An Ethical Realism in the Prose of Gottfried Keller Michael Lipkin
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Ways of Living: An Ethical Realism in the Prose of Gottfried Keller Michael Lipkin Submitted in partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2018 ©2018 Michael Lipkin All rights reserved ABSTRACT Ways of Living: An Ethical Realism in the Prose of Gottfried Keller Michael Lipkin My dissertation, Ways of Living: An Ethical Realism in the Prose of Gottfried Keller, takes as its focus the extensive discourse in mid-nineteenth century German letters on what constitutes a properly “realist” work of literature. My study examines three major works by Gottfried Keller: Der grüne Heinrich, the Leute von Seldwyla cycle, and the political satire Martin Salander. Keller, I argue, is less interested in offering a comprehensive social portrait of his native Switzerland than he is in exploring contrasting ethics, or modes of disposition towards the world: resentment and affirmation, parsimoniousness and wastefulness, sensuality and renunciation. To this end, Keller uses the familiar structures of Realist prose, like the construction of characters as types, the extensive description of physical objects, or the use of narrative topoi like the marriage plot, to dramatize conflicts between various Lebensarten: self-sacrifice in service of an unattainable ideal or fleeting happiness in the here and now, for example. For Keller, then, the “objectivity” championed by the Realists is above all a way of directing the reader’s attention towards the crises of value underpinning the most unremarkable of people and the most mundane of occupations. In Keller’s prose, I conclude, Realism is less an aesthetic program than a way of comporting oneself, a survival mechanism by means of which the hard truths of life, above all the vanity of human endeavor and the painful renunciations demanded by the world of work, are poeticized in order to make them bearable. This page left intentionally blank. TABLE OF CONTENTS I. INTRODUCTION 1. Keller as Poetic Realist………………………………………………………1 2. Versittlichung: The Ethical Turn in Realism……………………………...15 3. Keller as Ethical Realist…………………………………………………….23 II. LEBENSARTEN: ETHICAL TYPOLOGY IN DER GRÜNE HEINRICH 1. Introdution…………………………………………………………………...32 2. “Zwei erklärte Atheisten”: A Typology of Ethics…………………………41 3. Ethical Typology as Structural Principle…………………………………..55 4. Typology and the Bildungsroman………………………………………….. 66 5. Conclusion……………………………………………………………………81 III. DER SCHAUPLATZ DER DINGE: THE ROLE OF DESCRIPTION IN DIE LEUTE VON SELDWYLA 1. Introduction…………………………………………………………………..84 2. Description as Socio-psychology…………………………………………….95 3. Sinnbilder ......................................................................................................109 4. Reinigung……………………………………………………………………118 5. “Unbewusstes Weben”……………………………………………………..131 6. Conclusion…………………………………………………………………..136 IV. EIN ÖFFENTLICHES SCHAUSPIEL: ZEITROMAN AS ETHICAL FORM 1. Introdution………………………………………………………………….139 2. Excelsior!: Zeitroman as Pedagogical Form…………………….………...147 3. “Jeder Mensch hat einen Ölgötzen: Failures of Pedagogy………………161 4. “Ein öffentliches Schauspiel”: Festspiel as Ideal and Critique………….176 5. “Ein kritischer Gesell”: Politics as Ethics of Renunciation……………...190 6. Conclusion…………………………………………………………………..198 V. CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………….201 Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………212 i Dedicated, with thanks, to Neil Christian Pages and Dorothea von Mücke ii I. Introduction 1. Keller as Poetic Realist In his 1927 review of the first published edition of Gottfried Keller’s collected works, Walter Benjamin observed that Keller occupied a curious place in the canon of German letters. The new-old truth that Keller is one of the three or four greatest prose authors is too old to interest a modern readership, wrote Benjamin, and too recent to oblige anyone to read him.1 Nearly a century later, the difficulty facing a scholar preparing a study of Gottfried Keller is very much the same as the one that faced Benjamin. Certainly, Keller’s status as a canonical author of German-language literature has been cemented. His Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe and Kleider machen Leute remain staples of the Gymnasium reading list; and the rest of his works have been read consistently since his death—Keller’s legacy even managed to survive the National Socialist period without the message of tolerance and liberalism in his texts being abridged or distorted. In Zürich, Berlin, and Munich, the cities where he lived and worked, his memory is preserved by street signs, stamps, and plaques bearing his name. The last decade alone has seen scores of articles, conferences, and omnibus collections of criticism on Keller’s work, a sign not only of its depth and complexity, but of the abiding loyalty it inspires in its readers. At the same time, the defining features of Keller’s work—its proud provincialism, its gentle irony, its skepticism of lofty philosophical speculation—have always prevented 1 “Wie dem nun sei—die neu-alte Wahrheit, die Keller unter die drei oder vier größten Prosaiker der deutschen Sprache aufnimmt, hat immer noch einen schweren Stand. Sie ist zu alt um die Leute zu interessierien, und zu neu um sie zu verpflichten.“ Benjamin, Walter. Erzählen. “Gottfried Keller.” Suhrkamp: 2007. p. 40. 1 him from attaining the highest rank in the pantheon of German writers. Theodor Adorno, in his remarks on the centennial of Heinrich Heine’s death, mentions the “utterly dismal” level of the prose written during what he dismissively refers to as “the epoch between Goethe and Nietzsche”—the era, in other words, of Keller and poetic Realism.2 The periods that bookend Keller’s time, that of Idealism and Romanticism on the one hand, and “the Modern” on the other, have always attracted Germanists and comparatists because of the extremely close relationship to speculative philosophy enjoyed by literature during those times, as though the latter, lacking in nobility, is only justified as an object of inquiry by association with the former. Realism, by contrast, has the ring of the philistine, the blithely unreflective. For Erich Auerbach, an admirer of Keller’s, the simple fact that Adalbert Stifter and Gustave Flaubert were contemporaries was definitive proof of the mediocrity of nineteenth century German letters. Even Keller’s appearance, W.G. Sebald observes, suggests a fundamental lack of seriousness in his work. With his pointy goatee and round spectacles, he seems more a provincial bureaucrat, the ink-stained holder of an insignificant public office, than an artist with penetrating insight into human existence.3 The difficulty, then, is why one ought to write about an author whom everyone is familiar, but in whom, because of his attachment to a little-loved period, no one expects to find the fertile ground for scholarly research afforded by a Hölderlin or a Kafka. As a result, recent scholarship has tended, largely though not exclusively, to soft- pedal Keller’s relationship to the Realist period. In his book Sprachbilder, published in the year 2000, Helmut Pfotenhauer observes that the overwhelming tendency of scholarship 2 “Das Ärgernis umgeht, wer sich auf den Prosaschriftsteller (Heine) beschränkt, dessen Rang, inmitten des durchweg trostlosen Niveaus der Epoche zwischen Goethe und Nietzsche, in die Augen springt.” Adorno, Theodor W. Noten zur Literatur. Suhrkamp, 2003. p. 72. 3 Sebald, W.G. Logis in einem Landhaus. Fischer Verlag: 1998. 2 on Realism in the previous years has been to attack the notion that an objective reality is represented in the works of the period. “Das Interesse der Realismus-Forcsung in den letzten Jahren richtete sich vonehmlich darauf,” writes Pfotenhauer, “die Gebrochenheit der in den einschlägigen Texten konstituierten ‘Wirklichkeit’ zu erweisen,” best represented by scholars like Ursula Amrein, Gerhard Neumann, and Christian Begemann. That tendency has become still stronger in the decade and a half since Pfotenhauer’s book. Many studies choose to side-step the question of representing reality by adopting a tighter thematic focus—Sabine Schneider, Ursula Amrain, Caroline von Loewenich, for example, on representations of the female figure and the role of the family4; Karl Wagner and Phillip Anjouri on Keller’s relationship to the natural sciences and other emerging modes of knowledge in the mid-nineteenth century5; Richard Ruppel, and Karl Pestalozzi on the themes of happiness and the good life in his work6; Thomas Binder and Alexander Honold on the role of affect and socialization.7 The complex Textgestaltung of Keller’s works, which were written, re-written, and then revised again by Keller later in life remains a perennial subject of inquiry for Keller scholars.8 Those scholars who, like Ernst Osterkamp 4Cf. Schneider, Sabine. Der grüne Heinrich neu gelesen. “Ikonen der Liebe. Frauenbilder.” Ed. Wolfram Groddeck. Zürich: Chronos Verlag, 2009. pp. 201-220; Amrein, Ursula. “Süße Frauenbilder zu erfinden, wie die bitter Erdie sie nicht hegt!” Inszenierte Autorschaft bei Gottfried Keller. Rede zum Herbsbott 1996. Fünfundsechzigster Jahresbericht. Gottfried Keller-Gesellschaft-Verlag, 1997. pp 3-24. von Loewenich, Caroline. Gottfried Keller: Frauenbild und Frauengestalten im erzahlerischen Werk. Würzburg: Königshausen u. Neumann, 200. 224. 5 Cf. Wagner, Karl. “ ‘Das Glück des Wissens’: Formen des Wissens und der Wissenschaft in Kellers Roman.” Der grüne Heinrich neu gelesen. Ed Wolfram Groddeck. Chronos,