough, is also potentially misleading, for Fathom, far from being a Satanic (Gothic, Byronic) superhero, is an anti-hero, and more specifically what Ian Duncan has called a ‘rootless, aetiologically determined anti-hero’.12 The reader is appalled by Fathom’s unreliability, mendacity, duplicity and villainous, more than Venetian dissimulation. It may be that Smollett was ‘experimenting with new devices for keeping alive the interest of a picaresque novel’,13 but Fathom is no mere old-fashioned picaro. The most obviously Gothic interlude in the novel is the scene (ch. 20, 21) in which Fathom, finding himself benighted in a forest,14 is overtaken by fear: the darkness of the night, the silence and solitude of the place, the indistinct images of the trees that appeared on every side, ‘stretching their extravagant arms athwart the gloom,’ conspired with the dejection of spirits occasioned by his loss to disturb his fancy, and raise strange phantoms in his imagination [...] his mind began to be invaded with an awful horror, that gradually prevailed over all the consolations of reason and philosophy.

12 13 14

Ian Duncan, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 64. Smollett’s next work was a translation of Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1755). Compare the extravagant fears of Pedrillo, who sees spectres in everything he meets, in Book III, Ch. 1 of Wieland’s comic novel Der Sieg der Natur über die Schwärmerey, oder die Abentheuer des Don Sylvio von Rosalva (1764, reissued 1772 as Die Abenteuer des Don Sylvio von Rosalva), included by Summers in his Gothic Bibliography.

416 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Harrowed with these apprehensions, he resolves to commit himself to the mercy of the hurricane as the lesser evil. His greater fear, shortly to be realized, is of banditti. The trouble is that in seeking to avoid Charybdis he falls into the arms of Scylla in the form of a withered Hecate who foretokens the wild hunt that is still to come, and who proceeds to lock him into a loft room in the robbers’ lair (the lonely house in the forest, derived from fairytale, that reappears in Godwin’s Caleb Williams) in which he finds beneath the trusses of straw that were to constitute his bedding ‘the dead body of a man, still warm, who had been lately stabbed’. He is shaken, as well he might be, for he has seen himself as he is (an outlaw) and as he is likely to be (the victim of his own crimes). As Foster wrote, Smollett was clearly aware of the mounting interest at the time in ‘strong sensations such as are aroused by the awe-inspiring, the mysterious and the dangerous’.15 On his excursion with the withered Hecate Fathom is ‘haunted by the most intolerable apprehensions’: Every whisper of the wind through the thickets was swelled into the hoarse menaces of murder, the shaking of the boughs was construed into the brandishing of poignards, and every shadow of a tree became the apparition of a ruffian eager for blood.

This is not merely Gothic; it is fully accomplished Gothic. If the rest of the novel had been as straightforwardly serious as this, Ferdinand Count Fathom would have been a Gothic novel. As it is, it is not. This episode, re-used by Lewis in The Monk (ch. 3), clearly involves fear of two dangers, one largely imaginary, the other all too real. In their ‘On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror’ (1773), John and Anna Laetitia Aikin described this scene as involving ‘the best conceived, the most strongly worked-up scene of mere natural horror’, and Nathan Drake, in his essay ‘On Objects of Terror’ (1778), referred to this same scene, saying that ‘Smollett [...] ha[d] [...] painted a scene of natural terror with astonishing effect; with such vigour of imagination indeed, and minuteness of detail that the blood runs cold, and the hair stands erect from the impression.’16 Edith Birkhead argued that Smollett had here ‘chanced upon the devices employed later in the tale of terror’: his use of terror is ‘merely incidental: he strays inadvertently into the history of the Gothic romance’.17 This is true in the historical sense that Smollett, like Walpole in Otranto, is, as it were, using a 15 16 17

James R. Foster, History of the Pre-Romantic Novel in England (New York: Modern Language Association of America, and London: Oxford University Press, 1949), 130. Both quoted from Gothic Documents, ed. E. J. Clery & Robert Miles (Manchester & New York: Manchester University Press, 2000), 129, 162. Edith Birkhead, The Tale of Terror (London: Constable, 1921), 23.

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technique that does not yet exist; but that is also precisely where the rub lies. Besides, novelists of Smollett’s quality know what they are about; they do not ‘stray inadvertently’. To be able to assess the significance and implication of this and other Gothic incidents and elements in the novel, we need to consider the nature of the text itself, but first let us note the other Gothic elements, in particular the scene in Chapters 62 and 63, borrowed from Congreve’s tragedy The Mourning Bride (1697): The clock struck twelve, the owl screeched from the ruined battlement, the door was opened by the sexton, who, by the light of a glimmering taper, conducted the despairing lover to a dreary aisle, and stamped upon the ground with his foot, saying ‘Here the young lady lies interred’.

It will be agreed that Smollett has ‘concentrated in this perfunctory sentence all the essential ingredients of Gothic horror’.18 And there are other protoGothic elements: Renaldo’s mother immured in a tower, his sister incarcerated in a convent, and the gloom and mystery of the scene where Renaldo stumbles across deserted vaults and fancies he sees the ghost of Monimia. Robert D. Spector has argued19 that ‘Smollett’s apparitions invariably turn out [to be] one of the tools of the humorist’, the implication being that for that reason they are not to be taken seriously. This is hardly true, for Fathom’s ‘intolerable apprehensions’ were, despite the context, entirely serious. Smollett is in effect using the explained supernatural, and combining it with something very like Brecht’s alienation effect. Birkhead. argued that Smollett, in anticipating the methods of Mrs Radcliffe, ‘sedulously avoids introducing the supernatural, [although] he hovers perilously on the threshold’,20 but is this true? Melvil only sees the white figure whom he takes for the spirit of Monimia after he has experienced the ‘highest pitch of enthusiastic sorrrow’, the ‘infirmity of human nature oppressed by the presence of a superior being’, and then ‘awestruck rapture’, when the spirit is revealed to be the living Monimia. First comes the seeming supernatural and the ‘sublime’ emotions it triggers, and only then the explanation. Tompkins was right to speak of this as ‘the first notable scene of the explained supernatural’.21 The fact that it is the mocksupernatural that Smollett deploys means that here too he is far in advance of his time, for while the explained supernatural as such is a feature of the 18 19 20 21

Tobias Smollett, Ferdinand Count Fathom, ed. Damian Grant (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 383. In his Tobias George Smollett (New York: Twayne, 1968). Birkhead, 12. Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England, 292.

418 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective early Gothic writing of the late 1780s and early 1790s, parody of it is a feature of early nineteenth-century spoof Gothic. In his Dedication Smollett noted that ‘The impulses of fear, which is the most violent and interesting of the passions, remain longer than any other upon the memory.’ Fear (Angst, terror, horror) is central to this novel with its ‘eerily macabre atmosphere of pre-Gothic gloom’.22 Its tendency to the sombre and terrible has been the subject of repeated comment. Baker noted that Smollett plays upon our sense of terror and suspense and weaves an atmosphere of gloom which gives a foretaste of the Gothic novel [...] Mrs Radcliffe herself could not have improved upon the gloomy symphony of sights and sounds and mysterious apprehensions in the account of Ferdinand’s night in the forest.23

Smollett does more than ‘occasionally touch a reader’s nerves with forebodings’; Ferdinand Count Fathom is much more than a matter of ‘an incidental incursion into the realm of terror’,24 into which Smollett blundered like the bull into the china shop. Lévy writes: ‘Que Smollett ait été séduit un instant par le sombre et le terrifiant, nul ne songera à le nier. Mais il convient à même temps de rendre à cet intérêt de justes proportions: l’emploi de la terreur est ici au service d’intentions morales.’ (That Smollett has allowed himself to be momentarily seduced by the sombre and the terrible, no one would dream of denying; but this [new-found] interest must be kept in proportion: terror is here deployed in the name of morality).25 That a Gothic writer can have a moral purpose is shown by Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron and by Ann Radcliffe’s novels, which end, like the French fairytales from which they derive, in a clearly stated moral. Varma, for his part, regards Fathom’s adventures as too picaresque, and as entirely lacking ‘the „romance“ of chivalry’, but there is more to Gothic than the Gothick extravaganza of Fonthill Abbey and the phoney medievalism of Walpole’s ‘little Gothic castle’ at Strawberry Hill, more to the genre especially when viewed from the vantage point of two centuries - than the particular kinds of Ritterroman associated with The Castle of Otranto and The Old English Baron. Besides, Fathom is introduced ironically, as ‘This mirrour

22 23 24 25

P.-G. Boucé, in the Introduction to his Penguin 1990 edition of the novel. Ernest A. Baker, The History of the English Novel , 10 vols (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1936), VI, 217f. Devendra P. Varma, Gothic Flame (Metuchen, NJ & London: Scarecrow Press, 1957), 40. Lévy, Le roman ‹gothique› anglais 1764-1824, 130.

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of modern chivalry’, so the chivalric is not so much lacking as subverted. The villainous count embodied by Fathom became a stock figure of Gothic. If Smollett is simply seen as having anticipated the Gothic romance by various ‘special devices and moods’,26 it would follow that Ferdinand Count Fathom is, if not a Gothic novel, then a novel on the cusp of Gothic. Or does the novel actually possess ‘all the essential ingredients of Gothic horror’? Is Ferdinand Count Fathom a proto-Gothic novel, or an early Gothic one? Should Smollett be given the credit for discovering most of the important ingredients of the ‘Gothic mix,’ or be criticized for deploying them in anon-Gothic, picaresque context? It seems to me that credit ought first to be given where it is so obviously due. The inescapable fact is that Ferdinand Count Fathom includes a wicked count and the Fall in the form of his repeated transgressions; libertinism; elements of criminal biography; outlawry; doubles; obscured family ties; the inclusion of antiquated spaces; the terrors of the forest; the horrors of the robbers’ house; imminent death; phantoms; the emotive sublime; the explained supernatural; privation; abandonment; immurement; incarceration in a convent; the protagonist’s imprisonment; a secret from the past; problematical identity; impersonation; dissimulation; supposed translation; the unfolding of a mystery; an unstable, unreliable, self-subverting text; texts within the text; readers’ uncertainty; and so on. There has to be a very good reason for not calling such a work Gothic, although lists of topoi, which could make even Wilhelm Meister seem Gothic, can be and often are profoundly misleading. To my mind Fathom is more Gothic, and Gothic in a more modern manner, than the fancy-dress whimsy of Otranto and the Oriental exoticism of Vathek. It is episodic in the manner of Gothic, and it is the Gothic episodes that are the making of the novel. The only question is whether, when all is said and done, Fathom reads like a Gothic novel. The answer must, of course, be that it does not. What makes Ferdinand Count Fathom both as a novel and, potentially, as a Gothic romance is the unreliable, incongruous nature of the text, which has been found so ‘derivative, „literary“, curiously second-hand in many of its features’ that one reader fancied it might have been translated from another language. And so it has, though not in such an obvious literal sense. What has been in doubt is the novel’s authenticity, raised again by the borrowed Shakespearian characters (Smollett is as attached to Shakespeare as Radcliffe) and in a different sense by the mixed character of the work (part romance, part melodrama, part satirical novel), its improbable stories, its incongruities, and the way in which it appears to mix elements of criminal biography (very much a feature of Gothic, this) with passages that approach 26

Varma, 39f., 107.

420 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective lyric, in other words, its mélange of forms and styles. Gothic to modern eyes is essentially cross-generic. What all these features indicate is therefore not just that this is a novel of mixed parts with some proto-Gothic elements, but that it is something much more quintessentially Gothic and much more characteristic of Gothic in today’s definition. Smollett’s comic treatment of his material has mostly been seen as non-Gothic, and indeed as detracting from a proto-Gothic romance; but it is precisely his aristophanic treatment that makes the text forever unpredictable, unreliable, uncertain, unstable. This instability, which reflects the instability of Fathom’s identity, and with it the whole question of impersonation, in turn makes it Gothic in a much more modern sense than Radcliffe’s relatively old-fashioned ‘fairy-tale’ romances, which are, by contrast, models of literary decorum. Gothic, in today’s view,are the blurring of lines, the deconstruction of preconceived ideas, the challenging of forms, boundaries and distinctions of every kind, including, as in this case, class distinctions. Ferdinand Count Fathom even points forward to Frankenstein in that Fathom fabricates himself into an artificial (social) creature and indeed a monster. He is a fraud, a liar, a confidence trickster, a con-man of the kind that infests the pages of the Gothic fiction of the late 1790s, when the goodhearted picaro appears in the person of Christian Vulpius’s Rinaldo Rinaldini. Here already are the ‘Venetian dissimulation’ and duplicity of the Gothic novel from Abällino to Klosterheim. The Dedication, addressed by Smollett to himself, undermines author, reader, and text, while the text itself opens by emphasizing authorial fallibility. The uncertainty of the text creates matching uncertainty in the reader, who is left uncertain as to how to take it. Nothing is more Gothic than these particular uncertainties. From all this I deduce that Smollett was not merely ‘experimenting with new devices for keeping alive the interest of a picaresque novel’, and not merely ‘anticipating the methods of Mrs Radcliffe’, but was, consciously or unconsciously, feeling his way towards something altogether more modern and, indeed, altogether more Gothic. But this still does not make Ferdinand Count Fathom a Gothic romance, for when all is said and done its atmosphere is closer to pantomime than to Gothic, so that the reader’s attitude towards the text is simply not that of a reader faced with a Gothic text. In brief, Smollett’s text is prevented from being Gothic by what is at the same time one of its most Gothic features, the author’s aristophanic stance, which was not to be absorbed into Gothic until many years later. The adventurer-novelist Carl Grosse, in ennobling himself as Marquis von Grosse, may well have had the example of Fathom in mind, so that Ferdinand Count Fathom is not only, in many ways, a prototypical Gothic novel, but establishes the prototype of the Gothic adventurer.

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II Heinrich Zschokke (Die schwarzen Brüder, 1791-95) and Christian August Vulpius (Aurora, 1794) both produced secret-society novels before going on to write very different kinds of Räuberroman. Foremost among the Räuberromane to which Die Räuber gave rise are Zschokke’s Abällino, der große Bandit (1793; stage version, 1795),27 tr. by M. G. Lewis as The Bravo of Venice, (1805), and Vulpius’s Rinaldo Rinaldini, der Räuberhauptmann (1798; stage version, 1799), tr. by I. Hinckley as The History of Rinaldo Rinaldini, Captain of Banditti (1800, 1801, 1801 [Dublin], 1814 [Charleston, SC], 1831, 1841).28 That Abällino is an assassin and Rinaldini a kind-hearted bandit points to the inadequacy of the Räuberroman label. Zschokke’s Abällino as refashioned by Lewis proved the more important of the two in the Anglo-German Gothic context, although Rinaldo Rinaldini, Captain of Banditti was important enough to appear in a fourth edition in Hazlitt’s The Romancist and Novelist’s Library in 1841, but in the German-speaking world Vulpius’s novel was by far the more influential. In European terms Rinaldo Rinaldini was a runaway bestseller, translated into all the main European languages except Italian. If it had been presented as what it was, a vie romancée of the historical capo di banda Angelo Duca, it would probably have been translated into Italian as well, as a rifacimento by A. Söndermann was in 1882.The name Rinaldo Rinaldini, so Italian-sounding to foreign ears, to Italian ones sounds as alien as the supposedly German names in the English Gothic novel sound to German ears. The story of Rinaldo Rinaldini begins with Zschokke’s Die schwarzen Brüder (1791-95), from which Vulpius derived his ‘black fraternity’ (fratelli [brothers, cf. ‘members of the criminal fraternity’] is the Italian popular name for banditti), and with his own earlier, secret-society novel, Aurora. Ein romantisches Gemälde aus der Vorzeit (1794), the hero of which, Rinaldo, is in love with Aurora, the supposed illegitimate daughter of the Prince of Ferrara. A quasi-Masonic/Illuminist secret society is conspiring to place Aurora on the throne of Ferrara. Aurora and Rinaldo are received by a Spanish grandee who, despite turning out to be Aurora’s real father, is powerless to save them from a shameful death for treason, which they evade only by suicide. Aurora bore the words ‘Vom Verfasser des Rinaldini’ (by the 27 28

Hence the fact that it appeared in a French edition of Schiller’s plays. The novel lived on in German, as a rifacimento by A. Söndermann, Rinaldo Rinaldini, der größte Räuberhauptmann des Jahrhunderts, sein und seiner Gefahrten Leben und Taten (3 vols, Berlin, c. 1880; Rinaldo Rinaldini [Turin: Meyer, 1882]), as a twentieth-century penny-dreadful, Rinaldo Rinaldini, der größte Räuberhauptmann der Abruzzen (Leipzig, 1926), and, most recently, as a television series.

422 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective author of Rinaldini), which is strange, for Rinaldo Rinaldini was not published until four years later. The two novels are, however, connected in many ways, notably in their main figures (Rinaldo, Aurora; Rinaldo, Aurelia) and in the conspiratorial secret society common to both. The fact that Aurora elaborates the idea of a secret society engaged in political conspiracy that features in a more rudimentary form in Rinaldo Rinaldini indicates that Rinaldo Rinaldini was written first. Rinaldo Rinaldini der Räuberhauptmann. Eine romantische Geschichte unseres Jahrhunderts (1798) is a Gothic Romantic tale based on the life of the celebrated Italian bandit Angelo Duca (Angiolillo) (1734-84 ),29 a popular Robin Hood-like figure who took from the rich enough to feed the poor and support his own band. Born in 1734, he lived a quiet life as a small-time farmer until 1778, when he fell foul of a powerful neighbour, Francesco Caracciolo, Duke of Martina, who demanded that Duca stand justice for an uninentional incursion onto his property by his goatherd. Knowing that the ‘justice’ of the regime would inevitably support its own and destroy the underdog, Duca saw himself as having no choice but to outlaw himself and join a band of robbers led by a well-known capo di banda of the time, Tomasso Freda. After serving an eight-month apprenticeship with Freda he left to set up his own band of banditti. As a capo di banda Duca, who quixotically - regarded himself as a servant of the justice that had been denied him, practised a strict form of justice. An uncompromising disciplinarian, he demanded absolute obedience from his men, in return for which he shared all takings equally with them. Wanting to reconcile himself with the ‘law’ on which he had been obliged to turn his back, he is said to have written to King Ferdinand IV in 1783 asking for a commision in the royal army, something which, as we shall see, many brigands enjoyed. The King ordered first his arrest and then his summary execution. Duca was hanged in Salerno on 26 April 1784 following a decision, taken at the highest level of the unsavoury Bourbon regime, no doubt by Queen Maria Carolina, who took the decisions her husband was too idle to take, in order that the populace, ninety per cent of whom supported ‘Angiolillo’, should be faced with a fait accompli. This judicial murder saved the face if not the skin of the Justice Minister, Marchese Carlo de Marco, who was, it seems, more 29

See Bruno Santaelena, I briganti celebri Rinaldo Rinaldini, capobanda abruzzese (Milan, 1911); Curt Elwenspoek, Rinaldo Rinaldini, der romantische Räuberfürst (Stuttgart: Süddeutsches Verlagshaus, 1929). Angelo Duca also features in many Italian works on the brigantaggio of his time (e.g. M. Pennacchia, Briganti in terra di santi (Terni: Editore Punto Uno, 2005), and is the subject of a notable short study by Benedetto Croce, Angiolillo (Angelo Duca), Capo di banditi (Naples, 1892 [Collezione Minima, No. 9].

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interested in canon law, and in preserving his own position, than in the justice for which he was nominally responsible; more important - in their view - it served to save the regime from the wrath of the populace. Francesco Caracciolo, whose highhandedness and intransigence in 1778 obliged Duca to seek refuge from the law in outlawry, was himself hanged in 1799 as a result of the highhandedness and intransigence of Admiral Nelson. The ‘outlaw’ was the only player to emerge with any credit. Angelo Duca was first mentioned in German by Johann Heinrich Bartels, in his Briefe über Kalabrien und Sizilien (1787), although Vulpius is said to have found his material in an Italian booklet on the death of Duca.30 In literary historical terms Rinaldo Rinaldini is descended from Schiller’s Karl Moor, but in some ways he is closer to his real-life contemporary Michele Pezza (Frà Diavolo, discussed below), although he lacks Frà Diavolo’s ingrained criminality and unscrupulous ferocity. Driven, like Michele Pezza, to escape from the unheroic life of poverty, he was educated and his imagination given a romantic turn by the hermit Onorio. A goatherd at ten, at seventeen he enlisted with his head full of the idea of heroism, and served the Vatican, Venice, and Sardinia, before being compelled, as a result of insubordination and violence towards a superior, to give up the military life and with it the idea of heroism. Exchanging the military life for the only real alternative, he eventually joined a band of robbers and soon became their captain. He is a contradictory character, courageous and daring, but also weak and vacillating: he spends much time in the novel sitting around thinking aloud in a Romantic-introspective way. He is the pawn of chance events which continually frustrate him in his attempts to escape from himself and his ‘involuntary’ past life of crime. When the reader meets him he has reached the point of wishing to exchange a life of crime for an honourable, peaceful, Rousseauistic existence. Vulpius’s once so celebrated Räuberroman built on the convention of the noble outlaw established by Schiller, who referred to Robin Hoodin Die Räuber, to which it added something like the Vehmgericht of Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen and Benedicte Naubert’s Hermann von Unna, together with allusions to the supposedly Illuminist-inspired conspiracy against the crowned heads of Europe that was the talk of the continent. It was to prove a heady combination. Rinaldo Rinaldini includes hand-to-hand combat with the local militia, the contradictory and therefore interesting figure of the peripatetic good-hearted bandit or compassionate criminal whose whole life, like that of Angelo Duca, is ‘an imposture in behalf of justice’,31 and who is 30 31

This may have been Bellissima istoria delle prudenze ed imprese di Angelo del Duca nativo della terra di San Gregorio (Naples: Luigi Rosso, 1785). Tymn, 165.

424 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective also a picaro and, thanks to the influence of Goethe’s Crugantoni in Claudine von Villa Bella (1776),32 a Casanova. His many disguises, masquerades, and adventures packed with gripping incident, his many amours, the chastisement of evildoers, the ‘Black Judges in secret’ and their agent, the man in black, and the ‘honourable’ dagger that saves Rinaldo from the ignominy of the scaffold,33 combine to make him an engaging, contradictory figure. Rinaldo Rinaldini is Gothic in much of its detail and some of its action. The opening of the novel, which has Rinaldini and Altaverde sitting beside a fire they have kindled beneath a projecting rock while ‘the boisterous winds rolled over the Apennines like the mountain-waves of the ocean’,34 is like a scene from Salvator Rosa (1615-1673), or from his conremporaries Jan Both (1618?-1642), Michelangelo Cerquozzi (1602-1660) or Pieter van Laer (15821642). In literary terms it is reminiscent of what, following the success of Richard Cumberland’s The Carmelite (1784), became a favourite Gothic setting: a rocky shore with a view of the sea at the break of day, on the shore two strangers who have survived a shipwreck, a piece of Gothic convention and stagecraft on which Willibald Alexis rings the changes in his knowingly Gothic Walladmor. For one so passive Rinaldini is a man of many identities (Count Dalbrogo, Marquis Soligno, Count Mandochini, Cavaliere Della Cintra, Baron Tegnano), for this is a tale of masks and masquerades. Indeed, Rinaldini expressly laments ending up as the sport of masks and disguises after a life of Gothic vicissitudes from den of robbers to a loathsome dungeon, to the best society, and thence to the grave. In addition to that favourite, a bandit (Amadeo) in monkish disguise, there are assumed identities, false identities, doubtful identities, and conspiracies associated with mysterious figures. The ‘old man’ who crosses Rinaldini’s path is a figure from German folktale.35 There is a mysterious apparition-like white figure, various no less mysterious black figures,36 and a band of robbers in black monks’ habits. Is this set of thieves identical with the black fraternity? When Rinaldini is summoned to appear before the judge of all crimes committed in secret, the

32 33

34 35 36

In this he differs from Angelo Duca. Tymn, 165, writes that Rinaldini is saved from ignominy by means of ‘one of the most honourable suicides in Romantic literature’, but in reality he is stabbed by the Old Man of Fronteja. Tymn was presumably thinking of the Rinaldo in Vulpius’s Aurora. The translation is Hinckley’s. See Max Lüthi, The European Folktale (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1986), 20. Cf. the similar figures in Grosse’s Memoiren des Marquis von G***s (1792-95).

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so-called black messenger of justice is dressed as a Carmelite, which is the one thing he is not.37 There are banditti dressed as hermits, a mountebank, and a case of cross-dressing (Rosalia in boy’s clothes). In the background is a Heroic-Gothic landscape. There seem to be caverns, ruined castles and ruined chapels everywhere, to say nothing of trap-doors, vaults, suites of subterraneous chambers, a notable case of immurement, and so on. Gothic locations include a den of assassins in a ruined castle in a forest, with a trapdoor leading to a vault, and a ruined chapel on a hill (which will have put contemporary readers in mind of the Vehmgericht) full of endless vaults and caverns, reputedly the meeting place of the black fraternity, in which Rinaldini proceeds to quarter himself. He, who is inevitably reputed to have entered into a compact with the Devil, doubtless because his men appear very devils to their victims, wants an honourable life, or, failing that, an honourable death. When he is arrested, a trap-door covered in turf opens to reveal steps and dark passages through which he is dragged; further steps and a further trap-door bring him to the courtyard of a castle. Gothic melodrama is, at times, much in evidence, hence the success of Rinaldo Rinaldini on the German popilar stage, which, following its first dramatization, Karl Friedrich Hensler’s Rinaldo Rinaldini, Der Räuberhauptmann (1799), it dominated for a generation. In England there was even a ballet, Rinaldo Rinaldini; or, The Secret Avengers (also known as Rinaldo Rinaldini; or, The Black Tribunal) (1801). There are in the novel two separate, albeit strangely overlapping, secret societies and conspiracies: the Old Man of Fronteja, on whom Lytton was to base his Zanoni, heads a secret society that is reminiscent of the Pythagorean Brotherhood, a secret religious, political and scientific sect founded in Italy by Pythagoras (BC 580-500), and heads an anti-French conspiracy that reflects the Illuminist-inspired conspiracy of which so much was heard at the time, and then there is the Black Brotherhood, which appears to be a Jacobinical conspiracy, indebted both to Zschokke’s Black Brothers and, believe it or not, to the Secret Tribunal. The latter’s procedures, are counterfeited and parodied in the three men in masks who sit round a table covered with black cloth and surrounded by skeletons. It is a strange combination, for the Illuminati and the heilige Vehme with their ‘Wissende’ have little in common: unlike the revolutionary Order of Illuminists, the Vehme is by definition a conservative society. Rinaldini’s verdict on the black fraternity, that Justice does not hide itself in night and darkness, is the most telling argument against the Vehmgericht system of 37

Angelo Duca occasionally disguised himself as a monk, and frequently took refuge in monasteries. The Capuchins in particular had the reputation of supporting banditti.

426 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective secret justice. The black fraternity is both one of the most original and puzzling features of the novel, for it also appears to be more another criminal gang than a body like the Vehme, but Vulpius is following Veit Weber in showing the Vehme as having degenerated into a quasi-criminal enterprise, that being the form in which it lived on in the public memory at the end of the eighteenth century. The fraternity offers Rinaldini an alliance against what they call a tyrannical government, which he refuses because he is no rebel against his king, the very argument that, as we shall see, in real life led Michele Pezza to support the corrupt Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, which an outlaw might have been expected to oppose. As a vie romancée, a ‘romantic’ tale, and in some respects both a picaresque novel and its opposite, the Bildungsroman (Rinaldini is a rogue and the novel episodic, but, unlike the picaro proper, Rinaldini becomes a changed character), Rinaldo Rinaldini raises the question of its generic and textual status. In a general way and on its popular level it appears to belong with the mixture of Bildungsroman and Gothic novel that is associated with Jean Paul and Hoffmann, but questions remain. Is the text what it seems? Are the figures in the text what they seem to be?38 Rinaldini has no compunction in lying, for instance about having eight hundred men under command in Italy. Both the text and its hero rest on an unstable basis, and the text is further undermined by the fact that successive editions and additions were given different endings, thus emphasizing its unreliability and the fact that readers have to decide for themselves about Rinaldini, but also, for myth transcends truth, the fact that Rinaldini, like Duca, is essentially a mythical figure. Not the least ambiguity of Vulpius’s celebrated novel is the fact that Rinaldini lives to experience a second series of episodic adventures. Ferrandino (1800, with a third part in 1801: Ferrandino, tr. H. G. Bohn, 1813), which appeared as a separate work, as Vols 5 and 6 of a series entitled Biographien berüchtigter Schwärmer, Jauner, Mörder, Mordbrenner und Straßenräuber aus dem achtzehnten Jahrhundert (1800), and as books ten to fifteen of Rinaldo Rinaldini, restored Rinaldini to life by declaring him to have been wounded, not killed at the end of Rinaldo Rinaldini.39 Readers’ credulity is taken for granted. Vulpius’s Glorioso der große Teufel focuses on the French invasion of Italy, which involves all bandits willing to join in the defence of their country being promised an amnesty. This brings us to Frà Diavolo, alias Colonel Pezza of the military wing of the ancien régime. In Glorioso ‘Colonello Nardone’ (cf. Italian ladrone, robber, highwayman), one-time brigand based

38 39

In Ferrandino the Old Man of Fronteja turns out to be Rinaldini’s father. For an account of Ferrandino, see Heiderich, 135ff.

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on Michele Pezza, ends life as a respected citizen. How different was the real-life version of this story, to which we now come.

III Not only did the Devil appear as Gothic hero; that most Gothic of personages, the Captain of Banditti, appeared as the devil in the person of ‘Frà Diavolo’, the Italian capo di banda Michele Pezza, who entered the service of the King of Naples in 1799, was promoted Colonel, and became notorious for his atrocities, before being captured and hanged by the French. It is characteristic of the age that a guerilla leader known as Frà Diavolo should be involved, locally, in the wars against Napoleon, that ‘singular emanation of the Evil Principle’40 long personified in Satan. Frà Diavolo was just two years younger than Napoleon, who was appointed to lead the French army in Italy in 1796. Pezza’s career as brigand began the following year. Frà Diavolo was born Michele Arcangelo Pezza on 7 April 1771 in the old quarter of Itri in the province of Rome. How he came to be nicknamed Frà Diavolo is not entirely clear, but, given his family’s poverty, it is probable that he found himself dressed in a hand-me-down Franciscan habit, which he enjoyed wearing, or that he occasionally dressed up as a monk as a way of attracting attention and appearing to surmount the poverty of his family. If the latter was the case, he may have continued to use a monk’s habit as a disguise, which would explain Sir William Hamilton’s description of him as ‘an outlaw’d Priest’. Ever the outlaw, he was never a priest, nor was there anything remotely priestly about him. For young men of his time and background there were few ways of making good: the church, the robber band, and, to a lesser extent, the army. His friends naturally called him Frà Michele (Brother Michael), but the parish priest (Fr Nicola de Fabritiis), to whose care he had by now been consigned, and who could not control him, dubbed him ‘Frà Diavolo’ [Brother Devil], and the name stuck. The idea that the man whom he calls ‘Grand [sic] Diavolo’ was a renegade priest, reported by Sir William Hamilton to the Foreign Office in 1799, is simply part of the myth that inevitably came to supplant the reality, for Frà Diavolo and his exploits and criminal excesses were larger-than-life, and therefore, it must have seemed, the stuff of fiction rather than history. He may have been thought of as a renegade monk because the name by which he was generally known, combined with his 40

Quoted from Parsons, Witchcraft and Demonology, 3.

428 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective violent behaviour, put people in mind of the ‘wicked monk’ of the contemporary (Gothic) novel,41 but real and reputed renegade monks (the latter a Calabrian type) were ten a penny at the time; one of Pezza’s fellow guerilla leaders was ‘Abbé’ Pronio. To members of the French army in Italy and their Polish allies and local Jacobin sympathisers, many of whom would never see anything else, he must have seemed the Devil incarnate. In 1797, then, while apprenticed to a boat-builder, Eleuterio Agresti, young Pezza reacted violently when Eleuterio and his brother Francesco spoke slightingly of a grisette for whose easy charms he had fallen, killing both of them, and at the time there was also talk of some kind of rustic duel in which two cousins named Di Mascolo had also died at his hands. Having thus revealed his fierce pride and, with it, the violent streak in the fatally flawed character that was to govern the rest of his life, Pezza, in order to evade the gallows that eventually claimed him, fled Itri and took to the life of a bandit. After two years as a bandit/brigand,42 he was able to better himself by escaping first into and then from military service in the form of the ‘Messapia’ regiment. In late 1798 he proceeded to show himself in his true colourful complexity, for his career as a mercenary, guerilla, freedomfighter, or terrorist was about to begin. When the French general Championnet forced the Bourbon army to retreat, Frà Diavolo formed his own private army of some hundred men and usedit to attack the Polish advance-guard of the French army in December 1798, thereby slowing down their entry into Itri and Naples. The savagery of this enterprise led to the revenge killing of his father by the Poles in January 1799, which in turn made Pezza hell-bent on killing the invading French and their allies in as large numbers as possible. He was driven by revenge; patriotic idealism doesn’t come into it, and while he evidently attached importance to the ‘pardon’ for murder by which he was soon suborned, he did not behave like a religious idealist, although his nom de guerre meant that he was perceived as one. He was simply a mercenary employed at arm’s length by one of the most corrupt branches of the ancien régime. At this stage the Royal Navy, which supported that regime, comes into the frame, for after the Battle of the Nile in 1798, Nelson, taking his squadron to Naples, where Sir William Hamilton had been British Plenipotentiary ever since 1764, ill-advisedly advised the Bourbon King, Ferdinand IV, to act against the French, with disastrous results: having made a pre-emptive strike against the French-held Roman Republic, the King of 41 42

Schiller’s Karl Moor dresses as a Capuchin monk to visit Roller in prison. While writers on Gothic write of banditti, French and Italian historians write of brigands, but there is also a difference of meaning: banditti are glorified robbers, brigands are military irregulars: Pezza was both.

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Naples (which comprised the whole of Italy south of Rome), was, within a matter of weeks, driven from the mainland of Italy and obliged to take refuge in Sicily under Nelson’s protection. Nelson was instructed to cooperate with the Austrians, with whom the Neapolitan government, in declaring war on France, had made an alliance. Nelson having set sail for Leghorn on 22 November 1798, Naples, unprotected on the land side, was taken by the French, aided by the Neapolitan Jacobins, in January 1799. After overrunning the Kingdom of Naples, General Championnet established the so-called Parthenopaean Republic of Naples in January 1799, only to find himself recalled to Paris for opposing the daylight robbery of the French civil commissioner, Faypoult, whom he had expelled from Naples. From the safety of Sicily Ferdinand IV now set in train measures to take back the kingdom of Naples from the republican regime. Cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo, Ferdinand’s ‘vicar-general’ who had accompanied his master to Palermo, offered to lead a counter-revolutionary march through Calabria to reconquer Naples. The King agreed, giving him carte blanche with the powers of a viceroy. Ruffo landed at Punta del Pezzo on 7 February with only eight supporters, but very soon assembled a fanatical horde of so-called Sanfedisti, with whom he ‘advanced in the name of God and the King with all possible savagery towards the capital.’43 The Sanfedisti, ‘Warriors of the Holy Faith’ who by the end of February numbered seventeen thousand, consisted of peasants, urban riff-raff, criminals, convicts and banditti recruited with the help of a general pardon announced by Ruffo in respect of past crimes (including murder) to anyone willing to join these irregular bands of ‘freedom-fighters’. Ruffo, whose army, like Chinese Gordon’s, was ‘constantly on the verge of mutiny, supporting itself on plunder, and, at the slightest provocation, melting into thin air’,44 promised his lazzaroni-in-arms ‘plunder in this life, life everlasting in the next’.45 Pezza, who had swiftly volunteered, was made chief of one band, with the nominal rank of Captain in the Bourbon army. He returned to the mainland, landing north of Naples, near Gaeta, with a force of some four hundred men that was in time to grow to six thousand. With others of his kind Frà Diavolo spent the next six months assisting in the Bourbon recovery of the Kingdom of Naples by harassing the French republican forces in Sora and Terra di Lavoro:

43 44 45

David Constantine, Fields of Fire. A Life of Sir William Hamilton (London: Phoenix, 2001), 230. Harold Acton, The Bourbons of Naples, 1734-1825 (London: Prion, 1998), 372. Constantine, 231.

430 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective While Ruffo [in spring 1799] was recovering Calabria, other guerilla leaders were recovering the rest of the kingdom [of Naples]: Sciarpa in the Cilento, Pronio in the Abruzzi, Salmone in Aquila, De Donatis in Teramo, Michele Pezza, better known as Fra Diavolo, and the notorious Mammone brothers in Sora: soldiers of fortune who skilfully exploited royalist sentiment. To read of their adventures is to enter a world of picaresque fiction.46

By mid-June Ruffo and Frà Diavolo overwhelmed Naples, using that city ‘much as they had all other human habitation along the way’.47 Cardinal Ruffo, as commander of the royal forces, agreed terms on which the Jacobins would capitulate, terms which the English ConsulGeneral at Palermo, Charles Lock, judged ‘a very wise measure [...] as it efffectively sweeps the kingdom of the disaffected’, who were to be shipped out. However, Nelson, on his return, dismissed Ruffo as ‘that swelled-up priest’ and peremptorily annulled the capitulation, insisting on the absolute surrender of the Neapolitan Jacobins. The King, unable to see that this was to his own disadvantage, offered his British henchman Ruffo’s job when the Cardinal resigned in disgust at what he regarded as Nelson’s perfidy. Ruffo, it has to be said, was the only person involved to behave in a statesman like way. Nelson, for his part, allowed himself to be manipulated by Ferdinand and Caroline, and by Emma Hamilton, by whom he was fatally distracted at the time. The violence practised against the Neapolitan Jacobins by Nelson at the behest of a weak, malicious king and his vengeful wife was as unjust as it was injudicious. He had Francesco Caracciolo48 (commodore of the Neapolitan navy, who had deserted) court-martialled on board his flagship, Foudroyant, and promptly hanged at the foremast of the Neapolitan Frigate Minerva, which Caracciolo had once commanded, and a hundred refugees who had been protected by Ruffo’s treaty were executed; many more were subsequently massacred. Charles Lock wrote: ‘You will hear with grief of the infraction of the articles convened with the Neapolitan Jacobins and of the stab our English honour has received in being employed to decoy these people, who relied upon our [good] faith’.49 Nelson, his reputation damaged by his high-handedness in failing to honour an agreement made in his absence, was made Duke of Bronte in Sicily for his role in restoring the civil power in Naples. It has to be said that at this point, when Neapolitan foreign policy was dictated by those most Gothic of motives, vengeance and fear, Nelson was, like his ally Frà Diavolo, out of control, a law unto

46 47 48 49

Acton, 372. Constantine, 236. The aristocratic Caracccioli first came to prominence in Naples in the 12th century. Acton, 420.

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himself. Reality had come to partake of the Gothicism of contemporary literature. Many of Pezza’s men were beyond his or anyone else’s control, hardened criminals who regarded themselves as licensed by Ruffo to commit mayhem. The actions of these bloodthirsty ruffians (and in Italian ruffiano, while meaning ruffian, would at this time have had the connotation of ‘one of Ruffo’s men’), added to Frà Diavolo’s own reputation as a hard man. From now on his name was associated with atrocities of the kind depicted by Goya in his Disasters of War series, which throws a ghastly light on the comparable campaign that took place in Spain just a few years later with some of the same players. Indeed, Pezza and his men conducted themselves with such savagery that Ruffo, fearful both of the butchery that might ensue and of the damage its Warriors might do to the Holy Faith in whose name they operated, forbade them from operating in densely populated areas. Not that this prevented atrocities elsewhere: on one occasion Frà Diavolo had some of his prisoners, men, women and children, thrown over a precipice; on another he had a party of seventy prisoners shot. At such points even the most ‘horrid’ novels are tame compared with the brutal reality of the times that spawned them. Frà Diavolo’s exploits caught the imagination both of the Italians, who regarded him as an effective defender of their faith and in that sense as a patriot, and of the French invaders, for whom he was a terrorist with much French blood on his hands. Napoleon’s invasion of Italy served to raise Italian hopes of independence and unification, although these were not to be attained until 1861, and the Italians saw themselves as fighting for their religion against revolutionary atheism. Athough he fought for the corrupt regime of the Spanish Bourbon King of Naples, Frà Diavolo was, because he was fighting against the ‘godless’ French invader, perceived to be a patriot. His nom de guerre served him well. He was involved in precisely the sort of guerilla war that in Spain, a few years later, was a war of independence, and was indeed fighting the same enemy in the person of Joseph Bonaparte. The mass executions in Madrid in 1808 were ordered by Murat, against whom Frà Diavolo fought in 1801, and who eventually replaced the ‘intruder King’ Joseph Bonaparte as King of the so-called Two Sicilies, which in effect meant King of Naples, for from 1806 to 1815 Sicily remained under British protection as the bastion of the Bourbons. A meeting with Captain Thomas Troubridge, Nelson’s second-incommand at Naples, is said to have served to re-awaken Pezza’s sense of honour, but this attempt to put a reputable gloss on a disreputable episode needs qualifying, for he will have considered himself motivated all along by a sense of honour which demanded that the murder of his father be avenged

432 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective as bloodily as possible. At all events the meeting with Troubridge (and, later, with Sir Sidney Smith) gained him the good opinion of the English, who may or may not have connected Captain Pezza with the ‘Gran Diavolo’ of their dispatches. The siege of the fortress of Gaeta, which he undertook by agreement with Troubridge, who himself led the simultaneous assault on the fortress of Capua, was seen by Pezza as a way of emphasizing his credentials as an active supporter of the monarchy. However, when the fortress of Gaeta capitulated, the French, unwilling to treat with a terrorist, stipulated that the negotiations should be led by Nelson and the personal representatives of the King, rather than by Frà Diavolo. Cardinal Ruffo ordered Frà Diavolo to stand down, but the King, recognizing his contribution to the royalist cause, made clear that he was minded to make further use of him. Frà Diavolo, galled at finding himself sidelined, went off to get himself married. Honeymoon over, on 29 July he left with his men for the Papal States, intending eventually to drive the French out of Rome. Following the King’s return to Palermo on board Nelson’s Foudroyant in August 1799, such guerilla leaders as ‘Abbé’ Pronio, Sciarpa, Frà Diavolo and Mammone were promoted and rewarded in various ways.50 At the end of August a mixed army of Neapolitan regulars and irregulars invaded the Roman State, supported by a British naval squadron under Troubridge which sailed to Civitavecchia. On 24 October the King promoted Pezza to Colonel in the Bourbon army and charged him with the liberation of Rome. This was the official recognition Fra Diavolo had long craved. On arriving at Velletri he found himself acclaimed by the people as their liberator from the French revolutionaries. Overrunning the Alban hills, however, he again showed himself in his true colours, destroying his reputation in the process, when he had the mayor of Albano, Angelo Bianchini, arbitrarily executed. This was the first in a series of events that led to Colonel Pezza being arrested in Albano and imprisoned in the famous Gothic fortress of Castel Sant’ Angelo, from which he inevitably contrived to escape. Napoleon’s victory over Austria at the battle of Marengo in 1800 restored French power over northern Italy, and in 1805 Napoleon was to proclaim himself King of a new kingdom of Italy. From 1800 to 1805, years of peace between France and Naples, Frà Diavolo enjoyed celebrity status. It is sometimes said that he was created Duke of Cassano by Ferdinand IV, but this is not true; the 4th Duke of Cassano (1747-1825) was alive at the time. Then in 1806 Napoleon, enraged by Ferdinand IV’s failure to observe a treaty of neutrality to which he had agreed, sent his forces into Naples in 50

Acton, 428.

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order to bring down Ferdinand’s government. The Bourbons once more fled to Sicily, protected by the British Mediterranean fleet, leaving the French to occupy Naples and other fortresses of the kingdom. Napoleon sent his brother, Joseph, to Naples as the new king, with orders to rid the kingdom of brigands. Admiral Sir Sidney Smith dropped off guerilla leaders at various points on the coast of Calabria with proclamations inciting the people to revolt; to Gaeta he sent, among other things, four heavy guns, some English gunners, and Colonel Pezza: After harrying the French lines with his band of cut throats, Fra Diavolo became bored by [...] routine in the fortress [of Gaeta]. [The Prince of] Hesse[-Philippsthal] discovered that he was negotiating with the French and sent him back to Palermo under arrest, but he was too plausible a rogue not to exculpate himself, and his services were soon called for again.51

Ferdinand called for volunteers to form another irregular army to retake the kingdom, Fra Diavolo, wrongly feeling that he had nothing to lose, again answered the call, as did numerous others of his ilk. Landed at Amantea, north of Maida, bySmith, he swiftly recruited a private army, this time of fifteen hundred men, with which he proceeded to wage a private, hit-andrun guerilla war against the French regular forces commanded by General Massena, inflicting heavy losses on them. Frà Diavolo was once again an Italian popular hero. The ‘Corsican upstart’, Napoleon, demanded his capture, putting a price of 17,000 ducats on his head. An informer enabled the French to track him down, inflicting heavy losses on his band of brigands. It was at this point heralding his imminent downfall that Frà Diavolo finally showed the full extent of the barbarity of which he was capable, carrying out atrocities - the murder of prisoners, assassinations, summary executions, rape, pillage - all in the name of the king’. The atrocities depicted by Goya in ‘The Bandits’ Attack I-III’ in his Real-Life Caprichos of c. 1798-1808 are ones in which Frà Diavolo and his rabble are said to have indulged in 1806. The idea that he was some kind of Robin Hood does not stand up to scrutiny: the real Robin Hood of the time was Angelo Duca, model for the fictional Rinaldo Rinaldini. Pezza became a nightmare for Joseph Bonaparte, who went so far as to tell his brother that Frà Diavolo had been hanged by the Bourbons in Palermo. Frà Diavolo, in the meantime, was continuing to make Bourbon-funded mayhem. The beginning of the end for Pezza came when Joseph Bonaparte entrusted the command of a detachment of ten thousand men to a brilliant young officer with experience of guerilla war in the Vendée, Sigisbert Hugo 51

Acton, 567.

434 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective (father of the poet Victor Hugo), who set about hunting down his quarry, the most wanted brigand of them all, whom he came to respect.52 Pezza’s ragtail army was decimated at Campobasso; he himself managed to escape with a handful of followers, whom he disbanded, knowing that at this stage it was a matter of sauve qui peut. He was hoping to reach the coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea, where he anticipated being saved by the Royal Navy and taken to Palermo to rejoin his Bourbon master. In the event he was taken by bandits who beat him and left him for dead. Despite his wounds he managed to reach Baronissi. Unfortunately for him the pharmacist whose help he sought was also the commander of the local national guard. Escorted to Salerno, he was recognized by a turncoat former Bourbon soldier. The French authorities rejected out of hand a demand by Sir Sidney Smith that he should be treated as a prisoner of war. After a summary trial he was hanged in Naples Market Place (Piazza Mercato) at midday on 11 November 1806, at the age of thirty five. He went to his death wearing the uniform of a Colonel in the service of the Bourbon regime that he had ultimately disgraced, for both the Italian patriot and the terrorist perceived by the French were but masks for a deeply flawed human being, a pathological killer and Gothic hero-villain destroyed by his own lack of selfcontrol. King Joseph Bonaparte was finally able to announce to his brother that ‘Frà Diavolo a été exécuté’. A solemn mass celebrated after the hanging by the Archbishop of Palermo was attended by, among others, a detachment of English marines. The end of Michele Pezza’s short and violent life helped to ensure that he lived on in mythical form, but even in his lifetime he achieved such legendary status that he was confused with the Gran Diavolo of history. Sir William Hamilton wrote to the Foreign Secretary, Lord Grenville, of ‘an outlaw’d Priest that goes by the name of the Grand [sic] Diavolo, a notorious murderer who wishes to obtain his pardon by his Services’, which shows that in 1799 Pezza was craving a pardon, and thus explains why he volunteered again in 1806. Hamilton may here be harking back to or confusing Frà Diavolo with the Gran Diavolo, the nom de guerre given to the celebrated Italian condottiere Giovanni de’ Medici (1498-1526), better known as Giovanni delle bande nere, great-grandson of Lorenzo de’ Medici, son of Caterina Sforza, Duchess of Forli and Imola (1462-1509) by her third husband, Giovanni de’ Medici. Trained from childhood for the military life, he was given his first command by his relative, Pope Leo X, in 1516, and swiftly won renown as a courageous military man and charismatic leader. 52

See Sigisbert Hugo, Mémoires du Général Hugo, 2 vols (Paris: Ladvocat, 1825). A German Gothic based on the French civil war in the Vendée is H. G. Schmieder’s Die Heldin der Vendée (1801), an Abällino-imitation.

Hues of Villainy 435

His nickname, said to have been acquired because of the black stripes (bande) of mourning on his banners after the death in 1521 of Leo X, may equally well have derived from the ‘black bands [bande]’ under the control of this ‘Gran Diavolo’. In the Italian wars of 1521-26 he changed sides twice before dying of a wound received at the battle of Pavia. His near-namesake, Frà Diavolo, was in most senses a lesser man, but if Hamilton was confusing the two men, the mistake is understandable, given the similarity of the two nicknames and the obvious parallel between Ruffo’s and Pezza’s bands and the earlier bande nere. It was inevitable that Pezza’s impossibly colourful life, which reads like a vie romancée even before being fictionalized, would be celebrated in songs and tall stories of the Romantic period and in novels by, among others, Alexandre Dumas, who during the dictatorship of Garibaldi used his position as Director of the National Museum at Naples, which gave him access to the state archives, to collect material thought suitable for fictional adaptation; his I Borboni di Napoli (10 vols, 1862-65), which is said to be historically unreliable, has not been translated. Frà Diavolo plays a minor role in Dumas, Love and Liberty; or, Nelson at Naples, tr. R. S. Garnett (1916), in which the hero of Scribe and Auber’s ahistorical comic opera Fra Diavolo, ou l’Hôtellerie de Terracine (1830) was reduced to a figure of farce in a ‘Fra Diavolo Travestie’, Fra Diavolo or The Beauty and the Brigands, A Burlesque Burletta (1860) by Henry James Byron (1834-84), whence it was but a short step to the 1933 Laurel and Hardy (‘Stanlio’ and ‘Ollio’) film Fra Diavolo (also known as The Devil’s Brother), which had little connexion with historical fact. Scribe’s story was based on Jean Francois Lesueur’s opera La Caverne (1793), which was produced in Vienna in 1822 as Der Räuber der Abruzzi. At the time of writing the most recent novel to feature Pezza is Giuseppe dall’ Ongaro’s Frà Diavolo (Istituto Geografico De Agostini, 1985). Faction predominates in two other novels. Müller-Fraureuth53 refers to two Gothic histories involving Frà Diavolo, his paramilitary activities and motivation: Die Geschichte des Antonio Gargiulo, genannt Fra Diabolo, Banditenhauptmanns und Heerführers der Kalabresen (1803) and Peter Kuttler, Antonio Farfallo, Der Bandit aus Ehrgefühl und Menschenhaß, Sittengemälde unserer Zeit (Ulm, 1841; Farfallo, whose name derives from farfallone (philanderer), is Frà Diavolo). Another rare curiosity is Friedrich Bartels, Diavolo, oder der deutsche [!] Teufel in Neapel. Eine schauderhafte Räubergeschichte (Nordhausen: Fürst, 1832). Frà Diavolo featured in Pietro Colletta’s Storia del regno di Napoli dai 1754 al 1825 (1848, many editions). The first separate biography was Bruto Amante’s Frà Diavolo e il suo tempo 1796-1806 (1904, repr. 1974). More 53

Die Ritter- und Räuberromane, 93, 112.

436 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective reliable than Amante was Alessandro Luzio’s essay in his Profili biografici e bozzetti storici (2 vols, 1927). Studies by Ernesto Jallonghi (1910) and Anna Franchi (1945) attracted less attention than Piero Bargellini’s Frà Diavolo (1943, repr. 1956,1975), but this too, like all these earlier studies, has now been superseded by the fullest study to date, Francesco Barra’s Michele Pezza detto Frà Diavolo (2000), which is based on a thorough re-examination of the historical facts and the discovery of twenty-one documents relating to the life of Michele Pezza that were originally found at Sora, the site of his last stand and capture. The documents in question, which proved to include Pezza’s correspondence, were sent to Joseph Bonaparte, who took them with him to Spain when he was appointed King of Spain by Napoleon in spring 1808. Following the defeat of Joseph Bonaparte by an Anglo-Spanish army under Arthur Marquis (later first Duke) of Wellington, at Vitoria, in 1813, the documents were transferred to the Public Record Office in London, where they remained, unread, until 1977, when they were purchased by the French state and deposited in the Archives Nationales in Paris (Archives de Joseph Bonaparte roi de Naples, puis d’Espagne, 381 AP). There are recent French studies by Olivier Séchan (1975) and Denis Duclos (Frà Diavolo, 2004). In English there was a short piece in Notes & Queries, 271 (1923). More generally, see Harold Acton, The Bourbons of Naples, 1734-1825 (1998); F. P. Badham, Nelson at Naples (1900); H. C. Gutteridge, Nelson and the Neapolitan Jacobins (1903), etc. Studies of other members of Pezza’s band of brigands include Leben, Schicksal und trauriges Ende Francescos, eines Mitgliedes von Fra Diavolos berüchtigter Bande (1845), and there are many studies of Italy in the age of brigands such as Francesco Barra’s Il brigantaggio del decennio francese 1806-1815(2003). Although he belongs to a type of brigand common in southern Italy from time immemorial, Frà Diavolo is, as his very nickname implies, a quintessentially Gothic figure. There could scarcely be a clearer incarnation of the hero-villain or Satanic hero than Frà Diavolo, who was a hero to the Bourbon loyalists, but a villain to the French and their Jacobin allies. He too could be described as ‘varying in his hue from an angel of light to a demon of the pit’.54 He who went to his villain’s death on the gallows in his hero’s uniform was the Anti-Jacobin in person. His ‘mask’ and diabolical lack of self-control identify him with Satan. Extravagantly wicked, he is a brigand by trade, tradition and inclination; his bands of bloodthirsty marauders are typical of the savage banditti of the Gothic novel and the history of Calabria. In Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya, or The Moor (1806) the Satanic Moor ‘grasps the wretched Victoria and with one push whirls her headlong down the dreadful 54

Maturin, Melmoth, ch. VIII.

Hues of Villainy 437

abyss’, a violent ending to a particularly horrid and currently underrated tale. In real life Pezza did the same thing to a whole group of men, women and children. However, while many of Frà Diavolo’s actions are vilely wrong, others are veiled in Gothic ambivalence, for when the law is corrupt, the outlaw can claim to be in the right. He is a larger-than-fiction version of the guerilla chief (cf. Emma Parker, The Guerilla Chief [1815; German translation, 1817]; Vulpius, Glorioso der große Teufel [1800]; Zschokke, Giulio degli Obizzi, oder Abällino unter den Kalabresen [1803]). Vulpius’s Glorioso der große Teufel focusses on the French invasion of Italy, which involves all bandits willing to join in the defence of their country being promised an amnesty; in this waythe ‘großer Teufel’ [Gran Diavolo] is transformed into Colonello Nardone (Nardonello), celebrated for his patriotic valour.55 At this point the parallel between fact and fiction is complete. Frà Diavolo’s story serves to show how closely the Gothic is interwoven with contemporary history. As terrorist and counter-revolutionary, an outlaw fighting on the side of the corrupt ancien régime against the forces of the French Revolution, he is necessarily an ambiguous figure who could even be deemed to be fighting for the Spanish Inquisition. All that is missing is the secret society favoured by the German Gothic novel in particular, and that deficiency was made good a couple of years after Frà Diavolo’s death when the Carbonari56 came into being. The Neapolitan wars of 1798-1806 were, of course, fought over the landscape of Calabria as depicted by Salvator Rosa and described by William Gaunt as a land of ‘solitudinous decay’, of ‘fearful enchantment which had lain waste through centuries,57 a landscape once haunted by warrior-monks, in which renegade monks, real and imaginary,58 were ten-a-penny, so that Frà Diavolo was an effective disguise. Operating in the landscape in which the German Räuberroman, unlike its English equivalent, is mostly set, and haunted, as he was, by his own murderous youth and the death of his father, for which he was indirectly responsible, he led a Gothic enough life, trying to atone for murder by murder. His whole life was a masquerade; he is the Gothic man of mystery, the very embodiment of the hero-villain, a figure of ‘colossal contradictions’, a flawed character divided against himself, a driven man, his mind clouded by that most Gothic of motives, the idea of revenge. 55 56 57 58

See Heiderich, The German Novel of 1800, 138f. See [Giuseppe Bertoldi], Memoirs of the Secret Societies of the South of Italy, particularly the Carbonari (London: J. Murray, 1821). Gaunt, Bandits in a Landscape, 30. Francis Lathom’s Midnight Bell: A German Story Founded on Incidents in Real Life (London: Symonds, 1798) opens with the solemn tolling of a bell summoning a band of renegade monks to a meeting in a ruined fortress.

12 ANGLO-GERMAN INTERACTIONS What Maturin, in the Preface to his Fatal Revenge (1807), was to dub the ‘plague ship of German letters’ arrived off these shores in 1794, just two years before thebeginning of Scott’s ‘German-mad’ phase (1796-1801). In its hold it bore a cargo of sensational novels that for a time proved almost as infectious as the vampire retrovirus carried by SS Demeter a century later. For the next decade British readers could not get enough of this ‘horrid’, ‘monstro-terrific’1 Teutonic fare, although critics soon came to regard it as too much of a good thing, for, true or not, the words ‘from the German’, intended by the author or publisher to signal the fashionably horrid, were soon taken by critics as signalling work characterized by overwriting and a dubious moral and/or political tone. In the context of the turn-of-thecentury Gothic novel the term ‘German manner’ completely lacks the admixture of admiration that it was to carry in the 1840s when applied to English history painting, but in both periods to attribute a ‘German’ or ‘Germanic’ tendency to writers or painters is to imply that they go too far. If we are to take his remark au pied de la lettre, it even crossed Scott’s mind to describe the Waverley novels as ‘from the German’; but he was right not to do so, not only because of the negative associations of the phrase, but also because by 1814 the vogue had long since lost momentum. In Britain and Germany alike the Waverley novels, for all their by then old-fashioned Gothic trappings, represented the future of the historical novel, a genre for which the way had been prepared by Gothic writers like Sophia Lee and Benedicte Naubert. Evidence that the traffic in Gothic novels was two-way is provided by the recently rediscovered library of Schloß Corvey (Fürstliche Bibliothek Corvey)2 and the resultant bibliography,3 an admirably accurate and useful work that includes a number of English Gothic novels no longer extant in this country, to say nothing of bringing together accurate details of translations into German, which were always laborious to trace and often

1

2

3

The epithet was used by W. Preston in his ‘Reflections on the Peculiarities of Style and Manner in the Later German Writers’, Edinburgh Magazine, 20 (1802), 353-61, 406-8; 21 (1803), 9-18, 89-99. See Rainer Schöwerling, Die Wiederentdeckung der Corveyer Schloßbibliothek (Paderborner Universitätsrede 4, 1986), and Christopher Skelton-Foord, ‘„Universalbibliothek der Trivialliteratur“, 1800-1830: Castle Corvey and the Distribution of Circulating Library Fiction in English’, Library History, 14 (Nov. 1998), 117-32. P. Garside, J. Raven and R. Schöwerling, The English Novel 1770-1829, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

440 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective inaccurate when found. This traffic included many translations, rifacimenti, plagiarisms, pastiches, and works seeking to cash in on fashion by purporting, in the target country, to be German or English respectively. The two-way nature of the traffic illustrates the absurdity of fashion. In the second half of the 1790s, then, and to a lesser extent in the early years of the new century, German literature was more popular than it had ever been in Britain. The fact that what was so acclaimed was for the most part a hybrid literary form on which German critics frown to this day, is an irony of reception history, all the greater in that the decisive models were, seen in retrospect, canonical4 and German: Schiller’s Der Geisterseher and Die Räuber were hugely influential, and Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen almost equally so, for it led, via Benedicte Naubert’s Hermann von Unna, to the secret-tribunal novel that was to prove the most successful form of German Gothic in Britain and France, and to the second most successful form, the necromancer novel modelled on Der Geisterseher. Before this cultural invasion the boot had been on the other foot as first Defoe and Swift, and then Richardson and Sterne were greeted with enthusiasm by German readers whose Shandyism, which is by far the most interesting and engaging aspect of the Anglomania of the time, was followed by the success in Germany first of Ann Radcliffe and then of Scott. The nearest the phlegmatic, insular British ever came to Teutomania was, by comparison, short-lived, an historical aberration, a blip on the screen of reception history. If there can be said to be such a thing as a current view of the interrelationship of English and German Gothic, it can be traced back to Agnes Murphy’s Banditry and Chivalry in German Fiction, 1790-1830 (1935) and Bertrand Evans’s Gothic Drama from Walpole to Shelley (1947), which misread the evidence: the Gothic species flourished in England even before there were any horrific elements to borrow from Germany. Goethe’s Götz and Schiller’s Räuber, the first works of their kind in Germany, followed Otranto by nine and seventeen years respectively. English novelists and dramatists maintained a full ten-year lead in the development of mystery, gloom and terror materials. 5

This view is open to challenge not least because it begs the question of the extent of the early impact of The Castle of Otranto (1764), and of two works by which it was preceded, Smollett’s Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753: Begebenheiten des Grafen Ferdinand von Fathom, 1770) and Leland’s Thomas Longsword, Earl of Salisbury (1762: Longsword, Graf von Salisbury, 1775). In 4 5

At the time they were seen as revolutionary. Evans, 252, n.1.

Anglo-German Interactions 441

England no Gothic novel followed Otranto for fourteen years, and in Germany its early translation, Seltsame Begebenheiten im Schloße Otranto, eine gotische Geschichte (1768) remained without resonance. This means that by the time Clara Reeve’s The Champion of Virtue (1777; re-issued 1778 as The Old English Baron) was translated into German (Der altenglische Baron, 1789) the Ritterroman in its modern form had already been established by Veit Weber. Indeed, by 1789 the Ritterroman was, like the English variety (James White, Earl Strongbow, 1789: Graf Strongbow, 1790), already on the point of becoming subject to parody. If the Champion of Virtue had enjoyed a succès d’estime in Germany following its publication in English, it would have been translated that much earlier; its actual, limited impact is discussed presently. Evans is profoundly mistaken when he goes on to argue, with Murphy, that Though Goethe’s Götz, with its legitimate medievalism and its secret tribunal (the Vehmgericht of the later Middle Ages), gave the initial impulse, the later romances in Germany acquired the accumulated machinery of the Gothic school in England [...]By 1789, in England, the Gothic in fiction and drama had attained elaborate development, but had scarcely begun to grow in Germany. On the whole Germany lagged about ten years behind England throughout the period of development. [...] Up to 1798 the stream of influence flowed from England to Germany rather than from Germany to England.6

With the exception of what is said about Götz all these statements are misleading. The idea, discussed in more detail later in the chapter, that the Gothic vogue started in England with Walpole and others, was taken up in Germany, where the tale of horror developed, and was then re-imported into England in more horrific guise, is simply not true. There is a great deal more to the German Gothic novel than the horrid sensationalism popularly associated with the Schauerroman, and the idea that English Gothic took its ‘lurid force’7 from Germany - the implication being that without such ‘horrid’ Teutonic influence it would have remained nicely Radcliffian - is mistaken. The Monk, the grossness of which is mainly Lewis’s own, not only showed that the British are just as horrid as their German cousins when they set their collective mind to it; it was also a far stronger influence on the English early Gothic novel than any real or imaginary Schauerroman.

6 7

Evans, 119, 123, 124. I quote from Evans rather than Murphy because his book is more accessible. Michael Sadleir, in his Introduction to Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, (Oxford: World’s Classics, 1958), x.

442 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective The real state of affairs regarding developments in the two countries can largely be deduced from the dates of the key novels and their translations and reviews. The Chronology showed not only the intertwining and interdependence of English and German Gothic; it also showed, quite unambiguously, which country initiated which form. Dates of publication are the key to clarity, particularly as regards the impact of German novels in Britain, where most readers had no German; in Germany the situation is modified in that many German readers knew English and did not need to wait for translations to appear. By and large, however, the Gothic interchange took place via the translations that survive as a monument to it. English readers without German missed most of Veit Weber’s work and much of Naubert’s, which caused them to underrate the originality of the early German Gothic novel. German readers without English had all the main English Gothic novels at their disposal in translation.

I It was in April 1793 that the Critical Review commented on the increasing British interest in German literature, of which the reaction to Werther had been such an important part, but not even the most prescient of critics could have anticipated the explosive impact which German Gothic in translation, and counterfeits of it, would shortly have in England. By the mid-1790s, when many Sturm und Drang (in English terms, pre-Romantic or early Gothic Romantic) plays were being translated and adapted for the London stage, rapidly mounting interest in their narrative equivalent - the ‘vivid’, ‘terrific’, and ‘horrid’ German novels of the time - was fuelled by a string of translations of which the historically most significant are Kahlert’s The Necromancer (1794), Naubert’s Herman of Unna (1794), Schiller’s The GhostSeer (1795), Tschink’s The Victim of Magical Delusion (1795), Veit Weber’s The Sorcerer (1795), and Grosse’s The Dagger (1794-5), The Genius (1796) andHorrid Mysteries (1796).8 Of these The Necromancer, The Victim of Magical Delusion, The Genius and Horrid Mysteries are in varying degrees imitations of The Ghost-Seer (first published in German in novel form in 1789), the importance of which is thereby underlined. Kahlert’s and Tschink’s novels were, in their own country, discounted as mere Schiller-imitations, and were therefore more successful in this country, where such niceties attracted less attention. An example of an English Gothic novel deriving its illusionary supernaturalism 8

See James Raven, ‘The Novel Comes of Age’, in The English Novel 1770-1829, ed. Garside, Raven, and Schöwerling, I, 60-71.

Anglo-German Interactions 443

from The Ghost-Seer is Isabella Kelly’s The Abbey of Saint Asaph (1795), of which a reviewer wrote that He [sic] has thought it necessary, in compliance with the present rage for the terrible, to conduct the reader into a horrid cavern [...] and there to terrify him [sic] with a fiery spectre emitting from its gaping jaws sulphurous flames, and sending forth horrid screams, and with a moving and shrieking skeleton, only that he may afterwards have the pleasure of finding that he has no occasion to be frightened, the spectre being only a man, its infernal flames nothing more than a preparation of phosphorus, and the inhabitant of the skeleton not a ghost, but a rat. (MR, 18 [1795], 229)

By 1795 already another reviewer was writing ‘In truth, we are almost weary of Gothic castles, mouldering turrets and ‘cloud inveloped battlements’ (CR, 15 [1795], 480), which raises the not entirely unpleasing idea that without the fecundating influence of German Gothic the English variety might have petered out by the turn of the century. The predilection of the British for ‘trifling German novels’ belonging to what Carlyle in 1827 called the ‘bowl and dagger department’9 of German literature was a matter of comment. German visitors, overlooking the fact that the novels in question were German, were inclined see this as evidence of British shallowness. The British, for their part, saw the German popular novel as especially ‘horrid’. London with its partly German-speaking court and sizeable German colony was, at the turn of the eighteenth century, the main source of information about contemporary German letters, which for fashionable readers meant, above all, the Gothic effusions of the popular writers of the day. The main works in question, not quite all of which are novels, are these: Goethe, Götz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand (1773: Goetz of Berlichingen with the Iron Hand, tr. Scott, 1799) Bürger, Lenore (1774: Six different translations, 1796) Goethe, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774: The Sorrows of Werter, tr. Daniel Malthus, 1779) Schiller, Die Räuber (1781: The Robbers, tr. Tytler (1792, 2nd edn, 1795; 3rd, 1797; 4th, 1800) Veit Weber, Die Teufelsbeschwörung (1787-8: The Sorcerer, 1795) Naubert, Hermann von Unna (1788: Herman of Unna, 1794) Schiller, Der Geisterseher (1789: The Ghost-Seer; or, Apparitionist, 1795)

9

Thomas Carlyle, ‘State of German Literature’ in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, 2 vols (London: Chapman & Hall, n.d.), I, 29.

444 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Naubert, Elisabeth Erbin von Toggenburg (1789: Feudal Tyrants, tr./adapt. Lewis, 1806) Tschink, Geschichte eines Geistersehers (1790-91: The Victim of Magical Delusion, 1795) Kahlert, Der Geisterbanner (1790:The Necromancer, tr. Teuthold, 1794) Spieß, Das Petermännchen (1791: The Dwarf of Westerbourg, 1827) Naubert, Alf von Dülmen (1791: Alf von Deulmen, 1794) Grosse, Der Genius (1791-4: The Genius, tr. Trapp, 1796) Grosse, Memoiren des Marquis von G*** (1792-95: Horrid Mysteries, tr. Will, 1796) Zschokke, Abällino der große Bandit (1794: The Bravo of Venice, tr./adapt. Lewis, 1805) Grosse, Der Dolch (1794-5: The Dagger, 1795) Veit Weber, Die heilige Vehme (1796: tr./adapt. Scott, The House of Aspen, 1799, publ, 1830) Vulpius, Rinaldo Rinaldini, der Räuberhauptmann (1798: The History of Rinaldo Rinaldini, Captain of Banditti, 1800) Vulpius, Ferrandino; Fortsetzung der Geschichte Rinaldinis (1800: Ferrandino, 1813) Hoffmann, Die Elixiere des Teufels (1815: The Devil’s Elixir [sic], tr. Gillies, 1824) Hoffmann, ‘Rolandsitten’ [from Das Majorat] (1817: ‘Rolandsitten; or, The Deed of Entail’, 1826) Alexis, Walladmor (1824: Walladmor, remake by De Quincey, 1825) Meinhold, Sidonia von Bork, die Klosterhexe (1847-8: Sidonia the Sorceress, 1849) Notwithstanding the late Englishing of a few of these titles, most were translated and published within a month or two of their first appearance in German. Zschokke’s Stephan Bathori, König von Polen (1796: The Polish Chieftain, 1806) is not a Gothic but a Romantic tale comparable, as its English translator rightly implied, to Jane Porter’s Thaddeus of Warsaw (1803: Thaddäus Constantin, Graf von Sobieski, 1825). Jane Porter’s Duke Christian of Luneburg (1824: Herzog Christian von Braunschweig-Lüneburg, 1825) was criticized by Willibald Alexis for its Gothification of history. In the post-1800 decade the most significant translations are Vulpius’s The History of Rinaldo Rinaldini (1800), Zschokke/Lewis’s The Bravo of Venice (1805) and - the most important and most Gothic - Naubert/Lewis’s Feudal Tyrants (1806, a rifacimento of Naubert’s Elisabeth Erbin von Toggenburg, 1789). If more British readers had been able to read German in 1789, Naubert’s novel might have

Anglo-German Interactions 445

changed the course of the Anglo-German interchange, which by 1806 was largely over. The idea that German Gothic somehow lagged behind its British counterpart is not borne out by publication dates, which show that the main impact of the German Gothic novel in England came as early as 1794-97. This is confirmed by the pattern of reviews in some of the leading magazines of the day (Analytical Review, British Critic, Critical Review, European Magazine, The English Review, Monthly Mirror, The Monthly Review, Scots Magazine), which includes some surprising details: Kahlert, The Necromancer: 6 (AR, 20 (1974), 52; BC, 4 (1794), 194; CR, 11 (1794), 469; ER, 24 (1794), 149; MR, 16 (1795), 465; SM, 57 (1795), 312) Veit Weber, The Sorcerer: 6 (AR, 23 (1796), 53; BC, 7 (1796), 430; CR, 17 (1796), 113; EM, 29 (1796). 260; MR, 21 (1796), 458; SM, 59 (1797), 49) Veit Weber, The Black Valley: 6 (AR, 23 (1796), 507-10; MM, 2 (1796), 97; MR, 21 (1796), 458; BC, 9 (1797), 560; CR, 19 (1797), 227; SM, 59 (1797), 49) Grosse, The Dagger: 5 (BC, 8 (1796), 180; CR, 16 (1796), 116; ER, 27 (1796), 77; EM, 29 (1796), 101; MR, 19 (1796), 207) Grosse, The Genius: 5 (CR, 18 (1796), 342; MM, 2 (1796), 482; BC, 10 (1797), 195; CR, 19 (1797), 227; MR, 22 (1797), 93) Naubert, Herman of Unna: 2 (BC, 3 (1794), 278-83; MR, 15 (1794), 21-27) Grosse, Horrid Mysteries: 1 (CR, 21 (1797), 473) Naubert, Alf von Deulmen: 1 (BC, 6 (1795), 189) Schiller, The Ghost-Seer: 1 (BC, 6 (1795), 188) The biggest surprise for today’s reader is probably the fact that Horrid Mysteries, later so celebrated, was, in 1797, barely noticed. This is simply due to the fact that its alternative version, The Genius, which was the first to appear in translation, and was later to disappear from view, had just been widely reviewed. The Necromancer, The Black Valley and The Sorcerer received more critical attention than The Ghost-Seer and Herman of Unna; the latter, with Kahlert’s novel, were to prove far more influential than the Veit Weber titles. Heiderich has rightly emphasized that at this time German novels received more attention in England than was given to their English counterparts in Germany.10 Given the impact in Germany of British novelists from Richardson to Sterne, and of Radcliffe and Scott, this 10

Heiderich, 39.

446 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective remarkable state of affairs means that, their Anglophilia notwithstanding, German readers tended to lump English Gothic together with German and to think of both as sub-literary, whereas for English readers anything went so long as it was sufficiently ‘horrid’ and preferably labelled ‘from the German’. Few paused to ponder the accuracy of such labels, which were in truth little more than aids to marketing. Not all the reviews that did so much to spread knowledge of the new German Gothic-type romance were enthusiastic. William Taylor, one of the few experts in the field, writing in the Monthly Review in 1796, dismissed The Genius as third-rate, and shortly afterwards he is found writing there11 of the bloated diction, extravagance of imagination, wild eccentricity of adventure, and dubious moral tone of such work, all these qualities being associated with novels ‘from the German’. The fashion for tales ‘from the German’, which often have no German component except outlandish, supposedly German names, created the impression that German influence was more widespread than it really was. German diablerie, as it was known, was all very well, but when it came (in the English Gothic novel) to exposing monkish villainy, the excesses of Catholicism, and especially of the Inquisition, Italian and Spanish backgrounds were deemed more to the point. It was also in 1796 that the reviewer in the Critical Review exaggerated in writing that ‘The principal part of [The Genius] consists of a wretched imitation of the account of the secret tribunal in the popular novel of Herman of Unna.’ Because some prominent Romantics enthused about it, Horrid Mysteries was puffed up (for the most part, one may safely surmise, unread) by later criticism, while Herman of Unna, much more influential at the time and by far the better novel, was forgotten. Later sections of this chapter consider the impact of German Gothic on major English practitioners of the genre. In general the evidence shows, not surprisingly, that the German Gothic novelists reviewed in 1794-97 are those who had most impact at this time, and that the most influential were Grosse with five instances of perceived influence, followed by Kahlert (four), Vulpius (four), Schiller (three), Veit Weber (two) and Naubert (one). Details are as follows: Grosse: Ircastrensis, Love and Horror (1815); Anna Maria MacKenzie, Düsseldorf (1798); anon., The Secret Oath; or, Blood-Stained Dagger (1802); anon., The Secret Tribunal; or, The Court of Wincelaus (1803); Mrs Sally Wood, Julia and the Illuminated Baron (1800) 11

MR, 22 (1797), 93.

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Kahlert: Frederick Chamberlain, Lucretia; or, The Robbers of the Hyrcanean Forest ( n.d.); William Godwin, St Leon (1799); Anna Maria MacKenzie, Düsseldorf (1798); C.R., Castle Zittaw (1794) Vulpius: Edward Ball, The Black Robbers (1819); anon., The Romance of the Apennines (1808); Henry Siddons, Reginald de Torby and the Twelve Robbers (1803); George Soane, Knight Daemon and Robber Chief (1812) Schiller: Edward Ball, The Black Robbers (1819); Henry Siddons, Reginald de Torby and the Twelve Robbers (1803); George Soane, Knight Daemon and Robber Chief (1812) Weber: anon., The Black Valley; or, The Castle of Rosenberg (1803) Naubert: anon., The Secret Tribunal; or, The Court of Wincelaus (1803, a chapbook bastardization of Herman of Unna]) From 1794 to 1806 ‘German’ and ‘Gothic’ were popularly supposed to be more or less synonymous, for what the ‘plague ship of German letters’ denounced by Charles Maturin in 180712 carried in her hold was, implicitly, Gothic horror-novels. In June 1807 a reviewer in the Critical Review commented on the ‘German vogue’ in English letters: So great is the rage for German tales and German novels, that a cargo is no sooner imported, than the booksellers’ shops are filled with a multitude of translators, who seize with avidity and without discrimination whatever they can lay their hands on.13

This is sadly out of date, for by then the ‘rage’ had already peaked and was rapidly cooling: the following month the Critical Review remarked, in the course of a review of Lewis’s rifacimento (Feudal Tyrants, 1806) of Benedicte Naubert’s Elisabeth Erbin von Toggenburg (1789) that We well know what we are to expect in a German work of imagination, bones, chains, dungeons, castles, forests, murders and rapine pass before us in long order, till sated with horrors [...] we regard them with as much composure as an undertaker contemplates the last melancholy rites of his mortal brethren.

Even before the German vogue in English letters peaked in 1806, talk of the ‘rage for German tales’ had represented a wild exaggeration, for in reality 12 13

Quotation from the Preface to Maturin’s Fatal Revenge (1807, repr. Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1994). Quoted from Summers, The Gothic Quest, 146.

448 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective less than twenty German ‘Gothic’ novels of any consequence ever made it into English, and some of those were of dubious quality. The ‘plague ship’ with its teeming cargo that reads like a presentiment of Dracula must be taken with a pinch of salt. Jane Austen’s Northanger Seven are a pretty German-sounding crew, but only two of them are, if not exactly ‘the genuine article’, at least German in origin. When Coleridge, slating Maturin’s Bertram in 1815 in a misleading review that was to promote much misunderstanding of the literary interrelationship under discussion, referred to German Gothic novels as ‘speaking Monsters imported from the banks of the Danube’,14 the invasion of England by the German Gothic novel had been over for almost a decade. The last, really influential collection of German Gothic ghost stories, Tales of the Dead, appeared in 1813, the year in which Lady’s Magazine stopped publishing Gothic tales. From 1814 in Britain and from 1819 (translation of Ivanhoe) in Germany Gothic fiction was largely supplanted by the Waverley novels. By the time Hoffmann’s The Devil’s Elixir (1824) and Spieß’s The Dwarf of Westerbourg (1827) appeared in English, the Gothic period proper was long over. Maturin’s Melmoth (1820), Alexis’s Walladmor (1824), De Quincey’s Klosterheim (1832), and Meinhold’s Sidonia the Sorceress (1847) are exceptions that prove the rule. In the 1840s there was, in both countries, a Gothic revival, which, thanks in part to extra-literary factors such as the impact of German Nazarene painting and of Prince Albert on the English cultural scene, had more impact in Britain than in Germany. This revival is marked by the publication of the Romancist and Novelist’s Library (8 vols, 1839-1842)15 and its German counterpart, the Bibliothek von Ritter-, Räuber- und Criminalgeschichten (10 vols, 1839-40).16 Although there were notable exceptions like Robert Huish (who studied at the university of Frankfurt am Main), M. G. Lewis (who learned his German in Weimar), Thomas De Quincey (whose German was largely selftaught, although he was helped by German friends), and George Soane (who acquired his German at Cambridge, where he graduated in 1811), at the turn of the eighteenth century very few English-language Gothic novelists could 14

15

16

Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, new edn (London: Bell, 1876), 274. The Danube tends to be mentioned in such contexts because it is the Catholic south of ‘Germany’ that is thought to be important in the Gothic context, whereas the heilige Vehme or ‘secret tribunal’ originates in the north. The volumes of The Romancist and Novelist’s Library, of which there is an original and a new series, have slightly different titles and inconsistent volume numbers (see Copac). While the inclusion of Criminalgeschichten here parallels the way in which the Gothic tale gave way to the Blackwood’s tale, it should be remembered that August Gottlieb Meissner’s Kriminalgeschichten came out in 1796.

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read German. Throughout the High Gothic period from 1790 to 1820 more English Gothic novels were translated into German than vice versa, while more novels than ever before, most of them non-Gothic, were translated into English from German, the type and quality of translation differing widely. To put such figures into perspective it is important to remember that throughout the period 1790-1830 fewer novels were translated (into English) from German than from French. Even in 1790-99 there were three translations of French novels to every two of German novels, and in 18001809 translations from French exceeded those from German by two to one. Most of those translated from German were not ‘Gothic’, and the number of German Gothic novels translated into English was surprisingly small. There were twice as many sham translations as real ones, and it was because the sham translations were generally assumed to be real ones, that German Gothic was, at the time, perceived to be far more influential than was in reality the case. Some of the best ‘translators’, including Lewis and De Quincey, chose to produce adaptations rather than translations. The rifacimento is a peculiarly Gothic form. There was, especially as regards German, more translation work available than there were competent translators to carry it out; translation was badly paid and was expected to be done at breakneck speed; that little editing was done is painfully obvious. Translations ranged from the hit-or-miss or overliteral, where the translator’s knowledge of the foreign language was not really up to the task in hand, to the over-free, to the sham translation purporting to be what it was not, to say nothing of work that concealed the fact that it was a translation, for not the least form of Gothic transgression was literary peculation. The idea of free translation, theorized by Dryden a century earlier, resurfaced in the wake of A. F. Tytler’s Essay on the Principles of Translation (1791) and in complaints about the quality of contemporary translation such as A. F. N. Willich’s ‘Letter to the editor on the inadequacy of the existing translations from the German’ in the Monthly Magazine (5 [1798], 399). It was Willich who acted as instructor to the famous Edinburgh German Class in 1792, which, according to Scott, whose German and translations from German bear out the point, involved ‘much laughing and little study’.17 Translationese, a kind of bastard Anglo-German in which English words were made to dance to German syntactic tunes, with many ‘Devil’s bridges’ of misunderstanding crossed in oblivious haste by Germanborn translators who possessed a dictionary but little knowledge of English syntax, is seen at its worst in Peter Will’s Horrid Mysteries, while the 17

On Willich, see Gillies, Recollections, 265; and Leslie Stephen, Studies of a Biographer, 4 vols (London: Duckworth, 1898-1902), Vol. 2 ‘The Importation of German’).

450 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective anonymous translation of Grosse’s Der Dolch (1794-5: The Dagger, 1795) is an example of translation at its best. The words ‘from the German’ normally meant that the text introduced by those ominous words was either a rifacimento (often presented as the ‘translator’s’ own work) or the author’s own work (presented as a translation in order to pander to fashion) or, less often, an out-and-out plagiarism. It was, of course, because of the popularity of German novels of the Gothic/sensationalist kind that English novels began, in an unprecedented act of cultural symbiosis, to take on a supposedly German hue, or to masquerade as ‘from the German’. The English Novel 1770-1829, which includes some thirty, shows that such novels outnumbered real German Gothics by almost two to one. Just as the words ‘From the German’, whether true or not, were for a time thought to lend a fashionable gloss or touch of German mustard to English Gothic sub-Radcliffian fare, so too in Germany, where Gothic novels purporting to be English in origin were, a decade later, more popular than unashamedly German ones. In Germany, as in France, novels would be attributed to Ann Radcliffe, or would pose as translations ‘from the English’. German sham attributions to Radcliffe are reviewed later in the chapter; French Radcliffades are discussed by Maurice Lévy.18 An early and revealing case in point is an anonymous German epistolary novel, Das Nonnenkloster; oder, Die Geschichte der Jungfer Sophia Howard. In zween Theilen. Aus dem Englischen übersetzt (Lübeck, 1772). Not a translation at all, but a rifacimento of the anonymous The Convent; or, The History of Julia (1767), this formed the basis of Ann Fuller’s first novel, The Convent; or, The History of Sophia Nelson (1786), hitherto assumed to be an original novel (German translation, 1788; French translation, 1790), which is in fact a rifacimento. Whether the ‘translations’ that British readers were devouring were real or phoney seems not to have mattered, and for a time this vogue had some extraordinary results. C. R.’s Castle Zittaw: A German Tale (1794),19 the earliest of its kind, which announced itself as a (phoney) ‘translation from the German’, was in reality a rifacimento of Kahlert’s The Necromancer (also 1794 in English, although C. R. may conceivably have read it in German). Anna Maria Mackenzie’s Martin and Mansfeldt; or, The Romance of Franconia (1802) came complete with an ‘Introduction by the Editor’, signed Anna Maria Mackenzie, which stated, in a take on Gothic convention, that the work was translated from an (imaginary) old German manuscript . ‘Mr Lyttleton’s’ The German Sorceress (1803) purported to be translated from a lost German 18 19

Lévy, Le roman ‹gothique› anglais 1764-1824, 479-576. C.R. may or may not be Crabb Robinson, who was nineteen at the time.

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legend, and Maria Vanzeee’s Fate; or, Spong Castle (1803) included a Preface which claimed that it was based on a German manuscript dug up in Yorkshire! Maturin, let us remember, had written in the Preface to his Fatal Revenge that The present style of novels is most piteously bewailed by those who are, or say they are, well affected to the cause of literature. Diavolerie tales fit to frighten the nursery, German horrors, are the best language they give us. Whatever literary articles have been imported in the plague ship of German letters, I heartily wish were pronounced contraband by competent inspectors. But I really conceive that the present subjects of novels and romances are calculated to unlock every store of fancy and feeling. I question whether there be a source of emotion in the mental frame so powerful or universal as the fear arising from objects of invisible terror.

Bram Stoker’s schooner Demeter, which was to dock in Whitby almost a century later, was presumably based on Maturin’s ‘plague ship’, but so too was the pirate ship in Willibald Alexis’s Walladmor, symbol of the smuggling and literary piracy in which Alexis was engaged as he played with the key metaphors of the novel. Plagiarism, pastiche and sham translation are part and parcel of the Gothic novel.20 Walladmor, famously refashioned by De Quincey, was only the most daring and, in literary terms, the most thoughtprovoking, of such forgeries. In the Gothic novel and tale supposedly German names abound (some thirty novels have German names and settings), many of them showing nothing more clearly than the author’s ignorance of German onomastics, and German castles, forests full of banditti, and attendant horrors, are as de rigueur as Italian and Spanish villains and villainesses of a monkish or nunnish hue, all of them reflecting the long life - till 1834 in Spain, till 1859 in Italy; in northern Germany it was abolished at the Reformation - of the Inquisition. Leaving aside the Northanger novels, two of which are translations from the German, while three describe themselves as ‘a German story’ or ‘a German tale’, other novels indebted to Germany, most of them proclaiming the fact, include Clara Reeve, The Exiles; or, The Memoirs of the Count de Cronstadt (1788), based on d’Arnaud’s ‘D’Almanzi’ (in Vol. 4 of his Suite des épreuves du sentiment, 1776), which influenced Harriet Lee’s Kruitzner and the anonymous Cronstadt Castle; The Cavern of Death: A Moral Tale (1794), involving a usurper by the name of Baron Dornheim;C. R., Castle Zittaw: A 20

On these ‘confusing translations, adaptations and re-adaptations’, see Daniel Hall, ‘The Gothic Tide: Schauereroman and Gothic Novel in the Late Eighteenth Century’, in The Novel in Anglo-German Context, ed. Stark, 51-60. On novels falsely attributed to Mrs Radcliffe, see Trainer, 24f.

452 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective German Tale (1794), in large measure an imitation of Kahlert’s The Necromancer, published earlier that year; Anna Maria Mackenzie, Dusseldorf; or, The Fratricide (1798), an imitation of Kahlert’s The Necromancer and Grosse’s Horrid Mysteries; Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland; or, The Transformation (1798); Sarah Lansdell, The Tower (1798), set in a German tower; The Prophetic Warning; or, The Castle of Lindendorff (1800); Harriet Lee, Kruitzner (1801); Shrewtzer Castle; or, The Perfidious ırother, A German Romance (1802), a sham translation; The Black Valley; or, The Castle of Rosenberg (1803), a crude, abridged counterfeit of Veit Weber’s Das schwarze Tal; Cronstadt Castle; or, The Mysterious Visitor (1803); The Forest of Hohenelbe: A Tale (1803); Lyttleton, The German Sorceress (1803), which claims to be a translation of a German legend, borrows from Veit Weber’s The Sorcerer and Catherine Smith’s Barozzi; The Secret Tribunal; or, The Court of Wincelaus (1803), a plagiarized, abridged imitation of several similar works; Thomas Pike Lathy, Usurpation; or, The Inflexible Uncle (1805), which features a villainous uncle by the name of Baron Rofestein; Baron de Falkenheim: A Tale (1806); Charlotte Dacre, The Passions (1811), an epistolary craft manned by a motley German crew; P. B. Shelley, St. Irvyne (1811); George Soane, Knight, Daemon and Robber Chief (1812), a work, by one of the best translators from German of the time, that borrows from Goethe, Schiller and Vulpius; Mrs Ross, The Strangers of Lindenfeldt (1813); Edward Ball, The Black Robber, a Romance (1819), a Mischmasch of Schiller and Vulpius; Margaret Holford, Warbeck of Wolfstein (1820); The Horrible Revenge (1828), a chapbook set in Swabia; Thomas De Quincey, Klosterheim, (1832); and so on. No doubt there are (or were) others. Smart readers in Britain for a time preferred ‘German tales’ to British ones, and vice versa; in either case the market supplied them. The fact that Scott, as late as 1814, seriously considered subtitling Waverley ‘A Romance from the German’, but in the event did not do so, speaks for itself. With such a title, Scott asks, what head so obtuse as not to image forth a profligate abbot, an oppressive duke, a secret and mysterious association of Rosycrucians and Illuminati, with all their properties of black cowls, caverns, daggers, electrical machines, trapdoors, and dark lanterns?

The founding of The German Museum or Monthly Repository of the Literature of Germany, the North and the Continent in General (printed for C[onstantine] Geisweiler [of 42 Parliament Street, Westminster] and the Proprietors, 3 numbers, January 1800 to June 1801), to which many of the German literati in London21 briefly contributed, set out to ‘make the English reader more 21

One of whom, the Rev. Peter Will (1764-1839, Minister in charge of the Reformed

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intimately acquainted with the literary labours of Germany’ - an endeavour in which it must be deemed to have failed since it ran aground shortly after being launched. By then the boat had been missed: the popularity of German literature had peaked in 1798, and that of German Gothic was already on the wane. After 1806 a reaction set in, and German literature, especially drama - a more dangerously public form than the novel - was, for a time, seen as ‘Gothic’ mainly in the old pejorative sense of ‘barbaric’. Among the reasons for this failure wartime xenophobia was the most obvious and British fear of continental Jacobinism the most important. After being greeted in the mid-1790s with excessive enthusiasm, German literature was, by the late 1790s, ‘demonized by being associated with French revolutionary excess’.22 In two extremely influential books, Abbé Barruel’s Mémoires pour servir à l’Histoire du Jacobinisme (4 vols, London, 1797-8; Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism, tr. Robert Clifford (London: Burton, 1798) and John Robison’s Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe (Edinburgh, 1797), it was linked with atheism and Jacobinism. A correspondent of Der Genius der Zeit (17 (1799), 498) went further, describing the German writers and philosophers of the time as being, to a man, Freemasons, Illuminati and ‘leidenschaftliche Beförderer der königsmörderischen französischen Freiheit’ (passionate supporters of the regicidal French notion of Liberty). It is true that writers like Herder, Goethe and Wieland were Masons, and that Herder and Goethe and many German academics were Illuminati. Many German men of letters had supported the French Revolution, but were horrified by the Terror. In England the first fact was better known than the second. The Anti-Jacobin and its successor, The Anti-Jacobin Review, took much the same view as Der Genius der Zeit. Coleridge, reviewing Lewis’s The Monk back in February 1797, had already argued that any attempt to import German horrors [into] Britain would precipitate a decline of its literature’,23 but the following year (4 and 11 June 1798) the The Anti-Jacobin went much further when, with the cases of Goethe’s Stella (English translation, 1798) and Schiller’s The Robbers in mind, it implicitly defined German drama as ‘morally promiscuous and bent on overthrowing all government’. It was because of The Anti-Jacobin’s anti-German stance that Scott decided to put off publication of his

22 23

German Congregation in the Savoy, and best known as translator of Grosse’s landmark Horrid Mysteries), gave Peter Pindar’s term ‘pulpit terrorist’ a new meaning. Gamer, 222. See also David Simpson, Romanticism, Nationalism and the Revolt against Theory (University of Chicago Press, 1993). Michael Gamer, Romanticism and the Gothic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 77.

454 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective ‘Germanized brat’,24 The House of Aspen, which in the event did not appear until 1830. The famous burlesque, The Rovers; or, The Double Disappointment. A Drama Written in imitation of the German Drama, appeared in the Anti-Jacobin Review in 1798 and was probably written by John Hookham Frere. A footnote glosses The Robbers as ‘a German tragedy, in which Robbery is put in so fascinating a light that the whole of a German University went upon the highway in consequence of it’.25 The Rovers marked the point beyond which the tide began to turn, although the record is confused, for the vogue for the ‘German tale’, dating from 1794, lingered on until 1806. Things went so far that in 1799 the European Magazine published an ‘Ode to German Drama’ beginning ‘Daughter of Night, Chaotic Queen!’ and going on ‘Bound in thy necromantic spell / The audience taste the joys of hell,’ that was applicable, rather, to the German Gothic novel. Seeking to cash in on the success of the Anti-Jacobin Review’s Schiller parody of the previous year, The Meteors(17991800: No III, 1799) set out to ridicule The Robbers under the heading of The Benevolent Cutthroat. The Gentleman’s Magazine (35 [1800]. 260), in an ‘Ode on the Prevalence of the German Drama’, asked, rhetorically, ‘Say, from what cause proceeds the modern rage / Of German dramas on the English stage? / Must British tears for ever cease to flow / Save through the fount which streams from German woe?’ That the German and German-inspired Gothic-style drama survived such attacks may seem to be suggested by the fact that The Rovers was revived in 1811 as The Quadrupeds of Quedlingburgh; or the Rovers of Weimar. Tragico-Comico-Anglo-Germanico-Hippo-Ono-DramaticoRomance, but by now people were laughing at the absurdities of the past; German drama was now’beyond the reach of ridicule’,26 its vogue destroyed by the notion, still being propagated by Hazlitt in 1820, that the German dramatists of the day were, to a man, ‘incorrigible Jacobins’.27 Just three years previously Coleridge had been instrumental in founding the ‘Friends of German Literature’ whose first guest was Tieck.

24 25 26 27

The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, ed. H. J. C. Grierson (London: Constable, 1932), I, 124. Canning and Frere, Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin (1799, repr.Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1991), 168. The reference is to Göttingen university, a hotbed of Illuminism. V. Stockley, German Literature as Known in England 1750-1830 (London: Routledge, 1929, 188-190. Hazlitt, Complete Works, ed. E. P. Howe, 21 vols (London: Dent, 1930-4), VI, 362.

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II Ann Radcliffe In terms of the impact of German Gothic on English writers the most important writer is arguably not the Germanophile M. G. Lewis, but the seemingly so English, so insular and conservative Ann Radcliffe, who made her name in the wake of the French Revolution. It has repeatedly been said that she could not read German, but this does not follow from the evidence. The fact is that her A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794, through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany (1795, repr. Olms, 1975) includes lengthy excerpts in English from a German pamphlet about the French occcupation of Mainz, and in Freiburg she and her husband were mistaken for Germans (presumably because William Radcliffe addressed him in German) by an illiterate Piedmontese lieutenant de place in the Austrian service. It therefore seems most likely that she and/or her antiquarian husband, who encouraged her to write, and who was known to be a ‘brilliant linguist’,28 could read German. This may account for the fact that Schedoni in The Italian bears what seems to be a more than generic likeness to Père Luprian in Naubert’s Elisabeth, Erbin von Toggenburg (1789), which did not appear in English till 1806. Scott supposed the visit to Germany to have left its mark on the descriptive background to Udolpho: the mouldering castles of the robber-chivalry of Germany, situated on the wild and romantic banks of [the Rhine], seem to have given a bolder flight to her imagination, and a more glowing character to her colouring, than are exhibited in The Romance of the Forest.29

This would have made more sense if the journey had taken place in 1793, as Scott thought it did; in reality The Mysteries of Udolpho was published in April 1794, before the journey in question was undertaken. Radcliffe and Schiller Opinions have long been divided on whether or not Ann Radcliffe ‘drank of German sources’.30 This is no longer in doubt. Even if she could not read German herself, which has never been proved, she will have had access to the celebrated German texts of the day via her linguist husband. One of her 28 29 30

DNB. The implication is that he knew not only French, but German and Italian too. Sir Walter Scott on Novelists and Fiction, ed. Ioan Williams (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1968), 104. Beers, quoted from Tompkins, Ann Radcliffe, 92

456 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective favourite works, Schiller’s Die Räuber (1781: The Robbers, tr. A. F. Tytler [later Lord Woodhouselee], 1792), left its mark on her; it is characteristic of her, and an entirely Schillerian point of view, that while attracted aesthetically by Schiller’s robbers, she withholds her moral sympathy. Cian Duffy has shown that the words ‘those faint traces which the memory bears of music that is past’ (Udolpho, Vol. II, ch. 1) derive from Tytler’s translation of Die Räuber (Act II, [Sc. 1]), where they are spoken by Amelia to Old Moor.31 In Montoni and Schedoni there is something of the Titanic stature and glorification of the will, even something of the sophistry of these Revolutionary heroes [the reference is to Schiller’s robbers], but the author never once permits our sympathies to go out to them.32

Given her great admiration for Die Räuber and the nature of her literary interests and enthusiasms, it was always a racing certainty that Ann Radcliffe would read and be no less impressed by Der Geisterseher, which appears to have been the immediate source of the explained supernatural in the German and English Gothic novel.The only uncertainty is whether she read it in German or in English. The Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine, in 1801, implied that her ‘mysteries’ were ‘rather German than English’. Evidence that Radcliffe was indebted to the German Gothic romance is to be found not in incidental details of her novels, or in their ground plan, which derives from Mme d’Aulnoy, but in the parallel between the explained supernatural as found in Schiller (1787-9), Tschink (1789[1790]-93) and Kahlert (1790) on the one hand and Radcliffe (1790-7) on the other. In this sense her novels are indeed ‘rather German than English’. The ‘explained supernatural’, a feature of late Enlightenment thinking that is found in Smollett’s Ferdinand Count Fathom in 1753, is first found, in the form of ‘exposed magic’, in the German ghost-seer novel in 1787-9, and lasted until 1799; Heinrich Jung-Stilling’s Theorie der Geisterkunde, oder Was von Ahnungen, Gesichten und Geistererscheinungen geglaubt und nicht geglaubt werden müßte, published in 1808, was a late attempt to come to terms with the superstition of the age, the irrationalism of the age of reason. Assuming that either Ann Radcliffe or her husband could read German, it is likely that she got the mechanism of the ‘explained supernatural’ from German models read in German in the form of Schiller’s Der Geisterseher and Tschink’s Wundergeschichten sammt dem Schlüssel zu ihrer Erklärung, both of 31 32

Cian Duffy, ‘Faint traces which the memory bears’: A Radcliffe source in Schiller’, Notes and Queries, 247 (2002), 447-9. Tompkins, Ann Radcliffe, 95.

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them published (in book form) in 1789, and of Tschink’s Geschichte eines Geistersehers (1790-93), and that it was partly through her that it was subsequently passed on to other distinguished German writers such as Hoffmann. The ‘parallel between the „explained supernatural“ and the debunking of the pseudo-scientific deception, the „original smoke and mirrors“ practised by the Armenian in Der Geisterseher’, which Trainer found ‘very striking’,33 most likely means that before writing Udolpho she had read Schiller’s novel, in German, or that her husband had done so and explained its machinery to her. The first English translation did not appear until 1795, one year after The Mysteries of Udolpho. It was Schiller’s ‘spectacular supernaturalism’ that made Der Geisterseher such an attractive model for German and English novelists of the time. It seems that the idea of the ‘explained supernatural’ may derive from Schiller, the rest being brilliant elaboration, although, as ‘the inevitable compromise between romantic emotions and an enlightened judgment’,34 it need not be indebted to anyone, despite the suggestive timing. The main difference between Schiller and Radcliffe is that whereas Schiller and his German imitators expose the machinations of charlatans whose ‘phantasmagoria’ or magical effects are designed to deceive the gullible, Radcliffe and her followers show how easily the mind may mislead itself into supposing the supernatural to be at work, although Schiller and Tschink in particular are concerned with both aspects. Schiller, while sharing Radcliffe’s view of superstition and credulity in general, goes further in concentrating on the criminality of those who gull the gullible for their own pecuniary or other ends. There are also minor thematic links between The Mysteries of Udolpho and Der Geisterseher that confirm the impact of Der Geisterseher on Udolpho, which has hitherto been discounted because it was thought that Radcliffe did not read German and, implicitly, that her husband did not do so either. L. F. Thompson established in 1925 that some details from Der Geisterseher went into the forging of Radcliffe’s Udolpho villain, Montoni,35 and C. F. McIntyre pointed out that Udolpho also provided a source for the description of a trip on the Brenta,36 so it is clear that she knew Schiller’s novel prior to writing Udolpho. By the time of The Italian (1797) there is further evidence that Radcliffe had read Schiller’s novel, either in German or, for by then it was available in translation, in English. Tompkins was the first to notice that the plan of The Italian,

33 34 35 36

Trainer, 14. Tompkins, Ann Radcliffe, 110. L. F. Thompson, ‘Ann Radcliffe’s Knowledge of German’, MLR, 20 (1925), 190f. C. F. McIntyre, Ann Radcliffe in Relation to her Time (London: Milford, 1920) 62.

458 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective the first half of which is dominated by Schedoni, who, in the second, summons up the dread society to fill the scene, and himself shrinks before it, is [close] to the plan of certain German romances which became known in England between 1794 and 1796.37

The romances in question are Schiller’s The Ghost-Seer, two novels which derive from it (Tschink’s The Victim of Magical Delusion and Grosse’s Horrid Mysteries), and Naubert’s Herman of Unna. By far the most important is The Ghost-Seer, although Tschink’s ‘novel’ would also have interested her, for, like The Ghost-Seer, it is in reality ‘an attack upon popular superstition, and the belief in magical operations, or those disguised appearances which ignorance induces many to think supernatural’.38 All four novels, the talk of literary England in the run up to The Italian, each of them more elaborately Gothic than the one before, work to the pattern established by Schiller and involve the nefarious activities of secret societies, the appearance of the society being heralded in the first three by that of a mysterious monklike individual, who turns out to be an associate or emissary of the society. Tompkins, assuming that Radcliffe read Grosse’s Horrid Mysteries (1796: Memoiren des Marquis von G***s, 1792-5) in English,39 saw some evidence of its influence on The Italian; but if she read it or its companion piece, Der Genius (1791-4), in German, it could also have affected Udolpho. These German romances featuring different kinds of secret society have in common those heart-shaking moments, when the ground rings suddenly hollow under a young man’s feet, when incidents, believed fortuitous, are seen to be pregnant with disquieting meaning, and he gropes onward, to find his energy baffled at every point, until he is precipitated into the appalling, though still only half-understood power of the society.40

Tompkins argued that, although necromancy was a German speciality, Such moments as these invited imitation, although the German theme as a whole was not naturalized in England, and as many of them as would bear transplanting were reset by Mrs Radcliffe in the Inquisition scenes of The Italian’, which is unique among novels influenced by Der Geisterseher in ‘maintaining a focus on the Inquisition as the truly dangerous ‘secret tribunal’.41

37 38 39 40 41

Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England, 281. Critical Review, 15 (1795), 63f. See Tompkins, Ann Radcliffe, ch. 4. Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England, 284. Miles, in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, 52.

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At this point Radcliffe borrows from Schiller’s The Ghost-Seer, where the Prince, accompanied by the Count, is arrested and taken to face the tribunal of the Inquisition: Hier erwartete uns eine Gondel, in die wir uns setzen mußten. Ehe wir ausstiegen, wurden uns die Augen verbunden. Man führte uns eine große steinerne Treppe hinauf und dann durch einen langen gewundenen Gang über Gewölbe, wie ich aus dem vielfachen Echo schloß, das unter unsern Füßen hallte. Endlich gelangten wir vor eine andere Treppe, welche uns sechsundzwanzig Stufen in die Tiefe hinunterführte. Hier öffnete sich ein Saal, wo man uns die Binde wieder von den Augen nahm. Wir befanden uns in einem Kreise ehrwürdiger alter Männer, alle schwarz gekleidet, der ganze Saal mit schwarzen Tüchern behangen und sparsam erleuchtet, eine Totenstille in der ganzen Versammlung, welches einen schreckhaften Eindruck machte. (Der Geisterseher, early in the first book) (We embarkedin a waiting goldola and were blindfolded before we landed. Then we were led up a substantial stone staircase, and through a long [winding passage] over vaults, as I judged from the echoes that resounded under our feet. At last we came to another staircase, and having descended twenty-six steps, we entered a spacious hall, where they took the bandage from our eyes. We found ourselves in a circle of venerable old men, all dressed in black. The hall was hung round with black, and faintly illuminated. The deathly silence which reigned in the assembly struck us with awe.)42

The Inquisition scenes in Der Geisterseher and The Italian have two main points in common, both of them symbolically necessary: the deathly silence and the omnipresence of the colour black. Schiller’s scene is the more dramatic, for within fifteen lines the Prince and Count O. see, with horror, the head of the accused severed from his body, a Gothic coup de foudre that takes some beating, but, poetic elaboration being one of her strong points, it is the drama-queen Radcliffe who wrings every last drop of drama from her Inquisition scenes. There are also differences: Schiller has a circle of venerable old men, Radcliffe just two men. In detail, on the other hand, the Inquisition scenes in The Italian have been shown to owe more to Philippus Van Limborch’s The History of the Inquisition43 than to Schiller, Naubert or Grosse.

42 43

Schiller, The Ghostseer, or Apparitionist, tr. D. Boileau (London: Vernon & Hood, 1795), 198f. I have made a few minor changes. See John Thomson, ‘Ann Radcliffe’s Use of Philippus Van Limborch’s The History of the Inquisition,’ English Language Notes, 18 (1980), 31-3, and Philip a Limborch, The History of the Inquisition, tr. Samuel Chandler (London: Gray, 1731; repr. London: Simpkin & Marshall, 1816).

460 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective There is a further connection between The Ghost-Seer and The Italian as regards the first meeting of Vivaldi and the monk. The important figure is Schedoni, in whom we see ‘traces of the man of mystery - [Schiller’s] Armenian [...] - who first enmeshes the hero’. Tompkins writes that ‘The face that is the frozen mask of extinct passions, the piercing eye that none can endure unabashed, the supple charm of bearing which at need replaces the accustomed austerity - these are the mark of Schiller’s Armenian’,44 and leaves the following passages to speak for themselves: Schiller’s Geisterseher (1795 translation). Never in my life did I see such various features, and so little expression; so much attractive benevolence, and so much repelling coldness in the same face; each passion seemed, by turns, to have exercised its ravages on it, and to have left it successively. Nothing remained but the calm piercing look of a person deeply skilled in the science of man; but it was such a look as abashed everyone on whom it was directed. Grosse’s Horrid Mysteries. A sparkling, majestic eye was [...] the only feature of a once handsome face that he had been able to save from the extinction of passion. His features bore eloquent signs that they had successively been the seat of every passion which, after being nursed up, had partaken of the general seizure of his lineaments apparently produced by some horrid incident. The wrecks of former violent passions could still be perceived on his countenance; and whenever one of them reappeared, all the rest seemed to revive along with it.45 Mrs Radcliffe’s Italian. There was something in his physiognomy extremely singular and that cannot easily be defined. It bore the traces of many passions that seemed to have fixed the features they no longer animated. An habitual gloom and severity prevailed over the deep lines of his countenance; and his eyes were so piercing, that they seemed to penetrate, at a single glance, into the hearts of men, and to read their most secret thoughts; few persons could support their scrutiny or even endure to meet them twice. Yet, notwithstanding all this gloom and austerity, some rare occasions of interest had called forth a character upon his countenance entirely different; and he could adapt himself to the tempers and passions of persons whom he wished to conciliate with astounding facility and generally with complete triumph.46 44 45 46

Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England, 285. I have had to amend Peter Will’s translation. Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England, 376f.

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Radcliffe is evidently paraphrasing from and elaborating on Schiller’s passage in Der Geisterseher. The Mysteries of Udolpho includes details that suggest that she may also have read, in German, Spieß’s Das Petermännchen (1791-2)and Naubert’s Elizabeth, Erbin von Toggenburg: in the former there is a torch-light funeral procession similar to the one in Udolpho; in the latter robbers cause the deserted wing of a castle to be considered haunted.47 Harriet Lee, too, like Radcliffe, was impressed by Die Räuber and influenced by Der Geisterseher. The mysterious Hungarian in her Kruitzner is reminiscent of the Armenian, and it may well be from him that Kruitzner inherited the Gothic ‘eye which darted forward a fire that seemed like new-created light upon the world’.48 Radcliffe and Naubert: see Chapter 4. M. G. Lewis Oppel is right to argue that Lewis received from Germany more than he gave to it. Unlike Radcliffe, Lewis has long been supposed to be fundamentally indebted to German Gothic, although the details and attendant controversy are little known. This is, however, an oversimplification, for Radcliffe appears to have inherited a major feature of her work, the explained supernatural, from Schiller and his imitators, while Lewis, magpie-like, merely took minor bits and pieces from wherever he found them, ending up with the reputation of being more of a magpie than he actually was; in particular, he has been credited with a far wider knowledge of the German Gothic novel than he actually possessed. At Oxford he began work on ‘a romance, in the style of The Castle of Otranto,’ that was subsequently remodelled into The Castle Spectre (drama, 1798, translated by Ludwig Wieland as Evelina oder das Burggespenst, 1804), which was also indebted to The Mysteries of Udolpho and Die Räuber. He was sufficiently impressed by Zschokke’s Abällino der große Bandit, Naubert’s Elisabeth Erbin von Toggenburg and Kleist’s Die Familie Schroffenstein topublish rifacimenti of them under his own name. His interaction with Zschokke is discussed below; the more important relationship with Naubert was analysed in Chapter 3, and the no less important, two-way relationship with Kleist was consided at length in Chapter 9. He also published, in the second volume of Romantic Tales, a translation of F. M. Klinger’s Der Faust der Morgenländer as Amorassan, which Frank has rightly described as ‘orientalized 47 48

In the latter case the inspiration may have come from Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron. Canterbury Tales (London: Colburn & Bentley, 1832), II: 138.

462 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Gothic containing strong reminders of Beckford’s Vathek’, although the reminders are indirect: Der Faust der Morgenländer (1796) betrays a knowledge of Tieck’s Abdallah (1795), which was influenced by Vathek. A. W. Schlegel merely exaggerated when he remarked that The Monk was ‘aus schlechten deutschen [Romanen] zusammengeborgt und nachgeahmt’ (borrowed from and written in imitation of second-rate German novels),49 for later studies of Lewis’s German sources have shown that there was more than a little truth in what he said.50 Tompkins, normally so reliable, wrote that with Lewis’s The Monk the German Schauerroman begins to affect the Gothic romance, and henceforward many of these books betray German influence, either by a delight in the physically repulsive, in monkish immorality, deeds of violence and such themes as are found in the drama of the Stürmer und Dränger, or by the grotesque treatment of the supernatural, and the use of crude, physical images to convey emotion.51

She then proceeds to play down her statement, no doubt because evidence is lacking to back it up. ‘Monkish immorality’ is a feature of the German Klostergeschichte of the 1780s, whence it was transplanted to the German Gothic novel as such. That the English Gothic novel enters a cruder phase with Lewis is not in doubt, but the way in which this crudity spreads is down to the influence of The Monk, not of the German Gothic novel as such, which could not have been known to most of the later English-language Gothic novelists since its cruder specimens were not translated. Most of the German Gothic novels that were translated were not Schauerromane as such. The most lurid parts of The Monk are Lewis’s own. There is no evidence that he knew any equally lurid German work; indeed, the German work he knew was less violent, less prurient than The Monk. The lesser and later English Gothic novelists, while sometimes pretending, for commercial reasons, that their work came from the German, derived such ‘lurid force’ as they had from Lewis, from novels purporting to be ‘from the German’, and from their own fevered imaginations, rather than from Germany. It was The Monk that caused British critics to dub Lewis a pupil of ‘the wild German school’. George Daniel, writing in 1827,52 called it ‘German from beginning to end’. Lewis’s ‘full avowal’ of all the plagiarisms of which 49 50 51 52

A. W. Schlegel, Vorlesungen über schöne Literatur und Kunst, ed. J. Minor (Heilbronn: Henninger, 1884), II: 36. See Guthke, Englische Vorromantik, 1-111. Tompkins, Ann Radcliffe, 114. George Daniel, in Lewis, ‘The Castle Spectre,’ Cumberland’s British Theatre, XV (1827), 10.

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he was himself aware was not only disingenuous; it was deliberately misleading: he was admitting to a few ‘plagiarisms’ in order to draw attention away from others. Leaving aside a considerable debt to Goethe’s Faust, The Monk has been shown to be indebted to Schiller’s Der Geisterseher, Kahlert’s Der Geisterbanner, Naubert’s ‘Die Fischer’ and ‘Die weiße Frau’, Spieß’s Das Petermännchen, Veit Weber’s Die Teufelsbeschwörung, and Naubert’s Elisabeth, Erbin von Toggenburg, which Lewis translated (as Feudal Tyrants) before writing The Monk, left its mark on it in important general ways. As we have seen, this is the novel from which he learned to write his own kind of Gothic novel, which he arrived at by contrast with Feudal Tyrants. The Raymond episode shows that he knew Der Geisterseher. The Strasbourg episode, on the other hand, is copied from Kahlert, who probably took it from Ferdinand Count Fathom, for Hadley was right to wonder whether Kahlert were not indebted to English Gothic: if the English reading public had not found in Kahlert’s The Necromancer (1794) elements with which they were already familiar in Walpole, Reeve and Charlotte Smith, and indeed if Kahlert had not found them there as well.53

Be this as it may - the apparent non-existence in German of the first edition of Der Geisterbanner and the unreliability of the English so-called translation make it impossible to arrive at a verdict - the ending of the first edition of The Monk was taken almost verbatim from Veit Weber’s Die Teufelsbeschwörung, which had been translated into English the previous year; Lewis silently acknowledged the plagiarism by changing the wording of the ending in the second edition of his novel. Charlotte Dacre then borrowed it from Lewis for the ending of Zofloya. Lewis’s Matilda is based on figures in two of Benedicte Naubert’s Volksmärchen, ‘Die Fischer’ and ‘Ottbert’. Lewis showed, in a letter to Scott, that he knew and had read Naubert’s Neue Volksmärchen der Deutschen,54 which also gave him the story of the Bleeding Nun (Naubert’s ‘Die weiße Frau’). So far as his Matilda is concerned, he does not simply take over a Madonna figure and a false woman figure (Beatrix) from Naubert, for his Matilda is not a false woman à la Naubert, but a false Madonna and, what is historically more important, the archetypal femme fatale. As such she is, as we have seen, the ancestor of Meinhold’s Sidonia. This means, as Guthke was the first to argue,55 that in The Monk Lewis has created a new, fully Romantic 53 54 55

Hadley, 130. Naubert’s Neue Volksmärchen der Deutschen, was reprinted in four volumes by Wallstein Verlag of Göttingen in 2001. See III: 7-130, IV: 187-259. See Hilary Brown, 119, to whom my wording is indebted; Karl S. Guthke, ‘Die

464 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective type of Gothic fiction in which supernatural occurrences no longer turn out to have rational explanations à la Radcliffe, but symbolize the precariousness of human existence in the face of forces that, as in the case of Kleist, are at best inscrutable and often evil. Tieck’s over-excited first reading of the first two parts of Der Genius took place in June 1792, at which time Grosse’s novel, well received in Germany, was on the way to becoming the literary sensation of the season. Given (i) that Lewis was in Weimar from July 1792 to the end of February 1793, (ii) that he read some of the work of some Gothic or reputedly Gothic writers including Kahlert, Naubert, Spieß and Weber, and (iii) that The Monk is built on the pattern of novels like Der Genius, in which Grosse (too) toyed with eroticism for its own sake - one of the main negative criticisms of The Monk (begun in July 1794) - the question arises whether Lewis read Der Genius during or after his time in Weimar. The second part of Der Genius was published just two months before he arrived in Weimar to learn German and explorecontemporary German literature. Given that he read Kahlert and Spieß, it is, notwithstanding Guthke’s statement that there was no evidence that Lewis read any German ‘subliterarische Populärromane’ (subliterary popular novels), difficult to believe that he did not read at least the first two parts of Grosse’s novel. If this was indeed the case, one need look no further for German influence on the eroticism of The Monk, although it amounts to little more than German encouragement for Lewis to be himself. Lewis obtained ‘the Legend of the Bleeding Nun, Lindenberg Castle and the proposed abduction of Agnes, together with the episode in which Raymond appears’,56 all of which feature in The Monk, from Musäus’s tale ‘Die Entführung’,57 and was evidently also impressed by the tale ‘Die weiße Frau’ in Naubert’s collection.58 However, the idea that Musäus was ‘personally known to and often discussed German literature with Lewis when „the Monk“ was residing in [Weimar]’59 is apocryphal and fanciful. At the time of Musäus’s death in 1787 Lewis was twelve; he did not go to Weimar until 1792. That he knew not only Musäus’s Volksmärchen der Deutschen but also Naubert’s Neue Volksmärchen der Deutschen is shown by his letter of 2 October 1807 to Walter Scott:

56 57 58 59

Herkunft des weltliterarischen Typus der „Femme Fatale“ aus der deutschen Volkssage,’ Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, 6 (1956), 294ff; Guthke, Englische Vorromantik, 33f; Praz, The Romantic Agony, 192-5. Railo, 345. J. K. A. Musäus, Volksmärchen der Deutschen (Munich: Winkler, 1948), 247-276. Benedikte Naubert, Neue Volksmärchen der Deutschen, 4 vols (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2001), III, 89-130. M. Summers, The Gothic Quest, 223.

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Besides Musäus’s five volumes (in which by the bye [sic] I found the same tradition employed under the name of ‘Die Entführung’ which furnished me with the Bleeding Nun) I have read five more volumes entitled ‘Neue Volksmärchen der Deutschen’.60

He most likely got to know both sets of Volksmärchen while he was in Weimar in 1792, the year in which Naubert’s collection completed publication. Lewis and Zschokke (The Bravo of Venice) Heinrich Zschokke’s novel Abällino, der große Bandit (1794, 3rd edn, 1823; dramatized as tragedy, 1795, 3rd edn, 1806, revised 1828) was translated by Lewis, without acknowledgment of Zschokke as the original author, as The Bravo of Venice, A Romance (1805, many subsequent editions; dramatized as Rugantino; or, The Bravo of Venice, melodrama, 1805, enjoyed by Tieck on his visit to England in 1817). In America a translation and adaptation for the theatre by Brockden Brown’s friend William Dunlap appeared as Abaellino the Great Bandit (1802). Lewis’s title is more accurate than Zschokke’s: the bravo is the assassin or hired killer, a Gothic type deriving from Zschokke, quite different from the Robin-Hood-like bandit of Vulpius. Generally regarded, on the strength of its German title, as the first great German Räuberroman, Zschokke’s Abällino came out in 1794, a year after Lewis had left Weimar with the intention of becoming ‘purveyor of German materials to the English Romantic movement’.61 Popular from the start, it was soon dramatized with extraordinary success, and was - the robber-novel being particularly prone to literary robbery - inevitably copied by others. Zschokke, like Vulpius, also copied his own work, in his case in Giulio degli Obizzi; oder, Abällino unter den Calabresen (novel, 1805-6). Abällino was neither Zschokke’s first ‘Gothic’ work, nor was it his last. His first novel, Die schwarzen Brüder, eine abenteuerliche Geschichte (novel, 1791-5; 3rd imp., 1800), which is devoted to a secret society that is more benevolent than its name (The Black Brothers) implies, ends with a vision of Europe in the 23rd century, its prosperity secured by the philanthropic Black Brothers; it is an original twist on the secret society that is normally seen as sinister - in Vulpius’s Rinaldo Rinaldini the ‘black brothers’ are a gang of revolutionaries. Zschokke’s other Gothic works include Die Männer der Finsternis (novel, 1795), Kuno von Kyburg nahm die Silberlocke des Enthaupteten und ward Zerstörer des heimlichen Vehmgerichts (novel, 1795), Die Zauberin Sidonia (drama, 1798), and 60 61

Quoted from Guthke, Englische Vorromantik, 177. Peck, 14.

466 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Drakomira mit dem Schlangenringe oder die nächtlichen Wanderer in den Schreckensgefängnissen von Karlstein bei Prag. Eine Schauergeschichte aus Böhmens grauer Vorzeit (1847).62 Guthke has shown that Lewis’s The Bravo of Venice, far from being a free translation of Zschokke’s dramatization, as had been supposed, is based on the original novel, of which it is for the most part a close translation. The opening of Zschokke’s best-known romance is Romantic and Gothic (we see a solitary stranger sitting beside the Grand Canal at midnight, proclaiming ‘Dreadful is the destiny of which I am made the sport’). Zschokke was indebted to Schiller for this reference to Das Spiel des Schicksals and the combination of love and intrigue,63 so that it was perhaps appropriate that Lewis substituted a few names from Schiller’s Fiesco for Zschokke’s names of minor characters.64 Gothic are the setting, the atmosphere of tension and terror, the banditti, murder and conspiracy, the hero-villain and his triple identity, Abaellino’s pursuit of his prey, the assassin’s disguise and masquerade, the beauty and the beast motif (Rosabella and Abaellino, the latter being explicitly ogre-like in appearance, although this proves to be but a mask). Gothic, too, is the way in which Lewis suppresses Zschokke’s name, half-implying that he himself is the author. He departed from the original text in two related ways: I must confess, that in making this translation I have taken some liberties with the original. Everything that relates to Monaldeschi (a personage who does not exist in the German romance) and the whole of the concluding chapter (with the exception of a very few sentences) have been added by myself. (5th edn, 1807, v-vi)

The introduction of Count Monaldeschi, a figure Lewis found in Zschokke’s early tragedy Graf Monaldeschi oder Männerbund und Weiberwuth (1790),65 is important in the present context, for Monaldeschi is the means whereby Lewis brought Zschokke’s thriller (an ‘electric’ Räuberroman) closer to the English Gothic novel. By making Monaldeschi the rival in love and thus the ‘inveterate enemy’ of Rosalvo/Abaellino, Lewis has further gothified Zschokke’s novel:

62 63 64 65

I have been unable to locate a copy of Drakomira. The reference is to Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe, of which Lewis’s The Minister was a translation. See Guthke, Englische Vorromantik, 209. The title rings a change on Veit Weber’s Männerschwur und Weibertreue.

Anglo-German Interactions 467 Zur Aufbauform des Schauerromans gehört es [...] eine ausführliche [...] fast in sich geschlossene Vorgeschichte zu bringen, die [...] alle Handlungsvoraussetzungen enthält. Lewis selbst wendete diese Technik noch in der Nebenhandlung des Monk an[...] In The Bravo of Venice ist [...] der Stoff der Vorfabel selbst - die Vertreibung eines rechtmäßigen Feudalherrn durch verbrecherische Neider - nichts weiter als eine Reihung von gängigen Motiven aus dem Schauer- und Ritterroman [...] Man kann also sagen, daß Lewis mit der Einführung des Monaldeschi in Zschokkes Roman die Skizze eines rudimentären Schauerromans eingeführt hat, die zugleich die Funktion erfüllt, die handlungsmäßige Motivation mit einer der Gothic Romance der Zeit entlehnten Technik [...] zu intensivieren. (A structural requirement of the Schauerroman is a detailed, more or less selfcontained prologue containing the seeds of the main action. Lewis himself used this technique in the subsidiary action of The Monk. But in The Bravo of Venice [...] the subject of the prologue - the ousting of a lawful feudal landlord by criminal rivals - amounts to no less than a string of popular motifs from the Schauerroman and the Ritterroman. One may therefore say that Lewis, in introducing the figure of Monaldeschi into Zschokke’s novel has introduced the makings of a rudimentary Schauerroman which at the same time serves to strengthen the motivation by means of a technique borrowed from the Gothic Romance of the time)66

Thanks to the introduction of Monaldeschi, Lewis’s The Bravo of Venice is Gothic in a way and to a degree in which Zschokke’s novel was not, which refutes Frank’s statement that ‘When the Gothic novelists plundered German sources for plot and character, they often preserved intact the Schauerromantik [sic] elements’,67 for in the case of The Bravo of Venice Lewis reinforced the Gothic elements. Lewis and Naubert: see Chapter 3 Lewis and Kleist: see Chapter 6 Scott and German Gothic: see Chapter 9 The Shelleys and German Gothic It has recently been argued that the major poets of Romanticism ‘wrote in Gothic’.68 The source of that ‘Gothic’ is partly German. Coleridge and Shelley in particular were strongly influenced by their German reading, and Byron commented on the impact of his boyhood reading of The Armenian, meaning Render’s translation of Schiller’s Der Geisterseher, The Armenian; or, 66 67 68

Guthke, Englische Vorromantik, 208; see also Beaujean, 140-6. Frank, The First Gothics, 211f. See Anne Williams, Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995).

468 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective The Ghost-Seer (1800). Coleridge, following the reading of Schiller’s Die Räuber that so impressed him, produced (in 1794?) a sonnet ‘To the Author of „The Robbers“’: Schiller! that hour I would have wish’d to die. If thro’ the shuddering midnight I had sent From the dark dungeon of the Tower time-rent That fearful voice, a famish’d Father’s cry Lest in some after moment aught more mean Might stamp me mortal! A triumphant shout Black Horror scream’d, and all her goblin rout Diminish’d shrunk from the more withering scene! Ah! Bard tremendous in sublimity! Could I behold thee in thy loftier mood Wandering at eve with finely-frenzied eye Beneath some vast old tempest-swinging wood! Awhile with mute awe gazing I would brood: Then weep aloud in a wild ecstasy!

He also wrote to Bedford of his plan to write a work to be called The Banditti, which sounds very much like a rifacimento of The Robbers. Southey planned a similar work. In the present context, as opposed to the general Anglo-German one, Shelley is more important than Coleridge. His knowledge of German horror tales has been exaggerated and misconstrued. He was deeply impressed by The Robbers, The Bravo of Venice, and Rinaldo Rinaldini,69 but also by The GhostSeer, The Necromancer, Horrid Mysteries, and maybe (the presumption is strong, the evidence lacking) by some less well known works. Peacock emphasized the formative effect on Shelley of his reading of Die Räuber, from which the underground dungeon of Zastrozzi and the Bohemian Castle of St Irvyne both derive. Cameron saw the opening of St Irvyne with its depiction of the bandits as patterned on that of The Robbers,70 but is not convincing on the subject. Shelley is, in fact, echoing not Schiller but Kahlert. Karl Moor’s robber band was the inspiration for what remains of The Assassins, although the impact of Der Geisterseher was scarcely less significant if one thinks of Shelley’s passion for ghost-raising and Devil-raising (cf. ‘While yet a boy I sought for ghosts’, in the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty) and the opening of Alastor: ‘I have made my bed / In charnels and on coffins [...]forcing some lone ghost / Thy messenger, to render up the tale / Of what we are.’ The

69 70

See W. E. Peck, ‘Shelley, Mary Shelley and Rinaldo Rinaldini’, PMLA, 40 (1925), 165-71. K. N. Cameron, The Young Shelley, 333 n. 123.

Anglo-German Interactions 469

dual figure of Ginotti-Nempere in St Irvyne is reminiscent of that of Flodoardo-Abällino in The Bravo of Venice. By 1803-10, when young Shelley was an avid reader of Gothic tales, English enthusiasm for German or supposedly German horror tales was already peaking, although the fact, of which he was unaware, naturally did not dampen the impressionable young poet’s enthusiasm. In 1803 Shelley and his cousin Thomas Medwin, then at Sion House preparatory school, were devouring Gothic bluebooks, resorting, sub rosa, to ‘a low circulating library’ in Brentford in search of the treasured works by Ann Radcliffe and Rosa Matilda (Charlotte Dacre) that left their mark on Shelley’s early work.One Gothic bluebook that Shelley got his hands on in this way is Wolfstein; or, The Mysterious Bandit: A Terrific Romance (1800), a crude plagiarism of a German work by F. C. Laukhard, which Shelley in turn plagiarized in St Irvyne. Shelley and Medwin are supposed to have got their hands on other German material in this way, but this is unlikely to have amounted to much, for the lower the circulating library, the less likely it would be to purvey material in German, knowledge of which was restricted to a minority of the educated, who would be unlikely to resort to such libraries. Few German Gothic titles were on sale in England at this time. Those that were on sale at one of the very few booksellers in London dealing in German material, J. H. Bohte & Co of 4 York Street, Covent Garden, were the obvious ones by Schiller, Zschokke and Grosse; in Bohte’s catalogues there is no sign of lesser German Gothic titles, let alone of chapbook literature. Thomas De Quincey, who in 1803 was in Everton, filling in time while waiting to go up to Oxford, read his way through the Gothic material available at the nearest circulating library, but that merely meant translations of Schiller and Grosse (The Dagger), and, otherwise, novels by Ann Radcliffe, Sophia Lee, William Parnell, Mary Pilkington, Clara Reeve, and Mary Robinson. With the exception of Schiller, Grosse and Radcliffe, this is not what Shelley is thought to have been reading at the time; he preferred Lewis and Dacre. Of course, the young enthusiasts of the time (Shelley and De Quincey, Tieck and Hoffmann) read, indiscriminately, whatever they could get their hands on. A few years later Willibald Alexis, who, like Tieck and Hoffmann before him, grew up with the German variety of Gothic, was reading C. H. Spieß, Karl Gottlob Cramer, Karl Friedrich Kahlert, Laurids Kruse, Johann Andreas, and Karl Hildebrand. Shelley read Kahlert’s The Necromancer, in English, but is not known to have read Spieß or Cramer, who would in any case have held less appeal for him. The Necromancer, on the other hand, was right up his street. At Eton he is said to have concentrated on German and chemistry to the neglect of every other subject, but even if the implication is that he might

470 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective have been capable of reading the average shilling-shocker in German, it does not follow that he did so, or indeed that he had the opportunity to do so. Mary Shelley wrote that her husband developed a taste for the ‘wonderful and wild’ from ‘such German works as were current in those days’, and that he composed his two horror romances ‘under the influence of his reading of German horror romances and tales’,71 which is less to the point than Hogg’s statement that even at Oxford Shelley ‘read German works only in translations’.72 Put together, the facts suggest that Shelley owed his reputation for devouring German horror tales to his reading of (i) the more lurid of the romances translated from the German, particularly those of what we may call the Ghost-Seer complex, with their emphasis on necromancers, secret societies, assassins and schoolboy science, (ii) the numerous low-grade Gothics masquerading as ‘from the German’, which were popularly known as ‘German tales’, hence the misunderstanding about Shelley’s early reading, and (iii) romances with German or German-sounding backgrounds. In other words, works such as The Black Valley; or, The Castle of Rosenberg (1803), a crude bluebook condensation of Veit Weber’s The Black Valley (1796); The Prophetic Warning; or, The Castle of Lindendorff (1800), a cribbed compendium of German Gothic motifs; Shrewtzer Castle; or, The Perfidious Brother, A German Romance (1802), a typical shilling shocker. While there is no reason to suppose that he read any of these particular titles, there is every reason to think that it was to such concoctions that he owed his reputation for reading ‘German tales’. Edward Dowden was right to note Shelley’s predilection for ‘extravagant romances translated from the German’,73 and while Forman found in St Irvyne foreign-sounding phrases that looked to him like translations from the German,74 such phrases indicate borrowings from existing translations rather than Shelley’s translations from works he had read in German. If Shelley had translated them, the phrases in question would hardly have sounded foreign. Once up at Oxford, Shelley set about trying to persuade Hogg of the superiority of German to any other modern literature; Thomas De Quincey, up at the same time, would have needed no persuading. Hogg recalled how Shelley would read aloud to him with ‘rapturous enthusiasm the wondrous tales of German Illuminati’. According to Hogg, there was a time when

71 72 73 74

Queen Mab’, n. 9, in Shelley, Works, I, 167 Shelley wrote to Godwin on 10 January 1812 of his passion for reading the ‘wildest and most extravagant romances’. Hogg, 45. Edward Dowden, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley (London: Kegan, 1886), 1, 42. H. B. Forman (ed.), The Works of P. B. Shelley, 5 vols (London: Reeves & Tyrner, 1880), V, xiv.

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Shelley preferred the ghost-seers of Germany to the philosophy of Greece.75 Youthful enthusiasm can go no further. Hogg’s use of’ghost seers’ in the plural, taken together with Medwin’s comment that Shelley in his early school years had ‘become a believer in the ghost stories and enchantments of the Black Forest’,76 strongly suggests that Shelley, by 1810 at the latest, knew not only The Ghost-Seer, but also The Necromancer; or, The Tale of the Black Forest and Horrid Mysteries. The influence of The Ghost-Seer has been detected in the incantation scene of The Wandering Jew,77 and echoes of The Necromancer are scattered throughout the two Gothic tales. The way in which Wolfstein meets the robbers, for instance, let alone the way in which the robbers’ cavern is entered via the summit of a wild and rocky precipice, derives from Kahlert, on whose description Shelley merely rings a few changes. No doubt Shelley discussed The Necromancer with his father-in-law, William Godwin, who had used it in his novel St. Leon (1799, see Vol IV, ch. 5), in which the description of Bethlem Gabor is taken from Kahlert’s description of the robber chief Wolf. Shelley’s passion for Horrid Mysteries, mocked by Peacock, means that there are echoes of Grosse’s novel in the Gothic tales: the events around the hoary hermit’s cottage in Horrid Mysteries (Bk II, chapters 7, 8), for instance, reappear as those around the old woman’s cottage in Zastrozzi (ch. 2). He most likely also knew Tschink’s The Victim of Magical Delusion and Veit Weber’s ‘shockingly vivid’ The Sorcerer, which Godwin had also used in St. Leon. It was in 1810 that Shelley, who was already familiar with the Wandering Jew figure from The Monk, came across C. F. D. Schubart’s poem ‘Der ewige Jude’ in an English translation.78 The idea that Shelley’s Gothic works amount to little more than a couple of horror tales and a couple of fragments is misleading. The Gothic works include Zastrozzi (1810) and St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian (1811 [1810]), Sadak the Wanderer (an early fragment featuring the Wandering Jew),79The Nightmare (a lost horror tale, written by Shelley and Medwin), Ghasta or the Avenging Demon and The Wandering Jew (in Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire, 1810), Posthumous Fragments by Margaret Nicholson (1810), Zeinab and Kathema (181011, an imitation of Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer), The Assassins (fragment, 75 76 77 78 79

Quoted from Klapper, 3. Tom Medwin, ‘Memoir of Shelley’, The Athenaeum, No. 247 (July 1832), 472. Frederic Ewen, The Prestige of Schiller in England 1788-1859 (New York: Columbia U.P., 1932), 123. On the relationship of Schubart’s poem to the Wandering Jew in Shelley’s poetry, see Klapper, 58-106. Sadak betrays Shelley’s reading of Thomas Bellamy’s Sadaski; or, The Wandering Penitent (1798).

472 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective 1814), The Coliseum (fragment, 1817), and The Cenci (1819).80 Medwin attributed Shelley’s original inspiration to write poetry to Bürger’s Lenore with its spectral lover that caused Charles Lamb to write to Coleridge on 17 July 1796 ‘Have you read a ballad called Leonora [translated by W. R. Spencer] in the second number of the Monthly Magazine? If you have !!!!!!!!!!!!!!’. The headlong journey that opens Zastrozzi echoes Lenore, and even in 1817 Shelley is found reciting Bürger’s poem at a Christmas party. He was forced to withdraw Original Poetry from publication when Stockdale found that ‘Saint Edmund’s Eve’ was copied word for word from ‘The Black Canon of Elmham or Saint Edmund’s Eve’ from M. G. Lewis’s Tales of Terror (1799, 1808), while ‘Ghasta’ is a versification by Shelley of the subplot of The Monk, and ‘The Revenge’ is based on Lewis’s ‘Alonzo the Brave and Fair Imogene’. All these plagiarized pieces had been taken from German sources by Lewis.81 Shelley is said to have translated ‘A volume of [Gothic] tales from the German’, his St Irvyne being made up of two German romances of unknown authorship.82 This dubious, if not entirely implausible, claim, unsupported by any evidence, needs to be explored. It seems likely that Shelley somewhere or other, directly or indirectly, came across a trashy, long forgotten German Gothic tale by Friedrich Christian Laukhard (1758-1822), Franz Wolfstein oder Begebenheiten eines dummen Teufels (1799),83 which gave him the name of his Wolfstein and Mary the name of her Frankenstein. I doubt that Laukhard’s Franz Wolfstein came Shelley’s way in German, but a crude English bluebook based on it, Wolfstein; or, The Mysterious Bandit, A Terrific Romance (London: J. Bailey, 18[00]), would have served the same purpose. This cannot be the ‘undisguised plagiarism of Shelley’s St Irvyne’84 that it has been called, for it was published eleven years before St Irvyne. That St Irvyne is in part a plagiarism of Wolfstein is proved by the very passage that Frank, assuming the English bluebook to have been written after St Irvyne, took as evidence of the opposite. Wolf is a favourite name in German Gothic. It was first used by Schiller in Der Verbrecher aus verlorenener Ehre (1786; Engl. tr. 1801), whence it was purloined by Teuthold and smuggled into the spurious final section of The Necromancer. Veit Weber’s Wolf (Wolf, 1788; Engl. tr. 1806) is merely the (common German) name for a dog. It is also possible that Shelley came across a French Gothic romance, Regnault-Warin’s La caverne de Strozzi (1778: The Cavern of Strozzi, 1800), or its transmogrification 80 81 82 83 84

On The Cenci see Evans, 228-32. See A. B. Young, ‘Shelley and M. G. Lewis’, MLR, 1(1906), 233f. Stockley, German Literature as Known in England, 218 n. 5. Available in Göttingen University Library. Frank, The First Gothics, 424f.

Anglo-German Interactions 473

into J. J. Brückner’s Die Höhle von Strozzi; oder, Das enthüllte Verbrechen, published, like Franz Wolfstein, in 1799, and that this, as much as Dacre’s Zafloya, is the source of his Zastrozzi. For a time the Za- prefix was almost obligatory. With part of the proceeds of Zastrozzi Shelley ‘gave a most magnificent banquet to eight of his friends’.85 St. Irvyne, on the other hand, abandoned rather than finished, published after he had gone up to Oxford, left him more or less seriously and permanently out of pocket. Looking back, Shelley wrote ‘From a reader, I became a writer of romances; before the age of seventeen I had published two [...], each of which, though quite uncharacteristic of me as I now am, yet serves to mark the state of my mind at the period of their composition.’ He later glossed that ‘state of mind’ when he referred to Zastrozzi and St Irvyne as ‘distempered’,86 and was mightily huffed when someone identified him with a character in Zastrozzi. However, while all thisrings true, it does not follow that Zastrozzi and St Irvyne are ‘freaks’ (his father’s term, implicitly accepted by most mainstream Shelley critics), five-finger exercises in a genre he quickly outgrew.87 The fact of the matter is, as Behrendt has stressed,88 that elements of the Gothic persisted into his later works, for which the early overtly Gothic ones are, as it were, sighting shots. Zastrozzi and St Irvyne, for instance, mark the beginning of Shelley’s preoccupation with the Prometheus figure which led both to his Prometheus Unbound (1820) and to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Shelley’s Gothic villains point forward to the flawed SatanPrometheus or Prometheus Bound figure whose monstrous egocentricity derives from the gigantic Ginotti of St Irvyne, who for his part derived from the robber chief ‘whose figure was of a monstrous size’ in The Necromancer (1927, 207). Shelley may conceivably have known Gleich’s Udo der Stählerne (1799), but the outsize robber chief in The Necromancer is the more likely source of inspiration. What is often missing from discussions of Mary Shelley’s sources of inspiration is Goethe’s Faust, which features a homunculus generated alchemically in accordance with Paracelsus’s De generatione rerum naturalium, an idea that had been at the back of Shelley’s mind ever since his Eton days, only to rise to the surface in the course of those famous conversations at the 85 86 87

88

K. N. Cameron, The Young Shelley (New York: Collier, 1962), 12. This is similar to the distempered state of mind of Tieck and Kleist. Jack Donovan, writing in The Cambridge Companion to Shelley, ed. Timothy Morton (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006), 100, persists in calling Zastrozzi and St Irvyne ‘juvenile freaks’, which is reminiscent of F. R. Leavis’s description of them as akin to ‘the trashy fantasies and cheap excitements of the Terror school’. Behrendt, x.

474 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Villa Diodati. M. G. Lewis, who stayed with the Byron-Shelley party in August 1816, was at the time working on a translation of Faust. Peacock, in his Memoirs of Shelley (1860) wrote of the formative influence on Shelley’s mind of Goethe’s Faust and Schiller’s Die Räuber. The two influences come together in Shelley’s Zastrozzi, who is not only a rebel and a criminal, but a Faustian over-reacher.89 Shelley read Faust over and over again, ‘always with sensations which no other composition excites’,90 and, inspired by Lewis, began translating some scenes from the play in 1816. In 1822 he returned to it, translating two scenes in verse shortly before his death. Mary Shelley, for her part, had easy access to German Gothic. In addition to Goethe’s Faust with its man-made homunculus, to which she was clearly indebted, and to Lauckhard’s Franz Wolfstein, she may conceivably also have come across Gleich’s Udo der Stählerne; oder die Ruinen von Drudenstein (1799), perhaps via her husband: Udo’s stature and power anticipate the monster in Frankenstein, which prompted Tymms to suppose that Gleich’s novel might have had some influence on the making of Frankenstein’.91 More likely sources, however, are Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya (1806), by which Shelley was ‘quite enraptured’92 - his Zastrozzi and Ginotti both inherited Zofloya’s gigantic stature - and Kahlert’s The Necromancer. Back in 1915 Geoffrey Buyers pointed out resemblances between Mary Shelley’s monster and Schiller’s Christian turned criminal hero Wolf in Der Verbrecher aus verlorenener Ehre, but the point remained theoretical since he was unable to show that Schiller’s tale was available to Mary Shelley (who is said to have read little German)in English. Now that we know that a translation of kinds was available to her in the guise of the final section of Teuthold’s version of The Necromancer, which her father used while working on St. Leon (1799), and presumably possessed, making it part of the intellectual furniture of Mary’s childhood, Buyers’ point gains the validity it originally lacked. It has not only a similar structure to Frankenstein, but a similar storyline: ‘Each tale dramatizes a monstrous metamorphosis: creatures with the potential for nobility are transformed by fellow humans into fiends.’93 This is the very substance of Wolf’s address to the judge and jury. 89 90 91 92 93

See David G. Halliburton, ‘Shelley’s „Gothic“ Novels’, Keats-Shelley Journal, 16 (1967), 41. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. F. L. Jones, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), II, 406. Ralph Tymms, German Romantic Literature (London: Methuen, 1955), 72. See G. T. Medwin, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2 vols (London: T. C. Newby, 1847), I, 30f. Syndy M. Conger, ‘A German Ancestor for Mary Shelley’s Monster: Kahlert, Schiller,

Anglo-German Interactions 475

Tales of the Dead The name Victor Frankenstein points straight to Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose early nom-de-plume was Victor, and whose Wolfstein, if derived from Franz Laukhard’s Franz Wolfstein (1799), gave Frankenstein’s name (Franz = Frank + [en]stein). The Frankensteins’ country residence on the shores of Lake Léman is close to where the Byron-Shelley party stayed in 1816. The lengthy conversations there between Byron and Shelley, to which Mary was, in her own words, ‘a devout but nearly silent listener’,94 provided the inspiration that led to Frankenstein, which is, in brief, ‘Mary Shelley’s belated contribution to the discussion that is best known for the competition that produced The Vampyre’.95 Mary’s silent resolution to outdo the male members of the party at the Villa Diodati led her to delve deeply into her husband’s early reading in order to be able to meet him on ground central to his intellectual interests. Since Frankenstein’s scientific education reflects arguments with which Shelley had been familiar since his schooldays, it was not inappropriate that the original Preface to Frankenstein was written by him. Mary Shelley’s starting point was the Gespensterbuch edited by Johann August Apel and Friedrich Laun (6 vols, Leipzig: Göschen, 1811-17), known in French as Fantasmagoriana (1812) and in English as Tales of the Dead (1813), the French and English versions being different selections from the German original. The tales in question are, in English terms at least, Gothic tales, closely related to the ghost-seer or necromancer novel. Phantasmagoria denotes optical illusions of the kind staged in Paris in 1798 and in London in 1801-2 by Etienne-Gaspard Roberts(on), but also a gothically shifting series of phantasms or imaginary figures as seen in a dream or fevered condition or as conjured up by the imagination in a state of nervous agitation or fear. Sébastien Mercier described the Parisian phantasmagoriana as ‘the reflection of the revolutionary days’.96 In an age already obsessed by ghosts the Terror inevitably spawned nightmares and spectral visions. Etienne Gaspard Roberts(on)’s ‘Gothic extravaganzas’, as they were dubbed, involved the projection of a series of images (Fuseli’s ‘The Nightmare’, the ‘Bleeding Nun’, and so on), along with the eerie sound and lighting effects that were part and parcel of the Gothic repertoire from Otranto onwards.

94 95 96

and the Buried Treasure of Northanger Abbey,’ Philological Quarterly, 59 (1980), 216-32. Author’s Intrroduction to the 1831 Standard Novels edition of Frankenstein. P. D. Fleck, ‘Mary Shelley’s Notes to Shelley’s Poems and Fankenstein’, Studies in Romanticism, 6 (1967), 253. Quoted from Terry Hale’s Introduction to Tales of the Dead (Chislehurst: The Gothic Society, 1994), 13.

476 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective So central is the phantasmagoria to Gothic that Coleridge employed the metaphor of the magic lantern to describe and condemn the Gothic novel as such, writing of a sort of mental camera obscura [...] which pro tempore fixes, reflects and transmits the moving phantasms of one man’s delirium, so as to people the barrennesss of an hundred other brains afflicted with the same trance or suspension of all common sense and all definite purpose.

Wordsworth made the same connexion, writing of the ‘almost savage torpor’ of the contemporary mind that resulted from the ‘frantic novels’ that were so widely read at the time.97 The magic lantern and its fraudulent effects are closely connected with the explained supernatural and the insistence of ‘a very pretty brunette’ in ‘The Family Portraits’ that ‘no one shall search for any explanation’ of the mysterious, terrifying events of the story ‘as explanations would take away all pleasure from ghost stories’. The two most interesting of the tales in the French selection from the Gespensterbuch are those described by Mary Shelley in the preface to the revised (1831) edition of Frankenstein, namely Apel’s ‘Die Bilder der Ahnen’ (‘The Family Portraits’) and Laun’s ‘Der Totenkopf’ (‘The Death’s Head’). She takes Laun’s tale first: It proved a wet, ungenial summer, and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house [the Villa Diodati]. Some volumes of ghost stories, translated from the German into French, fell into our hands. There was the History of the Inconstant Lover, who, when he thought to clasp the bride to whom he had pledged his vows, found himself in the arms of the pale ghost of her whom he had deserted.

Her memory of the ‘inconstant lover’ found its way into Frankenstein (Vol. I, ch. 4), but Die Bilder der Ahnen (The Family Portraits), which Apel rightly considered his best work, is the tale in the Gespensterbuch that is closest to the English Gothic novel: There was the tale of the sinful founder of his race, whose miserable doom it was to bestow the kiss of death on all the younger sons of his fated house, just when they reached the age of promise. His gigantic, shadowy form, clothed like the ghost in Hamlet, in complete armour, but with the beaver up, was seen at midnight, by the moon’s fitful beams, to advance slowly along the gloomy avenue. The shape was lost beneath the shadow of the castle walls; but soon a gate swung back, a step was heard, the door of the chamber opened, and he advanced to the couch of the blooming youths, cradled in

97

See Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 153, 203.

Anglo-German Interactions 477 healthy sleep. Eternal sorrow sat upon his face as he bent down and kissed the forehead of the boys, who from that hour withered like flowers snapt upon the stalk.

The gigantic, shadowy figure in complete armour is, of course, indebted to Otranto, while animated portraits were a stock-in-trade of the Gothic novel of the 1790s. Both the vaulted gallery and theimmense vault in which a thousand-year-old document is recovered are Gothic, as are the spectral painter, the child-murdering spectre, the subterranean and secret passages, and the narrative encapsulations. At the same time these tales are close to the fairytale and legend conventions. Both the tales that caught Mary Shelley’s interest involve fairytale motifs: the dead lover who haunts his/her faithless sweetheart, and the fatal kiss from the dead.98 Another tale, König Pfau (King Peacock), borrows from Mme d’Aulnoy.99 The Family Portraits, which opens as dusk is giving way to night and the narrator’s carriage is surrounded by the increasingly oppressive silence of the forest that was by 1811 so familiar from so many Gothic novels, rightly emphasizes the imagination that is central to the tale and soon enough conjures up fear, although it is emphasized that the spectral murderer is no mere product of the imagination: the melancholy voice of the count pierced his heart, and seemed to annihilate his being, by the terrifying conviction of the existence of the spiritual world, and the secret horrors with which this idea was accompanied. It was not [...] a dream, a chimera, the fruit of an over-heated imagination, but a mysterious and infallible messenger [...] from the world of spirits.

These are also the tales on which Washington Irving was to ring the changes in ‘The German Student’ and ‘The Mysterious Picture’ in his Tales of a Traveller. Another tale by Laun, ‘Die Totenbraut’ (‘The Death-Bride’) was used by Irving in ‘The Spectre Bridegroom’ in his Sketch Book. The Preface to Tales of the Dead referred to Samuel Christoph Wagener’s Die Gespenster. Kurze Erzählungen aus dem Reiche der Wahrheit (2 vols, Berlin: F. Maurer, [1799] 1800) which ‘endeavours to explain apparitions by attributingthem to natural causes’. Wagener published a further collection of tales in the fashionable explained supernatural mode, Neue Gespenster, in 1801-02.

98 99

Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk Literature, F402.1.11.4 and E217. See Apel and Laun, Gespensterbuch, ed. Robert Stockhammer (Frankfurt a. M. & Leipzig: Insel, 1992), 285, 300 n. 29

478 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Stoker’s German Quarry That an anonymous tale ‘From the German’, The Mysterious Stranger (1860),100 was known to Bram Stoker is shown by the many close parallels between it and Dracula (1897). The ‘Mysterious Stranger’ is an early Gothic trope (cf. Sophia Reeve’s The Mysterious Wanderer [3 vols, 1807], Anne Ker’s The Mysterious Count [1803], and Eliza Ratcliffe’s identity fable The Mysterious Baron, [1808]), and is also a Gothic title that was used at the end of the high Gothic period by Washington Irving (‘The Adventure of the Mysterious Stranger’, in Tales of a Traveller (1824) and later by Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) in ‘The Mysterious Stranger’ (1916 and 1969). Like the anonymous tale, Twain’s is set in Austria, in the medieval village of ‘Eseldorf ‘in the case of Twain’s tale, in which, echoing Scott, the stranger in question is variously Satan and a printer’s devil. The title of our tale also evokes several Germanlanguage fictions of the Gothic period, including Hoffmann’s abandoned or lost novel, Der Geheimnisvolle (1796) and Tieck’s novella Der Geheimnisvolle (1805). The Mysterious Stranger, which is said to have been translated for the collection Odds and Ends, which I have been unable to confirm, may simply be an anonymous late Gothic tale claiming to be ‘From the German’, although it reads like a genuine German or, more likely, Austrian tale. By 1860 fake translations were less common than they had been two generations earlier, but then this is a tale of uncommon quality. The date of publication and the setting of The Mysterious Stranger point forward to Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872), but in 1860 Le Fanu was living the life of a recluse in his house in Merrion Square, Dublin, so that he is unlikely to be the mysterious author. The Mysterious Stranger opens in what became classical vampire territory, Styria (with Burgenland, the south-eastern province of Austria, bordering on Slovakia, Hungary and Slovenia). Charlotte Bronte was wrong to describe ‘the Vampyre’ as ‘the foul German spectre’, for it has mostly infested the wilder reaches of what used to be the Austro-Hungarian Empire.101 Baron von Fahnenberg, ‘a tall old gentleman, of aristocratic appearance’, sets out with his dazzlingly beautiful daughter Franziska, her friend Bertha and the young Baron Franz von Cronstein for Schloß Klatka, in the Carpathian mountains, which Fahnenberg has inherited from a childless brother. Both Fahnenberg/Klatka and Dracula have considerable properties in the Carpathians, in Transylvania, the lands beyond the forest, where, by implication, the horrors of the Gothic forest are revealed and thereby multiplied; Stoker rightly likens the Carpathians to the centre of an 100 101

The Mysterious Stranger can be found in The Penguin Book of Vampire Stories, ed. Alan Ryan (London: Bloomsbury Books, 1991), 36-70. Jane Eyre, ch. XXV.

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imaginative whirlpool. Like The Mysterious Stranger, Dracula was originally (in 1890) set in Styria, where the wind from the Hungarian plain traditionally brought in all manner of Gothic and folkloric creatures. Dracula, like Azzo von Klatka, is the archetypal ‘mysterious stranger’. The author of The Mysterious Stranger references Bürger’s ‘Lenore’ in the words ‘Oh, away [...] on a horse that never tires’, while Stoker actually quotes the famous phrase ‘die Toten reiten schnell’ (swiftly ride the dead). The Mysterious Stranger opens with a motto from Hamlet (‘To die, to sleep, / To sleep, perchance to dream, ay, there’s the rub’); Stoker constantly comes back to Hamlet. The dream or nightmare with which vampiric visitation is associated, is a leitmotif in both texts. Baron von Fahnenberg is described as a ‘tall old gentleman, of aristocratic appearance’, a description that Stoker applies to Count Dracula. His property is near another, ruined one, Schloß Klatka, that turns out to be inhabited by a vampiric Baron, who has ‘the frozen mask of extinct passions, the piercing eye that none can endure unabashed, the supple charm of bearing which at need replaces the accustomed austerity’102 that distinguishes Schiller’s Armenian and those Gothic figures who are descended from him: ‘there was contempt and sarcasm in the [Baron’s] cold, grey eyes, whose glance, however, was at times so piercing, that no one could endure it long.’ The first thing that Harker sees are Dracula’s feral red eyes (on another occasion they are blue) that point back to Baron Azzo von Klatka and are popularly associated with the evil eye. The colour of Dracula’s eyes, Gothic in its indeterminacy, reflects his state at the time. Klatka and Dracula have the deathly complexion that is the mark of the vampire: we read of the ‘deadly hue’ of Azzo’s complexion, and of Dracula’s ‘extraordinary pallor’. Dracula’s calèche, in which Jonathan Harker completes his journey and in which he is effectively imprisoned as the wolves close in, takes the reader back to the ‘horrid cage’ of a litter in which Franziska von Fahnenberg travels. Both parties set out for haunted castles (two castles in the case of The Mysterious Stranger): Schloß Klatka, ruinous, haunted, and, like the ruined castle in The Necromancer, one-time robbers’ den, is, or seems by moonlight to be, of some magnitude; passing it by, the Fahnenberg party proceed to the ‘venerable castle, the windows of which were brightly illuminated’ which proves to be their destination, although the action of the tale centres on Schloß Klatka and the ‘Fiend’ who infests it. Stoker, with perhaps a sharper eye for symbolism than his anonymous predecessor, makes Castle Dracula a ‘vast ruined castle, from whose tall black windows came no ray of light, and whose broken battlements showed a jagged line against the moonlit sky’. 102

Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England, 285.

480 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Dracula’s castle, like Schloß Klatka, has the indeterminate, shifting outline of the Gothic castle (‘it perhaps seemed bigger than it really is. I have not yet been able to see it by daylight’) that is now forever associated with Kafka’s Castle. It is on their respective journeys that the Fahnenberg party and Jonathan Harker have a remarkable identical experience that clearly illustrates Stoker’s debt to his anonymous predecessor. Both texts feature the howling of a dog that rapidly turns into the howling of wolves who face the travellers with a ferocious challenge, whereupon Azzo ‘raised his hand, appeared to wave it, and the [wolves] crawled back into the thickets like a pack of beaten hounds.’ Stoker takes over this remarkable supernatural incident: Dracula sweeps his long arms as though brushing aside some impalpable obstacle, whereon the wolves fall back. The incident epitomizes Stoker’s debt to the anonymous author of The Mysterious Stranger and reveals the lupine vampire nature of Azzo and Dracula, which, apart from anything else, stands for the way in which supposedly human beings prey on one another (Schopenhauer’s homo homini lupus theme). Stoker’s Lucy Westenra and Mina Harker are clearly modelled on Franziska von Fahnenberg and her friend Bertha. Franziska and Lucy, both beauties, are the vampires’ predestined victims. Azzo’s nocturnal assaults on the unsuspecting Franziska are mimicked in Dracula’s assaults on Lucy, who, like Franziska, is pale and exhausted after being visited by the vampire. Franziska dreams that ‘a sort of mist’ filled her room, and that Azzo materializes out of the mist. Stoker borrows again in having Dracula materialize in the same way. Later there is another, no less blatant borrowing by Stoker. The way in which Dracula hurls a woman from him, Van Helsing hurls Arthur across the room, and Harker ‘with a strength which seemed incredible’ flings to the ground the great box containing Dracula and his native soil variously reflect the way in which Azzo picks up Franz von Cronstein like an infant and is on the point of throwing him over a bridge, when he is stopped by Woislaw. Azzo and Dracula both have the vampire’s superhuman strength. Dracula, who is said to have the strength of twenty men, has a ‘grip of steel’ which reflects Woislaw’s iron hand derived from Goethe’s Götz, which allows him to mimic the vampire’s superhuman, supernatural strength. This iron hand is then replaced by a gold one made by an Italian master. Even the gold reappears in the form ofthe pile of gold in Dracula’s room and his table service of gold. Stoker originally planned to include in Book III a dinner party that was to have climaxed in the Count entering the room, as Azzo von Klatka does in The Mysterious Stranger. Dracula’s castle, like that of Klatka, has a vault full of coffins in which Dracula and Azzo respectively dwell by day; their nights are spent hunting.

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Both are rightly described as hunters (‘Who is not either the pursuer or the pursued?’ Azzo asks, ‘All persecute or are persecuted, and Fate persecutes all.’). The Mysterious Stranger features the inspection of coffins in the castle vault and the discovery of Azzo in his coffin, replete with stolen blood and therefore rosy-cheeked, that foreshadows Harker’s discovery of Dracula in a great box full of earth in the vaults of a ruined chapel. The Count’s cheeks have the warmth of life. Like Azzo, Dracula is ‘an entirely different creature’ after imbibing. In The Mysterious Stranger Woislaw eventually gets Franziska to drive three long nails into the lid of Azzo’s coffin. Stoker, who brings his vampire to a comparable end, vies with the anonymous earlier author in the high drama of the moment. The extent of Bram Stoker’s Gothic-style ‘borrowing’ from The Mysterious Stranger being clear, what remains to be stressed are its limits. Stoker’s structural model was Collins’ The Woman in White, but he took a good deal of his background detail from The Mysterious Stranger, elaborating in the process. Borrowed details are elaborated either by repetition, so that they become leitmotifs, or by the superaddition of further detail. The borrowings come thick and fast in the first three (Transylvanian) chapters of Dracula, after which Stoker is elaborating on his own work. He uses The Mysterious Stranger to get his own work going; only then does his own imagination kick in. When it does so, some of the most memorable details of the novel, such as the death-defying, lizard-like crawl down the vertical face of the castle, are original.

III Writing in 1799, the conservative critic J. A. Bergk complained that the majority of German readers were spending their time devouring the most wretched, tasteless novels.103 He was referring to what we now call Gothic novels, but it was the English Gothic novel rather than their own similar effusions that German critics of Bergk’s ilk blamed for this deplorable state of affairs, for England ‘stand nun einmal im Ruf, seit Walpoles Castle of Otranto dafür gesorgt zu haben, daß die Materie des Unheimlichen voll ausgeschöpft wurde’ (was popularly supposed, ever since the appearance of Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, to have run the whole gamut of terror literature).104 The irony of Bergk’s comment is, of course, that it echoes what was being said in England about the deplorable stuff being shipped 103 104

J. A. Bergk, Die Kunst, Bücher zu lesen (1799), quoted from Horst Oppel, Englischdeutsche Literaturbeziehungen, II, 7. Oppel, II, 7.

482 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective over from Germany. Each country found it convenient to blame the other for its own excesses. It is a matter of historical fact that more than twice as many English Gothic novels (forty-five) were translated into German as German Gothics (nineteen) were translated into English. The reason for this is also historical: in the later eighteenth century the English novel had been hugely popular in Germany, so that in the 1790s the German market was open to the English Gothic novel in a way in which the English market was not, initially, open to the German Gothic novel. The main titles, in chronological order, are as follows: Thomas Leland, Longsword, Earl of Salisbury (1762: Longsword, Graf von Salisbury, 1775) Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1765 [1764]: Seltsame Begebenheiten im Schloße Otranto, eine gotische Geschichte, 1768; Die Burg von Otranto. Eine Gotische Geschichte, 1794) Clara Reeve, The Old English Baron (1778: Der altenglische Baron, 1789) Sophia Lee, The Recess (1783: Die Ruinen, 1786) Clara Reeve, The Two Mentors (1783: Die zween Mentor, 1784) William Beckford, [Vathek] An Arabian tale (1786: Der Thurm von Samarah, [Leipzig,] 1788;Vathek, eine arabische Erzählung, [Mannheim,]1788) [Martha Hugill], The Castle of Mowbray (1788: Die Geheimnisse des Schlosses Mowbray, 1799-1800) Charlotte Smith, Emmeline, The Orphan of the Castle (1788: Emmeline; oder, Die Waise des Schlosses, 1790) Charlotte Smith, Ethelinde, or The Recluse of the Lake (1789: Ethelinde; oder, Die Einsiedlerin am See, 1792) James White, Earl Strongbow; or, The History of Richard de Clare and the Beautiful Geralda (1789: Graf Strongbow; oder, Die Geschichte Richard’s de Clare und der schönen Geralda, 1790) [John Moore], Zeluco, Various Views of Human Nature (1789: Zeluko; oder, Schilderungen der menschlichen Natur, 1791) Ann Howell, Rosenberg. A Legendary Tale (1789: Graf Rosenberg oder das enthüllte Verbrechen, 1791). Ann Radcliffe, A Sicilian Romance (1790: Die nächtliche Erscheinung im Schloße Mazzini, 1791) Ann Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest (1791: Adeline; oder, Die Abentheuer im Walde, 1793) Thomas Holcroft, Anna St. Ives (1792: Anna St. Ives, 1792-4)

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Anon., The Castle of St. Vallery, an Ancient Story (1792: Das Schloß St. Vallery, 1793) [Robert Bage], Man As He Is (1792: Der Mensch wie er ist, 1798) Mary Robinson, Vancenza; or, The Dangers of Credulity (1792: Vancenza; oder, Die Gefahren der Leichtgläubigkeit, 1793) Charlotte Smith, The Old Manor House (1793: Das alte Schloß, 1795) Charlotte Smith, The Banished Man (1794: Der Verbannte, 1795) Anon., Count Roderic’s Castle; or, Gothic Times (1794: Das Schloß des Grafen Roderich, 1796) Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794: Udolpho’s Geheimnisse, 17956) William Godwin, Things as they are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794: Caleb Williams, einphilosophischer Roman, 1795) Richard Warner, Netley Abbey, A Gothic Story (1795: Kloster Netley, 1796) Regina Maria Roche, The Children of the Abbey (1796: Die Erben, 1803) John Palmer, The Haunted Cavern (1796: Eldred und Jenny, oder: Die Geisterhöhle, 1799) [Robert Bage], Hermsprong; or, Man As He Is Not (1796: Hermsprong; oder Adelstolz und Menschenwerth, 1799 Mary Robinson, Hubert de Sevrac (1796: Hubert von Sevrac, 1797-8) Charlotte Smith, Marchmont, A Novel (1796: Marchmont, ein Roman, 1797) Anon., Montford Castle (1796: Das Schloß Montford, 1796) M. G. Lewis, The Monk (1796: Der Mönch, 1797) George Walker, Theodore Cyphon (1796: Theodor Cyphon, 1797-8) Harriet & Sophia Lee, Canterbury Tales, Vols I-III (1797: Erzählungen aus Canterbury, 1798-9) Ann Radcliffe, The Italian; or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents (1797: Die Italienerin; oder, Der Beichtstuhl der schwarzen Büssenden, 1797-9) [George Moore], Grasville Abbey, A Romance (1797: Die Abtey von Grasville, 1799) [Francis Lathom], The Midnight Bell (1798: Die Mitternachtsglocke, 1800) W. H. Ireland, The Abbess (1801: Die Priorin, 1824) T. J. Horsley [Curties], Ethelwina; or, The House of Fitz-Auburne (1799: Ethelwina oder das Fräulein von Westmoreland, 1803) William Godwin, St Leon (1799: Saint Leon, 1800) Mrs Croffts, Ankerwick Castle (1800: Schloß Ankerwick, 1801) Harriet Lee, Canterbury Tales, Vol. 4 (1801: Erzählungen aus Canterbury, IV, 1810; Kruitzner, 1810, 5th edn, 1823) Mary Charlton, The Pirate of Naples (1801: Der Seeräuber von Neapel, 1803) [Sarah Sheriffe], Correlia, or The Mystic Tomb (1802: Corelia, oder die Geheimnisse des Grabes, 1803)

484 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective G. D. Hernon, Louisa; or, The Black Tower (1805: Das schwarze Schloß, oder der Sturm der Leidenschaften, 1829) Charlotte Dacre, The Libertine (1807: Der Wüstling, 1829) There are a few surprises here (Hugill, Croffts, Isaacs), but most of the titles are obvious choices for translation. Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya (1806), Regina Maria Roche’s The Nocturnal Visit (1800), Elizabeth Helme’s St Margaret’s Cave (1801) and Mrs Isaacs’ Ariel; or, The Invisible Monitor (1801) are all said to have been translated into German, but so far evidence is lacking. The Gothic novel (in English terms) or (in German terms) novels of the Gothic complex loomed large in German literature from the late 1780s to the late 1820s. Even as late as 1826 a reviewer in The Monthly Review (III: 136) is found muttering about ‘all the [...] extravagant horror-mongers infesting the literature of Germany’, but by then the species is more bugaboo than reality. The popularity of the Gothic novel is illustrated by the fact that the 1800 Leipzig Easter book fair placed before the German public no less than seventy-seven new effusions belonging to the category of Ritter-, Räuber- und Geisterromane (novels featuring robber-barons, bandits, and bogeymen), the majority of them never translated. In a study that deserves to be remembered, Book Production, Fiction, and the German Reading Public, 1740-1800 (1974), Albert Ward noted that the majority of these works dealt with German history, ‘especially in the „dark Middle Ages“, where the world of monks, knights, castles, secret passages, and dungeons provided writers with far more possibilities for intrigues, and [for] vivid, terrible, and moving scenes, than the dry present’.105 Many of them were real or phoney translations from the English. Like English, German Gothic then enjoyed a revival in the late 1840s, and especially in 1847, the year of publication of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, G. P. R. James’s Castle Ehrenstein, Zschokke’s Drakomira mit dem Schlangenringe oder die nächtlichen Wanderer in den Schreckensgefängnissen von Karlstein bei Prag. Eine Schauergeschichte aus Böhmens grauer Vorzeit, and Meinhold’s Sidonia die Klosterhexe. For English Gothic novels translated into German the main period in question is 1790-1803, with high points in the years 1792-93, 1795-99, and 1803. New English Gothic novels (as opposed to belated imitations of Radcliffe) more or less ceased to appear in German after 1804. From the 1820s onwards, the impact of the Grimms’ Household Tales in Britain and of the Waverley Novels in Germany was incomparably greater than that of either country’s Gothic novelists had been in the other country. By comparison with the immense influence of Richardson and Scott in Germany, the 105

Albert Ward, Book Production, 53.

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English Gothic novel attracted relatively little attention and had little impact in literary terms. The fact is, as Horst Oppel has argued, that ‘Die Erzähltechnik und die Szenerie der „Gothic Novel“ haben vor allem auf den deutschen Trivialroman abgefärbt’ (the form and settings of the Gothic Novel impacted mainly upon the German popular novel).106 If one thinks in terms of the formative influence on the German novel of Richardson, Fielding and Sterne on the one hand, and of Scott on the other, it has to be said that the English Gothic novel as such left relatively few marks on the German novel, as opposed to the marginally literary popular novel, and did not affect its development, unless in predisposing German readers to be carried away by Scott’s part-Gothic historical novels, which contributed to the development of their own novel and, thereby, body politic. There are, of course, exceptions, of which the most significant is not Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto but Sophia Lee’s The Recess. Otherwise, just as German early ‘Gothic’ was to leave its mark not only on the legion of the second-rate, but on Radcliffe and Lewis, so, notwithstanding Hadley’s statement that ‘no English novel seems to have had any influence upon anything we could remotely call a gothic trend in Germany’,107 the work of Radcliffe and Lewis left its mark not only on their many German imitators, but on Tieck, Kleist, Hoffmann and Alexis. Radcliffe, influenced by Naubert, was in her turn widely read, admired and imitated in Germany from 1795 onwards, and especially in 1795-1815. M. G. Lewis, indebted as he was to Naubert’s Elisabeth Erbin von Toggenburg (Feudal Tyrants) and to her fairytales, incorporated German material in The Monk, which was, however, only marginally influenced by other German Gothic material. For its part The Monk left its mark on Heinrich von Kleist’s Die Familie Ghonorez (1800) and, to a lesser extent, on Hoffmann’s Die Elixiere des Teufels (1815-16). Otherwise Lewis attracted relatively little attention in Germany and his English imitators none. The tale of horror developed more or less independently and simultaneously in England and Germany. The supposed difference between English ‘terror’ and German ‘horror’ is apocryphal, as is Michael Sadleir’s idea of the English Gothics ‘borrowing [...] lurid force from Germany’.108 The real difference is simply that between Radcliffe and Lewis, or between Naubert and Spieß; in reality the English were ‘anything but the innocent victims of a corrupting continental influence’.109 Lewis’s lurid force, I repeat, was his own. 106 107 108 109

Oppel, II, 46. Hadley, 112. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, ed. Michael Sadleir (Oxford: World’s Classics, 1958), x. Alan Menhennet, Schiller and the ‘Germanico-Terrific’ Romance, 43

486 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective The fact that German critics tended to see English terror-novels as the trashy scrapings of the barrel of sensation means that some of the trashier such novels were read in English. What was translated into German in 17901803 was essentially the work of the most significant Gothic authors, with Ann Radcliffe and Charlotte Smith in the vanguard, together with work by some Radcliffe-imitators of the second rank. Ann Radcliffe was by far the most widely read and admired of the English Gothic novelists, although in literary terms her influence was less significant than that of Sophia Lee. Germany already had the ‘explained supernatural’ before Radcliffe popularized it, whereas Sophia Lee was a fundamental influence on Benedicte Naubert. Michael Hadley has ventured the opinion that an asssessment of [the early translations into German] from Sophia Lee (1786), Clara Reeve (1789), Charlotte Lennox (1791), Ann Radcliffe (1791), and on through M. G. Lewis (1797) ‘might well suggest that decisive contributions had been made to the new mode in Germany.’110 This is at best overstated. Not all these British writers contributed to German Gothic; it was only Sophia Lee who made a decisive contribution, leaving her mark on the work of Naubert, as on that of Radcliffe. Clara Reeve’s Der altenglische Baron appeared too late to affect the development of the Ritterroman, which was in full spate by 1789. Charlotte Lennox is irrelevant. Charlotte Smith’s novels were no doubt popular because they mixed the fashionably Gothic with the, for German readers, reassuringly sentimental, but in terms of her impact in Germany we have to look elsewhere in her work. We have seen that men like Schiller, Tieck, Spieß and Alexis take an interest in and collect material on real-life criminals (murderers and robbers). Literary interest in notorious felons goes back at least to the Inventaire Général de l’histoire des larrons (1625). In 1790s Germany there was a vogue for accounts of the careers of criminals and other social outcasts that was initiated by Charlotte Smith, who in her The Romance of Real Life [A collection of tales based on Pitaval] (3 vols, London: T. Cadell, 1787: Gemälde menschlicher Schwächen und Leidenschaften, Leipzig, 1789), argued that real-life romance and fable are as attractive as romantic fiction.111 Smith’s collection led the way, as we saw in Chapter 5, for those of Schiller, Spieß, Tieck and Alexis.

110 111

Hadley, 148. Charlotte Smith, The Romance of Real Life, 3 vols (London: T. Cadell, 1787), v-vi.

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IV Walpole in Germany Turning to the impact of English Gothic on German writers, we come back to The Castle of Otranto, which first appeared in German, under the title Seltsame Begebenheiten im Schloße Otranto, eine gotische Geschichte, in 1768, the year of publication of Gerstenberg’s Ugolino, which was to prove a far more potent influence on the German Gothic novel than any foreign import, for here, rather than in Lewis, is the ultimate source of the marked horridness of the German Gothic novel, which began by following powerful dramatic models (Ugolino, Götz, Die Räuber). In 1768, far from noticing a strange, whimsical, old-fashioned looking novel by an unknown English author, German-speaking northern Europe was in a fever of admiration for Young’s Night Thoughts, which more than any other work prepared the way for the Gothic novel by establishing the Gothic mood. It has been said that The Castle of Otranto ‘wurde das Urbild aller sogenannten Schauerromane’ (became the model for all so-called Gothic novels),112 started a trend in Germany, and helped to shape the German Gothic novel. This is overstated. Hadley was right to argue that ‘the insistence of some observers of English literature that Walpole’s Otranto initiated a new fashion in Germany or revitalized an old one, seems specious at best’.113 Even in Britain, Otranto was less instrumental in inaugurating the Gothic novel than Sophia Lee’s The Recess and Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron. Walpole himself was a deal more serious about the Gothic Revival than he was about his novel.114 The Castle of Otranto has been described as ‘a storehouse of the motifs that were to flood the Gothic novel’: The persecuted heroine, the long-suffering but devoted wife, the tyrannous villain, a virtuous hero, parental murder, the usurpation of hereditary titles and wealth, concealed identities and relationships, [...] a mouldering castle with subterranean passages, a neighbouring monastery, a family curse, moving portraits, haunted rooms and ‘things that go bump in the night’, a wildly desolate setting, moonlight and thunder.115

By no means all these motifs are specifically Gothic, and even if they were, it would be hard to point to one that demonstrably entered German Gothic

112 113 114 115

Meyers Lexikon, 7. Aufl. (Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut, 1930), Vol. 12, 990. Hadley, 112. Baker, V, 179. Anna M. Wittmann, in European Romanticism, ed. Gerhart Hoffmeister (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990), 63.

488 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective literature via Otranto, with the exception of Walpole’s briefly memorable description of the ‘cavern’ beneath his castle: The lower part of the castle was hollowed into several intricate cloisters; and it was not easy for one under so much anxiety to find the door that opened into the cavern. An awful silence reigned throughout those subterraneous regions, except now and then some blasts of wind that shook the doors she had passed, and which, grating on the rusty hinges, were re-echoed through that long labyrinth of darkness. Every murmur struck her with new terror. (ch. 1)

This is a motif developed by Kahlert in The Necromancer (1792), but while the Geisterseherroman or necromancer-novel is the place to look for signs of the impact of The Castle of Otranto, it must be remembered that Sophia Lee’s The Recess brought the ‘cavern’ to Germany eight years before the retranslation of Otranto. The ‘cavern’ imagery in Naubert’s Elisabeth, Erbin von Toggenburg, for instance, appears to derive from The Recess rather than from Otranto. There is, in Otranto, talk of apparitions, who are much in evidence, and necromancers, who are a figment of Manfred’s overheated imagination. Kahlert’s novel is about a supposed necromancer, who in his way is as fraudulent as Walpole’s Manfred, and the apparitions he pretends to conjure up. The Castle of Otranto and The Necromancer both involve a castle with extensive cellars in which a scene takes place that is short but memorable in Walpole’s case, prolonged and recurrent in that of Kahlert. Walpole has a ‘cavern, ‘a ‘vault’, and a ‘subterraneous passage’, while Kahlert has a ‘spacious cavern’, a ‘deep vault’, and a ‘long vaulted passage’ or ‘subterraneous avenue’. The use of the same nouns, with Kahlert adding an epithet in each case strongly suggests that he is elaborating on what he found in Otranto, and that he read Otranto in English. What takes place in this subterraneous region is in both cases what we have come to think of as a typically Gothic pattern of flight-and-pursuit: Isabella is fleeing from Manfred, while the ghostbusters in The Necromancer are driven by their own fears as they pursue the robbers. The vaults are full of ‘horrid stillness’ interrupted by Gothic noises off, partly occasioned by a howling wind that in both cases blows out the lamp that has been providing the only light.116 The ‘hollow groan’ and ‘sudden hollow noise’ in The Necromancer echo Otranto, where there is a ‘hollow [...] sound’ at the beginning of Manfred’s pursuit of Isabella. While the Gothic cavern in The Necromancer need not have any literary source of inspiration, for Germany has a wealth of mouldering castles with subterranean passages, the sights and sounds in question can be read as elaborations of what Kahlert found in Walpole. He 116

The same thing happens in Radcliffe’s The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (ch. 3).

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may also have been inspired by the English (1783-5) or German (1786) version of Sophia Lee’s The Recess. Two years after publishing her translation of The Recess, Benedicte Naubert applied the cavern image to Winceslaus, a ‘depraved prince’ who presides over a court that is likened to a typically Gothic ‘cavern of murderers’ in Hermann von Unna (1788), and used it again, to great effect, in Elisabeth, Erbin von Toggenburg (1789). By the time Vulpius came to use the cavern in Rinaldo Rinaldini it had become a German motif. The German reception of Otranto is a matter of unripe time: in 1768 Germany wasn’t looking, and by 1794, when the second translation appeared, Walpole’s novel no longer had novelty value. In 1770 the reviewer in the leading periodical of the time, Nicolai’s Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek, castigated Otranto, which he found ‘höchst ekelhaft’ (quite revolting): hier ist nichts als ein unendliches Gewirr übel zusammenhängender Träume durcheinander, die anstatt die Einbildungskraft zu belustigen, solche nur ermüden. Das erbärmliche Gewäsche einiger furchtsamen Bedienten, die sich für Gespenster halten, und alle die Sprache alter Weiber reden, die der Verfasser gleichwol so schön findet, daß er dem Shakespeare hierinnen nachzuahmen glaubt, steht hier ganz an der unrechten Stelle und macht den Roman höchst ekelhaft.117 (the reader is faced with a confused jumble of ill-connected visions which, instead of stimulating the imagination, merely exhaust it. The pathetic twaddle spoken by a handful of timid servants who are afraid of ghosts and speak like so many old women, which the author finds so sublime that he fancies himself vying with Shakespeare, is totally misplaced and makes the novel quite revolting to good taste.)

So much for the idea that The Castle of Otranto had a transformative effect on German Sturm und Drang writing. Hadley’s conclusion that ‘no English novel seems to have had any influence on anything we could remotely call a Gothic trend in Germany’118 is true of Otranto but ignores the fact that The Recess served to introduce the early (gothified) historical romance to Germany. In 1770, even as the first translation of The Castle of Otranto was being pilloried as hopelessly old-fashioned, Smollett’s proto-Gothic The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753) appeared in translation as Begebenheiten des Grafen Ferdinand von Fathom; it did not fare much better, although Kahlert and Grosse borrowed from it in Der Geisterbanner (The Necromancer) and Der Dolch (The Dagger) respectively. The episode in Part III of The Necromancer that is set in a wood-cutter’s cottage in a dreary forest and involves Lieutenant B. making a discovery in the form of fresh blood on 117 118

AdB, 112 (1770), 363. Hadley, 112.

490 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective his pillow that thrills his soul with horror is imitated from the famous passage in Ferdinand Count Fathom in which Fathom, seeking to avoid Charybdis, falls upon Scylla. More important is the fact that Fathom includes a model for the explained supernatural of which the ‘exposed magic’ of novels of the Geisterseher complex is part. Notwithstanding what has been said about Kahlert, the real reception in Germany of Walpole’s novel, such as it is, dates from the publication of the better known second German version, Die Burg von Otranto. Eine Gotische Geschichte, translated in 1794 by the dramatist F. L. W. Meyer who had visited England and knew it well. The English view of the reception of Otranto in Germany has been bedevilled by Coleridge’s statement, written in angry reaction to his play Zapolya being rejected by Byron in favour of Maturin’s Bertram for performance at the Drury Lane Theatre in 1816, that ‘The so-called German drama [...] is English in its origin, English in its materials and Englishby re-adoption.’119 Underlying this statement, as we have seen, is Coleridge’s view that Schiller’s Robbers and ‘the countless imitations which were its spawn’ were ‘themselves the literary brood of the Castle of Otranto, the translations of which [...] were about that time beginning to make as much noise in Germany as their originals were making in England.’120 It was in 1797 that T. J. Mathias declared that ‘Otranto Ghosts have propagated their species with unequalled fecundity. The spawn is in every novel shop’.121 By ‘about that time’ Coleridge means February to June 1799, when he was in Göttingen, and The Castle of Otranto was still the talk of the anglophile town. The Professor of Rhetoric and University Librarian, Christian Gottlob Heyne, arranged for Coleridge to have special borrowing privileges at the University Library, and may havetoldhim that a recent Göttingen student, Karl Friedrich Kahlert, had published a novel, Der Geisterbanner (The Necromancer), influenced by Otranto. By ‘translations’ Coleridge can only mean copies of F. L. W. Meyer’s translation and imitations of Otranto in the form of Der bezauberte Helm, oder der Ritter vom Riesensäbel (1797, which is a gaudy plagiarism of Meyer’s translation)122 and Die Folgen; oder, Begebenheiten im dem Schloße Raxall (1799), and there was also Margarete Liebeskind’s translation of the anonymous The Castle of Saint Vallery (1792), which was an imitation of The Castle of Otranto (which she will have read in English), a good example of the transnational convolutions of Gothic, and Das Schloß St Valery (1793).Another imitation, Der Schreckensturm am See by the prolific but uninspired H. A. Kerndörffer, which revolves 119 120 121 122

Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ch. XXIII. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ch. XXIII. The Pursuit of Literature, 6th edn, (London: Becket, 1798), 343. See Hall, ‘The Gothic Tide’, 52-6.

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around ‘das öde und entlegene Schloß Oranto’ (the desolate, remote Castle of Oranto), did not appear until 1808. Coleridge’s statement, taken out of context, prompted the erroneous idea that The Castle of Otranto must have been influential in Germany ever since its first translation in 1768, which is not the case. In 1799 only one translation, Meyer’s, was being bruited about in Göttingen, though not to the extent implied by Coleridge after talking to Meyer. The German imitations of Otranto of which Coleridge may well have been aware cannot be accounted examples of productive influence. Aside from The Necromancer no major German Gothic novel was influenced by Walpole. It was Burke’s aesthetic thought, rather than Otranto, that made the impact.123 Gothic, then, was not ‘taken up’ in Germany under the influence of Walpole, as Coleridge claimed. Otranto, apparently read in English by Kahlert, most likely (in English or German) attracted the attention of Veit Weber when he was studying at Göttingen at a time (1783-6) when the English novel was popular there. However, while Veit Weber, as an admirer of English literature and a regular visitor to Britain, must have known about The Castle of Otranto, he would have been much more likely to be impressed by Leland’s Longsword (1762) than by Otranto, but whatneeds to be stressed is that ‘if any single book can be said to have inaugurated the [Gothic] genre in [the UK], it is Sophia [Lee’s] story in the manner of Prévost’s Cleveland and D’Aulnoy’s Histoire d’Hypolite, the semi-historical novel called The Recess’.124 It is accordingly appropriate that in terms of its impact on German Gothic the English variety arrived in Germany in the form of The Recess, translated in 1786 by Benedicte Naubert, who in the late 1780s proceeded to use it as a model for her own Gothic historical romances. Naubert’s first novel, Geschichte Emma’s Tochter Kayser Karls des Großen (1785) included a reference to William Longsword, Earl of Salisbury, but her source is not Leland’s novel but Percy’s Reliques. By the time Otranto began to attract literary attention in Germany in the late 1790s, what in English is called the Gothic novel was already established there in the form of the Ritterroman (Veit Weber, 1787), Räuberroman (Schiller’s ‘dramatic novel’ Die Räuber, 1781; Zschokke, 1793), Geisterseherroman (Schiller, 1789), Bundesroman (Naubert, 1788), the explained supernatural (Schiller, 1789), and the horror novel (cf. Gerstenberg’s Ugolino, 1768; Durach, 1793). In 1794 Germany did not need Otranto, for its own Gothic fiction was by then more advanced, which made Walpole’s novel appear old-fashioned, pedestrian and whimsical. In Germany The Mysterious 123 124

See Zelle, Angenehmes Grauen, which explores in depth the aesthetics of horror/terror. Baker, 5:179.

492 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Mother was more influential (on Schiller’s final work, the fate-tragedy Die Braut von Messina, and on A. W. Schlegel) than Otranto. In brief, the idea that Otranto was an important influence on the German Gothic novel is largely fanciful; before the 1840s, when it helped to form Meinhold’s Sidonia von Bork, it seems to have contributed little more than incidental detail to the German Gothic novel in the form of Kahlert’s Der Geisterbanner. It is all very well to say that ‘What took place in Germany was an accretion of machinery, characters, and motifs similar to that which came about in English Gothic fiction and drama after Walpole’, and that when the paraphernalia of turrets, trapdoors, haunted chambers, castles, convents, and caverns which had gone to Germany via the Gothic novel returned to England as German drama, it brought with it Karl Moor, secret tribunals, and diablerie which included blue flames and decaying witch beauties,125

for both statements ignore the real question, that of the failure of Otranto to leave its mark in Germany between 1764 and 1781. Murphy’s statement that Walpole’s Castle of Otranto was ultimately the inspiration of the German genre is mistaken; it was Schiller’s Der Geisterseher (1789) which initiated the type in Germany.126 Murphy’s statement would only make sense if Otranto could be shown to have influenced Der Geisterseher. It does not follow from the fact that Die Räuber followed The Castle of Otranto by seventeen years that Schiller followed Walpole in the textual sense. It is true that Die Räuber has a castle, a crumbling tower and subterranean dungeon, a diabolical villain and a sublimely satanic hero, and a damsel in distress, but there is no cogent reason to suppose any of these features to derive from Otranto. Goethe and Schiller are known to have read Otranto in the late 1790s; the real question is whether Schiller read it before 1781, either in German or in the English of which he had a reading knowledge. If he read it at that time, the question would also arise whether the apparitions and (imaginary) necromancer of Der Geisterseher might go back to Walpole. There is no evidence that he knew the 1768 translation, or that Die Räuber reflects his knowledge of Otranto. Willoughby, in his very thorough study of Schiller’s sources and literary relations in Die Räuber, found no reason even to mention Walpole. Did Schiller know Robert Jephson’s dramatization The Count of Narbonne (1781), of which there were two German versions that appeared after Die Räuber, in 1784 and 1785? We know that he planned a play entitled Narbonne oder Die Kinder des Hauses after 125 126

Evans, 118, 119. Murphy, 29.

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reading Walpole in 1798, but there is no evidence that he knew Jephson’s play back in 1781. The discussion with Goethe in November 1798 followed their reading of Meyer’s 1794 translation. Walpole’s ‘horribly impressive’ (the epithet is Scott’s) The Mysterious Mother, on the other hand, the first Gothic play and a favourite of Ann Radcliffe’s, which Byron, for whom it served as a model for Manfred, called the ‘last tragedy in the language’, left a clear albeit superficial mark on Schiller’s fate tragedy Die Braut von Messina.127 In the run-up to beginning work on his final tragedy Schiller appears to have readthe very positive review of The Mysterious Mother in the Intelligenzblatt of the Allgemeine Literatur Zeitung on 24 February 1798 noting that ‘Sie wird als eine vollkommene Tragödie im Geschmack und Sinn des Ödipus Rex gerühmt’ (It is praised as an exemplary tragedy in the manner of Oedipus Rex). This was based on the reviewer’s argument in the Monthly Review (23 [1797), 248ff.) that The Mysterious Mother might fitly be compared with the Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles, for unity and wholeness of design in the fable, for the dexterous conduct and ascending interest of the plot, for crowded maxims of sublime instruction, and for the abominable horror of its petrifying event.

It was following his reading of the review in the Intelligenzblatt that Schiller wrote to Goethe, thus initiating their exchange of visits and views on the subject of The Castle of Otranto. A. W. Schlegel translated, as Historische, literarische und unterhaltende Schriften von Horace Walpole (1800), part of the five-volume 1798 edition of Walpole’s Works which he, like Tieck, possessed. That Tieck admired Walpole in general and Otranto in particular can be seen from his Gothic Abdallah (drafted 1790, rewritten 1792, published 1795), on which, as we have seen, Otranto left minor marks. Abdallah was, however, influenced less by Otranto than by Beckford’s Vathek. It would be good to know what Tieck made of Walpole’s Hieroglyphic Tales (1785), a fairy-tale anthology drawing on Arabian, Celtic and Oriental fantasy, reprinted in the Works, although he is unlikely to have known it prior to Abdallah. Given his evident interest in Walpole’s work, it may seem strange that in conversation with Friedrich Schlegel in 1799 he was disparaging about Walpole in general and The Castle of Otranto in particular: Wir - denn ich habe den ganzen Aufsatz [A. W. Schlegel’s introduction to his translation of Walpole’s Historische, literarische und unterhaltende Schriften (1800)] 127

See Ulrich Thiergard, ‘Schiller und Walpole. Ein Beitrag zu Schillers Verhältnis zur Schauerliteratur,’ Jahrbuch der deutschen Schiller-Gesellschaft, 3 (1959), 105-117, and Thiergard, Schicksalstragödie als Schauerliteratur (Diss. Göttingen, 1957).

494 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective mit Tieck zusammen gelesen - halten diesen Menschen für ein durchaus schlechtes Subjekt, und in der Tat begreife ich doch nicht wie einer der etwas so nach allen Seiten hin unendlich Plattes geschrieben hat, wie das Castle of Otranto, je etwas sagen könnte was geistreich wäre. Wenn der geistreich ist, so ist Jenisch wohl genialisch. Tieck meynte Walpole wäre schon zu viel Redens von ihm, besser nannte man ihn bloß Pole!’ 128 (Tieck and I [...] find him a pretty poor specimen of a writer, and I really cannot understand how someone who has written something as altogether banal as The Castle of Otranto could ever have anything witty to say. If he is witty, then [Daniel] Jenisch must be a genius. Tieck was of the opinion that Walpole was too big a name for him, and that he ought to be called Pole!)

This is of a piece with his captious attitude towards the Gothic literature in which, despite the disapproval of his better self, he revelled, this being explicable only in terms of his awareness of being devoted and indeed indebted to a genre on which the German literary establishment frowned. The conversation, it will be agreed, does nothing to support the idea that Germany had taken Walpole to its collective heart. Clara Reeve is a marginal figure. Her fairytale-like ‘conduct book with Gothic trimmings’,129 The Old English Baron (1778, reprinted thirteen times betwen 1778 and 1786; translated into Russian, 1792) appeared in German as Der altenglische Baron (tr. G. F. St. Steuber) in 1789, by which time the Ritterroman had been established for a decade and more. The fact is that Clara Reeve had little to teach her German contemporaries, who had their own Ritterromane and their own medieval past. There is little evidence that German Gothics quarried in The Old English Baron, which was, seen from their point of view, just a foreign example of a German speciality, but Benedicte Naubert showed that she knew Der altenglische Baron when she titled her historical novel Edwy und Elgiva oder die Wunder des heiligen Dunstan: Eine altenglische Geschichte (1791). It was Clara Reeve who imported into Gothic, presumably from Perrault’s Mother Goose Tales of 1729,130 the haunted Gothic castle’s forbidden chamber. In Naubert’s fairytale ‘Die weiße Frau’ the library with the Rosenberg family’s terrible secrets in the deserted south wing of the old baron’s castle is borrowed from The Old English Baron. Clara Reeve’s The Exiles; or, The Memoirs of the Count of Cronstadt (1788), a sentimental epistolary novel with Gothic trimmings, derived from Baculard d’Arnaud, D’Almanzi (1776), which was translated into French 128 129 130

Friedrich Schlegels Briefe an seinen Bruder August Wilhelm, ed. O. Walzel (Berlin: Speyer & Peters, 1890), 417. Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England, 229. ‘La Barbe bleu’ dates back to 1697. Perrault’s tales appeared in English in 1729 and, in German, in Das Cabinet der Feen, in (1761-6)

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(Mémoires du comte de Cronstadt, 1789) but not into German, left a slight mark on Harriet Lee’s Kruitzner (1801) and on the chapbook Cronstadt Castle (1803), but is of no real interest in the Anglo-German context. Beckford in Germany: see Chapter 8. Sophia Lee in Germany: see Chapter 4. Radcliffe in Germany The work of Ann Radcliffe, widely translated into German, was the subject of low-level imitations in Germany as well as in England. She enjoyed considerable popular success in Germany, being particularly well served by her translator, D. M. [Margarete] Liebeskind (1765-? 1809),131 who produced excellent versions of A Sicilian Romance (Die nächtliche Erscheinung im Schloße Mazzini, 1792), The Romance of the Forest (Adeline oder das Abenteuer im Walde, 1793), The Mysteries of Udolpho (Udolpho’s Geheimnisse, 1795), and The Italian (Die Italiänerin oder der Beichtstuhl der schwarzen Büssenden, 1797-99). Gaston de Blondeville was translated into German in the year of its publication in English, 1826. An abridged version of The Italian appeared in 1801 as Ellena, die Italienerin oder die Warnungen in den Ruinen von Paluzzi, and a rifacimento of The Italian by the novelist and dramatist J. E. D. Bornschein, Der Beichtstuhl (1802), quickly ran through five impressions. More than any other Gothic novelist Radcliffe was perceived as representing a model that could be followed, her very name guaranteeing success to those who lacked the ability to make a success of their own work. Outright imitations of her work, which are also common in French and Dutch, are found in Germany between 1800 and 1830. They include Bodo und seine Brüder, oder das Schloß der Geheimnisse. Ein Familiengemälde von Ludwig Dellarosa [ps. of Josef Alois Gleich] (1801), an imitation of The Mysteries of Udolpho; Magazin schrecklicher Ereignisse und fürchterlicher Geschichten (1801), an anonymous concoction indebted to The Italian; ‘Gregor’, Liebe, Krieg und Dummheit (n.d.), a rifacimento and sensationalization of The Italian;Das Grab (1800), F. von Oertel’s translation of Mary Pilkington’s The Subterranean Cavern (1798), which was ascribed to Radcliffe; and no doubt others no longer extant. The anonymous Die Geweihten des furchtbaren Bundes (1793) was wrongly supposed to be by Radcliffe, and there are also many German novels spuriously attributed to her in an attempt to cash in on her success, thus establishing a model that was followed in the 1820s when Scott was all 131

In the same period Margarete Liebeskind translated six other English novels including the anonymous The Castle of St Vallery (an imitation of The Castle of Otranto) and Godwin’s Caleb Williams.

496 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective the rage in Germany. They include Die Einsiedlerin am Vesuv. Eine abenteuerliche Geschichte nach dem Englischen der Miss Anna Radcliff (1801; whether the misspellings are down to ignorance or deviousness is unclear) and Der Eremit am schwarzen Grabmahle, oder das Gespenst im alten Schlosse. Ein Ritterroman der Madme Anna Radcliffe (1817). Die Erscheinungen im Schloße der Pyrenäen, frei nach dem Englischen der Anna Radcliffe, vom Verfasser des Admirals (1818) is the German translation of a French translation, Les visions du château des Pyrénées, of Catharine Cuthbertson’s Romance of the Pyrenees [1803], which had been spuriously attributed to Ann Radcliffe). It is not surprising that a German critic, writing in 1804 apropos German ‘Gothic’, remarked disdainfully that ‘Die schauerliche Miß Radclif hat ihnen vor Jahren dieselbe Schauer- und Graussuppe, nur in größeren Portionen aufgetischt’ (The terrific Miss Radcliffe served up the same horrid mixture, albeit in more generous portions, some years ago). Die Priorin. Frei nach dem Englischen der Anna Radcliffe, vom Verfasser der Centilles (1824) is a translation of W. H. Ireland’s The Abbess, implausibly attributed to Radcliffe. Angelina, oder die Abenteuer im Walde von Montalbano, aus dem Englischen der Miss Anna Radcliffe (1828) is a translation of Catharine Cuthbertson’s The Forest of Montalbano, falsely attributed to ‘Anna Radcliffe’. Der Turm von Aosta, oder Großmuth im Tode. Das schwarze Schloß, oder der Sturm der Leidenschaften. Aus den nachgelassenen Papieren der Miss Anna Radcliffe (1829) is a translation of G. D. Hernon’s Louisa, or The Black Tower (1805), falsely attributed to Ann Radcliffe. Then there is Die Todeswette. Roman in 2 Bänden von A. Radcliffe. Frei nach dem Englischen bearbeitet von L. von Alvensleben (1830), a reworking of Francis Lathom’s The Fatal Vow (1807). Kerndörffer’s Die Ruinen der Geisterburg oder die warnende Stimme um Mitternacht ‘nach Radcliffe’ (1805) is not a rifacimento of The Italian, as has been supposed, but an amalgam of M. G. Lewis’s drama The Castle Spectre and Eliza Parson’s The Mysterious Warning. Although there was a fashion for the ‘explained supernatural’ in Germany at the time of Ann Radcliffe’s greatest influence in England in 1792-9, this is attributable to Schiller’s Der Geisterseher and Cajetan Tschink’s Wundergeschichten sammt dem Schlüssel zu ihrer Erklärung, both of them published in 1789. Tschink’s novel is the most explicit monument to the fashion for the explained supernatural, but at the time there were many others, some of them summarized by Heiderich,132 of which the best-known was Kahlert’s The Necromancer (Minerva Press, 1794), in which the genial but unoriginal author follows Schiller’s (and maybe Radcliffe’s) lead in explaining all his ghostly visions and mysterious phenomena by natural means. Other German writers, including Hoffmann, found the ‘explained 132

See Heiderich, The German Novel of 1800, 43-62.

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supernatural’ both in her work and in Schiller’s. C. F. Kunz, Hoffmann’s friend and later publisher, opened a lending library, the Neues Lese-Institut, in Bamberg in 1812, of which Hoffmann had the run.133 It contained the work of Lewis (this is where he read The Monk) and Radcliffe, some of which he presumably read, for the ‘explained supernatural’ is a background mode in Die Elixiere des Teufels, in which Hoffmann explains some mysteries only to create others,and in Der tote Invalide where Achim von Arnim ‘suggests natural explanations for seemingly supernatural occurrences’.134 Hoffmann may, of course, have got the explained supernatural from the same German sources (notably Schiller’s Der Geisterseher) as Radcliffe. Radcliffe’s Pierre de la Motte in The Romance of the Forest, whom she took from Pitaval via Charlotte Smith, in turn appears to have influenced Vulpius in the fashioning of his Rinaldo Rinaldini, for the initial description of La Motte as a man whose passions often overcame his reason, and, for a time, silenced his conscience; but, though the image of virtue, which nature had impressed upon his heart, was sometimes obscured by the passing influence of vice, it was neverwholly obliterated. With strength of mind sufficient to have withstood temptation, he would have been a good man; as it was, he was always a weak, and sometimes a vicious member of society [...] Thus he was a man, infirm in purpose and visionary in virtue, [whose] conduct was suggested by feeling, rather than principle, and [whose] virtue [...] could not stand the pressure of occasion’

amounts to a character sketch of Rinaldo. Walladmor, too, shows the influence of Radcliffe, notably in its settings, for Alexis, who had not visited Britain, let alone North Wales, used Radcliffe as she used Salvator Rosa, as a landscape model. Tieck and Radcliffe: see Chapter 8 German Versions of The Monk The Monk (1796) first appeared in German in 1797-98 (Der Mönch. Aus dem Englischen übersetzt) translated by Friedrich von Oertel, who had already won his spurs as the author of a Gothified satirical novel, Denkwürdigkeiten des ehemaligen Nachtwächters Robert von Zwäzen (1794).135 It was in Oertel’s translation of the first edition, which in retrospect is by far the best of the 133

134 135

See Wulf Segebrecht, ‘E. T. A. Hofffmann and English Literature,’ in Deutsche Romantik and English Romanticism, ed. Theodore G. Gish & Sandra G. Frieden (Munich: Fink, 1984), 52-66. Ralph Tymms, German Romantic Literature (London: Methuen, 1955), 283. On Oertel, see Hadley, The German Novel in 1790, 223ff.

498 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective contemporary translations, that The Monk was denounced by A. W. Schlegel, who, in a magisterial review in the Jenaische allgemeine Literaturzeitung (1798, No. 157), described it as being ‘aus schlechten deutschen [Romanen] zusammengeborgt und nachgeahmt’ (borrowed from and written in imitation of second-rate German novels), which was merely an exaggeration of the truth. Lewis’s novel was then slated by a reviewer in the influential Neue Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek: Wenn [...] ein Schriftsteller, der den ganzen nachtheiligen Einfluß solcher albernen Erfindungen nicht verkennen kann, sich dem Willen des Verlegers und dem ausgearteten Geschmack des Pöbels der Leserunterwirft - so verdient er Verachtung. (NADB, 39 [1798], 71) (Any writer who is unable to recognize the pernicious effect of such mindless fabrications, and therefore bows to the will of publisher and the degenerate taste of the reading mob, deserves our contempt.)

The reviewer went on to describe Der Mönch as a Faust-type tale, which went to the head of an anonymous literary recycler, for 1799 saw the appearance of a work that Summers took for a translation of The Monk, Mathilde von Villanegas oder der weibliche Faust, but which is simply an anonymous rehash of Oertel’s translation. The anonymous Die blutende Gestalt mit Dolch und Lampe (1799), an abridged piracy of Oertel’s translation, was followed by a sequel, Der Geist Lurian im Silbergewand oder das Gericht über Ambrosio (c. 1800). Further damage was done to Lewis’s reputation by a second, anonymous free translation, Der Mönch: Roman (1799, repr. 1962), which by taking liberties with thetext that amounted to substituting the translator’s conservative view of life for the author’s liberal one did Lewis’s reputation in Germany no good at all. This markedly inferior version implicitly represented Lewis as adhering to outdated ideas: When [...] Lewis wrote The Monk, he was influenced by Sturm und Drang literature. Consequently, in his novels Lewis was able to transcend the limitations of the Enlightenment view of life imposed on the English novel at that time. When The Monk, as a popular English novel, influenced in turn a number of the English Romanticists, it also introduced them to the newer currents of German literature which Lewis had assimilated in his novel. Paradoxically, however, the anonymous German 1799 translation of Lewis’[s] work did not have the same effect on German letters, for Der Mönch retrogressively champions Enlightenment and Pietistic ideas, and does so in a simplistic fashion. Rather than abetting and popularizing the new ‘Romantic’ literature, as did its English counterpart, Der Mönch mirrors the ideas, taste and style of the popular German novel of the day.136 136

Gish & Frieden (eds), Deutsche Romantik and English Romanticism, ii. This is a summary

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The novel which Lewis had been forced to tone down substantially by 1798 was represented to the German reading public first as a work in deplorable taste, and then, having been sanitized by the anonymous translator, as a harmless, old-fashioned one. No wonder, then, that the novel failed to enjoy a major literary success in Germany, except for its impact on Heinrich von Kleist. Further rifacimenti of The Monk are Salardo der Schreckliche: Eine schauderhafte Erzählung aus Lorenzos Papieren (1802), Der Mönch; oder, Die siegende Tugend (1806) and Der Mönch. Eine schauerlich abentheuerliche Geschichte (1810). The Monk tempted by the Devil reappears in Hoffmann’s Die Elixiere des Teufels and in a lesser Gothic novel, Heinrich Müller’s Vasco und Isabella oder der Großinquisitor. The fourth volume of Lewis’s Romantic Tales (1808) included ‘Amorassan, or The Spirit of the Frozen Ocean. An Oriental Romance’, which Lewis describes, in his usual casual, misleading way, as being ‘of German origin’; in fact, as Karl Guthke was to establish,137 it is a translation of F. M. Klinger’s ‘philosophical novel’ Der Faust der Morgenländer (1796). This is all the more interesting in that Klinger’s Die Geschichte vom Goldenen Hahn: Ein Beytrag zur Kirchen-Historie (1785) turned on the ‘bedroom banditry’138 of a lascivious Spanish priest, thus providing a model not only for Veit Weber’s Die Betfahrt des Bruders Gramsalbus (1793) and so many others of that ilk, but, if he knew Die Geschichte vom Goldenen Hahn by 1796, as seems likely, for Lewis’s Ambrosio as well. It is surprising that of Charlotte Dacre’s powerful Monk-related novels, only one, The Libertine (1807) was belatedly - translated into German (Der Wüstling, 1829), for a number of lesser works were translated. When Francis Lathom’s The Midnight Bell (1798) appeared in German as Die Mitternachtsglocke, eine romantische Geschichte vom Verfaßer des Mönchs (1800), it was, no doubt for marketing purposes, attributed to Lewis, not a very intelligent strategy following the critical panning of the 1799 ‘translation’ of The Monk. Such scurrilous, subversive links between Gothic works are a key element in their Gothicity. Hoffmann’s Die Elixiere des Teufels (1815-16) was, in a number of externals, modelled on The Monk, a fact that assumes greater significance in that in Hoffmann’s novel, which is the more important of the two, ‘Minderwertiges, Äußerliches und Billiges vertieft und verinnerlicht wurde’ (the inferior, the superficial and the downright feeble have been intensified and internalized).139 We have seen that much the same applies to Kleist’s Die

137 138 139

of Gabriele A. Wittig Davis’s ‘Der Mönch, or A Moral Point of View?’ (ibid., 7-16). Guthke, Englische Vorromantik, 82-101. Hadley, The Undiscovered Genre, 117. Herbert Koziol, ‘E. T. A. Hoffmanns Die Elixiere des Teufels and M. G. Lewis’ The Monk,’ GRM.26 (1938), 167-170. See also Wilhelm Horn, ‘Über das Komische im

500 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Familie Schroffenstein, which also has its starting-point in The Monk. Montague Summers lists a few of the parallels that show Hoffmann borrowing details from Lewis, but they are mostly insignificant. Hoffmann’s significant borrowings come from elsewhere. Appropriating the name (Bruder Medardus) of a character in one of Benedicte Naubert’s Volksmärchen (‘Die Fischer’, NVdD, Vol. III) with a keen eye for female beauty, which is there associated with the devil, Hoffmann presents his novel as having been edited from the posthumous papers of a certain Brother Medardus, a Capuchin friar. Medardus, whose sermons are similarly crowded, corresponds to Lewis’s renegade Ambrosio (‘Abbot of the Capuchins’), Euphemia to Matilda, and Aurelia to Antonia. Such minor parallels are, however, misleading, for The Monk and Die Elixiere des Teufels are different types of novel: The Monk is a prototype and archetype of horror Gothic, whereas Die Elixiere des Teufels is Gothic novel and Bildungsroman in one.140 Die Elixiere des Teufels is not only a tale of diabolical possession, which The Monk is too, but is, in addition, a Doppelgängerroman, which The Monk is not, and it is as a Doppelgängerroman that Die Elixiere des Teufels retains its disquieting power. The Monk derives from the German Sturm und Drang; Hoffmann’s novel derives from Märchen and points forward to Kafka. These are huge differences. The much bruited influence of The Monk on Die Elixiere des Teufels in reality amounted to little more than a walk-on role. The real influence of Lewis’s novel on German literature is to be found in the work of Heinrich von Kleist.

140

Schauerroman, E.T.A.Hofmanns Elixiere des Teufels und ihre Beziehungen zur englischen Literatur,’ Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprsachen und Literaturen, CXLVI (1923), 153-63. See Webber, The Doppelgänger, 184-193.

13 A GOTHIC ICONOGRAPHY The key images of literary Gothic, which still partly define it, are foreshadowed in post-Renaissance poetry and painting. In German terms there is an obvious parallel between late eighteenth-century Gothic imagery and that of the poetry of the 17th-century with its omnipresent, war-induced labyrinth-images and dichotomy of heaven and hell, light and dark, life and death, war and peace, time and eternity. In Gothic the dichotomy of light and dark has an additional, historical connotation, for light (clarity, openness, reason, the straight and narrrow, order, harmony) tends to represent the Aufklärung, seen by contrast with the violent irrationalism of the Age of Terror as the opposite of everything Gothic-period (dark, clandestine, cloistered, claustrophobic, unreason, disorder, the wilderness or labyrinth). Labyrinthine complexity is a feature of the German Gothic novel. The Age of Revolution, Terror and two decades of seemingly never-ending war harked back to the dualistic imagery of the Thirty Years War, but late eighteenth-century Gothic imagery is also reminiscent of sixteenth-century Mannerism with its cult of the bizarre; that Gothicism is a maniera is clear from its addiction to copying and relative lack of depth. The seventeenthcentury poet Hofmannswaldau plays with the imagery of his contemporaries much as Tieck plays with the received forms and images of his early Gothic models, while his contemporary Lohenstein writes tragedies full of bloody horrors.On the textual level, Athanasius Kircher’s Mundus Subterraneus (1665) with its accounts of subterraneous (interior) giants, beasts and demons forms a bridge to late eighteenth-century Gothic and thence to twentiethcentury fiction (Kafka) and painting (Max Ernst).1 In today’s terms the beasts in question are figurations of the unconscious. The Gothic is, of course, associated with the sublime, especially in the form of the Alps and Apennines, the sublimely menacing mountain landscapes copied from Rosa by Radcliffe and from Radcliffe by Alexis. There are two main kinds of sublime: the sublime of nature as reflected in the setting of the typical Gothic castle, and that associated with privation. It is impossible to conceive of a Gothic novel of any kind in either language that does not include at least some of the master-images and image-clusters of the genre that begins with images of the grandeur, magnitude, power and violence of nature at its most awe-inspiring, in which human fear is 1

On Kircher, see Brischar, Athanasius Kircher, ein Lebensbild (1877) and Gustav René Hocke, Manier und Manierismus in der europäischen Kunst, 2 vols (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1957), I, 167ff; II, 122-124.

502 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective sublimated, and ends in those of privation (war, incarceration, vacuity, darkness, solitude and silence; but also the absence of peace, freedom, knowledge, certainty and security) which best define Gothic on the human level. Burke’s Of the Sublime (1756) appeared in German (Über den Ursprung unserer Begriffe vom Erhabenen und Schönen, [tr. Christian Garve])2 in 1773, a matter of months before Werther, as did Anna Laetitia Aikin’s On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror. Burke’s ‘Of the Sublime’,3 voices the idea that underlies his importance for the Gothic generation, the idea that the ‘pleasure’ (‘excitement’ is a better word) that is inherent in our response to the prospect of extreme pain or danger is at its greatest when it is mixed with terror because our very sense of self-preservation is aroused. Such existentially challenging terror, induced by the spectacle of the aweinspiringly great - the classical examples are our feelings on contemplating the Swiss Alps or Mount Etna, mountainous seas, awe-inspiring ruins, awesome subterranean caverns, or by the privations that are central to the awareness of sublimity, is central to writer after writer, German and English alike. Tsunami and tornado combine awesome power with extreme privation. Letter XXXI of Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774) listed some of the sublime phenomena that were to be noted by James Beattie in a work translated by Carl Grosse of Horrid Mysteries fame - stupendous mountains, precipices, mountain torrents, deserts, the immense ocean - as contributing to man’s awareness of his own puniness and contingency. Writing nine years later, Beattie notes ‘vast caverns, deep and dark woods, overhanging precipices, and agitations of the sea in a storm [...] conflagrations and the like’ as being among the natural phenomena that strike us as pleasingly terrible. Notably Gothic is the cavern in Hauff’s Lichtenstein, in which Duke Ulrich (like Otto von Wittelsbach at the end of Naubert’s Alf von Dülmen) takes refuge; it is both one of the most memorable such caverns in Gothic fiction and itself a classically Romantic fiction. Hauff likens the cavern to ‘die erhabenen Hallen eines unterirdischen Palastes’ (the lofty halls of a subterraneanpalace) of Oriental fairytale. It may seem a far cry back to Naubert’s Alf von Dülmen, in which Otto von Wittelsbach finds himself outlawed and subject to instant death on discovery, living in a cave, on roots, awaiting the executioner’s poniard, but Hauff’s image is simply a more Romantic and sophisticated version of Naubert’s. In each case the Gothic ‘hero’ is reduced to the level of hunted animal. 2 3

Schiller was, of course, familiar with Burke’s work and corresponded with Christian Garve; see his letters to Körner of 25 Jan. 1793 and 29 Dec. 1794. See Riedel, in SHB, 162, and Zelle, Angenehmes Grauen, which explores in depth the aesthetics of horror/terror.

A Gothic Iconography 503

Sublime, then, are images of nature at its most violent and destructive: the earthquake as depicted by Heinrich von Kleist and the shipwreck as described by Radcliffe in Chapter 9 of The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789) and later depicted by Caspar David Friedrich in Das Eismeer (182324), which portrays an Arctic wasteland like that at the end of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, pointing to the ice-raft on which the text leaves the Creature to drift back into the darkness and death whence he had been conjured. What is left of the wrecked ship points, in accordance with Christian iconography, to the end of man’s voyage through life, and therefore to what Kleist calls Gebrechlichkeit, meaning the innate frailty and vulnerability of the human animal. On a different level, and with a totally different meaning, is the shipwreck at the beginning of Walladmor (1824), with which Alexis plays in such a knowing way in the course of the novel, and which is, with the pirating and smuggling metaphors, an aspect of the central image-cluster of the novel. In this case shipwreck is less fear-inducing than comic, for Alexis’s stance, like Smollett’s stance in Ferdinand Count Fathom, is aristophanic from the outset as the twin heroes of the novel are found competing for the doubtful privilege of lying on a barrel in a choppy sea. Other memorably Gothic images include the earthquakes and fires in Kleist’s Das Erdbeben in Chili, and the conflagrations and glaciers in Naubert’s Elisabeth, Erbin von Toggenburg. Naubert not only depicts the sublimity of the Swiss Alps, but shows two heroic women crossing their glaciers. By comparison, the way in which Ann Radcliffe’s heroine in The Romance of the Forest merely goes riding to ‘take a nearer view of the Glaciers’ is decidedly unheroic. Both the novels in question were written in 1789. In Gothic terms the opposite of erhaben (sublime) is verfallen (fallen, ruined), for if the idea of pleasurable terror is peculiarly Gothic, so too is the idea of the Fall.The typical Gothic landscape features, in the background, the mountain peaks that point, like the cathedrals that were built to emulate them, to the idea of sublimity and the pleasurable terror it encapsulates, and thence to the idea of religious terror; but in human, all-too-human terms height is terrible because it leads to depth and thus to death. The dizzying crags and terrible chasms of Gothic convention point beyond life to the realm of King Death as charted in Young’s Night Thoughts and depicted alike in Piranesi’s prisons of the imagination and on Friedrich’s and Goya’s canvases. In the end there is no escape from gravity. What makes the famous ending of Lewis’s The Monk so terrible is what happens to Ambrosio in seconds of sheer terror once Satan lets go of him, although they are nothing compared with the nine days Satan is said to have taken to reach the bottom of the fathomless pit. Images of height lead inevitably to those of depth, both of which combine in Piranesi’s images of imaginary prisons.

504 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective The uncanny and the horror of the abyss come together in Hoffmann’s unforgettable image of the door that opens straight on to an abyss, into which the murderer precipitated his victim, and the image of the murderer in his guilt-induced madness desperately scraping away at the bricked-up doorway. These are the images and figures of nightmare. The abyss is the most telling leitmotif of Gothic. Another key image of Gothic and fantasy generally is the edifice, the most significant type of which is the castle situated, as often as not, on a rocky crag or outcrop (notable examples are Naubert’s castle of Rabenstein, Hauff’s Lichtenstein, and Alexis’s Walladmor), its time-worn battlements a puny reflection of the jagged mountain peaks by which it is surrounded. The Gothic castle/fortress/tower/vault is the seat and site of the irrational and its menagery of fears, the very source of the ‘visionary terror’ of which Maturin wrote in the dedication to The Milesian Chief (1812). One of the key images of German Gothic is the derelict robber-baron’s castle (‘Ein altes verfallenes Raubschloß’), in the derelict tower of which, ‘ausgemergelt wie ein Gerippe’ (a living skeleton), Karl Moor’s father is incarcerated. Imprisonment in a tower is a French fairytale motif, but there is nothing remotely fairytale-like about Franz Moor’s treatment of his aged father; on the contrary, the image of the tower in which prisoners are starved to death goes back to Gerstenberg’s Ugolino, by which the teenage Schiller was mightily impressed. It is with Kafka that the castle assumes the proportions and ultimate symbolical complexity of the edifice, but between The Castle of Otranto and Das Schloß4 there are endless Gothic castles of greater or lesser moment, the best examples of the type being found in Naubert, whose Elisabeth, Erbin von Toggenburg features the castle-fortress of Rabenstein, a mouldering pile that is classically Gothic, and there is in the same novel another Gothic edifice in the shape of Donat Fortress, which presents a reverse image of Rabenstein Castle, in that, like the Devil’s castle of folktale, much of it extends underground. Here nothing is to be seen but winding staircases, narrow passages and gloomy vaulted dungeons without end or number. The subterraneous world of vaults, passages and crypts invokes the unconscious, pointing backward to Athanasius Kircher’s accounts of interior demons, and forward to Schubert, Freud and Jung. Recognized from a distance by its outlines and situation, the castle is both the commonest and the most characteristic edifice of Gothic. Other symbolical spatialities include the cathedral, church, abbey/convent or chapel (including the ruined chapel on a hill, as in Rinaldo Rinaldini, which 4

Pollunder’s ‘country house’ in Der Verschollene is an outstanding example of the edifice.

A Gothic Iconography 505

was known at the time as a favourite site for sessions of the Freischöffenbund), but it is what goes on within the building that confirms its Gothic status. Significant spaces include the forbidden chamber, prison cell and dungeon (the Burgverliess or oubliette entered by a trapdoor, as in Schiller’s Das Spiel des Schicksals) with their connotations of immurement and live burial. The underground passage, room, or vault looms large in Gothic from Otranto onwards, and is often combined with constricted space. Like the trapdoor, the guttering candle that suddenly goes out became a standard, increasingly pantomimic effect from Otranto onwards. Then there are courtrooms and their furniture, apparatus (Iron Maiden, etc.) and symbolism, interrogation scenes - Inquisition (Schiller), Ketzergericht (Veit Weber), Vehmgericht (Naubert) - chamber of horrors (and, outside, the cavern of horrors), torture chambers and the whole machinery of terror. Privation, which in extreme form means the lowest and darkest dungeon (kept for those deemed the lowest of the low by the lawless overlord in question), is pre-eminently a feature of the Gothic, involving, as it does, both the presence of what is normally absent and the absence of what is normally present;5 it includes solitude, silence; the lightless, soulless, mindless, hopeless, lifeless; the unearthly, uncanny (eerie, weird, macabre). Angst, which ranges from uncertainty and insecurity to dread, is the Gothic emotion par excellence. Whether situated in Germany, Switzerland, Bohemia, Italy, Spain, Scotland or Wales, Gothic landscape is studded with similar symbolical features, castle, abbey, chapel, churchyard6 and tower (as in Die Räuber), mostly ruinous, with here and there Rosaesque banditti, a broken-down coach and broken bodies. The banditti in their ruins or mountain fastnesses symbolize the uncertainty at the heart of Gothic, the omnipresence of death in life. In Gothic landscape the very trees and rocks are symbols of tragedy, for the geographical stands for the human. It is his own life that Friedrich envisions, but at the same time the desolation and wilderness are the readerspectator’s, for the imaginary landscape that we see and which confronts and challenges us as we read it is our inscape, our own inner landscape. Friedrich’s image of the ruinous churchyard is arguably the Gothic image par excellence, but ittook a Goya to reveal the hideous truth behind all the tales of banditti or highwaymen that mostly fail to do justice to the rapacity of the human animal. That said, rhe almost identical images used by two writers also burn themselves into the memory.Kleist’s image of the Raubhündin Penthesilea, at one with her hunting dogs, sinking her teeth into

5 6

See Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Convention, passim. Cf. the work of Caspar David Friedrich and the leitmotif of the ruined arch in Werther.

506 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Achilles, and Hoffmann’s image of Aurelia, with the fury of a hyena, sinking her teeth into her husband, are as hideous as anything in Goya. The presence of the dangers of the road means that this landscape, open though it seems, is deceptively so, for it contains all the ingredients of the closed space of Gothic from the cavern or Räuberhöhle to the surviving underground spaces of ruins that are often, as in Kahlert’s Der Geisterbanner), infested by banditti, as by so many rats. The pattern of pursuit of the innocent is much the same whether it is along dark subterranean passages or narrow urban streets, or across a landscape or country or continent, and Gothic landscape includes not only the open road but also, from Die Räuber onwards, another recurrent master-image in the form of the forest that, paradoxically, encapsulates the same dangers as the open road or landscape. Trees block out light, leaving a dark world in which danger is, or, ever since Smollett’s Fathom, is feared to be, lurking behind every tree. The forest, which involves the prospect of losing one’s way and maybe one’s life, is part of the labyrinth cluster of images and ideas (maze, web, wilderness). In De Quincey’s quasi-Gothic Confessions the vast Hercynian forest, stands for the danger of getting (or being) lost in life and in the text, but the ‘Hercynian forest’ is also a metaphor for the hermeneutic sublime in the sense of ‘an encounter with a darkness encrypted within a text’.7 While the Gothic state of mind goes back, via the cult of Spenser and Milton, to the second quarter of the eighteenth century (Parnell, Young, Blair, and Gray), and, in Germany, to the poetry of the Thirty Years War, the most interesting models are found not among the motley melancholy crew of the graveyard poets and their immediate predecessors, but among painters from Caravaggio onwards. Dubbed the ‘Bravo of painting’,8 Caravaggio (1569-1609), the contemporary of Spenser (c.1552-1599), Shakespeare (1564-1616) and Webster (c.1578-c.1632), revelled, like them, in the night-side of nature, and while he may not be as important in the present context as that other so-called Bravo of painting, Salvator Rosa (1615-1673), from whom the landscape of the Gothic novel à la Radcliffe derives, his dramatic use of shade9 and near-black backgrounds (tenebrismo) anticipates the evocation of darkness by the graveyard school and the emphasis on dark deeds and the terrors of the dark of the Gothic novelists. Tenebrismo, which led, in literary terms, to the Night Piece (Thomas Parnell, ‘A Night Piece on Death’, 1772) is a basic feature of Gothic:

7 8 9

Clej, 233f. Gaunt, Bandits in a Landscape, ch. 2. It was continued by the caravaggisti or tenebristi, a group of young Italian and Spanish painters in early seventeenth-century Naples.

A Gothic Iconography 507 Shadows [...] were among the foremost characteristics of Gothic works. They marked the limits necessary to the constitution of an enlightened world and delineated the limitations of neoclassical perceptions. Darkness, metaphorically, threatened the light of reason with what it did not know. Gloom cast perceptions of formal order and unified design into obscurity; its uncertainty generated both a sense of mystery and passions and emotions alien to reason. Night gave free reign to imagination’s unnatural and marvellous creatures, while ruins testified to a temporality that exceeded rational understanding and human finitude.10

The painters around whom this chapter revolves - Rosa, Piranesi, Fuseli, Goya, and Friedrich - are individualistic, idiosyncratic artists, wild men and wild painters, in most things extreme, driven by emotion. Friedrich may seem, in some ways, to be an exception, but he is as much an emotiondriven individual as any of them. The work of all these men parallels the work of the Gothic novelists in significant ways; it is no chance that three of them (Piranesi, Fuseli and Goya) were influenced by Rosa.

I Salvator Rosa comes into the present story through what Lady Morgan called his ‘magnificent and endless combinations of the sublime and the terrific’, in other words, through his use of picturesque landscape and the idea of sublimity11 that it triggers, his use of crag and abyss, ruins and ruinous trees, the figure of the bandito, and so on, but also because a famous, partly fictionalized lifeby a Gothic novelist transformed him into a Gothic hero, a veritable noble savage, to say nothing of a tale by the most considerable German Gothic novelist that turned him into a comic hero, or the Victorian history of painting that turned him into a latterday villain. I am referring to The Life and Times of Salvator Rosa by Lady Morgan (née Sydney Owenson) (1824), E. T. A. Hofmann’s ‘Signor Formica’ (1820), and Ruskin’s Modern Painters (Vol. 5, 1860). As with any major influence, what counts is less what our hero was, than what he pretended to be, andwhat he was perceived to be. With Rosa, it is above all a matter of what the literary eighteenth century perceived him to be: we are concerned with an image, a falsification or counterfeit copy, a myth. In terms of painting, as opposed to

10 11

Bottting, Gothic, 32. Which is in the eye of the beholder, for it is not the innate qualities of landscape that is ‘sublime’, but our self-related perception of them; it is the same with ruins, which bring home to us the idea (and fear) of ruination.

508 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective the painter, it is a matter of how his paintings were seen and, in a general way, used as models by writers like Ann Radcliffe. Rosa began his Gothic afterlife in September 1739, when Horace Walpole, making the grand tour of Italy with the poet Thomas Gray, recorded his impression of the Western Alps as ‘lonely lords of glorious desolate prospects’ guarding a landscape of ‘Precipices, mountains, torrents, wolves, rumblings, Salvator Rosa’. Two days later he described the landscape in more detail: But the road, [...] the road! Winding round a prodigious mountain, and surrounded with others, all shagged with hanging woods, obscured with pines, or lost in clouds! Below, a torrent breaking through cliffs, and tumbling through fragments of rocks! Sheets of cascades forcing their silver speed down channelled precipices, and hasting into the roughened river at the bottom!12

Here already is the picturesque, sublime, ‘Salvatorian’ landscape that Ann Radcliffe, under the influence of eighteenth-century accounts of Rosa and the Rosaesque portrayals of Alpine landscape by travel-writers of the time like Henry Swinburne,13 was to describe in The Mysteries of Udolpho (II, ch. 5): From this sublime scene the travellers continued to ascend among the pines, till they entered a narrow pass of the mountains, which shut out every feature of the distant country, and, in its stead, exhibited only tremendous crags, impending over the road [...] Though the deep vallies between these mountains were, for the most part, clothed with pines, sometimes an abrupt opening presented a perspective of only barren rocks, with a cataract flashing from their summit among broken cliffs, till its waters, reaching the bottom, foamed along with unceasing fury; and sometimes pastoral scenes exhibited their ‘green delights’ in the narrow vales, smiles amid surrounding horror.

This is the locus classicus, the epitome of the wild landscape à la Rosa: It was commonplace even in the earliest criticism of her novels to mention Mrs Radcliffe’s [...] similarities of perception with the seventeenth-century Italian painter whose wildly craggy landscapes, peopled with shepherds and banditti, were especially popular and influential in eighteenth-century

12 13

Quoted from The Castle of Otranto, ed. Devendra P. Varma (London: The Folio Society, 1976), 8. In his Travels in the Two Sicilies (4 vols, 1790: IV, 169) Henry Swinburne wished for ‘the powers of a Salvator’ to enable him to do justice to ‘the sublime style’ of the north Sicilian landscape. Veit Weber refers to the German translation of Swinburne (Reisebeschreibung durch beyde Sizilien in den Jahren 1777 bis 1780, 1780-81) in Die Teufelsbeschwörung.

A Gothic Iconography 509 England. Scenes such as the famous description of the approach to Udolpho are verbal equivalents of a landscape by Salvator. In his paintings, as in Mrs Radcliffe’s pages on mountains, outline, mass, and elaborate shadings of chiaroscuro create an atmosphere in which awe serves only to heighten the sense of imminent danger and permanent terror which goes into an experience of the sublime.14

Rosa’s ‘Rocky Landscape’ epitomizes this landscape, as does ‘Attack by Bandits’, in which the crags in the background constitute a theatrical backdrop to the real terrors of the attack as a potential victim, stripped to the waist, kneels before a knife-wielding would-be assassin.15 As we shall see, Goya’s ‘The Bandits’ Attack’ takes on, literally, where Rosa’s ‘Attack by Bandits’ left off. Goya’s depiction of an all too familiar scene is the more explicit and therefore the more ‘enhorrored’ in the language of the time: The little figures of banditti, which formed pleasing decorative details in the landscapes of the Salvator Rosa school [...] came to life in the writings of Mrs Ann Radcliffe [...] and took on gigantic and Satanic proportions, becowled and sinister as Goya’s bogeys.16

Mrs Radcliffe’s novels are full of allusions to Rosa and descriptions of landscape that owe more to his paintings than to any landscape reality beyond the British isles. She was only eight years old when Reynolds gave the Royal Academy lecture and with it his own estimate of Rosa: He gives us a peculiar cast of nature, which, though void of all grace, elegance and simplicity, though it has nothing of that elevation and dignity which belongs to the grand style, yet has that sort of dignity which belongs to savage and uncultivated nature: but what is most to be admired in himis the perfect correspondence which he observed between the subjects which he chose, and his manner of treating them. Everything is of a piece: his Rocks, Trees, Sky [...] have the same rude and wild character which animates his figures.17

Reynolds’s admiration led him to imitate Rosa in works like Ugolino (1773) and A Captain of Banditti (c.1775). Ann Radcliffe, for her part, took Rosa’s landscapes as the negative pole of her own, verbal landscape painting, her model for the positive pole being Claude.

14 15 16 17

Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, ed. Bonamy Dobrée (Oxford, 1970), 674. See Jonathan Scott, Salvator Rosa, his Life and Times (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1995, 22. Praz, The Romantic Agony, 58.Cf .A Sicilian Romance, ch. 4, in which ‘the wilds of Sicily’ are described as being ‘frequently infested with banditti’. Quoted from Jonathan Scott, Salvator Rosa, 226f.

510 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective When traversing the Western Alps with Horace Walpole, Thomas Gray was carried away by ‘the most solemn, the most romantic, and the most astonishing scenes I have ever beheld’, and his impression of the Alps adds the all-important further dimension: ‘Mount Cenis [...] carries the permission mountains have of being frightful rather too far; and its horrors were accompanied by too much danger to give me time to reflect upon their beauties.’18 Rosa, a century before Romanticism, supplied a ready-made formula for wild, picturesque, ‘romantic’ landscape, but also, as Gray’s reference to ‘horrors’ reminds us, with a focus for the sublime, spiritualfeelings with which human beings are filled by awesomely great, infinitely challenging landscape of the sort that the eighteenth century associated with Rosa’s paintings. The sublime of terror, then. Smollett, in The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753), used Salvatorian scenery in a proto-Gothic way when he wrote (ch. XX, XXI) of ‘the silence and solitude of the place, the indistinct images of the trees that appeared on every side, stretching their extravagant arms athwart the gloom.’ Rosa inspired a new perception not only of wild, desolate mountain scenery with dizzying heights, dismal abysses, and caverns full of whatever horrors the spectator’s imagination might supply, but also of ancient ruined trees such as the scathed oaks on the approach to Udolpho, which, as we shall see, are everywhere in Friedrich’s landscapes, and of ruins as such. The philosopher of Gothic, Schopenhauer, was to write of the sublime effect of ruins: Manche Gegenstände unserer Anschauung erregen den Eindruck des Erhabenen dadurch, daß, sowohl vermöge ihrer räumlichenGröße, als ihres hohen Alters, also ihrer räumlichen Dauer, wir ihnen gegenüber uns zu Nichts verkleinert fühlen, und dennoch im Genusse ihres Anblicks schwelgen: der Artsind sehr hohe Berge, Aegyptische Pyrmiden, kolossale Ruinen von hohem Alterthume. (Some objects of our perception excite in us the feeling of the sublime because, not only on account of their spatial vastness, but also of their great age, that is, their temporal duration, we feel ourselves dwarfed to insignificance in their presence, and yet revel in the pleasure of contemplating them; of this kind are very high mountains, the Egyptian pyramids, and colossal ruins of great antiquity.)19

18 19

The Letters of Thomas Gray, ed. D. C. Tovey, 3 vols (London: George Bell, 1904-12), I (1900), 38-45. Arthur Schopenhauer’s sämmtliche Werke, ed E. Grisebach, 6 vols (Leipzig: Reclam, n.d. [1818]), I, 178; The World as Will and Idea, tr R. B. Haldane & J. Kemp, 7th Edition, 3 vols (London: Kegan Paul, Trench , Trübner, n.d.), I, 267.

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Rosa used ruins as stage props in his dramatic picturesque landscapes, leaving it to Hubert Robert to make them the main theme of a number of works, but the first painter actually to specialize in ruins was Giampaolo Pannini (c.1692-1765), whose pre-Romantic Capricci, which combine detailed renderings of actual buildings with fantastic ruins, often placing real ruins, accurately portrayed, in fantastic settings, point forward to Piranesi and, in literary terms, to E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Fantsasiestücke (capricci) ‘in the manner of [Jacques] Callot’. A painter of Horace Walpole’s generation, Giambattista Piranesi (1720-1778), anticipating the Romantic feeling for ruins, combined enthusiasm with an architect’s exactitude. The enthusiasm for Gothic ruins as such was, of course, one of the precursors of Romanticism in general and Gothic Romanticism in particular. Piranesi is important for his feeling for the poetry of ruins and the ‘translation of topography into nightmare’,20 and because what Horace Walpole called his ‘sublime dreams’ left their mark on The Castle of Otranto. Although Gothic started as, and for most people remains, an architectural term, and despite the fact that architecture (the ‘edifice’ and its component vaults, passages, trapdoors, dungeons, cells, priest’s holes, etc.) is an important part of modern literary Gothic, the Gothic novel links less with Gothic Revival architecture, which had its equivalent in Germany in the work of Caspar David Friedrich’s almost exact contemporary Karl Friedrich Schinkel, than with English eighteenth-century landscape and its architecture of ruins. Many of these were newly built in emulation of those in Salvator Rosa’s landscapes, which became cult objects.21 The late eighteenth-century fixation on ruins, seen alike in the very different work of Robert and Friedrich, was underpinned by Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88), and by Volney’s Les ruines, ou Méditation sur les révolutions des empires (1791: Ruins; or, A Survey of the Revolutions of Empire, 1795), which combined picturesque description of ancient ruins with philosophical reflection on the rise and fall of past civilizations and the outlook for modern ones following the French Revolution. Much of the available information about Salvator Rosa and his life comes from two of his contemporaries, Giovanni Battista Passeri (Vite de’ Pittori, 1772) and Filippo Baldinucci (Notizie dei Professori del Disegno, 1781), while not a little disinformation was conveyed by Bernardo De Dominici (Vite de’ Pittori, Vol. III, 1763), to which I return. Some of Baldinucci’s anecdotes concerning Rosa’s genially improvised comedies, which he had himself attended, are used as the basis of one of Hoffmann’s lesser known 20 21

Gaunt, 105. The first sham ruins in England date from about 1745.

512 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective tales, Signior Formica (1820), in which Rosa treads the boards as comic hero. A year later Tieck wrote a tale, Die Gemälde (1821: The Pictures, 1825), the plot of which turns on forged drawings by Rosa, but by then Tieck had known Rosa’s work for some time, for, as Paulin has noted, ‘as if reflecting the century’s weaknessfor Salvator Rosa, the forests [in Der blonde Eckbert, 1797] are dark, the peaks dizzy, the castles forbidding’.22 Rosa also featured in Tieck’s manuscript history of art, the unfinished Geschichte und Theorie der bildenden Künste.23 If Rosa, in 1797, had much the same associations for Tieck as for Ann Radcliffe, by 1821 this was no longer the case; but he certainly had them for Lady Morgan. It is appropriate, given the unique status that Salvator Rosa had attained by the time of the Gothic novel proper, when ‘the little figures of banditti, which formed pleasing decorative details in the landscapes of the Salvator Rosa school then in fashion came to life in the writings of Mrs Ann Radcliffe’,24 that he became the subject of a wildly enthusiastic, quasischolarly vie romancée by a Gothic novelist. In order to appreciate Lady Morgan’s life of Rosa we need to remember that What the eighteenth century did with Rosa was to dramatise his personality, enjoy his paintings and etchings, and forget about his philosophy. This was historically a falsification but [...] was not difficult to achieve. The result was a romantic, ‘bandit’ Rosa, whose landscapes supplied a formula for reactions to wild scenery.25

Thanks in no small measure to Lady Morgan, the nineteenth century discovered a new Rosa: the fearless champion of the autonomy of artistic genius, the critic of a decadent society, and the patriot, who supposedly joined his fellow-citizens in their revolt led by Masaniello against the Spanish overlords of Naples (in fact Rosa did nothing of the kind and was not in Naples at the time).26

Lady Morgan (née Sydney Owenson, 1776-1859), daughter of the Irish actor Robert Owenson, took to fiction in 1803. Her first novel, St. Clair or the Heiress of Desmond (1803), which romanticized the Irish past, was followed in 1806 by two novels with Gothic moods and scenes,27 The Novice of St. 22 23 24 25 26 27

Paulin, 69. See E. H. Zeydel, Ludwig Tieck, the German Romanticist (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1935), 205. Praz, The Romantic Agony, 58. M. Kitson (ed.), Salvator Rosa (London: Arts Council, 1973), 15. Kitson, 7. See Frank, The First Gothics, 264-7; Summers, The Gothic Quest, 40f, 80, 86, 100.

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Dominick and The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale, which suggest that she came to Rosa via Ann Radcliffe. It is significant that these Irish novels were described as ‘tissues of woven air’, for the term also applies to The Life and Times of Salvator Rosa, which came out in two volumes in 1824. Reviewing the work in the Edinburgh Review in 1824, Hazlitt wrote that On the meagre thread of biography [...] Lady Morgan has been ambitious to string the flowers of literature and the pearls of philosophy, and to strew over the obsure and half-forgotten origin of poorSalvator the colours of a sanguine enthusiasm and a florid imagination.28

In brief, Hazlitt sees the author as indulging in fine writing at the expense of truth, so that a great part of her work is ‘fabulous and apocryphal’. Though it remains the most important historical document in the history of the reception of Salvator Rosa in England, her work is, especially in the first volume, too often based on the notoriously unreliable life of Rosa byDe Dominici, which is generally agreed to be ‘a strange concoction [...] infused with many obvious falsehoods’.29 Her concerns being aesthetic and political rather than historical and scholarly, Lady Morgan allowed herself to be led astray by the ‘recklessly inaccurate stories’, which De Dominici compounds by adding ‘imaginative [imaginary] details from [...] fictitious sources’.30 By the time she further compounds them, we are faced with a thoroughly unstable Gothic text, the Gothic biography in which the subject’s life is in part counterfeited. Although she ignores the apocryphal story of Rosa’s involvement with the Compagna della Morte, the band of Neapolitan artist-bravos who were said to roam the city of Naples murdering members of the Spanish occupying army who were lording it over Neapolitans, she exaggerates (Vol I, 108-20) the myth of Rosa as the romantic associate of banditti in the Abruzzi and participant in Masaniello’s revolt of 1647. This seems to have happened because, drawn to Rosa via the Gothic novel à la Radcliffe, she approached her subject with the preconceived idea of presenting Rosa as Romantic hero, Gothic hero and noble bandit, which she was determined to illustrate. Hazlitt noted that everything ‘answers to a preconceived idea’. The idea in question was, above all, to present Rosa as a Gothic hero who had cast off the shackles of the monkish submission to which he had been destined, and who by way of reward had found, ‘in the trackless solitude of Nature magnificent combinations of the sublime and the terrific.’ The death of 28 29 30

Edinburgh Review, July 1824, 317. Jonathan Scott, Salvator Rosa, viii. Jonathan Scott, Salvator Rosa, viii, 236 n.21.

514 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Byron in 1824 meant that the Gothic Hero was very much in the public mind, and the position of Gothic Hero vacant, when Morgan’s biography appeared at the end of what, in The Novice of Saint Dominick, she had called ‘this Gothic age’. Reading it, Hazlitt found himself fancying he must be reading ‘a page of Mrs Radcliffe’s Italian or Miss Porter’s Thaddeus of Warsaw’. This is very close to the mark, for in many ways The Life and Times of Salvator Rosa is a kind of Gothic novel, the most Gothic of Sydney Owenson’s novels. Like The Novice of St. Dominick and The Wild Irish Girl (both published in 1806), the Rosa biography has a number of Gothic elements ranging from the nature of the hero to the nature of the text. Like them, it is part of the campaign against reactionary régimes on the part of the author, who, when travelling in Italy to collect material for her biography, was, as a notorious liberal, under police surveillance as a potential trouble-maker. In the event she subverted not the Austrian Empire, but her own work. In calling upon De Dominici’s already unreliable stories, she has further embroidered and fictionalized them in order to give them an anti-clerical, anti-authoritarian twist. Rosa’s early life is fictionalized, given a Gothic spin, and there is too much emphasis on the bandit (‘His deep and gloomy forests [are] only given as the shelter of the formidable bandit’) and the Gothic generally. It was left to Lytton to take the opposite point of view: in the landscapes of Salvator, the tree, the mountain, the waterfall, become the principal, and the man himself dwindles to the accessory [...] matter seems to reign supreme, and its true lord to creep beneath its stupendous shadow. Inert matter giving interest to the immortal man, not the immortal man to [...] inert matter. A terrible philosophy in art! 31

In modern terms, the text’s unreliability, its blurring of the distinction between fact and fantasy, is its most Gothic feature. Lady Morgan subverts the truth and, with it, her own text, which thus becomes inherently unstable, a castle in the air in which she is caught in the coils offancy. Rosa’s farouche landscapes are informed by the idea not of beauty, which he thought overrated, but of sublimity: ‘The nature that Rosa conjures up is hostile, desolate and barren [...] This is a landscape not to walk about in with delight but to get out of.’32 The publication of Burke’s essay on The Sublime and Beautiful in 1756 provided a timely basis for the understanding and appreciation of Rosa’s landscapes, in which those hallmarks of the sublime, ‘obscurity’, ‘privation’ and ‘vastness’ all loom large. 31` 32

Zanoni, Bk 3, ch. 4. Kitson, 15.

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In 1801 Uvedale Price has a connoisseur say of a scene of banditti by Rosa; ‘There is a sublimity in this scene of rocks and mountains, savage and desolate as they are’.33 He had a liking for the macabre that became obsessive. In his Gothic Zanoni (Bk 3, ch. 4), Lytton wrote that ‘[Rosa’s] images have the majesty, not of the god, but of the savage [...] he grasps the imagination, and compels it to follow him, not to the heaven, but through all that is most wild and fantastic upon earth,’ although he arguably held back from the full implications of Rosa’s work as seen by Ruskin. Kitson has rightly written of compositions consisting of ‘standing figures looking down and gasping with horror at the apparition of something on or below the ground.’34 It is this that places Rosa firmly in the Gothic context, for the thing in question is death, and it was this that caused Ruskin to recoil: ‘He had not the sacred sense [...] he saw only what was gross and terrible’.35 It was perhaps inevitable that one who had been seen as a Gothic hero would end by being vilified by Ruskin. The Rosa attacked by Ruskin was Lady Morgan’s Rosa. The very fact that Rosa had become so closely identified with the (to Ruskin, disreputable) Gothic novel was in itself sufficient to damn him in his eyes, and yet Ruskin’s very perception of Rosa as ‘the last man to whom the thought of a spiritual existence presented itself as a conceivable reality’, whose life passed ‘in horror, disdain and despair’, is itself Gothic.

II In De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater there is a notable description of Giambattista Piranesi’s engravings of imaginary prisons: Many years ago, when I was looking over Piranesi’s ‘Antiquities of Rome’, Coleridge, then standing by, described to me a set of plates from that artist, called his ‘Dreams’, and which record the scenery of his own visions during the deliriums of a fever.Some of these (I describe only from memory of Coleridge’s account) represented vast Gothic halls; on the floor of which stood mighty engines and machinery, wheels, cables, catapults, &c., expressive of enormous power put forth, or resistance overcome. Creeping along the sides of the walls, you perceived a staircase; and upon this, groping his way upwards, was Piranesi himself. Follow the stairs a little farther, and you perceive them reaching an abrupt termination, without any balustrade, and allowing no step onwards to him who should reach the extremity, except into the depths below. Whatever is to become of poor Piranesi, at least you 33 34 35

Quoted from Jonathan Scott, Salvator Rosa, 227f. Kitson, 14. Ruskin, Modern Painters, 5 vols (Orpington: G. Allen, 1888), V: 241.

516 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective suppose that his labours must now in some sense terminate. But raise your eyes, and behold a second flight of stairs still higher, on which again Piranesi is perceived, by this time standing on the very brink of the abyss. Once again elevate your eye, and a still more aerial flight of stairs is descried; And there, again, is the delirious Piranesi, busy on his aspiring labours: and so on, until the unfinished stairs and the hopeless Piranesi both are lost in the upper gloom of the hall. With the same power of endless growth and selfreproduction did my architecture proceed in dreams. (De Quincey’s Works, 3: 438f.)

This is, of course, a rifacimento in the sense of a recreation from memory of another man’s verbal account of a third man’s engraved image(s). It is more a conflation and interpretation or translation, applying Piranesi’s images to De Quincey’s fear of the abyss, than a description of any particular engraving. That these are not ‘Dreams’ but architectural drawings of c.1745 entitled Carceri d’Invenzione,36 is beside the point, as is the fact that these vast threatening spaces are, strictly speaking, not Gothic, in the historical sense of medieval, but classical. In the more important literary sense they are memorably Gothic, nightmare images of a Fall that is forever on the point of happening Piranesi’s powerful images of ‘metaphysical prisons, whose seat is within the mind, whose walls are made of nightmare and incomprehension, whose chains are anxiety and their racks a sense of personal and even generic guilt’,37 point to the heart of De Quincey’s Gothic, for these imaginary prisons memorably involve space that is as awesomely vast as, there being no escape from it, it is claustrophobic: the human, reduced to puny contingency and thereby to insignificance by the presence of the transcendent (which includes what German writers would call the negative transcendence of the Fall), faces an abyss in which the imagination is afraid of losing itself: Caught up in a metaphysical machine and whirled to dizzy heights of illusion, the artist was his subject’s victim. In the extraordinary series of prison etchings, said to have been executed in a high fever, the blocks of travertine started to build themselves up around him, enormous iron grilles snapped down and turned him into a tiny inventive prisoner, mounting great staircases that led nowhere, and stumbling amid chains and gaol instruments that lay about like heaps of weed.Itwas an obsession, the translation of topography into nightmare.38

36 37 38

These images can be found in Jonathan Scott, Piranesi (London: Academy/St. Martin’s, 1975). Aldous Huxley, Prisons (London: The Trianon Press, 1949), 21f., 24f. Gaunt, 105.

A Gothic Iconography 517 By placing puny figures among the wooden galleries of the Carceri, Piranesi depicted the hells which humans devise for themselves. This is an image of (probably self-inflicted) punishment and despair. The damned souls of those engravings are like neurotics clinging to their suffering [or likeThomas De Quincey clinging to the addiction by which he defined himself as the ‘English Opium-Eater’, so that without it he would have been nothing].39

These prisons of the imagination, which leave the imagination with no way out short of the fall into death, are closely connected with Coleridge’s Gothic Cathedral of Imagination in Chapter 13 of the Biographia Literaria (1817) and with De Quincey’s Confessions, which describe architectural vistas ‘in proportions so vast as the bodily eye is not fitted to receive’, where distance is ‘amplified to an extent of unutterable and self-repeating infinity’ (L 223). Piranesi’s images embody the chasm of De Quincey’s imagination that conveys not only a Gothic sense of unfathomable vastness in which depth after depth reverses Piranesi’s image of height after height while retaining its giddying meaning, but also a Gothic sense of claustrophobia and incarceration. In other words, they represent the sublime of terror and point straight to the Pit that Poe was to describe, the ‘cavern of death’ and ‘cavern of horror’ of the Gothic popular novel, the emptiness that Shelley was afraid would swallow him, as indeed it did.

III Known to his English contemporaries as (among other things) ‘Principal Hobgoblin Painter to the Devil’, Henry Fuseli may or may not have had a minor role in the genesis of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein;40 all that is certain is that he was, in c.1790-91, entangled with her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, the ‘termagent’ (Fuseli’s term) who was for a time enamoured of him; her idea of forming a ménage à trois with Fuseli and his new wife was scotched when Mrs Fuseli forbade her the house. Mary Wollstonecraft likened herself to a ‘Greek courtesan’; that Fuseli bluntly described her as little better than a prostitute means that she scared him. It was to her that he was referring when he remarked that he lived in an ‘epoch of viragos’.41 Fuseli was in Rome from 1770 to 1778, one of his preoccupations at this time being Mannerism, the trend in art of the period 1525-1600 that has been said to reflect the general malaise of the age and an acute awareness of its horrors. Mannerist art ‘put a premium on originality and imagination 39 40 41

Davenport-Hines, 198. See Marie Roberts, Gothic Immortals, 98f. Quoted from Martin Myrone, Henry Fuseli (London: Tate Gallery, 2001), 53.

518 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective which often passed over into exaggeration, morbidity and the bizarre’.42 The distinction between reality and fantasy was blurred as forms taken from reality were stretched into fantasy. The human form was attenuated, as by El Greco, and, later, by Fuseli. There has been much discussion, and scarcely less disagreement, as to the extent to which Mannerism with its cult of the bizarre was a symptom of ‘decadence’ in the sense of being the style of a Spätzeit or era coming to an end. Much of this also applies to literary Gothic, which coincided with the end of the ancien régime and, with it, the Age of Reason. The spatial instability of Mannerist painting is paralleled by the textual instability of Gothic writing. Whether or not Fuseli made any such connexion in his mind, it is a fact that The major principle of his Roman period is that of Terror, derived largely from Burke, who had coupled itwith the principle of Obscurity, remarking of Milton’s description of Death that ‘all is dark, uncertain, confused, terrible, and sublime to the last degree’.43

Fuseli was also in some ways a true successor of Salvator Rosa, whom he claimed to despise: ‘Fuseli too was clever, talkative, outrageous, a bit of a charlatan, and a sensationalist and lover of the macabre.’44 The settings of Fuseli’s work of the early 1780s conjure up the world of what became known as Gothic literature, although Füßli, as he then was, will at that time have known mainly its German antecedents (Goethe’s Werther, Schiller’s Die Räuber, Bürger’s Lenore). Peter Tomory has argued that the trigger for The Nightmare may have been Bürger’s Lenore (1774), which Fuseli may already have known at this time, if the fact that he later owned Bürger’s Gedichte (2 vols, 1796) is anything to go by, but the lines that Scott was later to translate as ‘At break of day, with frightful dreams / Lenore struggled sore’45 in Lewis’s Tales of Wonder (1801), which Fuseli was also to own, stand out less in the original (‘Lenore fuhr ums Morgenrot/ Empor aus schweren Träumen’), so they are not really very likely to have caught his attention back in 1781. It was no doubt of Fuseli that the Universal Daily Register was thinking when, on 2 May 1785, it remarked that ‘Gypsies, witches, and flying Devils seem to have engrossed the attention of many artists.’ Witchcraft engrossed the attention not just of Fuseli, but of Rosa and Goya too. Fuseli’s Schwarzkunststudien (necromantic studies), which include The Nightmare, date from this time, The Nightmare having created something of a 42 43 44 45

The Oxford Companion to Art, ed. H. Osborne, 687. Peter Tomory, The Life and Art of Henry Fuseli (London: Thames & Hudson, 1972), 75. Kitson, 15f. Tomory, 183.

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sensation when it was first seen in 1781. Compared with their literary (Gothic) counterparts, these ‘necromantic studies’ were in advance of their time: K. F. Kahlert’s The Necromancer did not appear in English until 1794, and T. Dutton’s novel of the same title (was this a translation of a new German work, as it claimed to be?) until 1819, and the more important, historical works until even later (Georg Conrad Horst’s Zauberbibliothek, 1821; Walter Scott’s Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, 1830; William Godwin’s Lives of the Necromancers, 1834). Myrone has noted the fact that many of the canvases prepared by Fuseli for the Milton Gallery project in the 1790s conveyed ‘a sense of tumultuous visual drama, as gigantic figures lurch, fly and fight in a fantastical arena of suffocating blackness relieved only by storm clouds and rocky precipices.’ The pessimism, he comments, ‘can be overbearing’.46 Fuseli’s closeness to literary Gothic was recognized when Maturin, shortly after the publication of Melmoth the Wanderer in 1820 was dubbed ‘the Fuseli of novelists’, while more recently it has been said that Fuseli’s paintings of the early 1780s deserve to be interpreted as painterly examples of the Gothic sublime, ‘not only because they share many of the trappings of its literary cousin but because they similarly straddle the division between high culture, with its sublime ambitions, and popular culture’:47 The Gothic sublime apparent in popular literature and in Fuseli’s paintings [...] has a nostalgic effect. In eschewing moral and narrative certainties, a different kind of certainty is projected onto the very bodies of their fantasy characters. The protagonists of the Gothic act out stereotypical roles recalling [...] a lost world of chivalry and heroism in which men were men and women were women. Hence the often stark gendering of visual form in Fuseli’s imagery, where all the heroes are supermen, with elongated limbs, pronounced muscles, armour and absurdly phallic weaponry, and all the young women are fleshly and curvaceous, caricatured signs of passive or depraved feminity [...] his paintings can be interpreted as, like the Gothic novel, a response to the developing uncertainties around gender.48

More important is the struggle of Gothic artists, of whatever ilk, with their subject: The fact that Maturin was called the ‘Fuseli of novelists’ shortly after the apperarance of Melmoth the Wanderer suggests more than a recognition of his special taste for the terrific. Fuseli’s mannered drawings display a curious struggle with his subject matter which gives point to his exclamation ‘Damn 46 47 48

Myrone, 61. Myrone, 44f. Myrone, 45.

520 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Nature - she always puts me out.’ It is a comment Maturin would have understood.49

Most important of all, however, is the realm of nightmare and, with it, of the irrational. What Botting has called the ‘unnatural creatures’ of night, meaning the (alas) all too natural creatures that accompany night thoughts, were painted first by Fuseli and then by Goya. The key images are Fuseli’s The Nightmare (1781) and Goya’s etching El sueño de la razon produce monstruos (The sleep of reason produces monsters) (1797-8); appropriately, sueño means both ‘sleep’ and ‘dream’, for we are in the realm of nightmare or incubus. Claude Fierobe, in an important article, has compared the imagery of Melmoth to the grotesque art of Goya and Fuseli50 in general and to the nightmare in particular. The Nightmare was one of the images employed in exhibitions of phantasmagoriana at the turn of the eighteenth century. Gothic, as I have said, is essentially a dream literature, its hallmark the realized nightmare. The Inquisition, which features in many Gothic nightmares, and in Goya’s work, was so concerned about the heresies expressed in dreams, that it sought to control them,51 and the literary Gothic Revival was preceded and accompanied by a preoccupation with dreams in general and the nightmare in particular. J. Bond published An Essay on the Incubus, or Nightmare in 1753 (the year that saw the publication of Smollett’s proto-Gothic The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom), and Adam Friedrich Wilhelm Saalfeld’s A Philosophical Discourse on the Nature of Dreams (1764) came out, appropriately, in the same year as The Castle of Otranto, which was said to be based on ‘the very imperfect recollection of a dream’. Saalfeld’s work prepared the way for Fuseli’s ‘The Nightmare’ (1781, parodied in 1794 in Richard Newton’s ‘A Night Mare’), which in turn opened up the way for further dreams in art, including Fuseli’s own ‘An Incubus Leaving Two Sleeping Girls’ (c.1793), in which, as in The Nightmare, the iconography of the dream is tinged with eroticism. Shelley wrote a related horror tale, ‘The Nightmare’, subsequently lost, which he had wanted Fuseli to illustrate.52 The Nightmare, first version exhibited in 1782, as Fuseli’s friend Beckford was beginning to write his Vathek, was widely circulated as a print; Goethe saw a copy at the Leipzig Fairin 1783.

49 50 51 52

Robert Kiely, The Romantic Novel in England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), 194. Claude Fierobe, ‘Les Derniers Feux „Gothiques“ en Angleterre,’ Dix-Huitième Siècle, 14 (1982), 391-406. See Caesar Careña, Tractatus de Officio Sanctissimae Inquisitionis (Cremona: Belpier, 1641). Shelley, Letters, I, 11.

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It is possible that Lenore provided the trigger for Fuseli’s famous image, but this is more likely to have been indebted to his early reading of a different order. Ernest Jones quotes from Montanus: an der untern Wupper dringt die Mahrte in Rossgestalt durch die Schlüssellöcher in Schlafkammern, legt die Vorderhufe auf des Schläfers Brust und starrt ihn mit glühenden Augen auf beängstigende Weise an. (In the lower Wuppenau [in Switzerland] the mara penetrates though keyholes into bed chambers in the guise of a steed, lays her fore-hoofs on the sleeper’s breast, and with glowing eyes stares at him in the most alarming fashion.)53

Since Wuppenau is in Switzerland, and Fuseli’s Swiss father was, among other things, an historian, it is not unlikely that the artist came across this particular description, which his image evokes. This is all the more likely if The Nightmare is read as a revenge-fantasy directed at Anna Landolt, the woman who had rejected Fuseli’s love in Switzerland in 1779. In any case the ghostly horse in Fuseli’s image (and especially in the second version of 1790-91) is the Night-Mare of European folklore, an icon of irrational eroticism,54 the ghostly horse that enters a house and puts its hoofs on (mounts) a sleeping person.55 The demon sitting on the sleeping woman is an Alp or (in Fuseli’s Swiss terms) Schrätteli (German: Schretel, from Schrat, goblin), in other words, anincubus. The horse with glowing eyes recurs in Theodore Meets in the Wood the Spectre of His Ancestor Guido Cavalcanti (c.1783). Fuseli’s The Nightmare represents a sexual fantasy; it was left to Goya to ground the nightmare in human depravity.

IV Of painters active at the turn of the eighteenth century the most considerable in the literary high Gothic context is Francisco Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828). Davenport-Hines has written of Goya’s ‘Gothic moods’ and ‘Gothicisms’, but there is a good deal more to this darkest and most enigmatic of painters than occasional Gothic moods, for, particularly in the aftermath of illness in 1792 and 1819, he takes Gothic commonplaces such as murder, rape, robbery, and shipwreck, and turns them into 53 54 55

Quoted from Ernest Jones, Nightmare, Witches, and Devils ((New York: Norton, n.d.), 256. See Nicholas Powell, Fuseli: The Nightmare (New York: Viking, 1973). Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, E281.2.

522 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective paradigms of human existence. It is the same with witchcraft and witchhunting, which Rosa had seen as a projection of morbid imaginings.56 Davenport-Hines has rightly described Rosa’s Scene of Witchcraft as ‘the quintessence of a gothic image, excessive yet evasive.’57 Goya follows suit, painting the night-side of human nature: he, more than anyone else, paints the excess that underlies Gothic man’s58 readiness to go from the beastly to the bestial, thereby reminding us that ‘Gothic’ means, in addition to many other things, ‘barbaric’ and ‘macabre’: Gothic signifies a writing of excess. It appears in the awful obscurity that haunted eighteenth-century rationality and morality [...] Gothic figures have continued to shadow the progress of modernity with counter-narratives displaying the underside of enlightenment and humanist values. Gothic condenses the many perceived threats to these values, threats associated with supernatural and natural forces, imaginative excesses and delusions, religious and human evil, social transgression, mental disintegration and spiritual corruption.59

The Gothic novel is frequently set in train by asudden event that comes like a bolt from the blue and spells the end of the relative security that preceded it, cases in point being the shipwreck that leaves the dramatis personae at the mercy of the sea, which Goya painted in 1793-4, and the attack by banditti, which gave him some of his most horrific images. The shipwreck is considered in relation to Friedrich’s famous The Sea of Ice (18234), which goes beyond Goya’s Shipwreck (1793-4), which had portrayed survivors. As to banditti, readers may think first of the little figures of bandits in Salvator Rosa’s landscapes, and indeed of Rosa himself as the one-time passive associate of banditti, but it is Goya who has visually documented the full horrors of what may be involved in an attack by bandits, which goes far beyond the ‘your money or your life’ of the innocuous highwayman of midnineteenth-century sub-Gothic (Ainsworth, G. P. R. James). Banditti, or rather bandilleras, for we are in Spain, loom larger in Goya’s work than in Rosa’s (Attack on a Coach, 1786-7; Attack by Robbers, 1793-4; The Bandits’ Attack, 1798-1800; the El Maragato60 series of c.1806). The Bandits’ Attack includes ‘Bandits Shooting Male Prisoners’, ‘Bandits Stripping and Raping Two Women;’, and ‘Bandits Murdering a Woman’. Associated with it is 56 57 58 59 60

See Kitson, 12. Richard Davenport-Hines, Gothic: 400 Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin (London: Fourth Estate, 1998), 19. And woman’s (cf. Kleist’s Penthesilea). Botting, Gothic, 1f. El Maragato was a notorious brigand.

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cannibalism. That this is a Gothic motif is shown by Maturin’s Melmoth, and, more luridly, by an earlier German novel from the Räuberroman (novel of banditti) branch of the Gothic family: Ich und meine Genossen waren so weit von den Grenzen der Natur zurückgetreten, daß wir das Fleisch unserer Ermorderten, wenn es gesunde junge Leute waren, fraßen. Schöne kraftvolle Jünglinge stachen wir methodisch ab, und die Mädchen, die wir genossen hatten, wurden gebraten und verzehrt. (My companions and I had deviated so far from the natural norm thatwe ate the flesh of those we had murdered, provided they were young and healthy [...] Strong, good-looking youths were slaughtered as a matter of course, and the young women we had enjoyed were roasted and devoured.)

This perverse and gruesome nonsense, clearly intended to offend the reader, is to be found in Der Schwarze Jonas 61 by Ignaz Ferdinand Arnold (ps. of Theodor Ferdinand Kajetan Arnold), a grisly Gothic tale involving one of the three types of ogre in the Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen: ‘The second group consists of social deviants; among them robbers and highwaymen who waylay young women, murder them, chop up their corpses, and cook the pieces in a stew.’62 Stith Thompson has shown just how common a folktale-motif cannibalism is.63 Goya’s overarching subject is that of Melmoth: the darknessor capacity for evil of the human mind. Los Caprichos, the collection of drawings published in 1799, touches Gothic in many ways. These ‘caprices’ or crotchets show, as DavenportHines has said, that ‘gothic effects reach their apotheosis when enlisted to convey ideas at the frontiers of human comprehension’, for they ‘raged against the brute stupidity which had been so nightmarishly empowered by the European revolutionary crisis of the 1790s’.64 The capriccio as such, the Hoffmannesque fantasy that mixes the real and the imaginary, reality and dream, in a capricious and, it may be, deeply troubling way, is by definition a Gothic form, but in Goya’s hands it includes a further Gothic form, the masque or masquerade: ‘The world is a masquerade; face, dress, voice, everything is put on or feigned. Everybody wants to appear what he is not; everybody deceives everybody else, and nobody knows anybody.’65 The most striking and best known of the Caprichos is, of course, the one entitled 61 62 63 64 65

Ignaz Ferdinand Arnold, Der Schwarze Jonas. Kapuziner, Räuber und Mordbrenner [Erfurt: Hennings, 1805], new edn (Frankfurt: ExcentricClub, 2000), 120. Tatar, The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales, 139. Stith Thompson, Motif-Index, G10-95. Davenport-Hines, 159f. Goya’s caption to Plate 6 of the Caprichos.

524 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, which evolved on the basis of earlier works such as St Francis Borja at the Deathbed of an Impenitent (1788), which shows demons clustered round the dying impenitent, and Sueño I (1797). Like all truly memorable images, The Sleep of Reason can be read in many ways; the very title is ambiguous, for sueño means both sleep and dream. The basic meanings of the image are psychological and historical: that when one is asleep/dreaming, reason cedes control of the mind to unreason (whose brood Goya, like Fuseli, depicts), and that the Age of Reason ended by giving birth to monstrous terrors and horrors.66 The Caprichos involved Goya in potential trouble with the Holy Office of the Inquisition, but the story begins with the Majas. In March 1815 the Director General for Seizures [of work deemed morally offensive] of the Inquisition wrote to the Fiscal Inquisitor of the Holy Office that he had seized Goya’s Maja desnuda and Maja vestida, which fell within his remit. In response Dr Zorilla de Velasco of the Secret Chamber of the Court Inquisition wrote, in a letter to an unknown addressee, that Goya was to be summoned before ‘thistribunal’ to explain himself and his motives in producing such works. It is not known whether Goya’s appearance ever took place; no record of it has been found, unless, that is, the Inquisition Scene (also known as the ‘Auto de fe’ of the Inquisition) of c. 1816 is thought to constitute such evidence. However, the fact that Goya later said that he had had problems with the Holy Office not on account of the Majas, but over the publication of the Caprichos, implies that in the event he was not summoned over the Majas. In the Inquisition Scene the repressive, omnipresent power of the Church is epitomized in an unending sea of monks of the Franciscan, Dominican and other orders. The scene is dimly lit, the architecture vaguely repressive.67 It is one of the many nightmare images produced by Goya. Writing of the ‘modern novel’ in 1800, Sade argued that it was necessary to ‘call hell to the rescue [...] and to find in the world of nightmare images adequate to ‘the history of man in this Iron Age of ours’.68 Fiedler, quoting Sade, commented that

66 67

68

See Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1983), 335f. On Goya and the Inquisition see Juliet Wilson-Bareau & Manuela B. Mena Marqués, Goya, Truth and Fantasy: The Small Paintings (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1994), 318ff. and Janis Tomlinson, Francisco Goya y Lucientes 1746-1828 (London: Phaidon Press, 1994), 229. I quote the paraphrase by Leslie A. Fiedler from his Love and Death in the American Novel (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1997), 136 as being more to my point than a literal translation.

A Gothic Iconography 525 The key words are ‘nightmare’ and ‘hell’, revealing how consciously [...] some gothic writers turned to the night side of life, the irrational world of sleep, for themes and symbols appropriate to the terrors bred by the Age of Reason.69

More than adequate nightmare images were subsequently found by Goya, who did indeed ‘call hell to the rescue’ when he produced his terrible Black Paintings right at the end of the Gothic period proper, in the early 1820s. The best known of these, Saturn (1821-3), goes back to Rubens’s Saturn Devouring His Son (1636), but it is the monstrous depravity of the Age of Terror, as seen by the artist in the blackest of his moods, when his mental balance was at its most precarious, that it illustrates. The counterpart of Sade and, later, of Schopenhauer, Goya is the cartographer of the Gothic imagination. He visits and revisits its recesses, revealing its often intolerable excesses. The Black Paintings (1821-3), painted in oil, in shades of black, grey and brown, on the walls of the Quinta del sordo, the house he purchased in 1819, illustrate the morbidity of his imagination at this time, and it has been suggested that they may also represent his response to the phantasmagoria that enthralled early nineteenth-century Madrid, which used a magic lantern to project ghostly, visionary figures in a darkened room,70 thereby putting spectators’ credulity to the test, a phenomenon that is seen at work in Schiller’s Der Geisterseher and in a string of German Gothic novels and ghost stories imitiating it; to most readers of Gothic tales ‘phantasmagoria’ will evoke the Fantasmagoriana, the collection of ghost stories of Villa Diodati fame. ‘Picking up on themes popularized by „Gothick“ novels,’ Tomlinson writes, ‘the phantasmagoria gave concrete form to what previously could only be imagined’.71 Of more fundamental importance is the fact the Black Paintings portray Gothic in all its horrid particularity; their accompanying text is Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea, which shares with them the idea (homo homini lupus) that humanity’s natural predator is humanity itself. The Black Paintings represent ‘a closed world in which hideousness in all its forms finds expression, and in which the myth of Saturn, the symbol of death and destruction, constantly recurs’.72 One of their most intriguing images, entitled Fantastic Vision (Al Aquelarre), depicts a visibly inaccessible Gothic edifice on a great mound that points forward to Kafka’s inaccessible Castle.

69

70 71 72

Fiedler, 136. The concept of the ‘night-side’ of life entered the English language in 1848 with Catherine Crowe’s The Night-Side of Nature, which was inspired by Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert’s Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft of 1808. Tomlinson, 246. Tomlinson, 247. Larousse Dictionary of Painters, 160.

526 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective

V Given that his high hieratic art is as far removed as may be from the abysmal depths of literary terrorism, the idea of associating Caspar David Friedrich with the Gothic novel might seem foolhardy were it not for the fact that the German Romantic master’s visions of Gothic landscape and penchant for Gothic ruins in every shape and form,73 and his treatment of figures like the wanderer and the monk, to say nothing of the hermeneutic instability of his work and his preoccupation with subjectivity and art as its own subject, suggest that his position vis-à-vis the Gothic Revival and subsequent literary Gothic needs to be examined. The things that Burke associates with the idea of sublimity - power, obscurity, privation, darkness, solitude, and silence, as well as vastness in nature and magnitude in building - loom large in literary Gothic and in Friedrich’s work alike. Friedrich had a life-long love of Gothic church architecture, particularly when in ruins, but little contact with literary Gothic except in the person of Heinrich von Kleist. One of the earliest of his works, a series of watercolours from 1794 illustrating Schiller’s Die Räuber, shows little more than his admiration for a play that happens to have a significant Gothic dimension. One of the first works he exhibited in Dresden, in 1801, when labouring under the misapprehension that he was a history painter, was a composition inspired by Die Räuber. Franz Reber, in his Geschichte der neueren deutschen Kunst (1876), noted Friedrich’s affinity with Tieck,74 who wrote about Friedrich in his short novel Eine Sommerreise (1834), using the character Walter von Reineck as his mouthpiece: Jene religiöse Stimmung und Aufreizung, die seit kurzem unsere deutsche Welt wieder auf eigentümliche Weise zu beleben scheint, eine feierliche Wehmut sucht er feinsinnig in landschaftlichen Vorwürfen auszudrücken und anzudeuten [...] es ist zuverwundern, wieviel er mehr als einmal mit wenigen Mitteln erreicht hat.75

73

74 75

As Jens Christian Jensen has noted (Caspar David Friedrich, tr. Joachim Neugroschel [Woodbury, N.Y.: Barron’s, 1981], 152), Friedrich approached Gothic architecture via ruins; it was not until 1810 that he painted an intact Gothic structure. Neogothicism (the Gothic Revival) has much the same connotations in Germany as in England. Carl Friedrich Schinkel, too, in 1810-15 produced a series of Gothic landscapes. See Joseph Leo Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the subject of landscape (London: Reaktion, 1995), 139. Quoted from Tieck’s ‘Walther von Reineck an den Grafen Bilizki, Dresden, den 19. Juni 1803’ is reprinted by Sigrid Hinz, in Caspar David Friedrich in Briefen und Bekenntnissen (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1984), 239f.

A Gothic Iconography 527 (Friedrich tries to express [...] the solemn sadness and the religious [impulse] which have recently seemed to be reviving our German world [...] it is astonishing how much he has achieved with so little.)

Eine Sommerreise is based on a journey that took place in 1803, during which Tieck, like Friedrich and Kleist, took a particular interest in Gothic ruins. There is, however, no reason to suppose that the early Gothic Tieck impinged upon Friedrich, for Tieck had emerged from Gothicism by 1798, the year in which Friedrich moved to Dresden. Tieck spoke of the ‘richly poetic’ character of the painter, whom he met but once, so different were their lifestyles in Dresden. Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert, a former fellowstudent of Friedrich, was on friendly terms with him during his residence in Dresden from 1806 to 1819. In his Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaften (1808: Views of the Night-Side of the Natural Sciences, 1808) he discussed Friedrich’s lost 1803 sepia series Stages of Life, in which the influence of the poet Young was later said to be fundamental (‘grundlegend’).76 To begin to explore Friedrich’s position vis-à-vis Gothic we need to look outside Germany, for from 1794 to 1798 he trained at the Kunstakadamiet (Academy of Art) in Copenhagen, which at that time had taken over from Edinburgh as the centre of the Northern Renaissance. One of the various influences on this was the English Gothic Revival, which Friedrich will have heard about from one of his teachers, Nicolai Abraham Abildgaard, who had been in Rome in 1772-77,77 and, like the young Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825), with whom he consorted, had fallen under the spell of the ruins there. The Gothic Revival fed into the fashionable melancholia of the time, which is in turn reflected in Friedrich’s oeuvre, so that it is hardly surprising that this is in some ways redolent of the English graveyard poetry of the second quarter of the eighteenth century. A further reminder of the contemporary taste for English-style melancholy is a volume of poems, Melancholien (1777), by someone Friedrich must have revered, Gotthard Ludwig Theobul Kosegarten, a friend of his first drawing master, Johann Gottfried Quistorp, and the first literary man of Pomerania. Of Friedrich it may be said, with that devoted scholar of Gothic architecture, the poet Thomas Gray, that ‘Melancholy mark’d him for her own’. Given that he grew up in the aftermath of the cult of Young that had, in Germany, followed on and surpassed that of Milton, this is hardly surprising. Young’s 76 77

Hinz, 259. See Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert, Ansichrten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaften, 291ff. The passage is reprinted in Hinz, 228-34. At this time Abildgaard was a member of the ‘Fuseli circle’, see Nancy L. Pressly, The Fuseli Circle in Rome: Early Romantic Art of the 1770s, ex. cat. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 1979.

528 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective The Complaint: Night-Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality (1742-5: Klagen oder Nachtgedanken über Leben, Tod und Unsterblichkeit, tr. Johann Arnold Ebert, 5 vols, 1760-71) led to an extraordinary fashion for what was referred to as Nachtgedankenmacherei (going in for composing night thoughts) or Youngisieren (Youngifying) in which even Herder, the most considerable writer in Friedrich’s part of Germany, was involved. At the age of nineteen he had produced an elegy on the occasion of the death of his father which has been described as one of the most thoroughgoing examples of Gothic poetry [...] in German [...] Hermitages, ghosts, midnight groves, cypresses, funeral urns, feudal ruins, Gothic towers, mouldering graves and sighing owls - all the stock-intrade of the genre is there. Not only Ossian, but Mallet, Young, Warton, Gray, and the whole tribe of the Gothic poets, English and German, have stood sponsor to these verses.78

Herder translated the first two of Young’s Nights,79 and while he had no time for ‘schlechte Schmierer von Nachtgedanken’ (second-rate scribblers of so-called ‘Night Thoughts’), he later called the Night-Thoughts ‘das non plus ultra sinnreicher, witziger, erhabner, frommer Gedanken, glänzend wie das nächtliche Firmament’ (the ne plus ultra of profound, witty, sublime, pious thoughts, brilliant as the night sky).80 Also popular in Germany, and part of the same mood, was James Hervey’s Meditations among the Tombs (1746). In analyzing the success of his Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774: The Sorrows of Werter, first translated 1779), Goethe ascribed it to the mood of romantic unrest triggered by the influence of the ‘pensive gloom’ of contemporary English poetry. In particular he cited Young’s Night-Thoughts and other meditative poems where the intellect is assigned a problem that it is unable to solve. Looking back, it seems incredible that at one time Young was, in Germany, rated above Milton: writing in Der Nordische Aufseher in 1760, Johann Andreas Cramer went so far as to judge Young ‘weit über einen Milton erhoben’ (far superior to a poet like Milton). Such a judgment is only possible if poetry is judged by non-poetic criteria, for its piety or whatever,81

78 79 80 81

W. D. Robson-Scott, The Literary Background of the Gothic Revival in Germany (Oxford: Blackwell, 1965), 41. See J. L. Kind, Edward Young in Germany (New York: Columbia University Pres , 1906. Quoted from L. M. Price, Die Aufnahme englischer Literatur in Deutschland 1500-1960 (Berne & Munich:Francke, 1961), 125. It is perhaps relevant that both Young and Cramer were clerics, as indeed were Herder and Kosegarten.

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for in retrospect what stands out in the Night-Thoughts are Young’s artlessness and penchant for mawkish, morbid introspection. Thanks to Herder and Kosegarten the Night-Thoughts were so much in the air in north-east Germany in the 1760s and 1770s that a young poetpainter with a natural predisposition to piety and sadness was bound to come across them both in Greifswald and in Copenhagen, and succumb to their mood. Even in 1810, Kleist, in reviewing Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea, commented that ‘Das Bild liegt, mit seinen zwei oder drei geheimnisvollen Gegenständen [...] da, als ob es Youngs Nachtgedanken hätte’82 (With its two or three mysterious objects, the painting stands there, as though partaking of Young’s Night Thoughts), a point that is repeated in the following dialogue by Brentano and Arnim. Hugely influential in Germany were Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition (1759; twice translated into German, 1760), which, Young’s own poetic lack of originality notwithstanding, contributed to the Sturm und Drang cult of original genius, which the writers concerned saw as epitomized alike in the ‘wild’ originality of Shakespeare and in the upward-striving form of Gothic architecture. Friedrich is the painter of Young’s ‘Night, sable Goddess’. He paints what Brentano and Arnim, deliberately misquoting Schubert, call the nightside of nature: dark, desolate Gothic landscapes that chart an elegiac world of absence, departure and loss. With its ‘larmoyant vein’83 and ‘valorization of night’ over day,84 Friedrich’s work displays the whole ‘machinery of melancholy’:85 his genius, Anna Jameson famously remarked, revels in gloom,86 although pensive sadness is more to the point. This fact has a number of part-explanations, including the death of his mother in 1781, when he was seven, and the death of his brother Johann Christoffer in 1787, as a result of going to Caspar David’s aid in a skating accident, but also the ‘solemn sadness’ (Tieck) of the time. What, if not ‘dramatized decay’,87 is so much of Friedrich’s work? The whole paraphernalia of graveyard poetry (ruins, ivy, owls, and suchlike) is much in evidence there. Indeed, Landscape with Grave, Coffin and Owl and Owl on a Grave encapsulate it. Here is the world left to darkness and to the poet:

82 83 84 85 86 87

Kleist, Sämtliche Werke (Munich: Droemer, 195t2), 902 (‘Empfindungen vor Friedrichs Seelandschaft’). Koerner, 68. Koerner, 23. Clark, 39 Anna Jameson, Visits and Sketches at Home and Abroad, 3 vols (London: Saunders & Otley , 1834), I, 144. Clark, 40.

530 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight, And all the air a solemn stillness holds [...] Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tow’r The mopeing owl does to the moon complain Of such, as wand’ring near her secret bow’r Molest her ancient solitary reign88

Ruins are omnipresent in Friedrich, who shared Tieck’s sense of being addressed by them ‘in fremder, schauerlicher, halbverständlicher Sprache’ (in an awful, alien, half-intelligible language).89 His work features Gothic ruins, blasted oaks, broken ships, broken lives, broken graves, broken crosses. As in literary Gothic, death is ever-present. The present is haunted by the past, by the spectres of its own future. More specifically, Friedrich was haunted by Eldena, a ruined twelfth-century Cistercian abbey three miles outside his native Greifswald, because such ruins were ‘monuments to a past spirituality and symbols of the incompleteness of earthly existence’, and because ‘Gothic art in ruins was a perfect symbol of his complex feelings about transience, beauty and religion’.90 A profoundly spiritual person, he longed for the medieval past with its unproblematical spirituality. It was because so many others shared his feelings that the English Gothic Revival resonated in Germany: In each case it appealed to a cult of the middle ages that involved national identity. Characteristic of Friedrich are studies of Gothic abbeys and chapels such as Cloister Cemetery in the Snow and Abbey in the Oak Woods, and of ruinous graveyardsthat reveal the overwhelming impact on him of Jacob van Ruisdael’s Jewish Cemetery, which was the most celebrated Dutch landscape in the Dresdner Galerie when Friedrich moved to Dresden in 1798; in it ‘tombstones and elegiac ruins, symbols of man’s transitory and ephemeral existence, are contrasted with nature’s power of renewal’.91 Though his artistry has much in common with Ruisdael’s, Friedrich’s vision is darker. He not only shares the graveyard poets’ delight in Gothic ruins;92 his work is 88 89

90 91 92

Gray, ‘Elegy written in a Country Church-Yard’. Tieck, Schriften, XVI, 327. On ruins see Robert Ginsberg, The Aesthetics of Ruins (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2004), which is important in many ways, not least in relation to the Romantic/Gothic fascination with ruins. See also E. Negri, Gusto e poesia delle rovine in Italia tra il Sette e l’Ottocento (Milan: Ceschina, 1965) and Rose Macaulay, Pleasures of Ruins (London: Thames & Hudson, 1966). William Vaughan, German Romantic Painting (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1980, 77. Oxford Companion to Art, ed. Harold Osborne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 1025.See also Goethe’s Ruisdael als Dichter. On the influence of Gray on the German poetry of the time, see O. Übel, Grays Einfluß auf die deutsche Lyrik im 18. Jahrhundert (Diss. Heidelberg, 1914). German

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itself a form of graveyard poetry. Graveyards are one of the favourite subjects of this most poetic of painters whose kingdom, however majestically he may paint it, is in the final analysis not of this world. His The Churchyard (1825-30) foregrounds a moss-shrouded gateway whose broken gates, hanging crazily from their hinges, frame rows of gravestones, some of themalso on the point of collapse, make this a meditation on death. A more stylized and in some ways more characteristic treatment of the same subject is Cemetery Entrance (1824-6), dominated by two monumental neoclassical gate pillars that are like larger-than-life-sized versions of the figure (the artist) in Old German costume barely visible against the left-hand pillar. Here the gates are wide open, as is the way between the trees in the middle distance, except that an obelisk-shaped gravestone is blocking our view, giving an extra twist to the mysterious scene, which is wraithed in mist that stands for inscrutability. In the present context Friedrich’s work parallels not only that of Salvator Rosa and Goya, but that of Piranesi too, whose aerial prisons are emblems embracing the emptiness depicted by Friedrich, who could at times, as Rosenblum has said, ‘locate us near a precipice of nothingness’.93 Works such as Uttewald Abyss (c.1801), Woman with Raven at the Abyss (1801-17), and Rocky Chasm (1822-23) show that Friedrich shared the fascination with the abyss and its symbolisms that Shelley and De Quincey exhibit in their Gothic tales. The fall that Hubert Robert depicts literally, but means metaphorically, is implicit in many of Friedrich’s images. In the background is that centrepiece of Gothic, the Fall. Like Salvator Rosa’s, Friedrich’s work is more about landscape itself as seen by the artist, and therefore the subject and discipline of landscape, than about the few figures in it, who resemble Rosean figurini and Kleistian puppets,94 or the small, ‘meaningless’ figures depicted by Magnasco. The emphasis is on landscape rather than its transitory human inhabitants. It is death rather than life that is charted, it being the dead who inhabit these mostly empty spaces. And of course these landscapes, seemingly so ‘realistic’, are often creative collages, ideal landscapes in the sense of landscapes of the mind and memory, spiritual landscapes, statements of faith in an age that is fast losing its faith. Landscapes that look real, but are not, counterfeit the real thing. Counterfeit is the domain of the Gothic.

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translations of Gray’s poems are listed in Clark Sutherland Northup, A Bibliography of Thomas Gray (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1917), 106-109. Rosenblum, 23. To say nothing of the puppet-like figures in so much Gothic fiction.

532 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective To say that Friedrich’s paintings incorporate a ‘passion for the equivocal, the indeterminate, the obscure and faraway’95 is both to define their Romantic quality and to point to the way in which they are, more specifically, Gothic-Romantic. What links Friedrich’s work with Gothic is not merely his melancholy as such, nor his variety of graveyard poetry and fascination with ruins, but the artistic and hermeneutic instability of his work, which is best tested against three of his best and best known works, Early Snow, Monk by the Sea, and Wanderer above a Sea of Mist, all three of which incorporate Gothic images. A further canvas, the Mountain Landscape of 1803 illustrates the same point, for the indistinct ruin of a Gothic castle on the summit, apparently cut off from the foreground by mist, as in the case of The Wanderer above a Sea of Mist, is phantasmagoric in a recognizably Gothic way. Such landscapes have ‘an ambivalent, almost hallucinatory quality’.96 As the mist swirls about it, the ruined castle appears now palpable, now a dream and thus anillusion. What makes this phantasmagoric quality specifically Gothic is the fact that the lack of stability extends to meaning. At first glance Friedrich’s work may seem straightforwardly ‘realistic’, neoclassical even in its purity, but appearances, as so often, are profoundly deceptive: Crystal-clear precision of detail and an even flat surface emphasize [the] curiously withdrawn and laconic quality [of his landscapes]. Their simultaneously sharp focus and vague, dissolving air of unreality, their literalness combined with the heightened ‘mood’ of poetry make us almost painfully aware of that element of uncertainty which lies at the heart of Friedrich’s work and his obsessive grappling with the problem of art and reality - with the agonizing doubts of a man of faith confronted with desacralized nature.97

Friedrich’s concern is the subjective process of perception and interpretation. Just as Gothic indicates its own fictionality, so does his work emphasize its subjectivity and the fact that it is art, not nature. He addresses not so much a given landscape as the subject (and with it the problem) of landscape painting. His very religious subjectivism often leads him to veil the meaning of his work. Critics are agreed that his work involves ‘exegetical uncertainty and creative misprision’,98 that it ‘demands and beggars description, calls for explanation yet defies analysis’.99 This means that it is 95 96 97 98 99

Koerner, 23. Honour, 77. Honour, 76. Koerner, 143. Honour, 30.

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comparable to Gothic at its most Gothic. Since the only point of view available to viewers is that of the artist himself, they are obliged to make the artist’s problems their own as they, like him, become entrapped in their owninteriority. A case in point is Early Snow (c.1828),100 an archetypal Romantic ‘forest picture’ and as such a study of an important Gothic locus, the viewer of which stands on a snow-covered path that disappears into the forest of all our fears. No human figure is present, although the artist is present as an invisible Rückenfigur (figure seen from behind) on the path, outside the frame, for we see the scene from eye-height. The patch of blue sky above the forest gives the viewer/wanderer a glimpse of what lies beyond it, that is, of the ‘beyond’ with all its imponderable connotations and implications, but the question, as with Wanderer above a Sea of Mist, is whether it is accessible. At this point the work takes on the aspect of Märchen and nightmare. The fact that the snow on the path leading into the forest bears no footprints suggests that this entrance into the forest, like the comparable entrance to the Law in the talmudic exemplum of the Doorkeeper in Kafka’s Der Proceß, is intended for the viewer (reader) alone. We have to follow the path to its symbolical conclusion or conclusions, for it is our path, it is there for us alone. There is, of course, some doubt as to whether the path is the right path, for it is a ‘Holzweg’, and ‘auf dem Holzweg sein’ means to be on the wrong path. The path leads round to the right (with its connotations via the word ‘zurecht’ of coping, of finding the right way through life), but we cannot see where it leads, if indeed it leads anywhere. The heart of the forest is dark, giving it the connotation of menace and hostility that it mostly has in Gothic iconography.Is what is to be found in the heart of the forest a womb-like security or a tomb-like final resting place? Viewers will find in the forest whatever they expect or fear to find there, for they are themselves the subject of the picture: the forest is our unconscious, a magic mirror in which we find ourselves, our hopes and fears. Yet at the same time we need to be aware that Friedrich ‘gives the observer the chance to see in his pictures something quite different from what he had himself intended, thus diverting superficial curiosity from his real intentions’,101 striking confirmation of the Gothic instability of this work. The same is true of two of the greatest (because most inexhaustible in meaning) of his other works, both of which feature a Gothic archetype. I mean, of course, Monk by the Sea and Wanderer above a Sea of Mist.

100 101

See Koerner, 151 H. Börsch-Supan, Caspar David Friedrich, tr. Sarah Twohig (Munich: Prestel, 1974), 10.

534 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective The most revolutionary and uncompromising of all Friedrich’s images, Monk by the Sea (1809/10)102 depicts a landscape of overwhelming bleakness: we see a solitary monk-like figure holding his head in his hands (a traditional gesture of mourning); the painting’s companion piece reveals it to be his own death that he is contemplating). He is standing on a narrow strip of sand, clearly more symbolical than real, facing a doom-dark, immeasurable sea, beneath a livid, brooding sky. Although its connotations are eschatological, the scene also takes one back to the darkness upon the face of the deep at the Creation. There the monk stands, ‘on the brink of an abyss unprecedented in the history of painting’,103 ‘at the brink of nothingness’,104 his head below the horizon, the implication being that, unable to see over it, he has no ‘Überblick’, no understanding of whatever ultimate meaning the desolate scene before him may have. One thinks of Keats’ lines in ‘To Haydon’ (1817): ‘on the shore / Of the wide world I stand alone, and think / Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.’ The painting belongs with Abbey in the Oakwood (1809/10),105 which appears to represent the funeral of the monk, that is, of the artist himself, for the monk is a veiled self-portrait by Friedrich, who as he paints in the monkish garb that Gothic banditti are prone to don (a long grey habit-like travelling cloak, beneath which he is in the naked human condition that his work reflects) in his empty cell-like studio, is foreseeing and brooding on his own death. Monk by the Sea is thus in the first instance a self-portrait of the artist as ascetic, clothed in a faith seemingly powerless in the face of an overpowering, incomprehensible, Kleistian world that threatens to engulf and annihilate him. The monk is Friedrich, the artist whose constant preoccupation is death, struggling to experience the divine in a secularized world. The otherworldliness indicated by the monkish garb stands for the experience of otherness, of alienation from the secular world. In their interpretation of Monk by the Sea Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim argued at one point that the monk ‘erscheint in einer gewissen Entfernung wie ein brauner Fleck’ (seen from a certain distance looks like a brown speck),106 a statement that C. J. Bailey has, appropriately, related to Theodor

102 103

104 105 106

See Koerner, 168. R. Rosenblum, Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition (London: Thames & Hudson, 1975), 13. It is a pleasure to acknowledge my indebtedness to this brilliant book. R. Rosenblum and H. W. Janson, Art of the Nineteenth Century (London: Thames & Hudson, 1984), 86f. See Koerner, 169. Caspar David Friedrich in Briefen und Bekenntnissen, ed. Sigrid Hinz (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1984), 226.

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Storm’s view that every human being is a speck lost in the immeasurable and unknown.107 It is that experience, that perception, that is the subject of Monk by the Sea. We are all monks by the sea. That is why the figure of the monk so upset contemporary viewers. Heinrich von Kleist, who knew Friedrich well, made the most memorable and incisive comment on Monk by the Sea when he said that since in its uniformity and boundlessness it has no other foreground than the frame, when one looks at it, it is ‘als wenn einem die Augenlider weggeschnitten wären’ (as if one’s eyelids had been cut off).108 That is the position in which we now find ourselves: unable to close our eyes to Friedrich’s image and its existential implications, we are compelled to identify with the monk/painter, compelled to see the scene through his eyes, compelled to share his sense of alienation and exclusion from the scene he is contemplating. In the third of his Neun Briefe über Landschaftsmalerei (Leipzig: Fleischer, 1831) C. G. Carus wrote that ‘eine einsame, in Betrachtung der stillen Gegend verlorene Gestalt wird den Beschauer des Bildes anregen, sich an dessen Stelle zu denken’ (a solitary figure, lost in contemplation of the silent scene, will prompt the viewer of the work to imagine himself in that figure’s place).109 If, however, our response is initially controlled by the artist, it follows from Friedrich’s words ‘Mit eignem Auge sollst du sehen’ (You should see things with your own eyes)110 that the viewer can and must give the work a subjective interpretation, for there is no other. The painting itself shows that there is only subjectivity, so that, as Gert Schiff has said,111 the viewer’s identification with the monk, becoming (in Kleist’s words) ‘der einzige Lebensfunke im weiten Reich des Todes, der einsame Mittelpunkt im einsamen Kreis’ (the only sign of life in the whole wide realm of death, the lonely centre of a lonely circle),112 may equally well result in a dispassionate contemplation of the universe or in a harrowing realization of the individual’s isolation. It all depends on the existential baggage with which we approach this exemplary painting. Monk by the Sea is therefore at once a self-portrait of the Romantic artist, a radically new kind of abstract landscape, a symbolical depiction of the human condition, and a kind of 107 108

109 110 111 112

In Caspar David Friedrich, Winter Landscape, ex. cat. National Gallery London, ed. J. Leighton & C. J. (1990), 16. The monk resembles a figurino by Rosa or Magnasco. Ibid, 16f. The famous article ‘Verschiedene Empfindungen vor einer Seelandschaft von Friedrich, worauf ein Kapuziner’ by Kleist, Brentano and Arnim appeared in the Berliner Abendblätter, 13 Oct. 1810, 47f. Quoted from Hinz, 214. Hinz, 83. In German Masters of the Nineteenth Century (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art 1981), 13. Verschiedene Empfindungen’, 47f; also in Hinz, 222.

536 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective modern icon, albeit without any of the conventional iconographic paraphernalia. It is also a mirror in which we see, ultimately, only ourselves.113 Wanderer above a Sea of Mist (c. 1818),114 a literal mise en scène of the Gothic figure of the Wanderer, is equally thought-provoking and veiled in enigma. If it is true that ‘Friedrich reads in the infinity of nature both the infinity and hopelessness and also the nobility of human yearning’,115 then Monk by the Sea represents the former and Wanderer above a Sea of Mist the latter. The immediate image in Wanderer above a Sea of Mist is easily described: we see a traveller (wanderer, wayfarer, rambler, but the German word also has the connotation of pilgrim and of nomad, to say nothing of its connotations as a Romantic and Gothic archetype, the Wandering Jew of legend) standing, his back to the viewer, on a rocky mountain top, looking across an islanded sea of mist (pierced by other rocky crags) at a sizeable mountain in the background, which on closer inspection is seen to be not the background at all, just something blocking the view of and way to it (‘mit etwas hinter dem Berge halten’ means to keep something secret). Friedrich, like Kafka after him, takes such phrases literally; but then as a painter he has to. The wanderer being a stock figure in Romantic poetry and painting, one is initially tempted to regard Friedrich’s figure as belonging to that type, and his experience as being that described by Carl Gustav Carus in the second of his Nine Letters on Landscape Paintingof 1831: Tritt denn hin auf den Gipfel des Gebirges, schau hin über die langen Hügelreihen, betrachte das Fortziehen der Ströme und alle Herrlichkeit, welche Deinem Blicke sich auftut, und welches Gefühl ergreift Dich?- Es ist eine stille Andacht in Dir, Du selbst verlierst Dich im unbegrenzten Raume, Dein ganzes Wesen erfährt eine stille Läuterung und Reinigung. Dein Ich verschwindet, Du bist nichts, Gott ist alles.116 (Stand on the peak, look out over the long succession of hills, gaze upon the rivers and all the glories that are revealed to your gaze, and what is the feeling that grips you? - A silent prayerfulness awakes within you, you lose yourself in boundless space, your whole being experiences a silent purification. Your selfdisappears, you are nothing, God is all.)

It may well be that Carus had Wanderer above a Sea of Mist in mind when he wrote these lines in 1817-20, yet such a reading of the painting would be not merely inadequate, but wrong on at least two counts. Friedrich’s inscrutable 113 114 115 116

Cf. Shakespeare, Hamlet (III: 4): ‘a glass where you may see the inmost part of you.’ See Koerner, 155. The Oxford Companion to Art, 382. Carus, Neun Briefe (letter 2), quoted from Hinz, 209.

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Rückenfigur is no mere Romantic or Gothic ‘wanderer’. Less literary, less literal, and less stereotypical than that, he is a highly complex figure with little or nothing to do with tropes or stereotypes. Nor is his experience, which is also ours, restricted to that described by Carus, although the experience of sublimity, and therefore of the divine, is an important part of any reading of the image. We need to look more closely at Friedrich’s image in order to appreciate its originality and multiplicity of meaning, for the landscape, seen at dawn, with mist rising up from the valleys, is as enigmatic as the figure contemplating it. As in Monk by the Sea, there is no straightforward, conventional perspective. Indeed, it is a feature of Friedrich’s work that the middle distance tends to be foreshortened and bathed in ambiguity, so that there seems to be no way for the figure in question to reach the distant object of his Sehnsucht. The background disappears in a haze that is more metaphysical than physical, for here, as elsewhere, Friedrich uses space to express the numinous and man’s inability to apprehend it. The intermediate crags are replications of the one on which the traveller happens to be standing; he, or another, might equally well be standing on one of the other crags, the view from which would be symbolically identical, for it is what we subjectively make of it. All this mirrors ourperception of the picture, which is itself now more sharply focused, and now less. The fact is that Friedrich, as Koerner has said, by rendering his landscape insubstantial and spatially unstable, [...] forces us to participate directly in what we see. The mists and mirages, rocks and trees are what they are only through the creative imagination of the beholder.117

Who, then, is the Rückenfigur? There is no one answer, unless it be that he is the figure through whose eyes we are obliged to view the landscape, no other point of view, no other foothold being available to us, and to that extent represents both the artist and the viewer. Indeed, what faces the viewer is not so much a ‘landscape’ as ‘an interiorized self-portrait of the artist’,118 a picture of the artist contemplating his own interior landscape/artistic creation and his own feelings vis-à-vis landscape and artistic creativity. At the same time it is both a picture of the viewer (also represented by the Rückenfigur, whose point of view is the only one available) contemplating Friedrich contemplating the ‘landscape’, and a picture of Friedrich envisaging the viewer seeing his picture, for the most remarkable feature of such a picture is that the artist is in total control of the viewer. 117 118

Koerner, 180. Koerner, 74.

538 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Wanderer above a Sea of Mist is therefore a symbolical landscape of a complex, many-layered kind. The idea of the artist as purgatorial wanderer, never at home, always in pursuit of one aesthetic goal after another, links Friedrich’s Wanderer with writers as different as Goethe, Byron, Maturin and De Quincey. The Wandering Jew is peculiarly at home in the Gothic context. Another symbolical landscape, of a different kind, is The Sea of Ice,119 also known in English as Polar Sea and Arctic Shipwreck, which was painted in 1823-4, although the initial conception went back to 1798, when Friedrich produced the more conventional Wreck in the Polar Sea, which goes all the way back to the most traumatic moment of his life, when as a boy he ‘suffered [...] the horror of seeing a beloved brother, with whom he was skating near Greifswald, fall through the ice and become swallowed up by the depths before his very eyes’.120 In The Sea of Ice, which depicts an Arctic wasteland like that at the end of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, pointing to the ice-raft on which the text leaves the Creature to drift into darkness and death, we see that ice grown to intolerable size. What is left of the wrecked ship points, in accordance with Christian iconography, to the end of man’s voyage through life, and therefore to human frailty and vulnerability (Gebrechlichkeit). Börsch-Supan sees the ‘blocks of ice pointing skyward’ as representing the divinity of nature: the composition and colour scheme [...] seem to express [...] the solemnity and sublime quality of the scene. The way the huge ice-floes are piled up against one another in the foreground [is reminiscent] of the steps leading up to a temple, which the imagination must climb in order to reach the flat expanse from which the icebergs soar up towards the clearblue sky.121

That this is only a partial reading and only a partially accurate one can be seen by comparing it with Rosenblum’s: Here, in a frozen world that has turned into a cemetery, we discernslowly the splintered remains of a wrecked ship, whose skeletal traces are almost wholly absorbed and concealed by the jagged pyramid of a shattered iceberg. In its spiky, attenuated patterns, this chilling phenomenon of nature becomes a kind of Gothic mausoleum, whose original monumentality, before man’s interventiondisturbed it, is suggested by the mirage-like vision of yet another iceberg at the far left, located like some unattainable goal at an incalculable distance from the sharply delineated foreground.122

119 120 121 122

See Koerner, 201. Hinz, 201. Börsch-Supan, 144. Rosenblum, 34.

A Gothic Iconography 539

The Sea of Ice is a variation on works like The Monk by the Sea, The Wanderer above a Sea of Mist, and Cemetery in the Snow. A study of ruins, it depicts the cemetery of life in which the dead vastly outnumber the living. There is no temple here, just that Gothic mausoleum, just a shipwreck, a wrecked iceberg, and wrecked human lives. The further iceberg is, like the further peaks in The Wanderer above a Sea of Mist, unattainable. The blocks of ice, far from ‘pointing skywards’ like the mountains their name proclaims them to be (Berg means mountain), are collapsing, are on their way to being consumed by the senseless, insensate sea; they are at the same crazy, impermanent angle as the gravestones in Churchyard in the Snow. The implication is that the idea of the divinity is collapsing, which links with the Christian symbolism of the ship as the vessel in which the faithful found safety and were borne to salvation, which it challenges. The viewer is left wondering whether the unknown sailors found salvation, or merely death. Does the wreck mark the shipwreck of the Christian ideal? There is no certain answer, nor is there intended to be, for the subjectivity of art, its validation and interpretation, means that the spectator is in the same position as the artist. What remains is just a bleakly ambivalent scene that lacks Ruisdael’s emphasis on natural renewal, its meaning as unstable as the foundering iceberg. Here, before our eyes, is the ‘abyss unprecedented in modern painting’; here, crystalized, is the nothingness implicit in The Monk by the Sea.

14 GOTHIC AND MÄRCHEN Gothic and Märchen are closely related: Gothic is constructed on the basis of the morphology of the folk fairytale. Gothic writers borrow extensively from the fairytale formula, often subverting it in the process. Great literature of all ages has, of course, ‘borrowed [...] fairy-tale motifs and often exhibited an imaginativeness not unlike that of the fairy tale’,1 and while most Gothic fiction is not ‘great literature’ by any stretch of the imagination, a small portion of it is, and Gothic, as a kind of fictional Night Piece, is heavily involved in borrowing from the Nights of the Eastern (Arabian Nights) and Western (the Piacevolissime Notti of Straparola) fairytale canons. The distinguished German Gothic novelist, Benedicte Naubert, published sizeable collections of tales from both canons, and a number of Gothic novelists, or writers like Goethe, who have been associated with Gothic, borrowed from fairytale in ways which reflect an affinity between these two formulaic genres that are closely related in terms of their history, machinery, personae, formulae and functions, and by their deployment of motifs ranging from subversion to the counterfeit. In brief, the building blocks or ‘functions’ of the two forms are much the same The fairytale novels of the Great Enchantress, Ann Radcliffe, are a case in point, as are those of Benedicte Naubert, part of the inspiration for which goes back to the Tausend und eine Nacht; her collection of ‘Egyptian fairytales’, Alme oder Egyptische Mährchen (1793-97), shows that she, like Goethe, grew up with Galland. This chapter considers the impact of the Arabian Nights, that important link between Gothic and fairytale, on the work of Goethe and Hoffmann in particular, with De Quincey pointing to a third way, and then of French fairytale on the work of Walpole, Naubert, Tieck and others. After considering the relationship between the tales of the Brothers Grimm and Gothic, the parallels and divergencies between Gothic and fairytale are explored in more general terms, from which it will be seen that the two genres are linked not only by similar clusters of motifs, but by the fact that the motifs in question are strung along a similar structural thread. A generation of criticism ago Hannelotte Dorner Bachmann showed,2 taking 1 2

Lüthi, Once upon a Time.On the Nature of Fairy Tales (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1970), 21. Hannelotte Dorner-Bachmann, Erzählstruktur und Texttheorie. Zu den Grundlagen einer Erzähltheorie unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Märchens und der Gothic Novel (Hildesheim: Olms, 1979), esp. 357, 359, 396. Dorner-Bachmann was elaborating, in overwhelming detail, Ilse Nolting-Hauff’s statement that ‘Der eigentliche Prototyp

542 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective The Castle of Otranto, The Italian and The Monk as models, just how closely Gothic and fairytale are related in structural terms. Whether approached from a detailed structural point of view, or from a general literary historical one, the Gothic romance is, by its very nature, a kind of Märchenroman (fairytale novel), which is in turn a kind of Kunstmärchen.

I Fairytale and Gothic both go back to The Golden Ass, but it is appropriate, in view of the influence of the Arabian Nights on the Western fairytale from the early eighteenth century onwards, that the fairytale genre appears to have originated in ancient Egypt. The earliest proto-fairytale, ‘The Doomed Prince’, goes back to the ancient Egypt of 1350 BC, although it was not written down until c. 1000 BC. In c.1250 BC a tale of two brothers, Anup and Bata, recorded on papyrus, included some of what subsequently became the most popular folk-fairytale motifs.3 On the northern side of the Mediterranean fairytale motifs are found in the work of Homer (8th century BC), and elements of fairytale proper go back at least as far as Plato (c.428c.348 BC) who wrote in his Gorgias of ‘old wives tales’4 being told to amuse and/or chasten children. The fairytale as such, an early type of moral tale, appears to have developed over a long period of time from oral folktales that were intended to still the existential terror to which the human animal has always been subject, on which Gothic writing plays. There is, then, every reason to suppose that the main types of fairytale go back at least to classical antiquity, surviving by oral transmission until the didactically minded middle ages, when they began to enter the literary canon. Elements of what we call Gothic also go back to the ancient world: Horace (65 BC-8 BC), in asking in his Epistles, ‘Somnia, terrores magicos, miracula, sagas, / Nocturnos lemures, portentaque Thessala rides?’ (Is it really by laughter that you respond to dreams, irrational fears, wonders, soothsayers, spectres that walk by night, and Thessalonian prodigies?), was clearly pointing to the realm that is now known as the Gothic. Edith

3

4

des neueren Märchenromans is [...] der Schauerroman’ (see Ilse Nolting-Hauff, ‘Märchen und Märchenroman’ and ‘Märchenromane mit leidendem Helden’, in Poetica, 6 (1974), 133f, 452-5). Details in Max Lüthi, Märchen, 9th edn, ed. Heinz Rölleke (Stuttgart & Weimar : Metzler,1996), 40. The type stretches via the Biblical Cain and Abel to Karl and Franz Moor and their successors and clones. That there is overlap between myth and fairytale is shown by the fact that Greek mythos means ‘tale’, while mythos graos means ‘old wives tale’ and therefore ‘fairytale’.

Gothic and Märchen 543

Birkhead, describing the romance Babylonica by the Greek second-century writer Iamblikhos, which, like Kahlert’s Der Geisterbanner (The Necromancer) turns on sorcery and is set among tombs, caverns and robbers’ dens, as anticipating the Gothic novel, added that a contemporary Latin novel, The Golden Ass of Lucius Apuleius (c. 125-after 170), included incidents just as ‘horrid’ as any of those devised by the latterday writers of Gothic romance. This is no exaggeration. In Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya, or The Moor (1806) the Satanic Moor ‘grasps the wretched Victoria and with one push whirls her headlong down the dreadful abyss’, a violent ending to a particularly horrid and currently underrated tale, while in real life, just a few years earlier, a capo di banda known as Frà Diavolo had done the same thing to a whole group of men, women and children. In The Golden Ass (ch. X: ‘Defeat of the Bandits’) some of the bandits in question, after twice talking of pushing others into a ravine, are themselves ‘rolled [...] over a near-by precipice’. Many of the types of violence found in the late eighteenth-century Gothic novel show that the imagination was forced into hyperactivity by the Terror in France, but they also have a long history, the robbber tale being almost as old as the hills they infested (if that is the appropriate tense)5 in southern Europe for two thousand years. The fugitives in Shelley’s Zastrozzi and St Irvyne, and in so many other English and German Gothic texts, who find themselves in robbers’ caves or caverns, are treading in the footsteps of the travellers in Thessaly in The Golden Ass. The incident in The Golden Ass involving the sudden apparition of an old woman who vanishes after leading the way to the room where the baker’s corpse is found hanging behind the door anticipates the bloodiest of all fairytales, that of Bluebeard. Fairytale and Gothic are closely related not only by the narrative stocks-in-trade they have in common, but by the fact that The Golden Ass contains models for both genres. The ancient Egyptian fairytale convention that allows humans to be transformed into animals underlies The Golden Ass, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Eastern and Western fairytale conventions, and lives on in the Gothic tales of Kafka, and, in figurative form, in the Gothic convention generally. The Golden Ass, which is written, as theArabian Nights were to be, in the demotic of street storytellers, became known in German in 1538 and in English, following the publication of William Adlington’s translation, in 1566.

5

Given that to this day the Mafia (which dates back to the ninth century) remains a power in Sicily, while the (nineteenth-century) Camorra runs much of Naples.

544 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective

II As a kind of fictional Night Piece6 or literary counterpart to Goya’s Black Paintings, the Gothic tale, long or short, is heavily involved in borrowing from the Eastern (Arabian Nights) and Western fairytale canons.7 The Arabian Nights, like the Western fairytale as such (Wieland8 refers to Galland’s collection as Arabische Märchen), appears to go back, like The Golden Ass (and with it, fairytale, Gothic, and fantasy generally), to the early Mediterranean world, for Apuleius was a North African rhetorician who was born at Madaura (Mda Urush) in 120 (or was it 125?), studied in Carthage, and lived into the 170s. MSS of both works, between which there are many thematic parallels, were circulation by the 14th century. As a collection of tales the Arabian Nights can be compared with Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (1349-51),9 Giovanni Francesco Straparola’s Le piacevoli notti, 1550-53: The Nights of Straparola, tr. W. G. Waters, 1894; The Most Delectable Nights of Straparola, anon. tr., [Paris,] 1906), and Giambattista Basile’s (Lo cunto de li cunti, 5 vols, 1634-6: The Pentamerone, tr. J. E. Taylor, 1848; tr. Richard Burton, 1893). Straparola’s second fable of the First Night is a robber-tale. In Germany, two of Straparola’s tales appeared in Caspar Lolivetta’s Das teutsche Gespenst (1687), and a German version of the Notti is said to have been published in 1699, although no copy has been found. An adequate German version (Die Märchen des Straparola, tr. Valentin Schmidt) did not appear until 1817. Straparola’s Notti contained four tales deriving from the Arabian Nights10 as well as a number of tales subsequently associated with Mme D’Aulnoy and Perrault. Like the Notti, the Arabian Nights combine meraviglia and terribilità, fairytale and Gothic. As for Basile, E. R. Vincent, in his Introduction to a reprint of Burton’s translation of The 6 7

8

9

10

Hoffmann uses the term Nachtstück, which was then borrowed by Schumann to mark his sense of affinity with Hoffmann. In Germany, two of Straparola’s tales appeared in Caspar Lolivetta’s Das teutsche Gespenst (1687), and a German version of the Nights is said to have been published in 1699, although no copy has been found. An adequate German version (Die Märchen des Straparola, tr. Valentin Schmidt) did not appear until 1817. The 3-volume Dschinnistan oder auserlesene Feen- und Geistermärchen (1786-9), edited (and in large part retold) by Wieland has a misleading title that leads the reader to expect oriental tales in the manner of Galland/Voss, whereas most of the tales are taken from French eighteeenth-century tales. By invoking the 1001 Nacht, Wieland was no doubt hoping to repeat its sucess. In this he failed. The adventurer, novelist and professional plagiarist, Carl Grosse, author of Der Geniusbest known in English as Horrid Mysteries), included a Dekameron (1797) among ‘his’ works. Nights IV/1, IV/3, V/3 and XII/3.

Gothic and Märchen 545

Pentameron, emphasized that, in addition to ‘magic happiness’, Basile’s world also contains terror, terror of pain and death, terror of the unknown. This horror-world is personified by Ogres and Ogresses more dreadful than ever under their name of Ghuls and Ghulas [...] Their occasional amiability towards their protégés is [...] outbalanced by their unrestrainable fondness for human flesh.11

Basile’s tales are, indeed, generally recognized as ‘crueller’12 than their more canonical counterparts but then he lived in hard times if one thinks of the ‘sanguinary executions, horrid punishments, and lingering torments’ that were also a feature of the life and work of the Neapolitan painter Jusupe (José) de Ribera (Lo Spagnoletto, c. 1590-1656).13 However, in the First story of the First Day, ‘Story of the Ghul’, the ghul in question is an amiable oaf rather than a raging ghoul (cannibal, vampire) of the kind that migrated from the Arabian Nights to the post-Gothic Penny Dreadful via E. T.A.Hoffmann. All this makes it all the more extraordinary that Basile’s collection was originally intended for children (peccerille). The Arabian Nights can be said to have officially arrived in the West in 1704, when Antoine Galland began publishing his Mille et une nuits (1704-17), although a few tales had been smugggled into France by Perrault and D’Aulnoy seven years earlier. Galland’s text was more or less simultaneously translated into English as Arabian Nights (1706 onwards; Arabian NightsEntertainments (10 vols in 5, 1763-65)14 and into German as Die Tausend und Eine Nacht, tr. August Bohse (ps. Talander), 6 vols, 1730, both of which were widely read at the time, as was Mille et un jour (1710-12, 5 vols) by F. Pétis de la Croix and Le Sage, an adaptation of Galland. By giving an eighteenth-century style free translation or paraphrase of a rather miscellaneous original, Galland was able to avoid everything that might have offended his French readers, but because the Arabian Nights as known in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was a compilation from several sources and, it seems, from Galland’s own imagination, the authenticity and reliability of his text, brilliant as it is, are open to question, a fact that immediately forms a bridge between Galland and Gothic. What are the Nights? A ‘Western fabrication’ or concoction? A ‘tissue of tales’ (cf. tissue of lies, Lügenmärchen)? Brilliant counterfeit or not, the Arabian Nights is, like 11 12 13 14

The Pentamerone, tr. Burton, introd. Vincent (London: Spring Books, n.d.) 8. The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales, ed. J. Zipes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 43. Grant, Bandits in a Landscape, 28. Best available edition: Arabian Nights Entertainments, ed. Robert L. Mack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)

546 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Basile’s Pentameron, a work of popular literature; in the original it is written not in classical literary Arabic, but in a more worldly form of demotic Arabic, over which Galland drew a veil of eighteenth-century literary French that served to make even cannibalism palatable. His translation is counterfeit in the sense that it is a version not of one collection of tales, but also of tales of various dates and geographical origins, all of them given in a brillliant free translation that is very much Galland’s own work and a reflection of French culture of the time; it has indeed been suggested that some of the tales may be Galland’s own invention and, as such, double counterfeits. The identity of the original tellers of the tales, which, being told at night, are by definition Nachtstücke in the sense of nocturnal tales, and, as such, models for the Nachtstücke of Hoffmann and others, is unknown. By the same token, the authenticity of the Grimms’ Kinder- und Haus-Märchen has been questioned because of the amount of ‘editing’ they received from Wilhelm Grimm in particular. According to Robert Irwin, the Grimms [...] identified the [1001 Nacht] as the ultimate source of eight of the tales they had been told’, tales from the Nights, stripped of their specifically Islamic and oriental features, having circulated orally in Germany in pre-modern times.15 Any tales told over centuries by oral tellers are inevitably subject to change, let alone improvisation and subversion. Both fairytale and Gothic are subversive forms which by their very names, signal their unreliability. Hauff, in ‘Märchen als Almanach’, the allegorical preface to his first cycle of fairytales, foregrounds the subversive nature of the genre, and many Gothic texts play with the self-subverting idea of a ‘found’ MS with which the ‘editor’ feels free to take liberties. Containing, as it does, ‘many most striking examples of the terrible joined with the marvellous’,16 that is, of Gothic and fairytale, the Arabian Nights is an important conduit for Gothic, which, when it appears on the scene in the second half of the eighteenth century, parallels themin a number of ways. Among the many motifs, figures and features later associated with Gothic that are found in the Arabian Nights are the genius/genie/djinn/jinnee/jinn, ogre (cannibal)/monster, necromancer; Geisterspuk (notably in the form of the ghoul or vampire); enchantment (in Gothic, incarceration); false identity (as a result of enchantment); live burial (as a matter of law!); abduction; bands of robbers; nest of assassins; the abyss, cavern and trap-door [via which victims are precipated into a vault littered with bones, cf. Schiller’s Das Spiel des Schicksals]; the cavern as Räuberhöhle sheltering forty [formulistic number] robbers; forbidden 15 16

Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nights: A Companion (London: Allen Lane, 1994), 101. Quoted from Gothic Documents, ed. E. J. Clery & Robert Miles, 128, 129.

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door/chamber; subterranean palace; subterranean room; secret passage; Destroyer Death;17 the Bluebeard motif; supernaturalism (the uncanny); the fantastic; etc. Formally speaking, the complex interlaced structure (tale within tale within tale) that is typical of German Gothic is found in the Arabian Nights, the very different impact of which on Goethe, Tieck and Hoffmann18 will be seen to speak for itself. While such parallels sometimes mean that a Gothic writer has - either directly, or more often, via Mme d’Aulnoy - borrowed from the Arabian Nights, they are essentially parallels showing the generic affinity of Gothic and fairytale. Goethe Goethe’s life-long love of fairytales goes back to books and chapbooks read in early childhhod. This applies above all to that treasury of Gothic motifs, the Arabian Nights (1001 Nacht). He is known to have read Les mille et une nuits, tr. Antoine Galland (6 vols 1704-17, new edn, 1747: Die Tausend und Eine Nacht, tr. from Galland by August Bohse [Ps. Talander], 6 vols, 1730). He valued Bohse’s translation, but it was in Galland’s French that he read the Arabian Nights until 1825. J. H. Voß’s translation of Galland, Tausend und eine Nacht (6 vols, 1781-5), which Wieland lauded as a ‘Meisterwerk’, Goethe seems not to have rated. Having read Les Mille et une nuits in his childhood, he returned to them again and again, both in Galland’s French, and later in the so-called Breslau edition, Tausend und Eine Nacht, tr. Max Habicht, F. H. von der Hagen and Karl Schall (15 vols, 1825), which he rated for its ‘greater authenticity’. The Tausend und eine Nacht was an unfailing source of inspiration from which he borrowed ‘zahlreiche Anregungen, Motive, Situationen und Abläufe’ (numerous stimuli, motifs, situations and outcomes),19 using them most tellingly in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre and Faust II. It was in childhood, in Galland, and especially in the story of a ghoul, ‘The Story of Sidi-Nouman’, that he first came across the Gothic figure of the vampire that he deployed in Die Braut von Korinth. He drew on the Arabian Nights throughout his life,20 but whereas Tieck borrowed from Galland the Oriental mode and a few motifs that he proceeded to use in his 17 18

19 20

Werther’s view of life and death may go back to Goethe’s life-long reading of the Mille et une nuits, many of which he had by heart. Carl Grosse’s writings include Morgenländische Erzählungen (1795), which, if it could be run to ground, would almost certainly prove to consist of, or include, material from 1001 Nacht. Gero von Wilpert, Goethe-Lexikon (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1998), 1050. See Katharina Mommsen, Goethe und die 1001 Nacht (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1981). The poetry of the Westöstlicher Diwan was influenced not by the Arabian Nights, but by Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall’s translation of the Divan of the fourteenthcentury Persian poet Hafiz.

548 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Oriental Gothic Abdallah, and De Quincey found in the Arabian Nights Entertainments, and more specifically in the tale of Aladdin, the stock of Gothic imagery that he used to express his inner life, Goethe found endless inspiration in Galland.’s text, which, regularly re-read, reinforced the ‘Lust zu fabulieren’ (love of storytelling) that he inherited from his mother, thereby enhancing his own already formidable storytelling ability.21 He will have identified Sheherazade with his mother.22 One wonders what he made of Benedicte Naubert’s Alme oder Egyptische Mährchen (5 vols, 1793-7)23 that goes back to her own childhood love of the 1001 Nacht. From Galland’s tales he took motifs and figures such as the Bote andthe Wanderer,24 and it was there, too, that he found the abyss that was to come to represent the demonic chaos of which he was so wary. In preparation for writing Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre he re-read the 1001 Nacht, which became his model for the construction of the novel, in which the inspiration of the Arabian Nights is decisive as motifs and echoes, borrowings and reminiscences help to generate the narrative, adding additional layers and narrative patterns, circularities and complexities to it.25 It is also difficult to over-emphasize the influence of the 1001 Nacht on Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre;26 it is a good example of creative borrowing as opposed to the petty pilfering that is so often involved in the Gothic novel. The influence of the 1001 Nacht takes different forms.27 In Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre it provides a narrative master-plan and model. It is to 1001 Nacht that Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre owes its characteristic interlaced narrative form. In Faust II, on the other hand, it is more a matter of the ways in which particular motifs have been developed and coloured.28 Sheherazade would not have been able to save her own life if her narratives had been less compelling. Goethe’s mother followed Sheherazade’s example in breaking off her own ‘Mährgen’ to be completed the next day. In doing so she laid the foundation of her son’s poetic life. Sheherazade is Goethe’s Meisterin, the mistress of his imagination, more truly 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

See Mia Gerhardt, The Art of Story-Telling: A Literary Study of the Thousand and One Nights (Leiden: ///, 1963). Virginia Woolf is thought to have identified with Sheherazade, see The Common Reader: First Series (London: Hogarth, 1925; new edn 1984, 149). Available online as an e-book. Goethe was known as ‘der Wanderer’. In Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre the Turmgesellschaft has a similar, supplementary function. See Mommsen, especially 63ff, 118-22, 125-52, 174ff. For a list of the seven main types of borrowing from 1001 Nacht to be found in Goethe’s work, and especially in Faust II, see Mommsen, 298f. See Mommsen, 298f.

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his muse, over a longer period of time, than any of his flesh-and-blood mistresses. She is the ‘Verkörperung jenes märchenhaft zaubernden Fabulierens, wie es die Mummenschanz beispielhaft zeigt’ (embodiment of the magical narration necessitated by the fabulous background),29 without whose help Faust II would have been differently structured and less inspired. The Breslau edition, by which he was so impressed, came at exactly the right time. That he identified with Sheherazade and identified her with his ideal Fabuliererin (storyteller), his mother, means that the 1001 Nacht hold an unrivalled place in his affections. The only comparison is with Thomas De Quincey, who, as we shall see, was deeply attached to the Arabian Nights, from early childhood, but for an entirely different reason. The ‘realism’ and particularity that make Goethe’s (as opposed to Schiller’s) work so poetic in the modern sense are the most striking features of Sheherazade’s tales. For Goethe this was reality as such. Schiller bought a copy of 1001 Nacht (whether in Bohse’s translation or in Voß’s is not known) in Jena - where he obtained books at 50% discount - on 14 April 1793, but the work had nothing like the appeal for him that it had for Goethe; indeed, Schiller, for all sorts of reasons, was in two minds about 1001 Nacht. On the one hand there is the magical evening of 11 April 1804, at which he told tales from the 1001 Nacht to the accompaniment of comments from Goethe that ranged from the ultra-serious to the frankly comic, while on the other hand there are occasions when Schiller showed little understanding of the nature of Goethe’s enthusiasm for the 1001 Nacht and the direction in which this was liable to take him. Behind this lies the old antagonism between moralist and poet. Goethe rather liked the way in which the tales hide their moral concerns beneath an exotic aestheticism; Schiller did not. What so appealed to Goethe was ‘der ausgeprägte Realismus orientalischen Erzählens’ (the marked realism of oriental storytelling), but also ‘das selbstverständliche Nebeneinanderstehen von Zauberding und Realität’ (the juxta-position as a matter of course of magical object and realistis style),30 which becomes a model for his own work and shows how close it often is to Märchen in general and these arabische Märchen in particular. Sheherazade’s storytelling operates in a creative borderland in which the natural and the supernatural, the real and the surreal co-exist. And the very territory of ‘des traumhaften Fabulierens, des an die Grenze der Märchensphäre vorstoßenden Dichtens’ (the fabulous storytelling that

29 30

Mommsen , 227-231 (‘Das Scheherazade-Gleichnis’). Mommsen, 297.

550 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective approached the poetry of fairytale)31 that Goethe took from Sheherazade and made so much his own is, of course, Gothic in its indeterminacy. Hoffmann, Tieck and Hauff In a letter to Kunz dated 19 August 1813, Hoffmann wrote, apropos Der Goldene Topf: ‘Denken Sie dabey nicht, Bester, an Scheherazade und Tausend und eine Nacht - der Turban und türkische Hosen sind gänzlich verbannt’ (Don’t think of Sheherazade and the Arabian Nights, dear fellow; turbans and Turkish trousers are completely ruled out). Notwithstanding his statement, this first Märchen, ‘Der goldene Topf’, is, as Hewett-Thayer rightly commented, ‘to be miraculous and magical (feenhaft), though daringly involved in ordinary life. Much later, in the Serapionsbrüder, Hoffmann characterized the Arabian Nights as belonging to precisely this type of tale.32 No wonder, then, that a significant borrowing from the Arabian Nights is to be found in the Serapionsbrüder. That the brute power of Gerstenberg’s Greuelstück (horror play) Ugolino (1768) impressed Hoffmann may be surmised from one of the most macabre of his ‘Night Pieces’, Der Vampyr (or Eine Vampyrgeschichte, or Die Hyänen, or Aurelia, or Cyprians Erzählung, 1821), which unwisely carried on where even Ugolino and the Arabian Nights Entertainments left off.33 Hoffmann defends the introduction of the horrible or revolting into fiction, but readers will not be convinced by his argument that necrophagy may be rendered harmless by poetic tact or control, for when all is said and done the key-image of Der Vampyr remains revolting. The fact is that it is in part copied from ‘The Story of Sidi-Nouman [or Nonman]’ in the Arabian Nights Entertainments, which contains the core of Hoffmann’s tale and shows that the Arabian Nights includes Gothic elements. In his Lives of the Necromancers (1834) William Godwin paraphrases ‘The Story of Sidi Nouman’, which he calls the ‘Story of a Ghoul’, remarking that ‘Almost every thing that can be conceived of marvellous and terrific is [...] to be found [in the Arabian Nights Entertainments] (123). The story as read in Galland’s eighteenth-century text can be found in Arabian Nights Entertainments, ed. Robert L, Mack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, 737-746), where it is called ‘The Story of Sidi Nonman’; an edited version is to be found in The Arabian Nights Entertainments, ed. Andrew Lang (London: Longmans, Green, 1919, 331-345). Hoffmann’s tale appeared in Die Serapionsbrüder, IV, 1821), and is included in Von denen Vampiren, ed. Dieter Sturm & Klaus Völker (Suhrkamp Taschenbuch, 1994, 22-36); for a 31 32 33

Mommsen, 296. Hewett-Thayer, 218. One of Fuseli’s little-known works, Ugolino im Hungerturm., illustrates the first Act of Ugolino.

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translation see Christopher Frayling, Vampyres (London & Boston: Faber and Faber, 1992, 190-207). The texts speak for themselves. After explaining that ‘goules’ of both sexes are wandering demons, which [...] sometimes go in the night into burying-grounds, and feed upon dead bodies that have been buried there’, Sidi Nonman goes on: I was in a terrible surprise to see my wife with this goule. They dug up a dead body which had been buried that day, and the goule cut the flesh into several pieces, and they [ate] together by the grave-side [Galland]

This passage gave Hoffmann his starting point: Da gewahrte er im hellsten Mondesschimmer dicht vor sich einen Kreis furchtbar gespenstischer Gestalten. Alte halbnackte Weiber mit fliegendem Haar hatten sich niedergekauert auf dem Boden, und mitten in dem Kreise lag der Leichnam eines Menschen, an dem sie zehrten mit Wolfesgier. - Aurelie war unter ihnen.34 ([In the burying-ground], in the bright moonlight, he saw a circle of frightful, spectral-looking creatures. Old women, half naked, were squatting on the ground, and in the midst of them lay the corpse of a man, which they were tearing at with wolfish apppetite. Aurelia was amongst them.)35

Theodor remembers that he came across this ‘gräßlich gespenstische Geschichte’ (this ghastly, ghostly story) in ‘einem alten Buche’ (in an old book). The book is Die 1001 Nacht, in which vampirism is reversed in that there the living devour the dead. Hoffmann orchestrates the episode and enhances the discourse, although, the flesh devoured, the bones of contention remain. Tieck shared Goethe’s enthusiasm for the Arabian Nights,36 but while Goethe was profoundly influenced by the Arabian tales, and above all by Scheherazade’s narrative artistry, Tieck merely produced an over-the-top horror tale, Abdallah, which, indebted to Galland though it was, owed a more fundamental debt to Beckford. Abdallah; oder, Das furchtbare Opfer, the full, original title of which so clearly evokes both the Arabian fairytale and 34 35 36

E. T. A. Hoffmann, Die Serapions-Brüder (Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2008), 1133. Quoted from an anonymous Victorian translation, in Frayling, 205. In the list of German books in Washington Irving’s Sunnyside Library and the German titles noted in his diaries.there is a title that points to the Arabian Nights Phantasus. Tausend und ein Mährchen, vom Verfasser der grauen Mappe [= Johann Christian Ludwig Haken] (4 vols, 1802; 2nd edn, 1819) - of which Irving possessed the first volume; it is not to be confused with Tieck’s Phantasus, which appeared a decade later.

552 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective the Gothic tale, was begun in 1790 while Tieck was still at school, and was published anonymously in 1795, when he was twenty-two. Voss’s translation of Galland, Tausend und eine Nacht (6 vols, 1781-5), appeared at exactly the right time to attract his attention, but the fact is that Tieck, who, like Musäus and Goethe, came to have a famously low opinion of Voss’s translation, got to know the Arabian Nights from the English translation of Galland, Arabian Nights Entertainments (10 vols in 5, 1763-65) and from Galland’s Les mille et une nuits (10 vols, 1788), both of which he possessed. Later he came to possess Tausend und eine Nacht, tr. Habicht and others (15 vols, Breslau, 1827; he also possessed the complete 1836 edition). He does not appear to have known Bohse’s early (1730) translation, which was widely read in Germany earlier in the century. Both the subterranean cavern into which Abdallah has to descend and the magic ring he is given by Omar (to use in an emergency: it is Aladdin’s magic lamp by another name) derive from the Arabian Nights,37 which also left its mark on another German Gothic novel, Ernst Theodor Jünger’s Carolo Carolini, der Räuberhauptmann (1800), and the mysterious inscription on the ring is reminiscent of the uncouth characters on a sabre both in the Arabian Nights and in Vathek, for Beckford too had borrowed from the Arabian Nights. While the Mille et une nuits clearly caught and held the attention of the voracious young reader, the orientalism of Abdallah is more manner than substance. For its oriental manner it is indebted in the first place to Jean-Paul Bignon’s Les Avantures d’Abdalla, fils d’Hanif (1712-14) and thence to the Arabian Nights, which was Bignon’s starting-point. Sheherazade’s example did not affect Tieck’s narration, as it did that of Goethe, nor did its imagery become a lifelong feature of his mental world, as that of the Arabian Nights Entertainments did in the case of De Quincey.38 Abdallah derives its Orientalism largely from the Arabian Nights, and its mixture of Orientalism and Gothic from Beckford’s Vathek. An Arabian Tale (1786), which appeared in two separate German versions within two years of its publication in French and English: Der Thurm von Samarah (tr. by Georg Schatz ‘from the Arabic’, 1788) and Vathek, eine arabische Erzählung (tr. by Georg Römer from Beckford’s French, 1788), and continued to be reprinted in German into the twentieth century. Given the impact of D’Aulnoy’s fairytales on the spatial imagery of Vathek - the tower and the cavern come straight from D’Aulnoy (e.g. ‘The Ram’), and Eblis is reminiscent of the underworld in ‘The Beneficent Frog’, which lies ten thousand steps down from the ‘black plain’, while the Giaour in its ‘horrible chasm’ is 37 38

Andersen’s The Tinder-Box, a retelling of a Scandinavian folktale, Aanden i Lyset (The Spirit in the Candle), also made use of Aladdin and his Wonderful Lamp. See Bridgwater, De Quincey’s Gothic Masquerade, 11-15.

Gothic and Märchen 553

imaginatively related to the Fairy Lioness in the same tale - it is appropriate that Vathek was composed in French. Gothic appears at its most imaginative in Vathek with its partly subterranean setting and its exotic eighteenthcentury orientalizing mode,39 the literary equivalent of the artistic and decorative chinoiserie of the time.The two are linked, for, as Robert Irwin has said, ‘The oriental and the Gothic were closely allied in the eighteenthcentury revolt against classical canons in literature.’40 The fairytale was part of that revolt. Beckford is a harbinger of the fantastic as well as a founding father of Gothic. Like Bonaventura and Heinrich von Kleist after him, he portrays a world governed by chance and chaos. The tower and the underworld of Vathek represent what profoundly troubled the young Tieck - the feeling of being imprisoned in a universe beyond control. Before we come to De Quincey, a passage in a post-Gothic Ritterroman, Lichtenstein (1826: The Banished, 1839), by Tieck’s friend Wilhelm Hauff, needs to be noted. The most notably Gothic feature of the novel is the cavern in which Duke Ulrich - like Otto von Wittelsbach at the end of Naubert’s Alf von Deulmen - takes refuge; it is both one of the most memorable of all the caverns in Gothic fiction and itself a classically Romantic fiction. Hauff likens the cavern to ‘die erhabenen Hallen eines unterirdischen Palastes’ (the lofty halls of a subterranean palace) of an unnnamed Oriental fairytale: in hohen, majestätisch gewölbten Bogen zog sich der Höhlengang hin und flimmerte und blitzte wie von tausend Kristallen und Diamanten [...] Glänzend weiße Felsen faßten die Wände ein, kühne Schwibbbogen, Wölbungen, über deren Kühnheit das irdische Auge staunte, bildeten das glänzende Kuppel [...] In grotesken Gestalten standen Felsen umher, und das aufgeregte Phantasie, das trunkene Auge glaubte bald eine Kapelle, bald große Altäre mit reicher Draperie und gotisch verzierte Kanzeln zu sehen. (the lofty and majestic vaulted arches running the whole length of the cavern, sparkling and glittering like thousands of crystals and diamonds [...] Brilliant white rocks composed its walls; bold flying buttresses and arches, at the glory of which the eye could only marvel, formed the gleaming cupola [...] The surrounding rocks were thrown together in such happy confusion as to give the excited imagination full scope to disover in their grotesque shapes, here a chapel, there high altars ornamented with flowing drapery; pulpits of richly decorated in gothic style)41 39

40 41

See Henry Weber, Tales of the East; Comprising the Most Popular Romances of Oriental Origin, and the Best Imitations by European Authors, 3 vols (Edinburgh: Ballantyne; London: Longman, 1812). Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nights. A Companion (London: Allen Lane, 1994), 253. The translations of this and the previous passage are modified from The Banished, 3 vols (London: Colburn, 1839), II, 102f., 149ff.) to bring them closer to the original.

554 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective This underground palace, which puts Georg in mind of an Eastern fairytale he had heard in his childhood from a miner ‘whose great grandfather was imprisoned in Palestine’, is reminiscent of the magnificent palace full of treasures ‘in the hollow of the mountain’ in ‘The Tale of Baba Abdalla’ in the Tausend und eine Nacht. Hauff’s vivid fairytales,42 influenced as they are by the copy of the Tausend und eine Nacht he discovered in his grandfather’s library, are known for the way in which they combine intensity of imagination with elements of the macabre (Gothic themes include the ghost-ship). His first collection, Die Karavane (1825), shows him following Sheherazade’s example: as a caravan crosses the desert, the merchants take it in turns to tell a story when they break their journey for the night. Half the tales they tell echo the world of the Arabian Nights while at the same time going beyond them in ways that show Hauff’s originality. They also invoke the Gothic tales of the time, for the figures, events and situations of which the Arabian setting provides (for European readers, but not for the original Egyptian ones) a colourful backdrop. The initial frame voices the fear of wild riders or robbers familiar from the Räuberroman. The first tale includes a number of Gothic motifs, among them the old manuscript, the peripeteia or sudden change for the worse, usurpation, and a ruin strongly reminiscent of Gothic novels like Kahlert’s Der Geisterbanner (1790), especially when combined with the figure of the enchanter (Gothic: necromancer) and enchantment (Gothic before Mesmerism: imprisonment). The second tale in the series, Das Gespensterschiff, goes back to ‘Vanderdecken’s Message Home’, which caused such a stir when it appeared in Blackwood’s five years earlier, but is also a markedly original treatment of its theme;43 it includes a reference to the valley of diamonds in Sinbad’s ‘Second Voyage’. The third tale features the motif of the locked (forbidden) room that goes back to The Golden Ass and is a feature of fairytale and Gothic alike. The fourth tale turns on false identtity. ‘The Fortunes of Saïd’ is set in the time of Haroun al-Rashid, while ‘The Inn in the Forest’ uses the locale associated with Smollett and Lewis. Readers will decide for themselves whether the echoes of the Thousand and one Nights amount to no more than exotic mood music,44 or, as I judge to be the case, provide an ingenious counterpoint to the Gothic motifs they incorporate.

42

43 44

Hauff’s Mährchen, 16th edn (Stuttgart: Rieger, 1879) came complete with 100 illustrations and six engravings, many of them redolent of the Tausend und eine Nacht. They were translated as Fairy Tales of Wilhelm Hauff (London: Abelard Schuman, 1969). See Peter Haining (ed.), The Ghost Ship (London: William Kimber, 1985), 39. Volker Klotz, Das europäische Kunstmärchen (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1985), 226.

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De Quincey The Arabian Nights Entertainments was a particular childhood favourite of the young Thomas De Quincey (see ‘Infant Literature’ in the Autobiography [Masson, 1: 127-30]), as it was of many other young writers-to-be at the time. De Quincey puts in a brief appearance here because he reacted to the Arabian Nights as deeply as Goethe, but in a very different way that showed, by contrast, just how superficial the influence of the Arabian Nights on Tieck really was, largely a matter of exotic ornament and manner rather than substance, of arabesques rather than Arabic influence. De Quincey reacted to the Arabian Nights in a way that may be compared with that of Coleridge, who left accounts of the ‘obscure dread and intense desire’ that he associated with the Arabian Nights.45 Some years before De Quincey’s first immersion in the thousand and one tales, John and Laetitia Aikin had written that ‘The old Gothic [medieval] romance and the Eastern tale, with their genii, giants, enchantments, and transformations, however a refined critic may censure them as absurd and extravagant, will ever retain a most powerful influence on the mind’, and had added that ‘In the Arabian Nights are many most striking examples of the terrible joined with the marvellous’.46 It is to this that De Quincey is alluding when he writes of Mrs Barbauld (née Aikin) - mistakenly in his view, although it is she who has been vindicated by history - insisting on ‘Aladdin’ and ‘Sinbad’ as the two jewels of the collection (1: 127). His retelling of the story shows that it worked its way deeper and deeper into his consciousness. Imagery from the tale spans his work, his concept of the sublime goes back to the story of Aladdin, and it was his love of the Arabian Nights in general, and the story of Aladdin in particular, that led directly to his enthusiastic reading of Gothic novels and tales a few years later, there being many bridges between the two, including the idea of ‘live burial in subterraneous chambers’, and the forbidden chamber (Bluebeard room), which are leitmotifs of the Arabian Nights. He never forgot the Arabian Nights: in 1854 he told Hogg that he was planning a volume of ‘Arabian Tales’, and while the plan was hardly serious, his continued attachment to the Nights certainly was. The passage in the tale of Aladdin that most held his attention (see 1: 383, 388; 7: 181) as exemplifying sublimity is that at the beginning of the tale in which a magician from the central depths of Africa is introduced to the reader. The secret art of an enchanted lamp imprisoned in subterraneous chambers, the mighty labyrinth of sounds, the sorcerer with his demoniac 45

46

See Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1989), 10f.; also, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956-71), I, 208. Quoted from Gothic Documents, ed.Clery & Miles, 128, 129.

556 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective gifts and murderous intention, the phantoms of the brain, and the idea that the least things in the universe can be secret mirrors of the greatest, such ideas fascinated De Quincey and are constantly reflected in his work. As he grew up and experienced a traumatic fall not just into adult self-awareness, but into the awareness of guilt, rifacimento and the incorporation of others’ work into his own became just such a ‘secret mirror’ by means of which he, the pariah, might secretly emulate the greatest, borrowing the emperor’s clothes at will. It was much the same idea that he drew from Phaedrus, who was so important to him because the ‘apotheosis of the slave’ gave him his ‘first grand and jubilant sense of the moral sublime’, and from Lucian, another early favourite, who wandered around Ionia in the garb of a slave before settling in Athens, where he wrote the works that brought him fame. Aladdin was a comparable figure, initially little better than a street Arab, who became a king. Aladdin’s ‘enchanted lamp’ became identified in De Quincey’s mind with that ‘lamp of Paradise [...] which burned so steadfastly’ in his sister Elizabeth (1: 36), and therefore came to symbolize the enchanted childhood that came to an abrupt end on her death, which ‘turn[ed] his heaven into hell, and reveal[ed] the abysmal depths of human life’,47 following which he became fixated on the underworld of death. Into those abysmal, abyssal depths he would descend in search of his lost paradise The ‘natural and mighty palimpsest’ of the brain (cf. the Jungian collective unconscious) holds ‘everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings’ corresponding to the endless strata of leaves shed by ‘aboriginal forests’ (13: 346, 348), and, more generally, to the detritus of millenia that builds up on the surface of the earth and the floor of the ocean: ‘Everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings, have fallen upon your brain softly as light. Each succession has seemed to bury all that went before. And yet, in reality, not one has been extinguished.’ Fundamental to De Quincey’s work is the spatial geometry of Gothic in which Piranesi’s aerial trap and the ‘horrid’ chasm, deep as oblivion (13: 348), deep as death, seemingly reverse images one of the other, their equivalent on the vertical plane endless corridors, are in truth both images of falling, and therefore of De Quincey’s own ‘aboriginal fall’. For the classicist De Quincey caverns are associated with the cavern-dwelling chthonic architect-god Trophonios (3: 394), but also with the ‘dreadful mouth of Acheron’ (3: 347) and its watery equivalent, the maelstrom; they lead into the interior darkness, to the unconscious underworld of hidden fears, to personal hells (‘the caves of hell’, 3: 446). The marine and submarine imagery is remarkable. De Quincey writes in 47

Hillis Miller, 18.

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Suspira that ‘A dark ocean would seem the total expanse of life from the first; but far darker and more appalling would seem that inferior and second chamber of the ocean which called him away for ever’ (3: 351), and the Gothic wreck/shipwreck imagery of the German Walladmor, which he proceeds to develop, is part of a recurrent pattern of ruination. He even writes of ‘wrecks of forgotten delirium’ (3: 366). To his own ‘unpardonable folly’ he traces ‘many ruins’ (3: 231), so that ‘ruin’ has a similar connotation to ‘wreck’; he writes, with subjective reference, of the wreck of a life and the wreck of a person (3: 356). Savannah-la-Mar is a submarine Pompeii, a complete, negative version of life lost in the ‘noiseless deeps of the Infinite’. Typically, he imagines ‘incoherent libraries [of shipwrecked books] on the floors of the hungry sea’, and even writes of ‘that vast submarine Bodleian, which stands in far less risk from fire than the insolent Bodleian of the upper world’ (3: 34l). To the classicist, the world of the ocean floor is the lower world of hell, as, too, is ‘the boundless ocean of London’ (3: 338). Most memorable is the image of a sea ‘paved with innumerable faces’ (3:441). The faces of the fluctuating crowds on the streets of London among which he sought in vain for Ann’s face were transformed by the dream-work of the day-dreaming mind into this extraordinary image, generated by the sense of loss that Gothic embodies. Central is the image of the cave, cavern and abyss, a fact that serves as a reminder that Gothic goes back not just to the sixteenth century, but to the ancient world. De Quincey’s cave or cavern image has models in the ancient Greek literature to which he was so attached, in the shape of Plato’s cave, Empedocles’ grotto, Trophonios’ cave, and so on. Plato pictures humans dwelling in a sort of subterranean cave or cavern (cf. the ‘subterraneous chamber’ of the Tale of Aladdin), his cave-metaphor serving to illustrate the limits of human knowledge; here is Holberg’s starting-point for his Journey to the World Under-Ground. Juan’s cave in De Quincey’s The Peasant of Portugal is based on the cave of Trophonios (a Cain-figure with whom De Quincey identifies), which, situated in the depths of the woods, and approached from above by a ladder, opened into a cold, black, yawning chasm. In Greek and Latin ‘abyss’ indicates a world of endless depth or height, thus underlining the fact that the aerial space of Piranesi’s prison-images can be read as a kind of cavern, just as the cavern itself is equivalent to what German calls a Satansburg, meaning an inverted (underground) castle, with the symbolism inverted, so that it is a Devil’s Castle. More generally the abyss represents sleep, death (the abyss of death and [...] its secrets, 3: 347), the unconscious, the unfathomable, the inescapable, the infernal. Gothic is rightly said to have ‘opened up to fiction the realm of the irrational and of the perverse impulses and nightmarish terrors that lie

558 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective beneath the surface of the civilized mind’.48 In symbolical terms, all De Quincey’s major symbols - the cavern, chasm/abyss, forest, ocean represent the unconscious, so that the hidden terrors of the forest represent fear of what the unconscious may reveal. Caverns, which are (via’s Plato’s cave-metaphor) prison-images, have also been said to symbolize ‘the locale of identity formation’.49 The very ubiquity of the cavern-image suggests that De Quincey was continually probing the involutions of his mind, continually searching for his real identity, which he identified with his lost past self, continually trying to make sense of his life and its dark hidden depths, continually failing to do so.

III Well-known Gothic novelists, including Walpole and Radcliffe, Naubert and Tieck, as well as lesser writers of ‘märchenhafte Geisterromane’ like Spieß,50 can be seen to have borrowed from the Oriental tale and the French fairytale. No wonder that Musäus’s Volksmärchen der Deutschen came into the domain of the Gothic novel when it was translated into English, supposedly by William Beckford, but in reality by Thomas Beddoes (1760-1808), the father of the Gothic poet, as Popular Tales of the Germans (2 vols) in 1791. What makes this little known translation so interesting is the fact that it was greeted by a reviewer51 as ‘a very singular display of the most risible absurdities of the Gothic Romance’. In other words, even informed readers of the time found it impossible to tell the fairytale from the Gothic tale. This is hardly surprising when The Enchanted Castle (1786) is not a fairy tale but a Gothic drama, and The Castle of Murder not a Gothic novel but a Grimm fairytale. Anthologies such as the widely read Popular Tales of the Northern Nations (3 vols, 1823) make no distinction between the two forms. Walpole and Clara Reeve In terms of general influence on the Gothic generation, Mme d’Aulnoy is an important figure. It is to her Les Contes des fées (1697) in particular that 48 49 50

51

M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 7th edn (Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace, 1999), 111. The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, ed. Jean Chevalier & Alain Gheerbrant (London: Penguin, 1996), 171. In her Der Trivialroman in der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts (Bonn: Bouvier, 1964), 120-.160, Marion Beaujean dates German ‘märchenhafte Geisterromane’ (fairytalelike spirit novels) from 1792. They include Tieck’s Karl von Berneck. European Magazine (19 [1791], 350-2.

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Gothic is structurally closest. But for Mme d’Aulnoy, Radcliffe’s Gothic paradigm would have been different, and she also influenced Walpole, Beckford, Naubert, Tieck, and others. It has been well said that ‘The sufferings of Clarissa are those of an imprisoned princess in a fairy tale: the cruelty and power of Lovelace is that of the giant ogre of the same order of fable’.52 Walpole, like Richardson, read fairytales, of which he liked those of D’Aulnoy best, and it was these that impacted on his work.Varma was the first to note that The Castle of Otranto opens like a fairytale, with ‘its irrational parent, one lovely and one unlovely child’,53 the classical D’Aulnoy model. The castle of Otranto is not only Walpole’s enchanting castellino of Strawberry Hillmetamorphosed into fiction; it is also the enchanted castle of fairytale. Mistaken identity, with which Walpole toys, was inherited by Gothic from Mme d’Aulnoy, so that Walpole’s Hieroglyphic Tales, a collection of fairytales drawing from Arabian, Celtic and Oriental fantasy, have been not unreasonably described as ‘Gulliver out of Mme d’Aulnoy on a planet not yet made.’54 The Castle of Otranto, celebrated as the first modern Gothic romance, has been defined as a Märchenroman and, artificiality being such a feature of a building that combines rococo with something of the pseudomedieval Gothic ruin, could also be described as a classic Gothic Kunstmärchen. Walpole is the first of a number of Gothic novelists whose work is manifestly close to fairytale. He rightly, if puckishly, described The Castle of Otranto as a ‘goblin tale’, a label that implies both fairytale and Gothic tale, and Birkhead was clearly right to remark that ‘the limbs, strewn carelessly about the staircase and the gallery of [the] castle [of Otranto], belong to a giant, very like those who are worsted by the heroes of popular story’,55 of which ‘The History of Jack and the Giants’56 is an English example. This features Blunderboar’s ‘inchanted Castle, situated in the midst of a loansome wood’; inside the walls of the castle the ground is ‘covered with Bones and Skulls of dead Men’. There is, however, a more likely literary source for this image in the form of D’Aulnoy’s ‘La Belle aux Cheveux d’Or’, which features an ogre named Galifron, all the roads leading to whose castle are strewn with the bones and bodies of men whom he has eaten or torn to pieces, which horrifies readers a good deal less than do instances of 52 53 54

55 56

H. D. Traill, 1883, quoted from Baker, 4:69. Varma, The Gothic Flame (London: Barker, 1957), 52. W. & S. Lewis, Horace Walopole (New York: Pantheon, 1961), 165; more generally, see Nancy B. Palmer & Melvin D. Palmer, ‘The French conte de fée in England’, Studies in Short Fiction, XI/1 (winter 1974), 43f. Birkhead, 12. See Iona and Peter Opie, The Classic Fairy Tales (London, 1974), 52-65.

560 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective cannibalism by lesser mortals in Gothic texts that are, worryingly, closer to real life. (Hoffmann’s Der Vampyr, Arnold’s Der schwarze Jonas, Kleist’s Penthesilea). Goethe, who knew The Arabian Nights better than any other writer falling within my purview, first found there, in early childhood, some of the Gothic images that were to find their way into his work. Walpole, for his part, found some of the comparable images in his work in D’Aulnoy’s fairytales. His Hieroglyphic Tales are tales in the manner of The Arabian Nights, although it was Beckford who, in Vathek, did more to combine the Oriental tale with the Gothic. Given the impact of D’Aulnoy’s fairytales on the spatial imagery of Vathek - the tower and the cavern come straight from D’Aulnoy (e.g. ‘The Ram’), and Eblis is reminiscent of the underworld in ‘The Beneficent Frog’, which lies ten thousand steps down from the ‘black plain’, while the Giaour in its ‘horrible chasm’ is imaginatively related to the Fairy Lioness in the same tale - it is appropriate that Vathek was composed in French. At this time the ‘innate desire for the marvellous’, that is, the nostalgia for fairytale elements, to which Clara Reeve referred when she wrote in the Preface to the second edition (The Old English Baron, 1778) of The Champion of Virtue (1777) that a work of fiction needed ‘a sufficient degree of the marvellous, to excite the attention’, was met by Galland’s Mille et une nuits (1704-17) and D’Aulnoy’s Tales of the Fairies (1707),57 and by Perrault’s Mother Goose Tales (1729),58 which includes a notable forbidden chamber, copied by Tieck in his Bluebeard tales, although it is not a haunted chamber of horrors of the type found in The Arabian Nights and depicted by Clara Reeve, who imported the type into Gothic, turning it into the haunted Gothic castle’s forbidden chamber. In Naubert’s fairytale ‘Die weiße Frau’ the library with the Rosenberg family’s terrible secrets in the deserted south wing of the old baron’s castle is borrowed from The Old English Baron. The castle haunted by demons and the motif of staying in a haunted house as a fear test occur in folktale, the latter being widespread - the Grimms’ ‘Märchen von einem, der auszog, das Fürchten zu lernen’, partly set in an enchanted castle, is a good example. We shall see in the next section that Ann Radcliffe, like Benedicte Naubert, was greatly attracted by fairytale, using it to construct her Gothic castle, to which it is in important ways the key, and Naubert’s work is characterized by its sophisticated mix of historical and Gothic novel with legend and fairytale. Walter Scott, who was Radcliffe’s successor, although he was surely more at home in Naubert’s world, grew up with ‘the usual, or 57 58

Birkhead, 13. ‘La Barbe-bleue’ dates back to 1697. Perrault’s tales appeared in English in 1729 and in German in Das Cabinet der Feen, in 1761-6.

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rather ten times the usual, quantity of fairy tales, eastern stories, romances, &c,’59 his enthusiasm being awakened by the wonderful and the terrible, in other words, by fairytale and Gothic, which between them formed his imaginative world, as they also formed that of Dickens. The young Scott would read the Arabian Nights Entertainments aloud to the family circle, and it was when working as Scott’s amanuensis, from 1804 to 1813, that Henry Weber prepared his Tales of the East; Comprising the Most Popular Romances of Oriental Origin and Best Imitations by European Authors (1812). Naubert and Radcliffe Leaving aside Walpole, Beckford and Clara Reeve, the work of some other Gothic novelists is manifestly close to fairytale. Benedicte Naubert and Ann Radcliffe are cases in point. In her early, Leipzig period (1779-1797) Benedicte Naubert produced both an impressive number of historical novels and, at the same time, collections of fairytales from the eastern and western canons, Neue Volksmärchen der Deutschen (1789-92) and Alme oder Egyptische Märchen (1793-97), of which the latter remains virtually unknown. Some overlap between novel and tale is to be expected, but it comes as a surprise that in reviews of the third and fourth volumes of the Neue Volksmärchen der Deutschen it was said daß sie sich angeblich dem Trivial- und Schauerroman annähern und dessen Mängel aufweisen, besonders ‘affektirt sentimental’ in der Gestaltung der wörtlichen Rede verfahren. Nauberts Gebrauch des Unheimlichen und Wunderbaren bediene die Sensationslust des Publikums und verletze den guten Geschmack.60 (that they supposedly come close to the Gothic novel, exhibit its shortcomings, and in particular are over-sentimental in the handling of direct speech. Naubert’s deployment of the uncanny and marvellous is said to pander to the public’s craving for sensation, thereby offending against good taste.)

Some (male) readers evidently considered Naubert’s tales to fall short of Musäus’s more obviously ‘literary’ ones; Musäus himself, who was one of Nicolai’s reviewers, may have been one of them. Given that his tales passed as ‘a very singular display of the most risible absurdities of the Gothic 59 60

Scott, ‘Autobiography’, in Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of [...] Scott, 7 vols (Edinburgh & London, 1837), I, 39. NADB (I:1, 1793 and VI: 1, 1793), quoted from Benedikte Naubert, Neue Volksmärchen der Deutschen, ed. Marianne Henn, Paola Mayer and Anita Runge, 4 vols (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2001), IV, 365.

562 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Romance’,61 it might be thought that the style of Naubert’s tales would make them seem even more ‘Gothic’, but this was not so in the case of one reviewer whose view is, however, both prejudiced and wrong-headed, for her Neue Volksmärchen are, in reality, exceptionally well written. Naubert’s most celebrated novel, Hermann von Unna (1788), may be described as a Bundesroman or Vehmgerichtroman, but technically it is a Märchenroman. Like Ann Radcliffe’s comparable novels, Hermann von Unna features the types, situations and structure of the fairytale à la D’Aulnoy. In English terms this is simply another Gothic novel, albeit better than most, that serves to show how close the two conventions are. Hermann von Unna is fairytale-like in its basic opposition of figures, mostly identified by epithet, personifying good and evil. Winceslaus, that depraved prince who presides over a court that is likened to a typically Gothic cavern of murderers (the symbolism duplicated in the Castle of Cyly, that den of murderers), is the ogre of fairytale. The Princess of Ratibor, governess of the royal household, a witch-like creature with ‘the severity of a rigid governess’, would be at home in one of D’Aulnoy’s tales, for instance in ‘Gracieuse et Percinet’, out of which she has probably stepped, and Winceslaus’s mistress, Susanna von Baden, is another figure straight out of fairytale or pantomime. Then there are the wicked abbess, the lecherous archbishop, and so on. These characters representing evil, mostly in the form of unbridled greed, jealousy, and the lust for power, with lechery thrown in for good measure, are contrasted with others representing good (Ida, Herman, Munster, Sophia, Alicia, the good Walter, the good queen Mary, Albert the noble Duke of Austria, the old Count of Unna, Ulric of Senden, and others of that ilk). The basic storyline of the page and the supposed statuary’s daughter who overcome the machinations of the wicked and live happily ever after is pure fairytale à la D’Aulnoy and Radcliffe. Benedicte Naubert and Ann Radcliffe are writers of a comparable type of Gothic Märchenroman, the tale of terror with a happy ending. Writing of Hermann von Unna, the one of Naubert’s novels by which Radcliffe was certainly influenced, Le Tellier has claimed that Radcliffe took the basic ground-plan of her novels from Naubert, who depicts a pure and noble couple separated by the villainous machinations of evil men and women, ecclesiastics among them. The eventual reunion and marriage of the hero and heroine represents the vindication of a beneficent world-order. This is the essential plan of all Mrs Radcliffe’s romances. 62

61 62

European Magazine, 19 (1791), 350-2. Le Tellier, Kindred Spirits, 38.

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If she was able to read German by the time she started writing, it is possible that she chose to follow Naubert’s general model, but it is far more likely that she was simply following the same fairytale model (in D’Aulnoy) as Naubert. It was affectionate admiration that led Keats to dub Ann Radcliffe ‘Mother Radcliffe’, but the epithet appropriately evokes Mother Goose, the nursery teller of tales, for Dostoevsky was by no means the only young reader to turn to Mother Radcliffe at an age when his peers were probably still reading fairytales. One reason for the difference between the early Gothic novels of Radcliffe and Lewis is the fact that Radcliffe’s formula, notably in The Italian, owes so much to French fairytale as to be selfevidently a development of it, whereas most of Lewis’s inspiration came from Germany. The point, made by Edith Birkhead and subsequently developed by Frederick Garber, deserves to be taken far more seriously. Birkhead was right to suppose that Ann Radcliffe adopted some of the familiar figures of old story [...] Montoni, in The Mysteries of Udolpho [...] may well [be] descended from the wicked uncle of the folk tale [The Babes in the Wood]. The cruel stepmother is disguised as a haughty, scheming marchioness in [A] Sicilian Romance. The ogre drops his club, assumes a veneer of polite refinement and relies on the more gentlemanlike method of the dagger and stiletto for gaining his ends.63

Ferdinand Count Fathom is a good example of the ogre as ‘gentleman’. The banditti and robbers who infest the countryside in Gothic fiction had been roaming their mostly Mediterranean real and imaginary landscapes since antiquity, and the robbers’ den in a cave or cavern, and the forest or ruins in which they lurk, is of similar antiquity. It was presumably The Romance of the Forest that Birkhead had in mind when she went on: The Gothic castle, suddenly encountered in a dark forest, is boldly transported from fairyland and set down in Italy, Sicily or Spain. The chamber of horrors, with its alarming array of scalps or skeletons, is civilised beyond recognition and becomes the deserted wing of an abbey, concealing nothing worse than one discarded wife, emaciated and dispirited, but still alive. The ghost-story which Ludovico reads in the haunted chamber of Udolpho is [...] common to the folklore of all countries.

There is, of course, one way in which Radcliffe’s work veers sharply away from its fairytale model in which the supernatural is commonplace and accepted as such, and that is in its use of the explained supernatural, which 63

Birkhead, 12-13. See also Gaunt, Bandits in a Landscape.

564 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective by definition means that the supernatural is no longer accepted;64 otherwise it follows fairytale closely enough. Being, in her hands at least, no less moral a form than fairytale, Gothic à la Radcliffe needed stereotypes just as much as fairytale needed them. Mrs Radcliffe borrowed from Mme d’Aulnoy’s romances and fairytales. The names of Hippolitus and Julia in A Sicilian Romance came from Mme d’Aulnoy’s Histoire d’Hypolite and The Sicilian Romance is primarily a story of love, the love of Julia and Hippolitus, who, as in Mme d’Aulnoy, are separated for a large part of the novel, neither knowing whether or not the other is alive. Mrs Radcliffe’s Julia, like Mme d’Aulnoy’s, is promised in marriage to a villainous character whom she detests and from whom she flees. Both heroines spend time in a convent and then run away from it. Both stories have episodes of mistaken identity, storms, and a sea journey. In Mrs Radcliffe the pirates become Sicilian banditti. In both stories minor characters enter, tell their ‘histories’, and somehow or other become involved in the main plot. But above all, A Sicilian Romance is the story of a tearful heroine and a sensitive and faithful hero and of their attempts to outwit a villainous suitor of the heroine’s.65

Other details in A Sicilian Romance appear to be taken from Mme d’Aulnoy’s Spanish Novels, and ‘strong connections’ have been shown to exist between Mme d’Aulnoy’s Histoire d’Hypolite, Comte de Duglas, 169066 (the English translation, The Earl of Douglas. An English Story, originally appeared in 1708; there was an edition in 1774) and Ann Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance: ‘Like Radcliffe’s heroine, D’Aulnoy’s Julia is promised in marriage to a villain whom she flees, and is briefly taken in at a convent, only to run away.’67 The Histoire d’Hypolite features the mixture of historical truth and ahistorical fantasy that was, almost a century later, to be characteristic of the early historical novel. The endings of all Radcliffe’s novels except the last are straight out of D’Aulnoy, as are many of their motifs. Most of the fairytale elements in her novels (feuding [warring], loss and restoration of birthright, transformation [literal in D’Aulnoy, figurative in Radcliffe: the free agent becomes unfree, etc.], jealousy of another’s beauty, abduction, endungeonment, imprisonment in a cave, belief in a malign supernatural world [as opposed to its apparent reality in Mme d’Aulnoy]) go back to 64 65 66 67

Schiller discusses the issue at some length in Der Geisterseher. Melvin D. Palmer, ‘Madame d’Aulnoy in England,’ Comparative Literature, 27 (1975), 249. The first French conte de fées to appear in English was The History of Adolphus (1691), originally an inset tale in the Histoire d’Hypolite. Alison Milbank, in the excellent Introduction to her edition of Ann Radclife, A Sicilian Romance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, 203.

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Mme d’Aulnoy, a ‘Select Collection of only the Best, most Instructive and Entertaining’ of whose fairytales appeared in English, under the title of Queen Mab, in 1770, at exactly the right time to catch the imagination of the future Gothic novelist. There is a parallel, too, between the invented facts with which D’Aulnoy laced her travel books, and the invented landscapes with which Radcliffe adorns her romances. Even the tendency to break into verse at strategic points in the narrative was probably inspired by D’Aulnoy. The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne is every inch a fairytale: the wicked Baron imprisons Osbert in a tower of the kind that so often serves as a prison in D’Aulnoy. There Osbert hears a voice singing of ‘fairy prospects’, which he answers with a sonnet enthusing over ‘fairy echoes’. Following the death of the ogre and the revelation of Alleyn’s noble birth, the tale ends in a double wedding. Ann Radcliffe herself drew attention to the parallel between her best-known novel and English fairytale when, in Chapter 5 of The Mysteries of Udolpho, she made Annette say ‘I can almost believe in giants again, for this is just like one of their castles.’ Which giant’s castle she had in mind is not specified, but it may well have been the ogre Galifron’s castle in D’Aulnoy’s ‘La Belle aux Cheveux d’Or’. Montoni is both the wicked ogre and the wicked uncle of folktale, a monster of ill-tempered pride with a thought for nothing save his own self-aggrandizement; he and his wife (the cruel aunt or wicked stepmother of fairytale) deserve one another. Frederick Garber has developed the general parallel in an exemplary way: Perhaps the closest generic analogy appears in the fairytale [...] Both genres present beings in human form (the wicked witch and the abbess, the ogre and the villainous count) who [...] wield demonic powers and cause the innocent to suffer for a while. [...] Furthermore, Mrs Radcliffe’s evil characters bring other demonic elements into play, [...] most particularly the underworld of caverns and dungeons in which so much of the evil takes place. For over a century, students of folklore and fairytales have emphasized how these have roots in the mythic, subconscious strata of our lives, the levels we would now call archetypal. [...] Her heroines are always running down long corridors towards doors that appear to recede as they do in nightmares, producing the same terrific shudder.68

The Mysteries of Udolpho contains a number of explicit references to giants and fairies, the last chapter, which includes several of them, amounting to the cosy ‘they both lived happily ever after’ formula of fairytale. Indeed, the novel ends, like Perrault’s and D’Aulnoy’s tales, albeit not in verse, with an explicit moral (‘though the vicious can sometimes pour affliction upon the 68

Ann Radcliffe, The Italian, ed. Frederick Garber (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1968, repr. 1987), xi.

566 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective good, their power is transient and their punishment certain; [...] innocence, though oppressed by injustice, shall, supported by patience, finally triumph over misfortune!’). All five of Radcliffe’s Gothic romances end, in accordance with fairytale convention, in the marriage of the hero and heroine. Nothing shows more clearly the indebtedness of the early Gothic novel to fairytale. Radcliffe is rightly credited with being the most successsful of the early Gothic novelists, but her novels are not simply ‘Gothic’; they are equally accurately described as fairytales for grown-ups, or as Märchenromane, as are many of the novels of Benedicte Naubert. Spieß There is no accounting for Tieck’s and Hauff’s69 early interest in the work of Karl Gotttlob Cramer, a dire Sudler, but in the case of Christian Heinrich Spieß (1755-99)70 there is at least a shared interest in Märchen, to account for their interest in a writer of such modest talent. Tieck admired Spieß’s ingenuity and lively - if somewhat wayward - imagination. In the Introduction to Phantasus Anton is made to refer to ‘alle die wundervollen [= full of wonders, not wonderful], bizarren und tollen Romane unseres Spieß’ (all the amazing, fantastic, madcap novels of Spieß). Now in a note to The Monastery Scott refers to a work by Spieß, whom he confuses with Tieck, which is not entirely surprising, given Tieck’s soft spot for the ‘horrid’ writer whose work, and that of Cramer, one bookseller-cum-librarian (H. R. Sauerländer) refused to lend to young women, a hare I do not have time to follow. Tieck, for his part, remarks in Zerbino ‘wie ein allerliebstes Publikum in [Spieß’] Narrheiten verliebt war’ (that the most amiable public was enamoured of Spieß’s follies). For a time the word Spießer71 acquired a nicely derogatory new meaning. While major novelists, Gothic novelists included, make creative use of fairytale, hack writers of the period like Spieß - less high-brow, less idiosyncratic, much less original than Hoffmann - use it as a crutch, filching its machinery to make up for their own imaginative deficiencies. Spieß had a penchant for incorporating spooky figures from the Ammenmärchen into his work: ‘Oefter noch als mit ungeschlachten Rittern macht er sich und seinen Lesern mit den gespenstigen Gestalten alter Ammenmärchen zu schaffen. Alles war bei ihm wunderbar, übernatürlich, grauslich’ (Spooky figures from the nursery tale are even commoner in his 69 70

71

Hauff read ‘Herren Spieß und Konsorten’ (Spieß and Co.) at the age of eleven. The oldest of the German Gothic-type novelists, Spieß’s early, non-Gothic work had already been collected by 1790. With the exceptions of his Biographien der Selbstmörder (4 vols, 1785), all his numerous ‘Gothic’ works were written in the 1790s. Spießer normally means bourgeois.

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work than uncouth knights. For him and his readers everything had to be prodigious, supernatural, dreadful).72 Seen in retrospect he is little more than a potboiling purveyor of supernatural fiction to the German market, which in the 1790s was considerable. In his work fairytale elements outweigh the Gothic ones, and while his works do have occasional Gothic features, in English terms he is hardly a Gothic writer as such, for he signally fails to develop the features in question.73 If he continues to have a place in the history of German Gothic, it is likely to be for his collections Biographien der Selbstmörder (4 vols, 1785) and Biographien der Wahnsinnigen (4 vols, 1795-6), both of which are in print in Germany. The idea that his romances were ‘popular objects of English translation during the Gothic period and were adored for their fabulous medievalism’74 is itself fabulous, the result of taking at face value a misremembrance by R. P. Gillies. In reality only one of Spieß’s novels, the non-Gothic Der Mäusefallen- und Hechelkrämer, 1792: The Mountain Cottager; or, Wonder upon Wonder (tr. Annabella [Bell] Plumptre), 1798 (Minerva), was translated during the Gothic period unless that is taken as extending to 1827, when one of his two most important works, Das Petermännchen (1791-2: The Dwarf of Westerbourg, London: W. Morgan, 1827), belatedly appeared in English. From about 1792 what Beaujean terms ‘märchenhafte Geisterromane’ the German term means ‘fairytale-like spirit novels’, but in English terms these are supernatural tales with an admixture of fairytale elements - began to appear in Germany, the best-known of them being Spieß’s Der Alte Überall und Nirgends (1802-03).75 This is, however, merely the last of a succession of novels by Spieß that overlap with fairytale. Others include Das Petermännlein (1792; reissued 1793 as Das Petermännchen); Die zwölf schlafenden Jungfrauen (1795-6) and Die zwölf schlafenden Jünglinge (1797), both of which are based on the tale of the seven sleepers and on tales involving twelve brothers or whatever, five of which were subsequently collected by the Grimms. Geheimnisse der alten Egyptier (1798-9 is awonder-tale inspired by Benedicte Naubert’s Alme oder ägyptische Märchen, 1793-97), and then there is Hans Heiling [...] Ein Volksmärchen des 10. Jahrhunderts (1798-9). That the connection between folk-lore and literary supernaturalism was closer in 72 73 74 75

Müller-Fraureuth, 54. Cf. Hadley, 98. Tymn, Horror Literature, 159. On Der Alte Überall und Nirgends see Beaujean, 156ff. In general terms Beaujean’s analysis of the ‘märchenhafter Geisterroman’ has been overtaken by Hannelotte Dorner-Bachmann,’s more fundamental Erzählstruktur und Texttheorie. Zu den Grundlagen einer Erzähltheorie unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Märchens und der Gothic Novel (Hildesheim: Olms, 1979).

568 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Germany at this time than in England 76 can be seen from Spieß’s Das Petermännchen (1791: The Dwarf of Westerbourg, 1827), ‘an extraordinary mixture of fairy-tale elements, heavy morality, horrors and the psychology of remorse’,77 which is one of the German romances that is closest to fairytale on the literal level. The work has been well described by Terry Hale as ‘The very antithesis of the explanatory rationalism favoured by Schiller’: ‘Closely allied to the German Märchen [...] on the one hand, and Christian apologetics on the other [...] Spieß’s novel is an unrepentant exercise in the supernatural, during which two demons fight over a man’s soul.’78 The Devil is never far as way at this time. Tompkins noted79 that the torch-light funeral procession in Das Petermännchen is substantially repeated in The Mysteries of Udolpho; assuming this is not simply a chance parallel, it raises the intriguing possibility that Radcliffe or her husband may have read Das Petermännchen in German. Scott, for his part, certainly knew and drew on the legend of the Petermännchen (Peterkin, Wee Peter). In the final note to The Monastery (1820, annotations added in 1830), he remarks that ‘the contrivance of provoking the irritable vanity of Sir Piercie Shafton, by presenting him with a bodkin, indicative of his descent from a tailor, is borrowed from a German romance of the celebrated Tieck, called Das Peter Manchen, i.e. The Dwarf Peter.’ Scott’s memory was playing him false, for Das Petermännchen is not by Tieck. In the incident in question, Wee Peter, the Puck-like guardian spirit of a German family, advises the hero to present his beloved’s father with a horse-shoe, an allusion to the mésalliance of one of his ancestors with the daughter of a blacksmith. R. P. Gillies wrote in his Recollections of Scott (1835, 72): ‘I have heard him speak with peculiar interest of the Petermännchen, a production of diablerie, which his own genius had probably invested with interest which no other reader could have discovered in it.’ It seems that Scott was impressed by this incident during his early burst of enthusiasm for German literature, but had forgotten that Das Petermännchen was by Spieß, and, having outgrown that early interest, was unaware that an English translation appeared in 1827.80 Gillies’ memory played him doubly false when he recollected that Scott translated ‘several of the romances of Spieß’, thereby giving rise to the mistaken notion that Spieß was ‘widely translated’. In Spieß’s novel, Wee Peter is a medieval knight who makes a pact with the Devil, breaks the pact, and is torn to pieces by his satanic master. Wee 76 77 78 79 80

Tompkins, Ann Radcliffe, 96. Tompkins, Ann Radcliffe, 99. Hale, in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, 68f. Tompkins, 109. See Parsons, 161; Hadley 96-99; Beaujean, 153-5.

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Peter’s wife fetches a hermit whose incantations piece him together again, albeit with some bits missing, hence his grotesque shape. Dismemberment is a common folktale motif, as is resuscitation by putting body parts together again,81 which is found in one of the Grimms’ Bluebeard tales, Fitchers Vogel, that represents the folk version of the tale from which Perrault deviated in his Gothic literary version of the Bluebeard tale.

IV The weird fairytales Shelley used to tell his sisters were very much of a piece with his Gothic tales, and the same goes for Hoffmann’s tales, which overlap with his Gothic Nachtstücke. Tieck’s recipe for a Gothic novel, ‘Riesen, Zwerge, Gespenster, Hexen, etwas Mord und Totschlag, Mondschein und Sonnenuntergang, dies mit Liebe und Empfindsamkeit versüßlicht, um es glatter hinterzubringen’ (‘Giants, dwarfs, ghosts, witches, a modicum of murder and manslaughter, moonlight and dusk, all this sweetened with love and sensibility to make it more palatable’)82 is scarcely less applicable to fairytale than it is to Gothic, these being the two modes that he, like Hoffmann and Dickens, famously combines in his work. The Märchen as written by Tieck and Hoffmann overlaps with Gothic, the ‘ruined castle’ of local legend, or the enchanted castle, being as much a property of the Tieckian Märchen as it is of the Gothic novel and tale. Der blonde Eckbert, combining and transcending both forms, is a Gothic fairytale proprement dit, as much fairytale as Gothic tale: it ‘ends in mystery and terror; „Waldeinsamkeit“, the words of Romantic enchantment, are also the enticing call to the abyss, to demonic chaos.’83 The world of faerie gives way to the world of Abdallah, both of them presaged in the selva oscura of Dante’s Inferno and the famous proto-Gothic scene of Ferdinand Count Fathom (ch. 21) in which ‘every shadow of a tree became the apparition of a ruffian eager for blood’. The dark forest, the very symbol of German Romanticism, is a labyrinth silently pointing to the labyrinths of the text. It was, above all, in Musäus’s Volksmärchen der Deutschen that the German Romantics discovered the fairytale, and Tieck, for one, initially followed Musäus in treating it as amusement pure and simple. He uses the fairytale 81 82

83

Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk Literature, AT311. Ludwig Tieck’s Schriften in 28 Bänden (Berlin: Reimer, 1828-54 ), XIV, 164. Brentano, in his Chronika eines fahrenden Schülers (1803), used the word ‘gotisch’, linking it with ‘modisch’. Paulin, Ludwig Tieck, 69.

570 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective rather as the rococo writers in France and Germany had done, ‘as amusement for sophisticated, grown-up children in the literary salon’,84 much the same audience as that for which Oscar Wilde was to write his fairytales a century later and Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter their Gothic fairytales a further century later. Amusement, as so often, means pleasurable learning. Playing with received forms is one of the Gothic features of the early work of Tieck, a master in the exploration of anguish and anxiety whose Der blonde Eckbert and Der Runenberg include horrific events and end in insanity. Kunstmärchen they may be, but it is the dark or Gothic aspect of the Romantic imagination that they reveal. For German Romantic sophisticates the Märchen held a magical appeal: the same distance or even escape from reality shows in Romantic creative work. Its typical form is the Märchen, which in the hands of the Romantics becomes a strange mixture of the primitive and the sophisticated. The fairytale world is at once a release, the willing return of modern intellect to the non- or pre-rational, das Wunderbare; and also the source of motifs and arabesques through which deeper meanings can be cryptically implied. In other words, primitive Märchen will accommodate cerebral allegory. It is a mixture of extremes.85

As a vademecum, a well-nigh bottomless sack of motifs and associations, the Märchen proved infinitely suggestive: Friedrich Schlegel’s statement that the essence of the Märchen is infinite association and meaning is re-echoed in Max Lüthi’s statement that ‘A folktale can be interpreted, but any single interpretation will impoverish it and will miss what is essential’.86 All this is in line with Schiller’s definition of Romantic Dichtung as infinite in content. There is in The Golden Ass a famous story entitled ‘At the Mill-House’ that anticipates the bloodiest of all fairytales, that of Bluebeard. Apuleius tale tells of a municipal councillor named Barbarus who has to go on a journey, from which he returns unexpectedly as his wife is on the point of seducing a baker’s boy; the story goes on to involve the sudden apparition of an old woman/witch who vanishes after leading the way to the room where the baker’s corpse is found hanging behind the door. Parts of this tale eventually found their way into Basile’s Pentameron (1634-6, Day 4, tale 6), in which an ogress (Apuleius’s witch) tells Princess Marchetta that she may enter any room except the one to which she was being given the key, whereupon the 84 85 86

Paulin, Ludwig Tieck, 61. In Germany. A Companion to German Studies, ed. M. Pasley, 2nd edn (London: Methuen, 1972), 523. Max Lüthi, The European Folktale: Form and Nature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 94.

Gothic and Märchen 571

inevitable happens. The tale in the Arabian Nights Entertainments (Nights 6062), in which Prince Agib is given a hundred keys, with permission to open a hundred doors, except for the golden door, so that when he opens it he loses both an eye and the prospect of a life of perpetual pleasure, appears to go back to Apuleius via Basile. Perrault, in his subsequently famous La Barbe bleue (1697), simplified Basile’s story and gave it a new ending, thereby producing the tale that became the model on which so many subsequent changes were rung. It is as author of this ‘classic’ version of Bluebeard that Perrault counts in the present context; his tales appeared in English in 1729 and in German in Das Cabinet der Feen, in 1761-6. Both Tieck’s Die sieben Weiber des Blaubart and the Grimms’ Blaubart derive, one directly and the other indirectly, from Perrault’s moral tale. In the oral versions that preceded La Barbe bleue the heroine feels it to be her duty to open the forbidden door, and resuscitates her sisters by putting their body parts together again, a motif copied by Spieß in Das Petermännchen. Perrault weakened his work by seeming to prescribe and thus limit the meaning of this tale of transgression against patriarchal command, and by blaming the victim for the villain’s villainy. The wife’s motivation in using the phallic enchanted key, which stands for its absent owner, for the key too has a Bart (bit),87 to gain entry to the forbidden chamber reflects her motivation in marrying Bluebeard for his money, but more fundamental is the fact that La Barbe bleue echoes the story of the Fall. It is this, when combined with its Gothic paraphernalia, that makes it an archetypal Gothic tale. In giving his wife the keys of his castle, Bluebeard is acting the part of the serpent (and his bride the part of the victim held by the serpent’s unwavering, mesmeric gaze), and therefore of the devil, in the story of the Fall. Frederick the Great, in a remarkable passage in his anti-clerical satire Commentaires apostoliques et théologiques sur les saintes prophéties de l’auteur sacré de Barbe-bleue (1779), rightly insisted that the man with the blue beard was none other than the Devil.88 The myth of the Devil is related to that of the serpent and the monster/guardian at the door, and to the Gothic symbolism of closing off and of setting fixed limits where there should be none. The Grimms’ versions of the Blaubart tale are discussed presently. Roger Paulin has rightly emphasized that Tieck’s ‘fairytale’ Der Runenberg (1802), involving the subterranean world, the uncanny and an almost Manichaean horror of life, does not parallel ‘Goethe’s descent to a mythical matriarchal realm in the second part of Faust’. Der Runenberg involves, rather, 87 88

And, being made of iron, would have had a bluish tinge. The whole passage is reprinted in M. P. Davies’s admirable The Tale of Bluebeard in German Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 68. The ‘blue bit’ also points to patriarchy.

572 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective a ‘descent into terror, the „Nachtseite“ (dark side) of nature’89 and the Romantic imagination. That the Tieck-like central figure is named Christian and that the regal, Marian beauty he discovers near the top of the Runic Mountain gives him the mysterious runic tablet with the words ‘Nimm dieses zu meinem Angedenken!’ (Take this in remembrance of me) shows that the tale is about the meaning of life. Even before this turning point in Christian’s life we read that ‘In seinem Innern hatte sich ein Abgrund [...] aufgetan’ (A chasm had opened up in his mind), and after that fatal meeting ‘[fiel es] wie eine dunkele Nacht [...] in sein Inneres hinein’ (A dark night descended into his mind’) - the dark night of the soul. Once aware of it, Christian will never forget the ‘schreckliches Geklüft’ (terrible chasm). It is after Christian has been left the devil’s purse of folktale by ‘der Fremde’ (the omnipresent stranger of German Gothic/Romantic fiction) that his life begins to fall apart as his mind slowly descends into insanity: growing all too aware of the omnipresence of death, he experiences fear of life, which alienates him from family and self. He obeys the call of the ‘Waldweib’ (the majestic beauty in old age), and heads for the ‘alter verfallener Schacht’ (dilapidated mine-shaft) that stands both for what remains of his young dream and for the insanity to which he has been reduced by the devil in the form of his fear of life. Der Runenberg is, then, a Romantic study of the ‘Nachtseite’ of the mind (the subconscious), a Gothic fairytale of a uniquely Tieckian kind, and accordingly a ‘Pendant’ to Abdallah. There are enough autobiographical echoes in the tale to show that Der Runenberg too is a confused young man’s reading of his own life as nightmare; like William Lovell it involves ajourney into the secret world of the mind. The tale is Gothic not so much in the sense that it ends in a dark ambiguity, it being not entirely clear whether Christian has ascended to a higher form of consciousness or has descended into insanity (the threat of which had dogged the early Tieck’s footsteps),90 as in the sense that it turns on the fear of death that underlies the whole Gothic genre. Der Runenberg is neither fairytale nor realized nightmare, but an uncanny combination of the two. As a fairytale without the customary happy ending, it is an early ‘Antimärchen’ (anti-fairytale). Hoffmann’s fairytales, like Jean Paul’s novels, are so idiosyncratic that they tend to be of limited use in comparative/intertextual contexts. Like Tieck, Shelley and De Quincey, Hoffmann was attracted by the mysterious and supernatural, hence his enthusiastic reading of Schiller’s Der Geisterseher and Grosse’s Der Genius. His own Gothic fairytales turn on the uncanny, on 89 90

Paulin, 142f. Donald Haase, in The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales, ed. Zipes, .524.

Gothic and Märchen 573

questionable identity and questionable reality, on occasion undermining not just the protagonist’s identity and sense of self and security, but, as in the case of ‘das öde Haus’, his very sanity (ödes Haus means deserted house, but also carries the secondary meaning of a witless individual, for in the German student slang of the time Haus means bloke). The Nachtstücke (1817) include Der Sandmann, which since Freud’s analysis of it has been taken as the paradigm of the uncanny (das Unheimliche),91 and Das Majorat, his ‘most classically Gothic tale’.92Das Majorat (The Entail; or, The Mysteries of the ManorHouse, to quote the appropriately gothified title of a translation that appeared in The English Fireside, an Almanack for the year 1829, is a Nachtstück or black tale, the atmosphere and background of which are unambiguously Gothic. A ghost-seer story93 that would have been at home in the contemporary Gespensterbuch of Apel and Laun, it turns, as De Quincey noted, on the for him powerfully attractive idea of secret murder. De Quincey recognized the hand of the author of The Devil’s Elixir in the way in which the murderer in question began to scratch at the walled-up former doorway through which he had precipitated his victim to his death in the abyss below ‘as if under the influence of some deadly torment’. ‘Das öde Haus’ is more Nachtstück than fairytale, but the dividing line is narrow, for in dividing ‘Der goldene Topf’ into vigils or night-watches, Hoffmann was both pointing to his knowledge of the Nachtwachen of Bonaventura, and, in effect, indicating that his own favourite fairyale is a Nachtstück. He regarded seven of his tales as Märchen. They are ‘Der goldene Topf’, ‘Klein Zaches’, ‘Prinzessin Brambilla’, ‘Die Königsbraut’, ‘Nussknacker und Mausekönig’, ‘Das fremde Kind’ and ‘Meister Floh’. Thanks to his use of the uncanny, which gives them a Gothic edge, they involve more than a little of what came to be known as the Greuelmärchen or Gruselgeschichte (horror story), which by definition overlaps with Gothic. Against a realistic, everyday background they feature the fancifully supernatural in ways that involve the uncanny,94 turning the familiar into the alien, and are for the most part sinister in tone and atmosphere and tragic in outcome or implication. It is the revelation of the profoundly alien within the mundane that characterizes Hoffmann’s fairytales. More fanciful than 91 92 93

94

See S. S. Prawer, ‘Hoffmann’s Uncanny Guest. A Reading of Der Sandmann’, German Life & Letters, 18 (1965), 297-308. Neil Cornwell, in A Companion to the Gothic, ed. Punter, 32. See Kenneth Negus, ‘The Allusions to Schiller’s „Der Geisterseher“ in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s „Das Majorat“: Meaning and Background’, German Quarterly, 32 (1959), 341-55. I have always found Hoffmann’s fairytales to be more uncomfortable reading than his night-pieces.

574 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective his more obviously Gothic tales, they share with these the fact that they turn on the conflict between Hoffmann’s ideal, creative world and the alien world in which he was obliged to live and earn his living, the conflict between the ideal and the real, dream and reality, dream and nightmare, creative fights of fancy and stolid, leaden-booted bourgeois life, the clash between the poetic imagination and what Hoffmann called the ‘materia peccans’. Embedded within this clash between antipodal worlds, which is liable to prove destabilizing and traumatic, is one of the major Gothic motifs, unstable, challenged identity. Gothic features instability of many kinds, to which Hoffmann adds mental unstability. In ‘Klein Zaches’, Hofffmann, who was small of stature, has the new Prime Minister banish to Wieland’s poetic realm of Dschinnnistan all those who spread among the populace a secret poison in the form of poetry. In course of time Klein Zaches himself becomes Prime Minister, but is regarded by the plebs as a performing monkey. Like so many Volksmärchen and Gothic tales, Hoffmann’s Kunstmärchen are highly subversive. Other Gothic motifs in Hoffmann’s fairytales include the grotesque, the sorcerer in the vampire-tale ‘Meister Floh’ (the diabolical flea-tamer Leuwenhoeck), and his wish ‘daß dich der schwarzgefiederte Satan zehntausend Klafter tief in den Abgrund schleudere’ (may black-feathered Satan hurl you ten thousand fathoms into the abyss). Meister Floh is not only that comic double-take on the Gothic monster, the ‘Ungeheuerchen’ (wee monster), but is also a satirical double take on the Gothically so active vampire, also represented in the tale by a leech described as ‘der ärgste Blutsauger von der Welt’ (the most fiendish bloodsucker in the world). It is revealing to compare Hoffmann’s two vampire stories, Der Vampyr and Meister Floh. The former is a Nachtstück, the latter a Märchen. Der Vampyr is a horror tale based on a tale in the 1001 Nacht; as such it is unoriginal and distasteful to boot. Meister Floh, by contrast, while retaining the basic elements of the Gothic vampire tale, is delightfully original, light-hearted and funny, showing Hoffmann at his brilliant best. Kleist’s Penthesilea, too, at its most horrible, is close to fairytale, while his Das Käthchen von Heilbronn goes, literally, from Gothic tribunal to fairytale marriage. For Gothic novelists incorporating fairytale motifs into their works involved drawing attention to their fictionality as so many ‘fairy stories’. Hoffmann’s ‘fairytales’ are fairytales proprement dit, but also ‘fairy stories’ that raise the question of their credibility. Fairytale, in short, is involved both in Gothic construction, some of the key elements of which it supplies, and in Gothic deconstruction.

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Grimm and Grimme The degree of kinship between Gothic and fairytale becomes particularly clear in relation to the Grimms’ Kinder- und Haus-Märchen (Nursery and Household Tales), most of which first appeared in 1812-15, in the last decade of Hoffmann’s life, and included tales that are not only marked by a high incidence of violence, cruelty and transgressive sex, but are at the same time, thanks to Wilhelm Grimm, unblushingly moralistic. It is these mostly German fairytales collected by the Grimm brothers, and in particular those omitted after the first edition of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen,95 that are the bloodiest and the closest to Gothic. Many of these tales are grim indeed. Judging by their names, Gothic might be expected to be grimmer than fairytale, but this is frequently not the case. On the contrary, in terms of characters, situations and outcomes alike Grimms’ tales are often grimmer than the average Gothic tale or novel. They are generally held to be more gruesome and horrific than most other such stories.96 Italo Calvino has written of the ‘continuous flow of blood’ in the Grimms’ ‘brutal’ [sadistic] tales, to which we may add that this is a feature which they share with the worst kinds of German Gothic novel. Others may ask whether the violence depicted in the Grimms’ tales is somehow uniquely German,97 a question that is as invidious as it is unanswerable; for my part I am concerned with a relatively straightforward issue, the many parallels between ‘Grimm’ and Gothic that both involve phantoms of the mind that take not only terrifying, but often markedly similar forms. There is no denying that the Grimms’ tales are infested by witches, giants and other cannibalistic fiends,98 and that they include graphic descriptions of murder (including burning at the stake and decapitation), butchery (in ‘Der Räuberbräutigam’ a girl is butchered, a fate that awaits fit young men in the 95

96

97 98

In Heinz Rölleke’s complete Reclam edition they are to be found in the appendices. In English, most are to be found in Wilhelm Hansen, Grimms’ Other Tales, tr. & ed., Ruth Michaelis-Jena and Arthur Ratcliff (South Brunswick, NJ: A. S. Barnes, and London: Thomas Yoseloff, 1966). See Maria Tatar, The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tale (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 185. On violence in the Grimms’ tales, see, inter alia, CarlHeiz Mallet, Kopf ab! Gewalt im Märchen (Hamburg: Rasch & Röhring, 1985) and two articles by Lutz Röhrich, ‘Die Grausamkeit im deutschen Märchen’, Rheinisches Jahrbuch für Volkskunde, 6 (1955), 176-224, and ‘Märchen mit schlechtem Ausgang’, Hessische Blätter für Volkskunde, 49/50 (1958), 219-45. The same point has often been (wrongly) made of the German Gothic novel. See Lutz Röhrich, Sage und Märchen: Erzählforschung heute (Freiburg: Herder, 1976), 23. Is the wolf in ‘Rotkäppchen’ (‘Little Red Riding Hood’) to be regarded as a werewolf? The Grimms’ cannibalistic witches may be compared with those in the ‘Story of Sidi Nouman’ in the Arabian Nights and in Hoffmann’s vampire-tale based on it.

576 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective horror-Gothic Der schwarze Jonas; in each case the resultant stew is enjoyed by the banditti in question), cannibalism, infanticide and ritual mutilation, to say nothing of abduction and incarceration in a tower without doors or stairs. ‘Das Mädchen ohne Hände’ has a girl’s breasts being cut off, a preliminary to her being burned at the stake, and Meinhold’s ‘amber witch’, Maria Schweidler, like the Grimms’ Marienkind is an innocent who is nearly burned at the stake. The way in which, in ‘Dornröschen’, the briars act as a kind of medieval/Gothic torture-machine, may put readers in mind of the memorably Gothic contraption, related to the Iron Maiden of Nuremberg,99 in the form of a so-called sword-mill100 in Benedicte Naubert’s Alf von Dülmen. Although Wilhelm Grimm is more squeamish about sexual deviation than he is about plain bloody murder, many of these tales are grim indeed: compared with Gothic, they get away with murder, and with incest too (cf. ‘Der Räuberbräutigam’ [The Robber Bridegroom], ‘Der Okerlo’ [The Ogre], ‘Blaubart’ [Bluebeard], ‘Das Mordschloß’ [The Castle of Murder], ‘Von dem Machandelboom’ [The Juniper Tree]). Readers of the time could be forgiven for supposing ‘Das Mordschloß’ to be the title of a Gothic tale. Gothic locations found in Grimm include forbidden chambers, prison-towers, and underground hiding places. The Bluebeard tales are more ‘horrid’ than most Gothic novels of the literary kind, and some of the Grimms’ Nursery and Household Tales are as Gothic as may be. Indeed, some of the tales included in the first edition were omitted from subsequent editions because they were too ‘horrid’, that is, too horrific (horrifying, horrendous) for young readers. Given that any parallels between Grimm and Gothic tale show Grimm to be the Grimmer of the two, the term ‘Gothic fairytale’ is most appropriately used to describe the work of Hoffmann and the brothers Grimm and the points at which they converge. Hoffmann’s Märchen, thanks to his use of the uncanny, which gives them a Gothic edge, involve more than a little of what came to be known as the Greuelmärchen (horror story), which by definition overlaps with Gothic. The contrast between the happy endings of fairy tales and the hard facts of fairy-tale life, of which Maria Tatar has written so brilliantly, is found again in the Gothic novel as written by those most influenced by fairytale, Ann Radcliffe and Benedicte Naubert: The melodramatic plot [of the Grimms’ tales] begins with an account of helplessness and victimization, rehearses the conflicts between hero and

99 100

Described in Brewer. Derived from die Mühle der Justiz.

Gothic and Märchen 577 villain, and concludes with a detailed description of reprisals taken against the villain and a report of the hero’s marriage or accession.101

This applies to Gothic novels stretching all the way from Udolpho to Klosterheim. Eventual translation from humble origins to an elevated rank, found in Grimm, as in the Arabian Nights and D’Aulnoy, is common in the Gothic novel. The protagonists of Gothic tales, like those of the Grimms’ tales, are ‘victims of hostile powers’.102 Fear and disempowerment are commonplace in both genres. The villainous (would-be) bridegroom who tries to trap or force his victim into marriage is common to Grimm and Radcliffe), and ‘fears about violence, death and sexuality’ are common to the female victims of fairytale and Gothic,103 although it has to be said that much of the violence and unspeakable behaviour in Grimm is down to females. The first edition of the Grimm’s Kinder- und Hausmärchen included a tale, Blaubart, which was omitted from subsequent editions as being too similar to Perrault, and another, Das Mordschloß, that is explicitly Gothic in that the Bluebeard figure appears as a count and lives in a castle complete with a subterranean chamber of horrors.104 In the Grimms’ Blaubart, Perrault’s wealthy bourgeois has become a king, while the bride’s family live in a Gothic forest. The ‘sinister, archaic, and magical context’105 of the Grimms’ Blaubart overlaps with Gothic, and the bride’s curiosity is seen, in Gothic terms, as a loss of control. Until 1997 the best-known versions of the Bluebeard tale by the Grimm brothers were Fitchers Vogel and Der Räuberbräutigam.106 In Fitchers Vogel Bluebeard is a sorcerer, in Der Räuberbräutigam a robber. It is impossible to escape the interrelationship with Gothic, the most fashionable and successful form of the popular literature of the time, which the Grimms appear to emphasize. The Bluebeard tales are Gothic in one sense or another. That they are Gothic in the sense of barbaric or macabre, is clear. Gothic in terms of eighteenth-century Gothic are, in Das Mordschloß, the Castle of Murder as such, which, as in much Gothic, is the hero of the piece; abduction/seduction (reiten, to ride or mount, is ambiguous) by the so-called count (whose identity is spurious), and his abandonment of his bride, which, 101 102 103 104 105 106

Tatar, Hard Facts, xx. Tatar, Hard Facts, 58. Tatar, Hard Facts, 170. This is probably why it was not included in Grimms’ Other Tales, tr. & ed. Ruth Michaelis-Jena and S. Arthur Ratcliff (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1959). Davies, 118. Brüder Grimm, Kinder- und Hausmärchen, Ausgabe letzter Hand, ed. Heinz Rölleke (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1997) now includes all the relevant texts.

578 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective happening on the day following their arrival at the ‘count’s’ castle, represents the breakdown of pre-existent order; prohibition and transgression; the nightmare of anxiety; the monstrous and macabre; Bluebeard as the Devil, the diabolical temptation and fall of Eve in Eden; the monster bridegroom; the subterranean chamber or cellar, the forbidden chamber, the chamber of horrors (which in Fitchers Vogel is described as a regular butchery); the labyrinth of mistrust and deviousness; the fatal loss of control that leads to the opening of the door, and the horror caused by awareness of Bluebeard’s sadism and his wife’s vulnerability. Gothic in the modern literary sense are the implicit idea of a precursor text that is being edited, and the generic and hermeneutic instability of the text, whose meaning is far from clear, for there are many different ‘Bluebeard’ texts with different implications and meanings.

V The folktale or folk fairytale, which constitutes the reservoir of motifs that the literary fairytale borrows, imitates and increasingly often subverts, is a somewhat mysterious genre whose origin is shrouded in the mists of time, and its significance in those of scholarly debate. More certain is the fact that the ‘fairytale’ is clearly far from being the delightful, harmlessly educative genre addressed to children that it appeared to be after some of the more shocking tales had been hurriedly deleted from the second edition of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen. The German word Märchen, which lacks the implication of whimsy, of the tale about fairies, of the French conte de fées and the English fairytale,107 and carries altogether weightier connotations, may seem more appropriate in the Gothic contect, although it is, paradoxically, to the contes de fées of Mme d’Aulnoy that modern Gothic is most indebted. There are many kinds of fairytale, of which the Gothic tale for children is but one, just as there are a number of different kinds of Gothic novel, of which the fairytale for adults is one, but both Gothic and fantasy generally grew out of the fairytale, so that the Gothic tale can be defined as a kind of Kunstmärchen, and the Gothic novel as a kind of Märchen-roman.108 The English and German Gothic novelists of the late eighteenth century had their imaginations fired by the fairytale, and the German Romantics in particular, coming of writing age before the Grimms’ collection had begun 107 108

I write fairytale without the hyphen that has the effect of emphasizing the word ‘fairy’. In the theatre Gothic melodrama has more than a little in common with pantomime, which frequently derives from fairytale.

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to appear, read the Arabian Nights and the collections of Perrault, D’Aulnoy, Bertuch,109 Musäus and Naubert, and the horror stories of the time, and put the two together in their minds, for the machinery of the two genres has much in common and there can clearly be malign ‘wonders’ as well as benign ones. The fairytale or Märchen, traditionally either a ‘naive’ tale of magic, wonder and cruelty, or a literary simulation or counterfeit of such a tale, is located on a continuum extending all the way from the oral fairytale to the Metamärchen (oral fairytale/VolksmärchenBuchmärchenKunstmärchen Metamärchen). It is easy to make too sharp and therefore false a distinction between the naive oral fairytale and the knowing literary one. The postRomantic distinction between the Volksmärchen (folktale, folk fairytale, popular tale) and the Buchmärchen (written fairytale) or Kunstmärchen (literary fairytale: the prefix denotes not ‘art’ but ‘synthetic’), long regarded as fundamental, has come to seem simplistic and misleading,110 although it helps to define the relationship between fairytale and Gothic. HewettThayer distinguishes beween the ‘naively optimistic’ Volksmärchen, and the Kunstmärchen which is ‘often sisister in tone and tragic in outcome’,111 a conservative definition that goes back to Schiller’s fundamental distinction between ‘naive’ and ‘sentimental’ (=reflective, self-reflective) literary modes. In the ancient world, which is the cradle of fairytale, fantasy and Gothic alike, humanity was closer to nature, still in a relatively childlike state of mind, whereas the modern world is marked by self-consciousness, which colours everything, and in colouring distorts. We are now told both that ‘As more and more wonder tales were written down in the 14th, 15th, 16th and 17th centuries [...] they constituted the genre of the literary fairytale’,112 and modern research has shown that the literary fairytale may precede its oral versions. ‘Cupid and Psyche’ is, after all, a literary fairytale that was followed by a multiplicity of related oral tales, although this is not to say that it may not also have been preceded by an oral one. Now if oral fairytales are ‘reconfigured’ by each telling to form kaleidoscopic variations with distinctly different effects’,113 this means that they are subject to continuous revision and hermeneutic shift. Any story, relayed from one person to another, swiftly changes out of all recognition, and this is all the more likely to 109 110 111 112 113

Friedrich Justus Bertuch’s Blaue Bibliothek aller Nationen (11 vols, 1790-97), which appeared anonymously, was widely known at the time. See D. R. Moser, ‘Theorie- und Methodenprobleme der Märchenforschung’, Jahrbuch für Volkskunde, 3 (1980), 47-64. Hewttt-Thayer, 215. The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales, ed. Zipes, xvi. See Maria Tatar (ed.), The Classic Fairy Tales (New York & London: Norton, 1999), ix.

580 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective happen when the storytellers, with their different standpoints and experiences of life, are telling tales they believe to have significant educative value. Given that tales were frequently modified in the telling, each telling is tantamount to an editing. Oral tales have inevitably been ‘improved’ over the centuries of their telling. In the Romantic period the term Volksmärchen, which has since been seen to beg too many questions, simply denoted a fairytale tout court. By contrast, the modern, post-Romantic term Kunstmärchen denotes a literary form as cultivated, particularly, by the German Romantics and those influenced by them, the Märchen made up by the author, as by the authors of many Gothic tales, on the basis of the morphology of the folktale. It is accordingly a purely imaginative tale, fairytale-like not only in terms of its structure, functions, and so on, but also in often carrying a good deal of allegory and therefore of morality, although this is sometimes absent, as in the case of Alice in Wonderland. However, if the Romantic Kunstmärchen seems to have had more to do with the play impulse than with any intrinsic moral purpose, the fact remains that Perrault gave his Contes du temps passé the subtitle Avec des Moralitez, and that the Grimms thought of their collection as an Erziehungsbuch. In calling Grimm’s fairytales Household Stories and Andersen’s Stories for the Household, the Victorians were not only emphasizing that such tales were addressed to adults as well as children; they were also signalling their relevance to the moral economy of the household, an idea with which Veit Weber would have been more at home than Hoffmann and Tieck. The fairytale, though imaginatively and morally true, is frequently a tall story in terms of the impossible or marvellous or supernatural events it takes in its stride, so that the Zaubermärchen (wonder-tale) is paralleled by Gothic tales of the ‘ghost-seer’ or explained supernatural type. The word Ammenmärchen, which in Wieland’s day meant nursery tale, now simply means an unlikely story, a ‘fairy story’, whereas the Lügenmärchen114 is the preposterously tall story (cf. Poe’s ‘The 1002nd Tale’, Hofmannsthal’s ‘Das Märchen der 672. Nacht’), one of the earliest collections of such stories being Lucian’s mendaciously titled Vera Historia (translated by Wieland as part of Lukians sämtliche Werke, 1788-9),115 which contains some early versions of stories that are also found in the Arabian Nights. Raspe incorporated incidents borrowed from Lucian, together with others found elsewhere, in his self-subverting Gothic travel book, Baron Münchhausen’s 114 115

The form goes back to antiquity and existed in German (MHG lügemaere) in the middle ages. Lucian’s Wonderland, tr. St. J. Basil Wynne Willson (Edinburgh & London: William Blackwood, 1899).

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Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia (1785). Because there is a considerable difference between what was believed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and what is believed today, a characteristic of the fairytale as told or read today is that it is unbelievable: in both English and German the term itself - fairy story, Märchen - has come to mean a cockand-bull story, although the word, like the word ‘dream’, often carries a positive charge in terms of wish-fulfilment. The folk fairytale depicts a self-contained, archetypal world of universal validity, an ‘otherworld’ in the sense of a naive vision or version of reality with its own symbolic formulations and chains of motifs tied together in a logical plot sequence that moves toward a preconceived goal in accordance with the laws of its internal structure or logic. A law unto itself, the folk fairytale is one-dimensional, single-stranded116 and episodic. Lüthi, indeed, sees single-strandedness (Einsträngigkeit) and episodic structure as ‘the foundation and the precondition of the abstract style [of the European folktale]’,117 emphasizing the narrative single-mindedness and narrowness of focus of the folk fairytale, the plurality of episodes strung on a single narrative line, and with these the characteristic hero-view perspective. In the folk fairytale only what impinges on the protagonist and his or her path through life is in focus.118 The same applies to many Gothic novels, including those of Ann Radcliffe, although Gothic at its best, as a kind of Kunstmärchen, diverges from the naive (folk) fairytale in terms both of its greater complexity and of its more knowing nature. This applies, particularly, to the German Gothic novel as produced by writers such as Naubert, Grosse and Kahlert, which is mostly more complex but similarly episodic, and tends to have different narrators for the various episodes, which thus become different versions of the truth.119 Paradoxically, some of the novels that are often dismissed as ‘trivial’ are, technically, in the vanguard of contemporary narrative writing. Der Genius (Horrid Mysteries) is a case in point. The basis or starting point of both the folktale and the Gothic romance is the breaking of a pre-existent pattern, that is, the breakdown of preexistent order, and accordingly the presence of something (e.g. villainy) that ought to be absent and/or the absence of something that ought to be present, loss followed by loss made good. In both genres loss of control is the trigger, transgression the motor of the plot. That the protagonists in the 116 117 118 119

On the ‘einsträngig geführte Handlung’, see Lüthi, Märchen, 29. Lüthi, The European Folktale, 34. Lüthi, Märchen, 30. Cf. Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet.

582 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Gothic novel and tale typically find themselves in an invasive, intrusive, hostile, destructive otherworld, often, as in fairytale, involving loss of freedom, does not need elaboration. The typical fairytale involves a problem or prohibition or difficulty and its resolution, a trial or struggle normally, though not always, leading to victory, or a task or imperative to make good in one sense or another and its mostly successful completion, in brief, the wresting back of order from chaos, the regaining of control. Much of this also applies not only to Kleist’s stories, which often start with a problem to be solved, but also to the Gothic novel to which they are related. The fairytale idea of a goal which the hero either reaches or fails to reach is the prototype of the Gothic ‘Quest’, the goal in either case being to regain the control that has been lost. The initial sudden change or reversal of situation (seduction, arrest, disappointment, transformation of one kind or another, etc.) is typical both of literary fairytale and of Gothic. In fairytale, as in most Gothic novels, being or getting lost, or having to face a hair-raising challenge, is a temporary state. The fairytale denouement of many late eighteenth-century Gothic novels, which often takes the form of marriage, betrays their origin. Common to fairytale and the Gothic tale (of Tieck, Kleist, Grimm and Hoffmann, for instance, and later of Kafka) is the peripeteia or sudden change of fortune, the sudden irruption of the extraordinary into the domain of the ordinary, of the other into the hitherto uniform, of the alien subliminal world of shadows into the conscious world. In many Gothic novels we see the same merging of world and shadow-world, in which the Other is found to be ominously omnipresent, for instance, in the guise of a secret society or conspiracy whose tentacles reach everywhere, as in Horrid Mysteries. Otherwise it may be a matter of an emotional reaction which turns out to have far-reaching consequences in what passes for the ‘real’ world, as in fairytale and legend, where a succession of bewildering signs and challenges issues from a menacing different order of reality typically represented by a dragon, giant or witch, or their Gothic counterparts. For Jung the various figures in folk fairytales are aspects of one and the same personality, as they are in the Gothic Doppelgängerroman which reaches its acme in Hoffmann’s Die Elixiere des Teufels. That the Gothic novel/tale is essentially a literary fairytale for adults is indicated not merely by the common origin in classical antiquity of these two types of tale, but by the narrative stocks-in-trade and structural devices common to both, which bear an often very close resemblance. Gothic and fairytale share stock figures, locations, situations, and narrative structures. The dramatis personae, ‘machinery’ and ‘functions’ of the two forms have much in common. The ‘heavily charged tension field’ of the fairytale of

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magic (wonder-tale, Zaubermärchen), for example, features in the ghost-seer novel. Some fairytales are tales of horror or terror, just as some fantasy tales are Gothic. Gothic is no less formulaic than fairytale, fairytale scarcely less sinisterly ambivalent than Gothic, hence the fundamental parallels between these two stylized, formulaic, non-realistic genres/conventions with their linked kinds of fantasy. Fairytale and fantasy are, of course, related: While fairy tales and fantasy are doubtlessly generically related, and it may even be argued that fantasy grows out of the fairy tale, their origins are quite different. Fairy tales have their roots in archaic society and archaic thought, thus immediately succeeding myths. Fantasy literature is a modern phenomenon.120

However, while fantasy in its developed form may be a ‘modern’ phenomenon, it originates in the same melting pot in classical antiquity as fairytale and Gothic: the Vera historia, for instance,shows that Lucian is a fantasist producing knowing fiction, and Apuleius’s Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) is the common ancestor of fairytale (‘Cupid and Psyche’ is a Kunstmärchen), fantasy and Gothic. Fantasy sits athwart a continuum extending from the marvelous to the uncanny, in other words, from fairytale to Gothic. Gothic is a subset of fantasy, which inherited the fairytale’s basic plot (the hero leaves home, meets helpers and opponents, goes through trials, loses his way, etc.): Most fantasy novels have many similarities to fairy tales. They have inherited the fairy-tale system of characters, set out by Vladimir Propp and his followers: hero, princess, helper, giver, antagonist. The essential difference between fairy-tale hero and [...] fantasy protagonist is that the latter often lacks heroic features [...] and can sometimes fail.121

Gothic shares with fairytale a symbolical approach to story-telling and a common structure or set and order of functions. Motivated by transgressive desire of one kind or another, themes and motifs common to the two forms, which feature similar kinds of motif-constellation, include usurpation; sibling rivalry;122 the incarceration and actual or threatened murder of the innocent and punishment of evil-doers; attack or abduction by robbers; live burial; privation; the eerily empty, silent castle or house; the enchanted castle; the forbidden door, forbidden chamber, chamber of 120 121 122

See Maria Nikolajeva, ‘Fantasy Literature and Fairy Tales’, in The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales, ed. Zipes, 150-154. Nikolajeva, 151. Cf. the hostile-brothers theme of German theatre in the years before Grimm.

584 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective horrors; the discovery of a mysterious chest; sleeplike and deathlike states; sexual danger and abuse; the labyrinth; the underground passage; the ‘subterraneous chamber(s)’; sorcery; vampirism; and cannibalism, which, paradoxically, looms far larger in the fairytale or tale of wonder than in the tale of terror, where it is rare but by no means unknown. Anthropophagy features in German Gothic, which in this respect really is more horrid than the British variety (see Ignaz Arnold’s Der schwarze Jonas, but also the Grimms’ ‘Von dem Machandelboom’ [The Juniper Tree]). Dracula shares with Grimm the motif of the blue light.123 Even what Sedgwick calls ‘the sudden, seemingly arbitrary, but massive inaccessibility of those things that should normally be most accessible’124 derives from fairytale. Gothic, like fairytale, focusses on situation rather than character, and therefore features stock types and situations. Similar types are found in both genres. Shared stereotypical stock figures include the Devil (commoner in the fairytale than in the Gothic novel to which he migrated); the tyrannical father, ogre, or wicked count; the monster bridegroom; the usurper; the wicked stepmother, witch or bitch, abbess or countess; the innocent victim; the helper; the wanderer; banditti; and so on. The ‘subterraneous world’ of Gothic derives from the underground world of fairytale with its treasures and terrors, and discovery of noble birth, so common in the early Gothic novel, is a plot motif in the French fairytale of the Perrault-D’Aulnoy era, whence it was taken over by Gothic convention. Being concerned with symbolic forms and figures rather than material ones, and therefore with symbolic logic and morality, neither genre is, typically, concerned with character development, or indeed with rounded characters, whose activities would be unpredictable, but, rather, with the punishment of evildoers, who are seen as incorrigible, and with the paradoxical - because unnecessary reward of the incorruptible, who are by definition not subject to temptation. In the novels of Radcliffe and Naubert, for instance, there is never any doubt that the good will win through. The stock stereotypes normally embody the clash between good and evil that informs both these varieties of cautionary tale, although fairytale, which rewards altruism and punishes selfishness, as often as not in a barbaric way, is both a more moral and arguably a more violent form than Gothic. In the Grimms’ tales murder, infanticide, cannibalism, abandonment, and sexual violence are commonplace, as are fear and disempowerment. The Bluebeard tales, are more ‘Gothic’ than most Gothic novels and tales of the literary kind, and the ‘ogre’ (euphemism for ‘cannibal’, which in turn is a euphemism for 123 124

See Stith Thompson, Motif-Index, Vol. VI, 81, which shows that blue light is associated with the Devil with witches and, particularly, with vampires. Sedgwick, 13.

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child-eater) of the traditional French folktale - cannibalism features in D’Aulnoy’s tales, which are so influential in the late eighteenth century - is a Gothic enough figure. In each genre the persons involved in the struggle between good and evil powers become the agents of those powers. Gothic and fairytale share locations too: the enclosure or imprisoning space (cage [as in ‘Hansel and Gretel’], tower, cavern, dungeon, vault, etc.); the edifice in the form of the accursed (enchanted, ogre’s) castle or (witch’s) house in the forest, or robbers’ lair in the forest; the locale (often a wilderness or labyrinth in which to get lost, in the form of a forest); and so on. The imprisoning tower and the subterraneous cavern and passage of Gothic are features of D’Aulnoy’s fairytales. The robber in the Grimms’ Der Räuber und seine Söhne, whose haunt is a dense forest, where he lurks in ravines and caves with his band, is a staple figure in English and German Gothic. The dark forest itself and the robbers’/murderers’ house are found alike in Grimm and Kahlert, but also in countless other fairytales and Gothic tales from Smollett’s Ferdinand Count Fathom onwards. The dark forest of Gothic and fairytale parallels the selva oscura in which Dante begins his spiritual ordeal in the Inferno: Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura chè la diritta via era smarrita (Half way through life / I lost my way / and found myself in a dark forest)

Such parallels show that Gothic drew some of its motifs from fairytale or from the same sources as fairytale. The claustrophobic enclosure acts as a focus for the fear which both genres implicitly seek to evoke. The forest, as in the Inferno, is the seat of that fear. In psychological terms the terrors of the forest are inspired by fear of what the unconscious may reveal, in other words, by fear of what transgressions may be revealed and what price the transgressor may be called upon to pay for them. While the close relationship between Gothic and fairytale is shown by their many common motifs, character types and locations, what counts is less individual motifs than the functional relationship in which these stand to one another, in other words, the structure or pattern of ‘functions’ which they also have in common.125 A generation ago Hannelotte Dorner Bachmann,126 elaborating Ilse Nolting-Hauff’s description of the Gothic 125 126

Mayer & Tismar, 141. Dorner-Bachmann, Erzählstruktur und Texttheorie, 357, 359, 396, who was elaborating, in overwhelming detail, Ilse Nolting-Hauff’s statement that ‘Der eigentliche Prototyp des neueren Märchenromans is [...] der Schauerroman’ (see Ilse Nolting-Hauff,

586 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective novel as the prototype of the modern Märchenroman (fairytale-novel) and applying Propp’s morphology of the fairytale to the Gothic novel, showed in great detail that the early Gothic novel in the form of Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Radcliffe’s The Italian, and Lewis’s The Monk, took its basic structure directly from fairytale, and can in that sense be described as a more developed and sophisticated form of fairytale. Notwithstanding the fact that fairytale reveals its structure on the surface of the text, while the Gothic novel conceals its fairytale structure,127 she concludes that Propp’s structural model not only applies to the fairytale, but, being more or less identical with the structure of the Gothic novel, is also fundamental to this as a form of Märchenroman. The development of the fairytale and Gothic tale from the late eighteenth century onwards involves a process of internalization as physical horrors are augmented and, increasingly, supplanted by inner, psychological ones. Gothic, it has been well said, ‘opened up to fiction the realm of the irrational and of the perverse impulses and nightmarish terrors that lie beneath the surface of the civilized mind’.128 It is those same terrors, which the French Revolution unleashed, that Gothic seeks to defuse.The symbolism through which both genres find expression is universal or archetypal, being also the language of dreams and nightmares. In their symbolism fairytale and Gothic alike parallel the nightmare, which, because human beings’ basic fears are few in number, is similarly limited in its recurrent figurations and situations. The chief external, psychological link between Gothic and fairytale is the dream. It was at one time thought129 that folk fairytales were re-narrated dream-sequences, and although this is no longer believed to be the case, both Freud and Jung commented on the connexion between dreams and fairytales; more recently Lüthi has written of the fairytale’s ‘dreamlike vision’. Not only does the fairytale resemble the dream in embodying universal archetypes;130 both work in much the same way, as does the Gothic tale, which turns on dream in the guise of nightmare.

127 128 129 130

‘Märchen und Märchenroman’ and ‘Märchenromane mit leidendem Helden’, in Poetica, 6 (1974), 133f, 452-5). Dorner-Bachmann, 119, 395-9, 445. M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 7th edn (Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace, 1999), 111. By Géza Róheim, see The Gates of the Dream (New York: New York International University Press, 1952). C. G. Jung, ‘The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairytales’, in his The Archetypes of the Spirit in Fairytales (Vol. 9 of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968). See also Marie Luise von Franz, An Introduction to the Interpretation of Fairytales (Limited edition, New York: Spring Publications, 1970).

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For all the many links and overlaps between Gothic and fairytale, there are, of course, significant differences between them, for the fairytale is essentially a moral, educative form, whereas Gothic is, in Tieck’s definition, in large measure a matter of entertainment for the jaded sophisticate. The main single difference between the Gothic novel on one hand and the Romantic novel and fairytale on the other concerns their respective depths, the implications and meanings of their texts, for while they have many motifs in common, the Gothic novel tends to be a rather facile affair, the reader’s interaction with which ends with the last page, while the highbrow novel and fairytale of the period give the paraphernalia of Gothic a deeper, metaphysical basis.131 Fairytales may seem ‘simpler’ than Gothic tales, but they are generally deeper. Both forms of tale are a matter of challenge and response; the challenge is by definition similar, but the responses differ: in the fairytale setbacks or reverses are normally accepted as unexceptional, whereas in the Gothic novel they occasion that most Gothic of all emotions, Angst, which is, however, not entirely unknown in the fairytale, compare the Bluebeard tales. Todorov identifies two tendencies within literary Gothic: the supernatural accepted (the ‘marvellous’: the typical fairytale figure, suspending disbelief, accepts the marvellous or monstrous or prodigious without question), which he associates with Walpole, Lewis and Maturin, and the supernatural explained (the ‘uncanny’), which he associates with Clara Reeves and Ann Radcliffe.132 The former corresponds to fairytale, while the latter seems to define a major difference, although the case of Tschink’s Wundergeschichten sammt dem Schlüssel zu ihrer Erklärung, a collection of Gothic Märchen in explained supernatural mode, points to the perils of over-definition when it is so often the interplay between the two modes that counts. Todorov’s distinction is at odds with Walpole’s arch, knowing form of magic and with Radcliffe’s obvious indebtedness to fairytale in other respects. More generally, the crucial difference between the two genres in the present context is that fairytale features magic or the ‘real’ supernatural, whereas in Gothic the magic is bogus, hence the ‘explained supernatural’. The proper realm of the fairytale is the marvellous, that of Gothic the uncanny, but the literal ‘smoke and mirrors’ effects of German Gothic romances in the convention established by Schiller in Der Geisterseher involve both the marvellous as experienced by a still credulous eighteenth-century readership and the uncanny, which is found alike in Hoffmann’s fairytales and night-pieces. Credulity was Schiller’s prime concern and Tschink’s 131 132

See Blackall, 64. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic. A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, tr. Richard Howard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 41-42.

588 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective concern in Geschichte eines Geisterseher, and Scott, for his part, believed or halfbelieved in all manner of spirits. These things are largely a matter of perception, hence the way in which the marvellous is taken on board without question, whereas the uncanny is viewed with misgiving and becomes the cause of fear. Perception is both personal and changes with cultural and individual history. An early twenty-first-century reader cannot read Der Geisterseher or Geschichte eines Geistersehers or Der Geisterbanner in the same way as a late eighteenth-century one did. The medieval era with its supernatural world of wonders and marvels survives on the surface of fairytale, whereas in Gothic any wonders are normally counterfeit ones: the magic is bogus, a matter of hocus-pocus. The folktale hero is ‘naive’, the Gothic hero ‘sentimental’ (reflective) in Schiller’s terms. The folktale hero, lacking the expectations and anxieties that flow from modern self-awareness, has no sense of the extraordinary or uncanny as such, and therefore no fear of it. The inexplicable is accepted in fairytale, and is therefore not feared. In the Gothic tale, being feared, it becomes the uncanny. While both genres are concerned with challenges, problems, and reverses, their attitude towards them is generally different: the fairytale hero or heroine often finds a solution or resolution without delay, and without any morbid sense of time, whereas the Gothic heroine or hero, being self-aware, is a prey to morbid fears, on which the narrative dwells. Their reasons for doing so are not the same, but many fairytales and most Gothic tales seek to evoke fear. The idea that with the exception of the fairy tale all supernatural stories are stories of fear is not entirely true, for Perrault shows that fairytales can be stories of fear, and one of the best-known of the Grimms’ fairytales is the ‘Märchen von einem, der auszog, das Fürchten zu lernen’ (tale of a young man who went forth to learn what fear was), which has a little-known variant, ‘Der Fürchtemich’.133 Again it is a matter of attitude and atmosphere: the reason why neither Ferdinand Count Fathom nor the majority of fairytales are Gothic is that, however ‘horrid’ some of the events they portray, their atmosphere is not ‘black’. In Fathom the protoGothic elements are subverted by the author’s aristophanic stance. The folk fairytale by its nature implies simplicity and sunlight; Gothic, by its nature, foregrounds darkness and complexity. Gothic diverges from the naive (folk) fairytalein terms both of its greater complexity and of its more knowing, often self-subverting nature. In narrative terms, the fairytale is ‘single-stranded’ (einsträngig), whereas some notable Gothic tales from Naubert to Maturin are marked by narrative 133

This appeared in Anmerkungen zu den Kinder- und Hausmärchen der Brüder Grimm in 1856. For an English translation, ‘Make-Me-Shudder’, see Grimms’ Other Tales, 13-16.

Gothic and Märchen 589

complexity or multi-strandedness (Mehrsträngigkeit). The folk fairytale was, until vampirized by the Romantics and turned into the often Gothically complex Kunstmärchen, a simple or popular form, whereas the Gothic novel is normally, at worst, a simplistic, popular form, or, at best, a complex, hybrid one. It is not that there are no complex fairytales, for the robber-tale, a type of complex fairytale, led to the Räuberroman; the medieval chivalric romance influenced both fairytale (e.g. Type 1697, ‘The Bride won in a Tournament’) and the Ritterroman, and Hoffmann’s literary fairytales and Gothic tales are complex in similar ways. Complexity for its own sake, alien to the folk fairytale, is a feature of the Kunstmärchen and of some Gothic novels (Grosse, Kahlert, Maturin). Lüthi has stressed the Flächenhaftigkeit (lack of depth) of the fairytale world,134 whereas much writing about literary Gothic has focussed on symbolical depth From this it might seem to follow that Gothic is deeper than fairytale. What Lüthi describes is, however, not hermeneutic, but narrative depthlessness; in other respects fairytale is arguably the deeper form.

VI In terms of common ancestry, shared motifs, structures and functions, theory and practice, the Märchen and the Gothic tale have so much in common that it is hardly surprising that many Gothic novelists have borrowed from the fairytale, which was and is, however, much more than an arcane, exotic Fundgrube for latter-day Goths. At the end of the eighteenth century even informed readers found it impossible to tell the fairytale from the Gothic tale. If one thinks of ‘The Story of Sidi-Nouman’ (Arabian Nights) and ‘The Castle of Murder’ (Brothers Grimm), the dilemma remains, and Der Runenberg arguably represents Tieck’s most significant contribution not only to the fairytale but also to the the Gothic mode. Hoffmann’s aim of showing the collision between a magical, spirit (irrational) realm and everyday reality brings his fairytales into the context of the Arabian Nights, in which it is commonplace for a jinn to disrupt reality as it had existed until that point. ‘The Story of Sidi-Nouman’ was already a Gothic Nachtstück before Hoffmann picked it up and ran with it. Of all the fairytale models it is the Arabian Nights, which, in influencing Goethe and De Quincey in such fundamental ways, proved most productive. And then there are Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s tales, many of which are neither fairytales nor Gothic, but 134

Max Lüthi, The European Folktale, tr. John D. Niles (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 11-24.

590 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective theirs is the only collection that contains a number of tales that out-Gothic Gothic. There is much disagreement about many aspects of both genres. Fairytale, distilled by endless telling, is the more refined form and the more open to interpretation; by contrast, most Gothic tales, though written for an urban and perhaps more urbane audience, are in themselves coarse-grained and liable to veer towards the crass, and are therefore more open to the crass certainties of some modern criticism, although these are, alas, also directed at the fairytale.

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Index Abrams, M. H. 22, 59, 558, 586 Aikin, Anna Laetitia 12, 168, 416, 502, 555 Ainsworth, William Harrison 44, 363, 522 Albrecht, J. F. E. 28, 40, 43, 73, 93, 98, 255 Alexis, Willibald (W. Häring) 7, 8, 18, 24, 29, 31, 42, 45, 53, 151, 171, 199, 218, 219, 275, 310, 339-362, 363, 368, 424, 444, 448, 451, 469, 485, 486, 497, 501, 503, 504 Apel, Johann August 37, 51, 66, 70, 149, 160, 184, 263, 310, 321, 323, 475, 476, 477, 573 Archenholz, J. W. von 45, 148 Ariosto, Ludovico 25 Arnold, Ignaz Ferdinand 17, 28, 29, 37, 39, 41, 43, 67, 72, 129, 261, 262, 281, 312, 414, 523, 584 Arnold, Matthew 62 Arnold, Theodor Ferdinand Kajetan 292, 523 Babo, Josef Marius von 61, 110, 148 Bachmann, Frederick Wilhelm 342 Bahrdt, Karl Friedrich 75, 76, 192, 207 Baldick, Chris 64 Ball, Edward 44, 447, 452 Barruel, A. 72, 167, 412, 453 Beattie, James 63, 125, 169, 201203, 502 Beckford, William 13, 28, 153, 196, 203, 216, 226-231, 247,

277, 374, 462, 482, 493, 520, 551-553, 558, 559-561 Behrendt, Stephen C. 25, 70, 473 Bertuch, Friedrich Justus 14, 579 Beaujean, Marion 34, 89, 101, 103, 118, 467, 558, 567, 568 Blackall, Eric A. 77, 211, 234, 249, 278, 284, 285, 289, 298, 300, 301, 314, 328, 587 Blair, Robert 11, 62, 275, 506 Boaden, James 39, 135, 395, 406, 407 Böcking, Eduard 69, 251 Böttiger, Karl August 69 Bohse, August 11, 50, 230, 545, 547, 549, 552 Boileau, Daniel 15, 39, 459 Bonaventura 7, 29, 31, 208, 271, 275-308, 310, 316, 553, 573 Bond, J. 11, 520 Booth, A. E. 15, 39, 131, 136, 382 Bornschein, Johann Ernst David 28, 36, 43-45, 148, 495 Boyle, Nicholas 56, 71 Brahm, Otto 61, 110 Bridgwater, Patrick 23, 24, 35, 97, 118, 150, 230, 283, 552 Brockden Brown, Charles 16, 452, 465 Brontë, Charlotte 19, 215, 478, 484 Brown, J. K. 68 Bruegel, Pieter (the yonger) 89, 291 Brückner, J. J. 28, 43, 472 Buchholtz, K. A. 28, 43 Bücher, G. 36

598 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Bürger, August 12, 15, 31, 50, 57, 66, 84, 85, 87, 90, 99, 102, 103, 109, 110, 148-151, 193, 195, 215, 291, 443, 471, 472, 479, 518 Burne-Jones, Edward 67, 378 Burke, Edmund 11, 12, 22, 160, 162, 168, 201, 411, 491, 502, 514, 518, 526 Burwick, Frederick 341 Byron, George Gordon 37, 44, 51, 54, 67, 70, 71, 187, 213, 310, 321, 341, 356, 467, 473, 475, 490, 493, 514, 538 Byron, Glennis 166 Byron, Henry James 435 Cagliostro, Alessandro (Giuseppe Balsamo) 73, 74, 98, 101, 176, 177, 192, 201 Carlyle, Thomas 58, 73, 147, 443 Castle, Terry 23 Clemen, Paul 80 Clery, E. J. 57, 62, 157, 178, 178, 363, 416, 476, 546, 555, 591 Cooper, James Fenimore 40, 45 Cotta, Johann Friedrich 88, 158, 161, 177 Cramer, Karl Gottlob 14, 16, 28, 34, 55, 56, 61, 76, 83, 132, 216, 218, 233, 235, 311, 340, 358, 359, 469, 528, 566 Dacre, Charlotte 17, 42, 375, 376, 378, 415, 436, 452, 463, 469, 472, 474, 484, 499, 543 Dainat, Holger 42, 44, 45, 166, 171, 592 D’Arnaud, Baculard 28, 148, 451, 494 D’Aulnoy, Mme 22, 28, 119, 124, 142-144, 164, 173, 227, 228, 264, 272, 456, 477, 491, 544,

545, 547, 552, 558-560, 562565, 577-579, 584, 585 Datt, Johann Philipp 60, 394 Davidson, P. De Bock, Jean-Nicolas-Etienne 86, 132, 134, 382, 394, 395, 403 Defoe, Daniel 45, 365, 366, 367, 368, 377, 440 De la Curne de Sainte-Palaye, Jean-Baptiste 87, 94 de la MotteFouqué, Friedrich 24, 34 Denton, Eric Hadley 58, 59, 64 De Quincey, Thomas 8, 19, 2426, 44, 62, 118, 122, 128, 150, 163, 170, 178, 179, 189, 191, 193, 196-201, 213-215, 230, 250, 303, 310, 323-331, 340, 341, 343-356, 364, 366, 368, 444, 448, 449, 451, 452, 469, 470, 506, 515-517, 531, 538, 541, 548, 549, 552, 553, 555558, 572, 573, 589 De Saint-Germain, Comte 74 De Staël, Mme 67 Drake, Nathan 62, 416 Dowden, Edward 470 Duff-Gordon, Lucie 36, 340, 362, 367, 369 Dunlap, William 43, 465 Durach, J. B. 14, 39, 94, 395, 404, 491 Ebert, Johann Arnold 11, 27, 61, 218, 248, 276, 528 Elgee, Jane 36, 340, 362 Evans, Bertrand 37, 136, 186, 187, 406, 440, 441, 471, 492 Eyries, Jean Baptiste Benoît 51 Feder, J. G. H. 75, 192, 205, Fiedler, Leslie A. 27, 524, 525 Follenius, C. F. 15, 35, 180, 328

Index 599

Frayling, Christopher 67, 319, 551, 551, 592 Frank, Frederick S. 71, 227, 247, 592 Friedrich, Caspar David 26, 62, 91, 93, 122, 220, 244, 248, 249, 267, 273, 336, 503, 526, 533538 Fuseli, Henry 13, 49, 50, 54, 166, 184, 276, 277, 291, 319, 412, 475, 507, 517-521, 524, 527, 550 Galland, Antoine 11, 50, 67, 230, 319, 541, 544-548, 550, 551, 552, 560 Garber, Frederick 563, 565 Gautier, Théophile 67 Gerstenberg, Heinrich Wilhelm von 12, 28, 37, 41, 50, 151, 164, 261, 301, 312, 319, 487, 491, 504, 550 Gillies, A. 223 Gillies, Robert Pearce 18, 46, 198, 323, 325, 326, 327, 331, 444, 449, 567, 568 Gleich, Josef Alois 16, 28, 29, 276, 473, 474, 495 Gleichmann, Johann Zacharias 11, 21, 28, 31-33 Gleick, James 26, 251 Godwin, William 68, 155, 156, 156, 157, 161 218, 235, 295, 416, 447, 470, 471, 483, 495, 519, 550 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 7, 12, 16, 27-29, 33, 34, 36, 38, 41, 49-82, 83, 84, 87, 90, 91, 93, 98, 100, 104, 105, 109, 110, 111, 134, 147, 149, 150, 151, 152, 158, 159, 160, 161, 165, 167, 175, 177, 183, 185, 186, 187,

213, 217, 230, 233, 236, 247, 248, 249, 263, 264, 277, 278, 282, 286, 291, 299, 300, 306, 307, 310, 327, 335, 359, 382, 394, 396, 397, 399, 402, 403, 407, 412, 423, 424, 440, 441, 443, 452, 453, 463, 473, 474, 480, 492, 493, 502, 518, 520, 528, 530, 538, 541, 547, 548, 549, 550, 551, 552, 555, 560, 571, 589 Goldsmith, Oliver115, 116, 369 Goya y Lucientes, Francisco 16, 162, 166, 244, 245, 277, 281, 289, 316, 320, 338, 431, 433, 503, 505, 506, 507, 509, 518, 520, 521, 522, 523, 524, 525, 531, 544 Grimm, Jakob & Wilhelm 17, 18, 83, 84, 238, 268, 277, 363, 368, 369, 484, 523, 541, 546, 558, 560, 567, 569, 571, 575, 576, 577, 578, 580, 582, 583, 584, 585, 588, 589 Grosse, Carl 7, 14, 15, 29, 31, 36, 38, 39, 51, 62, 63, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 84, 85, 115, 149, 151, 155, 156, 160, 161, 168, 169, 176, 180, 182, 183, 191216, 218, 219, 222, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237, 240, 249, 271, 273, 281, 283, 296, 309, 310, 311, 314, 315, 316, 318, 332, 333, 348, 408, 414, 420, 424, 442, 444, 445, 446, 450, 452, 453, 458, 459, 460, 464, 469, 471, 489, 502, 518, 544, 547, 572, 581, 589 Gundolf, Friedrich 53, 217, 218, 231, 240

600 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Guthke, Karl S. 66, 69, 126, 128, 243, 251, 252, 253, 259, 260, 462, 463, 464, 465, 466, 467, 499, 499 Habicht, Max 50, 547, 552, Hadley, Michael 37, 41, 42, 43, 119, 121, 137, 141, 154, 195, 207, 208, 214, 215, 292, 294, 295, 463, 485, 486, 487, 489, 497, 499, 567, 568 Haining, Peter 45, 554 Hale, Terry 184, 475, 568 Halliburton, David G. 70, 474 Hammer, Joseph von 40, 118, 547 Hauff, Wilhelm 24, 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 45, 83, 151, 218, 240, 280, 306, 307, 339, 340, 342, 358, 359, 360, 361, 362, 502, 504, 541, 546, 550, 553, 554, 566 Hazlitt, William 44, 421, 454, 513, 514 Hebenstreit, Heinrich Michael 60, 131, 264, 387 Hegewisch, Dietrich Hermann 92, 104, 106, 107, 392, 393, 401, 403, 404 Heiderich, Manfred W. 42, 221, 266, 285, 413426, 437, 445, 496 Heine, Heinrich 45, 413 Heinse, G. H. 28 Herder, Johann Gottfried 33, 79, 152, 165, 191, 369, 453, 528, 529 Hervey, James 11, 528 Hewett-Thayer, Harvey W. 79, 211, 224, 264, 311, 314, 318, 322, 333, 550, 579 Heym, Georg 45, 299, 300 Hildebrandt, K. 28 Hinckley, I. 16, 44, 421, 424

Hippel, Theodor Gottlieb von 73, 311, 318 Hock, Stefan 37 Hocks, Gustav René 501 Hoffmann, E.T.A. 7, 18, 23, 26, 29, 31, 35, 36, 37, 41, 44, 45, 46, 57, 61, 79, 83, 110, 151, 152, 160, 171, 191, 205, 209, 210, 211, 218, 219, 224, 234, 244, 247, 249, 261, 264, 271, 274, 276, 288, 290, 292, 304, 309338, 343, 359, 398, 426, 444, 448, 457, 469, 478, 485, 496, 497, 499, 500, 504, 506, 507, 511, 523, 541, 544, 545, 546, 547, 550, 551, 560, 566, 569, 572, 573, 574, 575, 576, 580, 582, 587, 589 Hoffmeister, Gerhart 35, 118, 487 Hogg, James 18, 44, 46, 171, 331, 332, 333, 335, 337, 343, 470, 555 Hogle. Jerrold E. 26, 28, 157, 166, 179, 304, 320, 354 Holberg, Ludwig 53, 54, 557 Honour, Hugh 49 Huber, Ludwig Ferdinand 52, 87, 104, 105, 106, 158, 175, 201, 263, 271, 395, 399, 401, 403, 404, 405 Hughes, J. F. 90, 127 Huish, Robert 36, 87, 90, 98, 99, 412, 448 Hurd, Richard 21, 116 Hushahn, Helga 61 Hutchinson, William 12, 93 Huxley, Aldous 63, 516 Ireland, William Henry 16, 18, 255, 340, 350, 353, 362, 368, 375, 376, 377, 378, 382, 496

Index 601

Irving, P. M. 401 Irving, Washington 54, 66, 401, 402, 477, 478, 551 James, G. P. R. 19, 44, 97, 215, 484, 522 Jenisch, Daniel 52, 494 Jünger, Ernst Theodor 44, 230, 552 Kafka, Franz 24, 26, 35, 219, 305, 313, 316, 317, 338, 480, 500, 502, 504, 525, 533, 536, 543, 582 Kahlert, Karl Friedrich (Lorenz Flammenberg) 7, 13, 15, 34, 36, 37, 51, 73, 87, 91, 130, 155-156, 161, 172, 173, 179, 180, 183, 252, 315, 340, 345, 405, 413, 442, 444, 445, 446, 447, 450, 452, 456, 463, 464, 468, 469, 471, 474, 488, 489, 490, 491, 492, 496, 506, 519, 543, 554, 581, 585, 589 Kant, Immanuel 12, 271, 329 Kerndörffer, Heinrich August 29, 44, 221, 248, 413, 490, 496 Kircher, Athanasius 53, 54, 501, 504 Klein, Jürgen 30, 31 Kleist, Heinrich von 7, 8, 27, 29, 31, 34, 36, 41, 42, 55, 57, 61, 62, 83, 116, 117, 131, 145, 149, 150, 151, 152, 159, 161, 173, 207, 216, 228, 240, 243-274, 292, 309-310, 313, 398, 402, 405, 461, 464, 467, 473, 485, 499, 500, 503, 505, 522, 526, 527, 529, 531, 534-535, 553, 560, 574, 582 Klingemann, August 29, 87, 277, 278, 282, 283, 284, 285, 286,

287, 288, 292, 295, 297, 299, 302, 305, 306, 307, 308, 398 Klüber, Johann Ludwig 87, 94 Koerner, Joseph Leo 93, 526, 529, 532, 533, 534, 536, 537, 538, 593 Körner, Christian Gottfried 52, 117, 149, 159, 168, 175, 195, 200, 502 Komareck, Johann Nepomuk 58, 395, 405 Kornerup, Else 194, 216 Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve 24, 272, 273, 302, 303, 304, 354, 505 Kostka, Edmund 35 Lafontaine,August 79, 85 Lathom, Francis 16, 354, 437, 496, 499 Laukhard, Friedrich Christian 16, 53, 70, 469, 472, 475, Laun, Friedrich 15, 29, 37, 51, 66, 70, 149, 160, 183, 184, 263, 310, 321, 323, 475, 476, 477, 573 Lawrence, Rose 397 Lee, Harriet 18, 120, 160, 218, 294, 451, 452, 461, 483, 495 Lee, M. 68 Lee, Sophia 13, 32, 33, 53, 94, 115, 116, 117, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 131, 145, 148, 153, 160, 197, 218, 294, 332, 339, 375, 439, 469, 482, 483, 485, 486, 487, 488, 489, 491 Leland, Thomas 11, 12, 87, 94, 153, 440, 482, 491 Lévy, Maurice 23, 25, 450 Lewis, M. G. 15, 16, 17, 22, 35, 40, 41, 42, 43, 45, 51, 54, 61, 66, 68, 69, 70, 71, 88 Lindop, Grevel 25, 303, 324, 352

602 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective Longueil, Alfred 22 Lucian 13, 195, 196, 556, 580, 583 Ludz, Peter Christian 39, 381 Lyttleton, M. 17, 36, 450, 452 Macauley, Rose 530 Maier, Jakob 61, 110, 148, 158 Mailly, Jean-Baptiste 87 Malthus, Daniel 12, 27, 61, 64, 248, 443 Mandelkow, Karl Robert 55 Marlowe, Christopher 71 Marryat, Frederick 45 Maturin, Charles Robert 18, 23, 54, 70, 71, 165, 219, 273, 306, 311, 331, 344, 351, 436, 439, 447, 448, 451, 490, 519, 520, 523, 538, 587, 588, 589 Maurer, Friedrich 85, 94, 197, 369, 477 Meinhold, Wilhelm 7, 8, 19, 29, 31, 36, 68, 94, 97, 151, 191, 199, 215, 223, 332, 335, 340, 362378, 444, 448, 463, 484, 576 Meiners, Christoph 75, 84, 100, 192, Meissner, August Gottlieb 161, 448 Meissner, C. W. 29 Menhennet, Alan 9, 82, 174, 175, 485, 593 Mennie, D. M. 61, 110 Mercier de Compiègne 15, 277, 298, 307 Mesmer, Franz Anton 74, 322 Meyer, F. L. W. 15, 51, 2, 53, 159, 161, 185, 191, 211, 212, 490, 491, 493 Michaelis, Johann Davis 74, 212, 214 Michaelis-Jena, Ruth 575, 577

Miles, Robert 23, 26, 62, 64, 157, 166, 301, 303, 315, 416, 458, 546, 555 Minor, J. 69, 462 Möser, Justus 33, 34, 60, 83, 87, 90, 92, 93, 102, 103, 104, 107, 134, 175, 382, 394, 397 Moser, D. R. 579 Montague, George 374 Moore, John 14, 482 Moritz, Karl Philipp 35, 180, 294, 296, 299 Müller, C. 62 Müller, F. von 70 Müller, Heinrich 342, 355, 499 Müller, H. A. 29 Müller, Hans von 333 Müller-Dyes, Klaus 216, Müller-Fraureuth, Carl, 35, 93, 95, 221, 282, 284, 435, 567 Müller-Seidel, W. 243 Mulvey-Roberts, Marie 27 Murphy, Agnes 37, 440, 441, 492 Musäus 13, 86, 230, 464, 465, 552, 558, 561, 569, 579 Naubert, Benedicte 7, 13-15, 17, 29, 31, 32, 33, 38, 39, 53, 60, 63, 69, 72, 87, 89, 95, 101, 105, 111, 115-145, 148, 149, 153, 158, 159, 161, 164, 165, 168, 175, 176, 189, 197, 205, 218, 247, 248, 256, 257, 258, 263, 264, 265, 266, 270, 291, 295, 309, 310, 313, 316, 332, 334, 358, 361, 362, 364, 366375, 382, 383, 387, 389, 394, 395, 397, 403, 405-408, 423, 439, 440, 442, 443, 444, 445, 446, 447, 455, 458, 459, 461, 463, 464, 465, 467, 485, 486, 488, 489, 491, 494, 500, 502, 503, 504, 505,

Index 603

541, 548, 553, 558, 559, 560, 561, 562, 563, 566, 567, 576, 579, 581, 584, 588 Nicholas, Edward 352-354 Nicolai-Haas, Rosemarie 39, 176, 381 Nolting-Hauff, Ilse 585 O’Keefe, John 44, 165 Oppel, Horst 70, 71, 461, 481, 485, 594 Osborn, John 70 Osborne, Harold 518, 530 Paine, Tom 23 Pantenius, Walther 87, 88, 89, 90, 92, 94, 95, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 157, 291 Parsons, Coleman O. 59, 109, 195, 337, 346, 427, 568 Parsons, Eliza 15, 161 Pascal, Roy 57 Pater, Walter 57, 150373, 378 Paul, Jean 31, 38, 45, 46, 51, 57, 72, 79, 100, 281, 282, 288, 289, 291, 293, 296, 297305, 306, 310, 311, 313, 322, 326-330, 341, 358, 426, 572 Peacock, Thomas Love 70, 72, 191, 209, 210, 212, 213, 344, 345, 468, 471, 473 Piranesi, Francesco 26, 54, 63, 65, 244, 252, 330, 503, 507, 511, 515, 516, 517, 531, 556, 557 Pitaval, François Gayot de 50, 171, 174, 414, 486 Plutarch 54 Poe, Edgar Allan 45, 65, 211, 311, 314, 325, 338, 517, 580 Polidori, John 18, 3751, 54, 310, 356 Powell, James 17, 90, 341, 404 Powell, York 257, 373

Praz, Mario 66, 67, 68, 251, 262, 306, 412, 412, 464, 509, 512 Prévost, Antoine François 28, 491 Price, L. M. 358, 528 Prothero, R. E. 71 Pütter, Johann Stephan 60, 394 Punter, David 166 Oertel, Friedrich von 16, 40, 69, 154, 159, 161, 247, 255, 292299, 307, 312, 495, 497, 498 Radcliffe, Ann 14, 16, 17, 18, 22, 23, 35, 37, 39, 42, 61, 69, 88, 115, 116, 122, 123, 126, 127, 130, 131, 133, 142, 143, 144, 145, 148, 153, 155, 159, 166, 175, 183, 184, 187, 188, 192, 212, 218, 219, 220, 224, 233, 234, 248, 251, 255, 259, 260, 275, 294, 310, 312, 322, 323, 341, 342, 345, 346, 350, 377, 382, 395, 408, 417, 418, 419, 420, 440, 445, 450, 451, 455, 456, 457, 458, 459, 460, 461, 464, 469, 484, 485, 486, 488, 493, 495, 496, 497, 501, 503, 506, 508, 509, 512, 513, 514, 541, 558, 559, 560, 561, 562, 563, 564, 565, 566, 568, 576, 577, 581, 584, 586, 587 Rambach, Friedrich Eberhard (Ottokar Sturm) 14, 28, 171, 181, 218, 220, 221, 226, 231, 233, 236, 414, 594 Raspe, Rudolf Erich 13, 116, 191, 194, 195, 201, 580 Reckenberger, Rosina 80, 185, Reed, T. J. 56, 59, 61, 68, 163, 170, 179, 270 Reeve, Clara 12, 13, 22, 33, 53, 79, 88, 94, 115, 116, 119, 418,

604 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective 441, 451, 461, 463, 469, 482, 486, 487, 494, 558, 560, 561, 587 Reeve, Sophia 478 Regnault-Warin, Jean-Joseph 40, 294, 298, 472 Reichard, Heinrich 22, 33, 35 Reichardt, J. F. 55 Reitemeier, Frauke 90, 111, 594 Render 16, 467 Ritchie, Leitch 19, 44 Robertson, Etienne-Gaspard 16, 177 Robison, John 72, 167, 204, 453, 594 Robson-Scott, W. D. 56, 528 Roche, Maria 16, 484 Rogers, Samuel 71 Rommel, Otto 38, 81 Rose, Samuel 89, 96, 97 Rullmann, W. 42, 166 Runge, Anita 142, 561 Runge, Philipp Otto 26 Saalfeld, Wilhelm 12, 520 Schiller, Friedrich 7, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 21, 22, 29, 31, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 49, 50, 52, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 61, 66, 68, 69, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 85, 87, 88, 91, 98, 101, 102, 104, 116, 117, 118, 121, 131, 136, 145, 147-189, 191, 195, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 212, 213, 214, 216, 225, 229, 231, 233, 234, 236, 247, 251, 252, 253, 263, 269, 270, 278, 283, 286, 290, 293, 294, 309, 310, 312, 315, 318, 322, 323, 328, 332, 333, 337, 345, 346, 351, 395, 403, 408,

411, 412, 413, 421, 423, 428, 440, 442, 443, 445, 446, 452, 453, 454, 455, 456, 457, 458, 459, 460, 461, 463, 466, 467, 468, 469, 471, 472, 474, 479, 485, 486, 490, 491, 492, 493, 496, 497, 502, 504, 505, 518, 525, 526, 546, 549, 564, 568, 570, 572, 573, 579, 587, 588 Saine, T. P. 68 Salzer, A. 88 Sammons, Jeffrey L. 57, 150, 154, 179 Schall, Karl 50, 547 Schlegel, August Wilhelm 29, 69, 80, 185, 250, 251, 282, 292, 462, 492, 493, 498 Schlegel, Caroline 191, 209, 211, 212 Schlegel, Johann Elias 148 Schlegel, Friedrich 29, 69, 278, 285, 288, 296, 299, 493, 494, 570 Schlenkert, Friedrich Christian 28, 33, 34, 61, 83, 149, 216, 236, 245, 247, 248, 250, 264, 265, 266, 267, 269 Schreinert, Kurt 32, 265 Schubart, Christian Friedrich Daniel 35, 152, 171, 173, 178, 471 Schubert, Gotthilf Heinrich von 31, 53, 236, 271, 320, 525, 527, 529 Scott, Jonathan 63, 509, 513, 515, 516 Scott, Walter 16, 19, 45, 51, 53, 54, 59, 60, 61, 66, 83, 87, 88, 98, 99, 107, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 116, 131, 132, 134, 148, 158, 182, 187, 195, 199, 218, 224,

Index 605

310, 326, 327, 331, 340, 341, 342, 343, 344, 346, 347, 348, 349, 350, 351, 352, 354, 355, 356, 357, 358, 360, 361, 364, 366, 372, 375, 377, 395, 397, 398, 402, 403, 404, 405, 407, 408, 409, 410, 415, 439, 443, 444, 445, 449, 452, 453, 454, 455, 463, 464, 478, 484, 485, 493, 495, 518, 519, 560, 561, 566, 568, 588 Seidel, K. A. G. 29, 36 Shelley, Mary 18, 27, 37, 51, 53, 55, 66, 70, 71, 189, 291, 301, 321, 467, 470, 473, 474, 475, 476, 477, 503, 517, 538 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 17, 25, 40, 50, 53, 54, 70, 71, 118, 148, 150, 155, 160, 163, 166, 178, 179, 189, 191, 207, 209, 210, 212, 213, 250, 267, 280, 321, 452, 467, 468, 469, 470, 471, 472, 473, 474, 475, 476, 517, 520, 531, 543, 569, 572 Smith, Catherine 452 Smith, Charlotte 24, 88, 171, 355, 463, 486, 497 Smith, Sidney 432, 433, 434 Smollett, Tobias 11, 12, 24, 27, 38, 65, 153, 154, 159, 163, 166, 183, 215, 218, 277, 294, 412, 414, 415, 416, 417, 418, 419, 420, 440, 456, 489, 503, 506, 510, 520, 554, 585 Snyder, 26, 303, 315 Soane, George 17, 44, 55, 447, 448, 452 Spieß, Christian Heinrich 14, 19, 29, 36, 37, 53, 71, 83, 117, 149, 159, 171, 216, 218, 232, 233, 236, 238, 340, 358, 359, 444,

448, 461, 463, 464, 469, 485, 486, 558, 566, 567, 568, 571 Spittler, Ludwig Timotheus 84, 100 Stark, Susanne 68, 257, 451, 595 Stengel, Franziska von 40 Stevenson, J. 61 Stockhammer, Robert 51, 263, 477 Sturm, Dieter 66, 67, 319, 550 Summers, Montague 30, 52, 156, 182, 209, 313, 381, 500 Swift, Jonathan 440 Terry, Daniel 98 Thalmann, Marianne 81, 82, 192, 214, 217, 221, 222, 276, 595, Thiergard, Ulrich 80, 81, 187, 493, 595 Thompson, G. R. 26, 229, 304 Thompson, L. F. 457 Thompson, Stith 261, 477, 521, 523, 569, 584 Tieck, Ludwig 7, 14, 15, 29, 31, 34, 41, 53, 62, 78, 83, 85, 87, 98, 118, 151, 155, 156, 160, 165, 168, 171, 181, 182, 185, 191, 196, 200, 201, 203, 207, 209, 210, 211, 214, 216-241, 244, 247, 249, 250, 264, 271, 276, 278, 283, 286, 288, 290, 299, 310, 313, 316, 320, 332, 335, 359, 414, 454, 462, 464, 465, 469, 473, 478, 485, 486, 493, 494, 497, 501, 512, 526, 527, 529, 530, 541, 547, 550, 551, 552, 553, 555, 558, 559, 560, 566, 568, 569, 570, 571, 572, 580, 582, 587, 589 Tinkle-Villani, V. 61 Tompkins, J. M. S. 88, 89, 93, 94, 96, 224, 417, 455, 456, 457, 458,

606 The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective 460, 462, 479, 494, 568, 568, 595 Traven, B. 45 Tschink, Cajetan 7, 13, 14, 15, 36, 74, 76, 78, 155, 161, 180, 181, 182, 183, 204, 207, 252, 442, 444, 456, 457, 458, 471, 496, 587 Tunk, Eduard von 88 Turner, Joseph Mallord William 26 Tymn, Marshall B. 34, 97, 355, 404, 423, 424, 567 Tytler, A. F. 14, 44, 59, 110, 164, 443, 449, 456 Van Dülmen, Richard 72, 177, 381, 592 Varma, Devendra P. 37, 54, 125, 209, 344, 418, 419, 508, 559 Vaughan, William 58, 530 Völker, Klaus 66, 67, 319, 550, 595 Voigt, Johann 85 Von der Hagen, F. H. 50, 547 Vulpius, Christian August 7, 14, 16, 28, 31, 34, 36, 42, 43, 44, 45, 49, 52, 65, 107, 117, 139, 159, 161, 165, 192, 247, 248, 269, 344, 359, 397, 402, 404, 406, 414, 420, 421, 423, 424, 426, 437, 444, 446, 447, 452, 465, 489, 497 Wagner, Richard 45 Wallenrodt, Frau von 42, 165 Walpole, Horace 11, 12, 14, 15, 22, 35, 49, 50, 53, 54, 79, 80, 81, 87, 94, 116, 119, 121, 122, 125, 148, 152, 153, 159, 160, 161, 169, 185, 186, 187, 188, 199, 212, 216, 218, 222, 224, 233, 248, 332, 339, 340, 353, 365,

368, 373, 374, 377, 416, 418, 441, 481, 482, 485, 487, 488, 489, 490, 491, 492, 493, 494, 508, 510, 511, 541, 558, 559, 560, 561, 586, 587 Wardrop, Daneen 25 Webber, Andrew 46, 309, 313, 327, 328, 329, 330, 335, 500 Weber, Veit(G.P.L.L. Wächter) 7, 13, 14, 15, 29, 31, 32, 33, 35, 36, 38, 39, 53, 60, 61, 72, 81, 83113, 116, 130, 134, 138, 149, 154, 157, 160, 162, 165, 175, 216, 222, 224, 226, 236, 238, 255, 283, 291, 311, 333, 339, 341, 344, 359, 364, 372, 393, 394, 395, 397, 398, 399, 400, 401, 402, 403, 404, 407, 408, 412, 426, 441, 442, 443, 444, 445, 446, 452, 463, 466, 470, 471, 472, 491, 499, 505, 508, 580 Webster 41, 221, 257, 275, 373, 374, 377, 506 Wezel, Johann Karl 31, 38, 40, 73 White, James 13, 14, 441, 482 Wieland, Christoph Martin 13, 16, 50, 161, 195, 247, 257, 339, 415, 453, 544, 547, 574, 580 Will, P. 39, 181, 183, 397 Willoughby, L. A. 43, 152, 165, 185, 492 Wilpert, Gero von 50, 52, 547 Wilson. W. Daniel 75 Winckelmann, (Ernst Winter) 51 Wittmann, Anna M. 35, 118, 487 Young, Edward 11, 27, 61, 62, 118, 151, 152, 184, 218, 248, 249, 267, 275, 276, 288, 290, 298, 299, 487, 503, 506, 527, 528, 529

Index 607

Zipes, Jack 21, 237, 545, 572, 579, 583

Zschokke,Johann Heinrich Daniel 7, 14, 17, 19, 29, 31, 35, 36, 39, 40, 43, 44, 45, 51, 159, 161, 215, 221, 224, 233, 247, 250, 369, 370, 371, 395, 399, 408, 421, 425, 437, 444, 461, 465, 466, 467, 469, 484, 491