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Youth, Modernism, and the Deferral of Maturity Jan

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Youth, Modernism, and the Deferral of Maturity Jan Forever Young: Youth, Modernism, and the Deferral of Maturity Jan Küveler Submitted in partial fulfllment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2014 © 2014 Jan Küveler All rights reserved ABSTRACT Forever Young: Youth, Modernism, and the Deferral of Maturity Jan Küveler This dissertation is about adolescents in European literature between 1900 and the First World War who shy away from maturity. The authors discussed are Franz Kafa, James Joyce, Robert Musil, Georg Büchner, J.M. Barrie, Robert Walser, Rudyard Kipling and Witold Gombrowicz. The main argument is that the remark- able proliferation around 1900 of novels whose protagonists, by some means or other, avoid growing up is not due to a somewhat twisted afliation to the genre of the late and ultimately failed Bildungsroman, but rather to an underestimated branch of modernism. At frst glance, their strategy of retreat looks like a finching from societal responsibility, yet the opposite turns out to be true. Instead of repre- senting an early instance of the prolonged adolescence that has nowadays become proverbial, their recoiling from maturity entails a critique of the totalizing tenden- cies inherent to the ideals of Bildung and Enlightenment. Table of Contents Introduction: The Eternal Adolescent 1 Beyond the Bildungsroman: The Inward and Outward Trend of Literature 55 Georg Büchner: A Revolution in Disguise 84 Disquieting Imps: J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and Robert Walser’s Jakob von Gunten 135 “How Could Fools Get Tired”: Kafa and Kipling’s Far-fung Boys 208 “The Sniveling Brat Within Me”: Concluding with Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke 261 Bibliography 296 i Renate, Gerd, Tim und Theresa, die mich die ganze Zeit begleitet haben ii Introduction: The Eternal Adolescent Father: “How long a time you’ve taken to grow up!” “‘So you’ve been lying in wait for me!’, cried Georg.” Franz Kafa, “The Judgment”¹ Conventional wisdom has it that for most people the period of youth is rife with complications and contradictions. That is certainly true for the youths populating this dissertation. Since they are literary characters, however, their capriciousness, delusions of grandeur and occasional despair are mainly benefcial—if not for themselves, then for the reader. They ofer, albeit tongue-in-cheek and indirectly, perspective in a no less complicated time, roughly the frst decade of the twentieth century, epitome of modernity, whose name already suggests an obsession with anything that is not old—in those years, the querelle des anciens et des modernes is leaning toward one side. Of course, the cliché of youth is wrong in supposing an internal, unchanging essence where there is in fact a mercurial thing shot through with historical trans- formation. The experiences of the children of the European bourgeoisie at the beginning of the century difered tremendously from those of their parents, let alone those of their grandparents. In a survey of the situation of German youth around 1900, the historian Thomas Nipperdey mentions the patriarchal and au- thoritarian imprint that limited children’s spontaneity and trust in their parents. In a climate of “emotional asceticism” sexuality was taboo.² School, as memorable ¹ Franz Kafa, Selected Short Stories (New York, NY: Schocken, 1993 [1936]) 17. ² Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte 1866–1918 (München: C.H. Beck, 1990) 117. 1 scenes from Joyce and Musil illustrate, was no less—in the arena of the classroom, presided over by the teacher—a space of rigid discipline and— behind drawn cur- tains, played out among alleged equals—of frequently cruel games of domination. In a remarkable essay on rebellious youth in Hobsbawm’s long nineteenth century the Italian historian Sergio Luzzato points out that with the end of the an- cien régime and the rise of the bourgeoisie throughout Europe the traditional role of youth—“a culturally recognizable role and a factor in social cohesion”³— under- went a tremendous change. It was no accident, he writes, that reformist groups as diferent as the Masonic lodges of the Carbonari sects, the Saint-Simonian church or the so-called Icariens, a group of early socialists determined to put into practice the idea of a communist society as described in the utopian novel Voyage en Iacarie (1840) by Étienne Cabet, were united in their concerns “with fnding an associative formula that could reconcile the egalitarian aspirations contained in the idea of fraternity with the hierarchical order guaranteed by the recognition of paternity” (175). Throughout the century, this idea of fraternity at odds with paternity in- spired protests of young workers and intellectuals—on the barricades in Paris in the July of 1830, immortalized by Delacroix, of the Russian Decemberists in the 1860s, whom Dostoevsky was associated with, of the artists and writers standing up for Alfred Dreyfus in the 1890s and of the German Wandervögel who, just afer ³ Sergio Luzzato, “Young Rebels and Revolutionaries, 1789–1917,” in A History of Young Peo- ple in the West, ed. by Giovanni Levi et al., vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997) 174. 2 1900, in Luzatto’s words “attacked the tranquil Wilhelmine bourgeoisie and its la- bored certainties” (174). And they, in turn, inspired fear as well. In order to deal with this fear—no matter how real or fantasized—the pater- nal authorities, frst of all the representatives of the nation states, concocted what Luzzato calls “a kind of delaying tactic,” designed to postpone “the moment when young men could assume political and social responsibilities” (175). These measures comprised raising the voting age, the prolongation of schooling and the invention of organizations that were either outright militant, such as the Deutscher Wehrverein (German Army Club), or only latently so such as the Pfadfnder in Ger- many and the Boy Scouts in England. They were designed to put the amorphous time between the end of mandatory education and the beginning of military ser- vice to disciplinary use. The activities ranged from so-called beer trips, visits to famous battle felds and patriotic tours to war memorials on one side to recreation- al outings and outdoor games on the other. The militant Jungdeutschland-Bund (Union of Young Germany), for example, was founded in 1911 by feld marshal Wilhelm Leopold Colmar von der Goltz. As early as 1883, he had published the pamphlet Das Volk in Wafen (The Armed People), in which he emphasized the role of youth. It was the guarantor of national strength, Goltz said, and characterized by its readiness for action and willingness to take risks, because “it is only youth that easily parts with life.”⁴ Even though these activities were not mandatory, sig- ⁴ Andreas Gestrich, “‘Leicht trennt sich nur die Jugend vom Leben.’ Jugendliche im Ersten Weltkrieg,” in Der Tod als Maschinist: Der industrialisierte Krieg, 1914-1918, ed. by Rolf Spilker et al. (Bramsche: Rasch, 1998) 33. 3 nifcant numbers of a generational cohort took part in them, greatly infuencing the general atmosphere.⁵ In spite of the rigidity and hierarchies of the Scout movement, the regular outings—which along with rules of conduct, a downright code of honor, formed the center of the appeal to its members—were experienced as liberating and, par- ticularly in Germany, even as potentially critical of the state, with its association of asphyxiating bureaucracy, necessarily an indoor activity. More than half a century earlier, Heinrich Heine’s contemporary Ludwig Börne had summed up the corre- sponding sentiment that now gave way to a putatively unpolitical cult of hardening one’s body in nature, poised with an unfinching morale, in a nutshell: “It is be- cause every man is born a Roman that bourgeois society seeks to de-Romanize him.”⁶ The Boy Scouts saw themselves as the vanguard of re-Romanization. ⁵ By 1914, in only three years, the Jungdeutschland-Bund counted 680,000 members. See Wolfgang Benz, Handbuch des Antisemitismus: Judenfeindschaf in Geschichte und Gegenwart (München: Saur, 2011) 345. In England, the frst Scout rally, held in 1909 at The Crystal Palace in London, attracted 10,000 boys and a number of girls. By the time of the frst census in 1910, the movement counted over 100,000 members. By 1918, its numbers had risen to 300,000, and had reached the million mark before the end of the twenties. The constituitve book by Boy Scouts founder Robert Baden-Powell, called Scouting for Boys, is now the fourth-bestselling title of all time. Scouting History. http://www.davenhamscouts.org.uk/scouting_history.htm. March 23, 2014. ⁶ Ludwig Börne, Gesammelte Schrifen (Hamburg: Hofmann und Campe, 1862) 63. Cited in Luzzato, 176. 4 It bespeaks the complicated politics of youth at the time that Börne’s anger with the perceived quenching of youthful energy in the service of a liberal society⁷ through an anxious reactionary state, expressed by means of a martial metaphor, reverberated, two generations later, in an embrace of proto-military organizations for the sake of personal freedom. Luzzato writes, resolutely: In the end, the pedagogical eforts of two generations of educators would have the desired efect: the youth rebellion of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was diferent from what had preceded it, aiming to serve the interests of the nation rather than yearning for a revolutionary transformation of society. That is why it es- caped the control of the socialist parties even more than that of bourgeois organizations.⁸ This is an attempt at explaining the astonishing⁹ enthusiasm of war that gripped the vast majority of young Europeans in the years before and at least for some time afer 28 July 1914, one month afer the Yugoslav nationalist Gavrilo Princip had as- sassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo.¹⁰ A recent study by ⁷ Börne (1786–1837), a publicist and critic, was actively engaged in furthering democratic ideals in times of Restauration.
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