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From Goethe to Gundolf

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Roger Paulin

Romanticism

9. Gundolf’s Romanticism1

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  • 1 An earlier version of this chapter was published as ‘Gundolf’s Romanticism’, in Deutsche Romantik u (...)

Fig. 12 Friedrich Gundolf, photograph by Jacob Hilsdorf (1911), University Library Heidelberg, Wikimedia, https://commons.wikimedia.org/​wiki/​File:Friedrich_Gundolf_ (HeidICON_33461).jpg, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Fig. 12 Friedrich Gundolf, photograph by Jacob Hilsdorf (1911), University Library Heidelberg, Wikimedia, https://commons.wikimedia.org/​wiki/​File:Friedrich_Gundolf_ (HeidICON_33461).jpg, CC BY-SA 4.0.
  • 2Romanticism and criticism (writings authored by them). Schlegel. Wackenroder. In all of Romanticis (...)

Romantik und Kritizismus (Schriftstellertum). Schlegel. Wackenroder. In der ganzen Romantik ist der Geist, die Ironie die Hauptsache. Sie ist tief literarisch. Tieck. Wackenroder, ein Standard Werk der Romantik, ganz analytisch-schriftstellerisch. Und naiv. Ebenso Lucinde. Die Romantiker im Ganzen keine starken Plastiker: philosophisch. Ihre Naivetät (sic) ist Raffinement. ‘Welch ein Wissen vom Dichterischen, von Sprache und Bildung… ’
Gundolf.2

1This jotting by Thomas Mann, written sometime after 1907, after the appearance of Friedrich Gundolf’s Romantiker-Briefe/Romantics’ Letters, may serve by way of introduction to our subject. It demonstrates how pervasive and influential an approach to Romanticism such as Gundolf’s could be, one that was free of mere scholarly or academic detail or pedantry, which was presented with an analytical sweep, a self-confidence in judgement, a contentiousness reinforced at every turn by intriguing and tantalizing formulation, and above all a control of language; the whole revealing its author to be one who had, in a masterly and masterful fashion, read widely and in detail but had also drunk deep at the well of historical and philosophical speculation that owed much to Jacob Burckhardt or even Friedrich Nietzsche. Mann’s (and others’) knowledge of German Romanticism may have come from reading of single writers (notably Novalis and E.T.A. Hoffmann) or through the mediation of Richard Wagner; but one is also tempted to say that the synthetic and highly individual approach to the whole movement used by Gundolf not only in 1907, but time and time again in other writings, had an influence on the intellectually and culturally aware reader that may have been incalculable.

2If we turn from the incalculable to the certain, the following seems to emerge. It is customary to see Gundolf’ s views on Romanticism as an emanation of the Stefan George circle, the critical prose obbligato to the severe poetic tones of the master to whom Gundolf — publicly and privately — so selflessly and abjectly deferred. Seen thus, Gundolf’s two works on Romanticism, the Romantiker-Briefe of 1907, and Romantiker/ Romantics of 1930–31, but notably also Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist/Shakespeare and the German Spirit (1911), seem to reflect the preferences and prejudices of an exclusive circle. I believe this view to be in some need of revision: for the very simple, primary and obvious reason that the actual scholarly activity of the George circle or its associates cannot be subsumed under such general categories. One has only to mention the names of Norbert von Hellingrath, and his work on Friedrich Hölderlin, Karl Wolfskehl and his energetic activity on the literature of the Middle Ages and the Baroque, and Gundolf himself, with his highly disparate oeuvre, to remind oneself that the circle encompassed a wide range of intellectual and scholarly endeavour: editions, essays, translations, anthologies, critical studies.

3Yet the especial closeness of Gundolf to George, his role as the beloved disciple, the boundless love and respect of one for the other, seems to admit of a distinction in the case of Gundolf. Romanticism, seen from this perspective, might seem to represent rather more the crumbs from off the table where the feast of great names from history’s temple of fame is served: Caesar, Dante, William Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Nietzsche and George himself, confirming George’s own view of the nineteenth century as an age of spiritual and intellectual decline, as he writes on June 11, 1910 to Gundolf, with the following adaptation of Nietzsche:

  • 3 ‘How is it that the end result is not a GOETHE but CHAOS, a nihilistic sighing, not knowing one way (...)

Wie kommt es dass das gesamtergebnis kein GOETHE sondern ein CHAOS ist, ein nihilistisches Seufzen, ein nicht-wissen wo-aus-wo-ein ein instinkt von ermüdung der in praxi immer dazu treibt zum achtzehnten JAHRHUNDERT ZURÜCKZUGREIFEN?3

  • 4 ‘An age that was unbelievably tedious, materially-oriented, doctrinaire and embracing culture but s (...)

4This would leave us with only the ‘great figures’ of earlier history, or those few of the nineteenth century who have upheld standards against the rush of so-called progress and materialism, those names from across the ages that George invokes in the opening pages of Der siebente Ring/The Seventh Ring: Dante, Goethe, Nietzsche, Arnold Böcklin. To these names from the previous century Gundolf would hasten to add Burckhardt, Leopold von Ranke, Theodor Mommsen, Herman Grimm (the biographer of Michelangelo), even Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, for having kept their heads high amidst ‘unsäglich öden stoffseligen doktrinären und bildungswütig-seichten Zeitalter der Presse, der Technik, des naturwissenschaftlichen Forschtriumphes und eines missverstandenen Bismarck’.4 The return to Goethe in particular is a means of confirming a new and more exclusive awareness of culture and the poetic office; the return to the age which Goethe dominated, to which in Gundolf’s eyes he gave its quintessential poetic expression, receives — but essentially through the reference to Goethe — its most adequate justification.

5In these terms, two strands emerge in Gundolf’s writings, both affirmations, but one distinctly subordinated to the other. This seems to me to be at the very heart of Gundolf’s approach to literature — and by extension to Romanticism. Karl Wolfskehl, on receiving proofs of the Friedrich Schlegel section to Gundolf’s introduction to the Romantiker-Briefe, put his finger on the problem in this highly perceptive statement:

  • 5 ‘I won’t say that excitement, dissemination, lightning flashes, tilling, pointing the way — are mor (...)

Dass das Aufregende, Saaten Streuende, wetternde, pflügende, das Vorbotenhafte, Mehr, wichtiger, menschlicher sei als die Zeiten oder Wesen der Erfüllung sag ich nicht, ich sage nur es sei eine Geschmacksfrage, wie Nietzsche am besten und — Peinlichsten zeigt, ob einem Heraklit lieber ist oder Platon.5

6Heraclitus or Plato? Gundolf sees it in less philosophical terms, but the implications are the same. In almost every major work of Gundolf’s or in almost every statement about a, for him, major figure, we will find these two opposite positions stated and their polarity defended:

  • 6 ‘For Plato it was ideas, for Jesus the kingdom of heaven, for Hölderlin Hellas, the very present ti (...)

Fur Platon waren die Ideen, für Jesus das Himmelreich, für Hölderlin Hellas gelebte Gegenwart, für die Romantiker waren sie die Ferne, das Andre, das Noch-nicht oder Nicht-mehr.
Caesar6

  • 7 ‘Romanticism did not find fulfilment in great names and was not able to concentrate and give form t (...)

Die Romantik hat sich nicht in großen Menschen erfüllt und nicht in Werken ihr eigentümliches Leben zusammendrängen und festhalten können. Nur dichterische und gedankliche Bruchstücke geben uns Kunde von ihr als einer — weit über ihre Ergebnisse hinaus — eindringlichen und umfassenden Bewegung, wie angespülte Trümmer vom Sturm.7

  • 8 ‘Given their way of seeing the world, the Romantics could not and would not seek the individual; th (...)

Schon nach dieser Weltverfassung konnten die Romantiker nicht das Individuum suchen wollen, an Ausbildung der Persönlichkeit dachten sie nur, sofern dadurch ihr Spiel und die Fülle ihrer Gesichte gesteigert wurde. Sie sind darin die Widerrenaissance und stellen das Goethesche Ideal in Frage. Sie fühlten sich als Fragmente, als Wellen einer großen Vibration.
Romantiker-Briefe8

  • 9 ‘Of course in real poetry a classical principle of form found its final and ultimate expression in (...)

Allerdings hat in der eigentlichen Dichtung das klassischplastische Prinzip seinen endgültigen Ausdruck nur in dem einen Goethe gefunden. Die Romantik hat sich in der Dichtung nicht bis zu eigenen Formen verdichten können, ist Tendenz geblieben.
Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist9

  • 10 ‘His Hellas has nothing to do with a sentimental cult of ruins, or — as Haym would have us believe  (...)

Sein Hellas hat also nichts mit Ruinen-sentimentalität, auch nicht — wie man seit Haym meist annimmt — mit romantischer Sehnsucht zu tun, die aus der Leere kommt und durch Traum ersetzt, was die Wirklichkeit versagt.
Hölderlins Archipelagus10

  • 11 ‘It is an essential characteristic of classical natures that instinct, genius and thought all work (...)

Es ist ein wesentliches Zeichen der klassischen Naturen daß bei ihnen Instinkt, Genie und Denken in derselben Richtung arbeiten. Ihr Denken ist nur die bewußte, hell gewordene Verlängerung des dunklen Lebensstroms der aus ihrer Mitte bricht, nur der genaue und gewissenhafte Vollzieher dessen was der Grundtrieb ihres Lebens ihm befiehlt, ihr Denken hat nicht, wie bei den Romantikern, Mystikern, Musikern eine eigene gesetzgebende oder gesetzstürzende Gewalt, sondern nur eine exekutive. Bei solchen Naturen sind die Äußerungen des formenden Bewußtseins nur der getreue Index dessen was in der dunklen Mitte und Tiefe vorgeht, die Helle ihrer Glut, der Logos ihres Eros. Denn Logos und Eros sind dann nicht notwendige Gegensätze, es sind nur verschiedene Helligkeitsgrade desselben Zustandes. Für diese klassische Geistesart, welche im Altertum uns immer wieder als Norm bezaubert, ist in der neuen Welt Goethe das größte, sicher das deutlichste Beispiel.
Goethe11

  • 12 ‘Romanticism lived in a median realm between the eternal forces and the events of its day, in ‘cult (...)

Die Romantik lebte in einer Zwischenschicht zwischen den ewigen Kräften und den Zeitzuständen, in der „Bildung“: sie wucherte auf den von Goethe, Herder, Kant begründeten Ordnungen üppig weiter, ohne mit ihren Wurzeln in den Grund selbst hinunterzureichen. (…) Der Historismus, der nur Vergangenes sieht, das Epigonentum, das nur Vergangenes treibt, sind ihre Erben, ohne ihre Höhe und ihr Feuer, mehr und mehr dem toten Stoff verfallend und den leeren Formen.
George12

  • 13 ‘Movement’; ‘play’; ‘prefer everything that is wavering, floating, night, mystery and twilight’; ‘e (...)
  • 14 Oskar Walzel, ‘Review of Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist’, Jahrbuch der deutschen Shakespeare-Ge (...)
  • 15 ‘An individual’. Beiträge, 100.
  • 16 ‘We have the right to see Romanticism in its entirety as one individual’. Beiträge, 88.

7It is not by coincidence that the most extreme polarization and the most severe rejection of Romanticism come in the context of Shakespeare, Goethe and George. But we will find in Gundolf’s discussion of Romanticism proper words or phrases like the following, which characterize his position very clearly: ‘Bewegung’, ‘Spiel’, ‘Vorliebe für alles Schwanke, Schwebende, Nacht, Geheimnis und Dämmerung’, ‘grenzenlos’, ’expansiv’.13 In his very percipient — and remarkably fair — review of Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist, Oskar Walzel, no mean synthesist himself, takes Gundolf to task for not examining seriously enough the actual philosophical ideas of the Romantics, for overlooking its very marked sense of programme and system, for seeing only the ironical and protean side of the movement, and for rejecting almost the entire nineteenth century that followed.14 Gundolf’s view of Romanticism is less a rejection of what Walzel stood for than a disdainful declaration that the patient philology of Erich Schmidt, Jakob Minor, Carl Schüddekopf or Reinhold Steig was at most an inadequate means to a dubious end: but it comes perilously close to the notion of ‘romantische Schule’ which we may trace back to Karl Rosenkranz and to Heinrich Heine, and then to those very different figures, Rudolf Haym, Wilhelm Dilthey and Ricarda Huch; Haym, with his rejection of the Romantics as unstable, lacking moral fibre, inchoate, formless; Dilthey, fairer, but distinguishing perhaps too little between individual figures of the movement and submerging personalities into some higher entity; Huch with her vitalism. This Gundolf does too. For him Romanticism is ‘ein Individuum’:15 ‘Wir haben das Recht, die ganze Romantik wie eine Person anzusehen’.16

  • 17 ‘Jacob Burckhardt and his “Reflections on History”’. Beiträge, 58–71.
  • 18 ‘The inimitable Ranke’. Gundolf, Briefe. Neue Folge, ed. by Lothar Helbing and Claus Victor Bock (A (...)
  • 19 ‘Basically, I am striving for nothing different from Scherer or Ranke: awareness of that which has (...)
  • 20 ‘The need to penetrate the material philosophically while rejecting philosophical method and specul (...)
  • 21 Ibid., 60.
  • 22 ‘Everything systematic’. Ibid., 60.
  • 23 Ibid., 64.
  • 24 ‘The concentration of world history in heroes’. Ibid., 62.
  • 25 ‘Great men’ are ‘the executors of a will that extends beyond them as individuals’. Ibid., 67.
  • 26 ‘What is decisive, brings fruition, gives universal instruction’. Ibid., 68.

8There is more to this than the mere prejudice it seems to be and certainly is. We see this from Gundolf’s essay ‘Jacob Burckhardt und seine “Weltgeschichtlichen Betrachtungen”’ in the Preußische Jahrbücher of 1907, the same year as his Romantiker-Briefe.17 In numerous other statements in various places, Gundolf makes it very clear that he sees himself by calling and inclination as the successor to the great tradition of ‘der einzige Ranke’,18 the historiography of the nineteenth century (as opposed to mere ‘historicism’): ‘Grundsätzlich erstrebe ich nichts anderes als Scherer oder Ranke, Erkenntnis dessen was geschehen ist’.19 The Burckhardt essay makes a few aspects of his method clearer. He admires in the great historian the ‘Bedürfnis nach philosophischer Durchdringung des Materials bei bewußter Ablehnung philosophischer Methode und Spekulation’,20 he admires Burckhardt’s ‘irae et studia’,21 his willingness to abandon mere objectivity for the sake of a compelling truth that is dear to his heart, his rejection of ‘alles Systematische’.22 But Burckhardt also incorporates an ‘Aristokratismus’,23 a disdain for mere progress or utilitarianism, not as extreme as Nietzsche’s immoralism, not as mystically one-sided as Carlyle’s cult of the hero. What especially attractsGundolfinBurckhardtisthe‘VerdichtungdesWeltgeschichtlichen in den Heroen’,24 the view — allied to Hegel’s — that ‘große Männer’ are ‘Vollzieher eines über ihr Individuum hinausreichenden Willens’,25 are (here closer to Nietzsche, if not to the ‘Übermensch’ or ‘Jenseits von Gut und Böse’) ‘das Entscheidende, Reifende, und allseitig Erziehende’.26

  • 27 ‘We do not grasp Shakespeare’s works by way of his age; we grasp his age through his works.’ Gundol (...)
  • 28 ‘Historical paralysis’. Gundolf, Caesar im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, in Caesar, 252.
  • 29 ‘A science that proclaims the soul’. Ibid.

9It would seem to me that this essay explains much of what we find in Gundolf’s studies of Caesar, Goethe, Shakespeare and George: there are, on the one hand, figures representing timeless poetic genius, sufficient in themselves, adequate in their powers of utterance, beholden to no tradition, or transcending mere influence, not explicable only in terms of their own age but instead giving their personality to a whole epoch. Hence the classic formulation on Shakespeare of 1928: ‘Wir fassen nicht Shakespeares Werk aus seinem Zeitalter, sondern sein Zeitalter durch sein Werk’.27 On the other hand we have movers and initiators, explorers of the intellect and of the poetic imagination, those for whom the pursuit of new vistas of the mind is an end in itself. These were not of the first rank, but without them our century would be impoverished. This is Gundolf’s more conciliatory view of Romanticism. In German terms, therefore, without Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, Tieck, especially without August Wilhelm Schlegel’s Shakespeare, the realm of the intellect and the imagination, the scope of poetic expression would be diminished. In European terms, without Byron, Heine, Victor Hugo, Alphonse de Lamartine or Adam Mickiewicz, there might not be a Mommsen or Burckhardt or even a Nietzsche; for they, too, are part of that process directed against ‘historistische Lähmung’,28 the reaction against which reaches its zenith in Nietzsche’s ‘seelenkünderische Wissenschaft’.29

  • 30 ‘Positive Hellenic faith’. Gundolf, Dem lebendigen Geist, 36.
  • 31 Beiträge, 85.
  • 32 Ibid., 37.
  • 33 Gundolf, George, 5, 10.

10 And so if we examine in more detail Gundolf’s statements on German Romanticism, we are left with the impression that he saw a gulf fixed between the ‘great’ unapproachable names and the eminently approachable Romantics. Whereas the ‘great’ names are meaningless in mere human or biographical terms, the Romantics must be seen in just that very light, as products of their own age, if they are to be appreciated at all. In his Romantiker-Briefe and Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist, Gundolf suggests that there is a ‘romantische Schule’ in the older, less complimentary sense, an entity that is more communal than individual, where single figures reflect a corporate ethos or spirit, where the same characteristics, kaleidoscopically changing, recur in constant variations and refractions. His two-volume Romantiker of 1930–31 seem much more concerned with the individual figures (notably Ludwig Tieck) and are less stringent in their chronological definition of Romanticism (hence they include Franz Grillparzer, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff and Eduard Mörike) and more concerned to hold on to what the early to mid-nineteenth century was able to achieve before positivism, historicism or materialism swept all standards away. Goethe, of course, remains extraterritorial; similarly, Hölderlin’s ’positiver hellenischer Glaube’30 cannot be subsumed under mere groupings; while Heinrich von Kleist’s fierce individualism excludes him from the start,31 and Gundolf is inclined to keep Jean Paul separate.32 Gundolf does not of course alter a jot of his anti-Romantic stance in the third edition of George in 1930,33 but in the different context of Romantiker in 1930–31 he is more willing to see Romanticism as the interrelation of various notable personalities, not a mere amorphous and inchoate state of non-fulfilment. This does not mean to say that Romantiker is free of prejudice or even outrageous near-travesty (especially the essay on Friedrich Schlegel), but it speaks with a greater — if sometimes misguided and partial — authority than Romantiker-Briefe of 1907.

  • 34 Such as Shakespeare-Rezeption. Die Diskussion um Shakespeare in Deutschland. 1. Ausgewählte Texte v (...)

11For Gundolf the disciple of George cannot entirely deny in himself the scholarly training received at the hands of Erich Schmidt and Gustav Roethe (if later repudiated); he cannot abjure a love of the obscure reference, the recondite print, the antiquarian edition. He may cover his tracks very well by disdaining the footnote or even the index, but the intimate acquaintance with texts, the ‘homework’, if one so will, is there. The best example is Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist, a book whose conclusion and climax in August Wilhelm Schlegel’s translation nobody has to date effectively challenged and the patterns of which are reflected in nearly all the anthologies of material relative to Shakespeare in Germany.34 But we note also Gundolf’s historical sense if we compare him with Wilhelm Dilthey, Ludwig Klages or Herbert Cysarz. All this is to some extent nurtured within the George circle itself: there is George’s own philological austerity and lack of self -indulgence guiding Gundolf on Shakespeare; there is Wolfskehl’s less orderly spirit suggesting all kinds of excursions and anabases into the world of the curious and the erudite. One feels therefore that the ‘public’ contexts, the prefaces, the articles, the occasional addresses, display a greater openness of spirit.

  • 35 ‘Better at seeing people than solving problems’. Gundolf, Briefe, 220.
  • 36 ‘It was my task to depict people and not ferments’. Wolfskehl-Gundolf, Briefwechsel, II, 46.
  • 37 ‘A figure, one and indivisible’. Gundolf, Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist, 349.
  • 38 ‘Fundamentally new experience’. Ibid., 353.
  • 39 ‘Using the resources of the language released by Goethe’s experience and become word, and applying (...)

12Gundolf claimed in a letter that he was ‘mehr menschensichtig als problemgriffig’.35 If we apply this statement to his view of Romanticism, we are bound to say that he is more successful in discussing figures who have, in his eyes at least, some human interest or some lasting achievement. In response to Wolfskehl’s criticism of his treatment of Friedrich Schlegel, Gundolf replies ‘dass es meine Aufgabe war, Menschen zu zeichnen und nicht Gährungen’.36 Indeed his aspect of Friedrich Schlegel is too much one of a man blown about by doctrines, responding feverishly to the times and exploring restlessly every path of the intellect — but little more. August Wilhelm Schlegel, on the other hand, although not emerging as a person, receives Gundolf’s accolade of approval for having produced Shakespeare in ‘unauflösliche Gestalt’.37 True, the Shakespeare translation is not an ‘Urerlebnis ’,38 but the mere ‘Anwendung der durch Goethes sprachgewordenes Erleben geschaffenen Sprachmöglichkeiten auf Shakespeares Werk’.39

  • 40 First published as ‘Ludwig Tieck’ in Jahrbuch des Freien Deutschen Hochstifts (1929), 99–195, subse (...)
  • 41 ‘Concentration of world history in heroes’.

13 There is however one particular aspect of Gundolf’s reception of the Romantics which shows him to be not so much — or not only — the recorder of their subordinate status compared with the ‘great figures’, but in a deeper way the continuer of their work and their attitudes. One is perhaps not surprised that Gundolf fails to honour August Wilhelm Schlegel’s other side, his critical achievement in the Berlin and Vienna lectures, leaving only the translator of Shakespeare. His view of Tieck, too, although he scrupulously discusses nearly all the many facets of that writer’s long and many-sided career, is more concerned with showing Tieck’s importance than his intrinsic quality;40 that is, his significance as the great initiator of so much in subsequent fiction, drama and poetry, the butterfly drinking from every flower, bewitched by every tradition. It is true that so much of Tieck did, as it were, slip into the mainstream of German literary and intellectual culture without its originator being recognizable in the end product: the European and American tale of terror, the ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ of Wagnerian provenance, the vision of the Renaissance later seen by Burckhardt or Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, the discursive, conversational mode of fiction perfected by Theodor Fontane, the celebration of the ‘great’ figures of national poetry, Dante, Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes, Luís de Camões, Goethe. Some of these Gundolf found congenial, many distinctly not. Thus it may be that Gundolf, himself in thrall to that ‘Verdichtung des Weltgeschichtlichen in den Heroen’,41 while recognizing Hegel’s or Carlyle’s, Burckhardt’s or Nietzsche’s role in isolating and celebrating greatness, chose to overlook that the Romantics themselves began this process — in other terms and for other purposes — with their establishment of a canon of Romantic poetry enshrined in names like Dante, Shakespeare or Cervantes (the trinity of the Schlegels’ Athenaeum), with Goethe only, never Schiller, as the modern embodiment of the rebirth of the universal poetic spirit. Indeed this opening up of the national literature to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance — the Romantic — may rightly be seen as the real lasting achievement of the Schlegel brothers. It explains why so much of their endeavour is directed towards the figures of Goethe and Shakespeare, why, in Tieck’s case, these two became a preoccupation and an obsession.

  • 42 See Roger Paulin, Ludwig Tieck: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), 239–59.
  • 43 ‘True sense’; ‘action’. Cf. Eudo C. Mason, ‘Gundolf und Shakespeare’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 98 (196 (...)
  • 44 Gundolf, Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist, 187f.
  • 45 Beiträge, 349.
  • 46 Ibid., 134.
  • 47 The main points set out by Mason, ‘Gundolf und Shakespeare’, without parallels being drawn.
  • 48 George-Gundolf, Briefwechsel, 259.
  • 49 Cf. Shakespeare in deutscher Sprache. Neue Ausgabe in sechs Bänden, ed. and trans. by Friedrich Gun (...)
  • 50 Cf. George-Gundolf, Briefwechsel, 184, 191, 275.
  • 51 Gundolf, Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist, 353.
  • 52 Wolsfkehl-Gundolf, Briefwechsel, I, 86.

14Bardolatry one can certainly hold against Tieck;42 Goetheolatry, certainly in later life, rather less so. Gundolf places both on the altar of his idolatry. What is more, he adduces one in defence of the other. For it is the Goethe of Shakespeare und kein Ende! that Gundolf invokes in both of his works on Shakespeare, in order to justify the somewhat shaky thesis that first Herder and then Goethe had established Shakespeare as something indivisible from ‘deutscher Geist’. Shakespeare is thus not essentially of the stage, is ‘wahrer Sinn’ as opposed to mere ‘Handlung’.43 This enables Gundolf to play down the theatrical, rhetorical tradition represented by Schiller44and later by Grillparzer whom he condemns on account of his very theatricality.45 It affords a convenient side-swipe against the ‘Synthetiker’ Hugo von Hofmannsthal.46 This view of Shakespeare would not necessarily separate him from Schlegel, whose notion of the stage has less to do with theatre than with national character expressed in dramatic form. It would however go against everything that Tieck stood for. In several other significant ways, Gundolf stood in agreement or coincidence with much of what is representative of both Schlegel and Tieck as Shakespeare scholars and critics.47 First: his purely literary knowledge of English (plus a dislike of the nation itself)48 which made him choose the Romantic-Classical, ‘Goethean’ Schlegel translation as the model for his own version of the Shakespeare text49 and to disregard or disdain any subsequent attempts to render Shakespeare into German. Second: the open disregard for source material and philological apparatus (although statements in letters make it quite clear that he did use them),50 notably those of English provenance. Like Schlegel’s Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur/Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature of 1809–11, Gundolf’s two-volume Shakespeare. Sein Wesen und Werk/Shakespeare. His Life and Work of 1928 rises up seemingly from the pure source of the Bard himself, innocent of the footnote or the merely learned aside. Indeed, one might say that this discreet covering of tracks is one of the sources of fascination for the reader of any of Gundolf’s works and a compelling source of authority. (It is, in fairness, worth remembering that nineteenth century commentators51 also do this, the much-despised Georg Gottfried Gervinus and the more respected Otto Ludwig.)52 Third: Gundolf’s interest in character rather than in dramatic action is central to Schlegel’s approach to Shakespeare, but also indicates how closely he, like Samuel Taylor Coleridge at the same time, sees the plays in terms of dominating, often eponymous, figures.

  • 53 ‘No self-possessed virago’; ‘accommodating, wise and strong companion’; ‘welcoming female presence’ (...)
  • 54 ‘Old and loose and lascivious’. August Wilhelm Schlegel, Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Lit (...)
  • 55 ‘An out and out rascal’. Gundolf, Shakespeare. Sein Wesen und Werk, I, 296.
  • 56 ‘Lightly and felicitously woven together that they seem to belong together and form a whole’. Schle (...)
  • 57 ‘A rhythmical balance of coherence, antagonism and confusion’. Gundolf, Shakespeare. Sein Wesen und (...)
  • 58 Mason, ‘Gundolf und Shakespeare’, 116f., 118f.

15There are indications that Gundolf occasionally repeats or continues the particular emphases of his Romantic predecessors. Take Lady Macbeth, one of Tieck’s more daring, even outrageous, attempts to break with traditional characterization in Shakespeare, and in this case, with Schiller’s, which was to postulate a more female, femininely tender, Lady Macbeth. For Gundolf, too, she is ‘kein selbstisches Mannweib’, but ‘die schmiegsam kluge und starke Gefährtin’ with ‘geselliges Weibstum’, ‘Hausfrau und Schaffnerin’, ‘höfliche, umsichtige, ja bezaubernde Wirtin’, ‘die Berechnende’ as opposed to ‘der Besessene’ who is her husband.53 Take Falstaff. Like Schlegel, Gundolf, while fascinated by the breath-taking effrontery of this character and the sheer impudence of his wit, does not overlook that he is underneath it all ‘alt und dabey lüstern und liederlich’ (Schlegel),54 ‘ein saftiger Lump’ (Gundolf).55 Or, turning this time away from character to action, take AMidsummer Night’s Dream. Both Schlegel and Gundolf draw especial attention to the different levels of action — the wedding of Theseus, the quarrel between Oberon and Titania, the two pairs of lovers, and the ‘rude mechanicals’ and how they form part of one indivisible whole: ‘so leicht und glücklich verflochten, daß sie durchaus zu einander zu gehören scheinen, um ein Ganzes zu bilden’ (Schlegel),56 ‘ein rhythmisch ausgewogenes Zusammen, Gegeneinander und Durcheinander’ (Gundolf).57 I draw particular attention to these three examples, which are not randomly chosen: they are those on which Eudo Mason dwells in his article ‘Gundolf und Shakespeare’ as instances of Gundolf’s perception and sensitivity as a Shakespeare critic.58 For me, they show in addition a remarkable case of the persistence of Romantic approaches to Shakespeare — so very different from the technical and analytical approach of, say, Otto Ludwig, to whom Gundolf was nearer in time if not in spirit.

  • 59 Cf. ibid., 125.
  • 60 Cf. Paulin, Ludwig Tieck, 246f.
  • 61 Gundolf, Shakespeare. Sein Wesen und Werk, I, 373.
  • 62 As, for instance, in his assertion that Titus Andronicus contains all of Marlowe’s achievement. Ibi (...)
  • 63 Cf. Paulin, Ludwig Tieck, 245f.
  • 64 Ibid.
  • 65 ‘Universal spirit’. Cf. Mason, ‘Gundolf und Shakespeare’, 138.
  • 66 Gundolf, Shakespeare. Sein Wesen und Werk, I, 79.
  • 67 ‘The quintessential Elizabethan Renaissance dramatist’. Ibid.

16Even then our analogies are not exhausted. This time, Gundolf seems nearer to Tieck than to Schlegel. Take his tripartite division of Shakespeare’s life,59 a central part of Tieck’s fragmentary Buch über Shakespeare/Book about Shakespeare60 and incidentally also integral to Coleridge’s chronology of Shakespeare. Like both Tieck and Coleridge, Gundolf is once or twice only (to his credit) tempted to postulate a chronology of Shakespeare’s works different from the usual standard, in order to accommodate a seeming inconsistency or contradiction. Thus, for instance, he dates Henry V before Henry IV.61 But Gundolf comes closest to Tieck in his assertion of Shakespeare’s uniqueness, as the one figure bestriding all like a colossus.62 Tieck, who knew his Elizabethans and Jacobeans much better than Gundolf did, was of course concerned to relate every aspect of English drama between 1580 and 1615 to Shakespeare, to prove that no development came about without the Bard. It led him, on the one hand, to ludicrous extensions of the Shakespeare canon, a craziness of which we cannot accuse Gundolf.63 It led him also, and here we see Gundolf coming nearer to Tieck, to diminish and disparage the achievements of other Elizabethans, notably Marlowe. Both Tieck and Gundolf, in different contexts, are concerned to prove that the nobility, the magnanimity, the spiritual greatness, the heroic wilfulness, manifested in the plays are all part of Shakespeare’s own character. Tieck does this in fictive guise, in a contrast between Shakespeare’s assumed character and that of his contemporaries;64 for Gundolf, such a contrast is a postulate worthy of the ‘Allgeist’65 that is Shakespeare. Shakespeare, too, while absorbing elements of the Middle Ages or of ‘Renaissance-individualismus’66 displays these, significantly enough, only in the early stages of his career, as the author of Henry VI or Love’s Labour’s Lost, but not in the mature works where he is beholden to no ‘influence’ or ‘school’. Christopher Marlowe, by contrast, is ‘der eigentliche elisabethanische Renaissance-dramatiker’.67 In this, Tieck would heartily concur.

  • 68 Cf. Tieck’s Deutsches Theater (1817).
  • 69 Gundolf, Andreas Gryphius (Heidelberg: Winter, 1927), 20.
  • 70 Richard Alewyn, ‘Vorbarocker Klassizismus und griechische Tragödie. Analyse der “Antigone”-Übersetz (...)

17One final coincidence of ideas binds Tieck and Gundolf. Both are connoisseurs of the German drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Tieck its first real editor).68 Both, although separated by a span of a hundred years, are unable to appreciate the peculiar style of drama that the Jesuits, the Dutch, the German Silesians and, to some extent, Pierre Corneille brought about. Here the contrast with Shakespeare serves to do little more than cloud the issue, as in Gundolf’s short monograph on Andreas Gryphius.69 For Tieck, this might be pardonable, for Gundolf, less so. It was to be Walter Benjamin who first demonstrated convincingly that there is little to be gained by confronting the ‘great names’ of Aeschylus or Calderón or Shakespeare with Martin Opitz, Andreas Gryphius or Daniel Casper von Lohenstein. Similarly, we are bound to say that it was a pupil of Gundolf’s Heidelberg colleague Max von Waldberg, the young Richard Alewyn ,70 who was to establish that tradition and study of formal devices were of greater assistance in the understanding of seventeenth-century literary texts than some amorphous notion of ‘Geist’.

18I have said much of Gundolf’s limitations as a writer on German Romanticism. His writings nevertheless remain to this day eminently readable and stimulating and are part of the ‘Geistesgeschichte’ of the first decades of the twentieth century. Perhaps the time has come, nearly fifty-five years after Gundolf’ s death, to view them less in terms of strict philology or academic literary criticism, but as creative insights, the product very of their own age, written not in an anxious awe of the letter or the page but with imagination and sometimes uncanny intuitive vision, conjuring up, not through factual accumulation or adherence to doctrine, some of the essential spirit of a movement: in short, as literature.

Notes

1 An earlier version of this chapter was published as ‘Gundolf’s Romanticism’, in Deutsche Romantik und das 20. Jahrhundert. Londoner Symposion 1985, ed. by Hanne Castein and Alexander Stillmark, Stuttgarter Arbeiten zur Germanistik 177 (Stuttgart: Heinz, 1986), 25–40. On this subject, but with a different accentuation, see Peter Küpper, ‘Gundolf und die Romantik’, Euphorion 75 (1981), 194–203.

2Romanticism and criticism (writings authored by them). Schlegel. Wackenroder. In all of Romanticism spirit, irony is predominant. It is deeply literary. Tieck. Wackenroder, a standard work of Romanticism, analytical and literary to the core. And naïve. Lucinde the same. The Romantics in general have no strong sense of form. Philosophical. Their naivete is over-cultivation. “What knowledge of matters poetic, of language and culture…” (Gundolf)’. Thomas Mann, quoted in T. J. Reed, Thomas Mann. The Uses of Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 129.

3 ‘How is it that the end result is not a GOETHE but CHAOS, a nihilistic sighing, not knowing one way or the other, an instinct of lassitude that in practice impels us back to EMBRACE THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY?’ Friedrich Gundolf, Briefwechsel, ed. by Robert Boehringer and Georg Peter Landmann (Munich, Düsseldorf: Küpper, 1962), 202.

4 ‘An age that was unbelievably tedious, materially-oriented, doctrinaire and embracing culture but shallowly, an age of the press, technology, triumphant scientific progress and a Bismarck they failed to appreciate’. Letter to Wolfskehl, September 29, 1905. Karl and Hanna Wolfskehl, Briefwechsel mit Friedrich Gundolf 1899–1931, ed. by Karlheinz Kluncker, 2 vols, Publications of the Institute of Germanic Studies, University of London (Amsterdam: Castrum Peregrini, 1977), II, 30.

5 ‘I won’t say that excitement, dissemination, lightning flashes, tilling, pointing the way — are more, more significant, more human than times of fulfilment and their agents. I merely say: it is a matter of taste, as Nietzsche best shows — and most notoriously so — whether Heraclitus is more to one’s taste than Plato’. Ibid., II, 48.

6 ‘For Plato it was ideas, for Jesus the kingdom of heaven, for Hölderlin Hellas, the very present times they lived in, for the Romantics it was the distant, the other, the as yet fulfilled or not yet fulfilled’. Gundolf, Caesar. Geschichte seines Ruhms [1924], reprinted in Caesar. Geschichte seines Ruhms (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1968), 251.

7 ‘Romanticism did not find fulfilment in great names and was not able to concentrate and give form to the essential features of its life. Only fragments of poetry and thought bear witness to it — and far beyond what it actually produced — as an encompassing and penetrating movement — like jetsam after a storm’. Gundolf, Beiträge zur Literatur- und Geistesgeschichte, ed. by Victor A. Schmitz und Fritz Martini, Veröffentlichungen der Deutschen Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung Darmstadt 54 (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1980), 85 (referred to subsequently as Beiträge).

8 ‘Given their way of seeing the world, the Romantics could not and would not seek the individual; they were only concerned with the development of personality, and that only to enhance their play and their multiform visions. In that respect they are the Counter-Renaissance and they call the Goethean ideal into question. They had a sense of being fragments, waves of a great vibration’. Ibid., 88.

9 ‘Of course in real poetry a classical principle of form found its final and ultimate expression in Goethe. Romanticism was unable to achieve concentrated form and has never gained established status’. Gundolf, Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist (Berlin: Bondi, 1920 [1911]), 322.

10 ‘His Hellas has nothing to do with a sentimental cult of ruins, or — as Haym would have us believe — with Romantic longing, that comes out of the void and supplants through dream what reality does not supply’. Gundolf, Dem lebendigen Geist, ed. by Dorothea Berger und Marga Frank, Veröffentlichungen der Deutschen Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung Darmstadt 27 (Heidelberg, Darmstadt: Lambert Schneider, 1962), 30.

11 ‘It is an essential characteristic of classical natures that instinct, genius and thought all work in one and the same direction. Their thinking is but the extension, made clear and conscious, of the dark life-stream gushing forth from their inward parts, but the exact and conscientious executor of their basic urge and its demands. Their thinking, not as with the Romantics, or as with mystics or musicians, has power to make rules or overthrow them, only of putting into action. With natures like these the utterances that give conscious form are but an accurate indication of processes in their dark centre and depths, the bright flame of their blaze, the logos of their eros. For logos and eros are then not necessarily opposites; they are only different degrees of brightness of the same state. For this classical frame of mind, which fascinates us ever again, as a norm in classical antiquity, Goethe in the new era is the greatest and surely the most obvious example’. Gundolf, Goethe (Berlin: Bondi, 1930 [1916]), 12f.

12 ‘Romanticism lived in a median realm between the eternal forces and the events of its day, in ‘culture’: a rank growth on the foundations laid by Goethe, Herder and Kant, but not taking root as they did. Historicism, which only sees the past, epigonism, which only furthers the past, are their inheritance, without their status and their fire, ever more given over to dead material and its empty forms’. Gundolf, George (Berlin: Bondi, 1930), 5.

13 ‘Movement’; ‘play’; ‘prefer everything that is wavering, floating, night, mystery and twilight’; ‘expansive’; ‘without borders’. Beiträge, 87, 88, 95.

14 Oskar Walzel, ‘Review of Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist’, Jahrbuch der deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft 48 (1912), 259–74.

15 ‘An individual’. Beiträge, 100.

16 ‘We have the right to see Romanticism in its entirety as one individual’. Beiträge, 88.

17 ‘Jacob Burckhardt and his “Reflections on History”’. Beiträge, 58–71.

18 ‘The inimitable Ranke’. Gundolf, Briefe. Neue Folge, ed. by Lothar Helbing and Claus Victor Bock (Amsterdam: Castrum Peregrini, 1965), 80.

19 ‘Basically, I am striving for nothing different from Scherer or Ranke: awareness of that which has once been’. Ibid., 221.

20 ‘The need to penetrate the material philosophically while rejecting philosophical method and speculation’. Beiträge, 59.

21 Ibid., 60.

22 ‘Everything systematic’. Ibid., 60.

23 Ibid., 64.

24 ‘The concentration of world history in heroes’. Ibid., 62.

25 ‘Great men’ are ‘the executors of a will that extends beyond them as individuals’. Ibid., 67.

26 ‘What is decisive, brings fruition, gives universal instruction’. Ibid., 68.

27 ‘We do not grasp Shakespeare’s works by way of his age; we grasp his age through his works.’ Gundolf, Shakespeare. Sein Wesen und Werk, 2 vols (Berlin: Bondi, 1928), I, 11.

28 ‘Historical paralysis’. Gundolf, Caesar im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, in Caesar, 252.

29 ‘A science that proclaims the soul’. Ibid.

30 ‘Positive Hellenic faith’. Gundolf, Dem lebendigen Geist, 36.

31 Beiträge, 85.

32 Ibid., 37.

33 Gundolf, George, 5, 10.

34 Such as Shakespeare-Rezeption. Die Diskussion um Shakespeare in Deutschland. 1. Ausgewählte Texte von 1741 bis 1788., ed. by Hansjürgen Blinn (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1982).

35 ‘Better at seeing people than solving problems’. Gundolf, Briefe, 220.

36 ‘It was my task to depict people and not ferments’. Wolfskehl-Gundolf, Briefwechsel, II, 46.

37 ‘A figure, one and indivisible’. Gundolf, Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist, 349.

38 ‘Fundamentally new experience’. Ibid., 353.

39 ‘Using the resources of the language released by Goethe’s experience and become word, and applying them to Shakespeare’s works’. Ibid.

40 First published as ‘Ludwig Tieck’ in Jahrbuch des Freien Deutschen Hochstifts (1929), 99–195, subsequently in Romantiker. Neue Folge (Berlin-Wilmersdorf: Heinrich Keller, 1929), 5–139. Cf. E. C. Stopp, ‘Wandlungen des Tieckbildes’, DVjs. 17 (1939), 252–76.

41 ‘Concentration of world history in heroes’.

42 See Roger Paulin, Ludwig Tieck: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), 239–59.

43 ‘True sense’; ‘action’. Cf. Eudo C. Mason, ‘Gundolf und Shakespeare’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 98 (1962), 110–77, esp. 123f. On Gundolf and Shakespeare cf. further Rudolf Sühnel, ‘Gundolfs Shakespeare. Rezeption-Übertragung-Deutung’, Euphorion, 75 (1981), 245–74.

44 Gundolf, Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist, 187f.

45 Beiträge, 349.

46 Ibid., 134.

47 The main points set out by Mason, ‘Gundolf und Shakespeare’, without parallels being drawn.

48 George-Gundolf, Briefwechsel, 259.

49 Cf. Shakespeare in deutscher Sprache. Neue Ausgabe in sechs Bänden, ed. and trans. by Friedrich Gundolf (Berlin: Bondi, 1922), I, 5, 7.

50 Cf. George-Gundolf, Briefwechsel, 184, 191, 275.

51 Gundolf, Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist, 353.

52 Wolsfkehl-Gundolf, Briefwechsel, I, 86.

53 ‘No self-possessed virago’; ‘accommodating, wise and strong companion’; ‘welcoming female presence’; ‘housewife and housekeeper’; ‘polite, gracious and charming host’; ‘calculating’; ‘possessed’. Gundolf, Shakespeare. Sein Wesen und Werk, II, 296. Paulin, Ludwig Tieck, 252f.

54 ‘Old and loose and lascivious’. August Wilhelm Schlegel, Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Littteratur, Kritische Ausgabe der Vorlesungen, IV, i, ed. by Stefan Knödler (Paderborn, etc.: Schöningh, 2018), 352.

55 ‘An out and out rascal’. Gundolf, Shakespeare. Sein Wesen und Werk, I, 296.

56 ‘Lightly and felicitously woven together that they seem to belong together and form a whole’. Schlegel, Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Littteratur, 325.

57 ‘A rhythmical balance of coherence, antagonism and confusion’. Gundolf, Shakespeare. Sein Wesen und Werk, I, 210. The same point is made by Gundolf in the discussion of most of the Comedies.

58 Mason, ‘Gundolf und Shakespeare’, 116f., 118f.

59 Cf. ibid., 125.

60 Cf. Paulin, Ludwig Tieck, 246f.

61 Gundolf, Shakespeare. Sein Wesen und Werk, I, 373.

62 As, for instance, in his assertion that Titus Andronicus contains all of Marlowe’s achievement. Ibid., I, 27.

63 Cf. Paulin, Ludwig Tieck, 245f.

64 Ibid.

65 ‘Universal spirit’. Cf. Mason, ‘Gundolf und Shakespeare’, 138.

66 Gundolf, Shakespeare. Sein Wesen und Werk, I, 79.

67 ‘The quintessential Elizabethan Renaissance dramatist’. Ibid.

68 Cf. Tieck’s Deutsches Theater (1817).

69 Gundolf, Andreas Gryphius (Heidelberg: Winter, 1927), 20.

70 Richard Alewyn, ‘Vorbarocker Klassizismus und griechische Tragödie. Analyse der “Antigone”-Übersetzung des Martin Opitz’, Neue Heidelberger Jahrbücher (1926), 3–63.

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