The Representation of Contemporary History in Ludwig Börne, Heinrich Heine, and Georg Büchner
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Understanding the Present: The Representation of Contemporary History in Ludwig Börne, Heinrich Heine, and Georg Büchner Michael Swellander Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2019 © 2018 Michael Swellander All rights reserved ABSTRACT Understanding the Present: The Representation of Contemporary History in Ludwig Börne, Heinrich Heine, and Georg Büchner Michael Swellander Understanding the Present examines the thematization of the historical present in nineteenth-century German literary texts. In theorizations of political literature, such as Jean- Paul Sartre’s writings on “committed literature,” an emphatic concept of the present is a given. Of course, the present is a notoriously elusive temporality. The texts discussed in this dissertation, rather than focusing on accurate sociological representations of the present or an intensive rhetorical engagement in its political discourse, interrogate how the present can be evoked in literature in the first place. Understanding the Present discusses the forms privileged by certain authors in the representation of the present – prose, periodicals, drama – as well as the paradoxes such approaches posed. Rather than discussing these texts in terms of “operative literature” or “committed literature,” which has been a trend in scholarship since the 1960s, this dissertation approaches the nineteenth century from the perspective of so-called Gegenwartsliteratur. It does not claim the successful or unsuccessful political intervention of these texts, but rather shows how their authors imagined a literary intervention in the political present could occur at all. Chapter one shows Ludwig Börne’s popular magazine Die Wage: Eine Zeitschrift für Bürgerleben, Wissenschaft und Kunst, not only as surreptitiously carrying barbs against state- sanctioned censorship, as is most common in studies of the periodical, but as following a program of political historiography. Börne’s text is therefore subversive at a structural level and presents a poetics of representing the present. Chapter two shows how Heinrich Heine used the republication of his political journalism to reflect on the essential dynamic of understanding the present whereby one can only comprehend contemporary events with reference to the past and future. Georg Büchner’s drama, Dantons Tod, the subject of chapter three, presents a paradox similar to Heine’s, but through a little observed aspect of his citational practice, which I call “internal citation.” By showing his characters wittingly and unwittingly quoting each other in the play and repeating certain gestures, Büchner draws out ambiguities of authorship in political discourse and raises important questions about the experience of the present. Together, these three texts contribute to the study of political literature by interrogating the central notion of the emphatic present in it. This page is intentionally left blank. TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments iii Dedication iv Introduction 1 Gegenwartsliteratur 12 Young Germany’s Representation of the Present and Embrace of Ephemerality 17 Epigonentum and the Turn from Philosophy 23 Documentary Authenticity and Literary Form 28 Chapter I All Roads Lead to Politics: Ludwig Börne’s Associative Journalism 38 Introduction 38 Part One. “Ein Tagebuch der Zeit“: The Historiographical Program of Die Wage 52 Zeitschriftsteller. A Periodical Writer and Writer of the Times 57 Originalschriftsteller, or the Art of Free-Associating One’s Way to Politics 61 Part Two. The Actuality of Börne’s Theater Criticism 69 Urspruch: Börne’s Unwilling Collaborator 75 Conclusion 85 Chapter II Französische Zustände, or Heinrich Heine’s Book of Old News 89 Introduction 89 Part One. Heine’s Elevated Style: Heine’s Status as a Poet in Contemporaneous Critiques of Französische Zustände 93 Press Freedom and Journalistic Objectivity in Nineteenth-Century Germany 99 Part Two. “Wer ist denn der große Dichter, der dies alles erfindet?” Heine’s “States of Affairs” and “Private Feelings” 102 “Conditions” (Zustände) 103 “Private Feelings” (Privatgefühle) 109 i Part Three. “Das ist ein Höllenzwang.” The Book Edition of Französische Zustände. 120 Chapter III “Nicht heller sehen”: Internal Citation in Dantons Tod 137 Introduction 137 Part One. Modes of Citation in Dantons Tod 149 Internal Citation 154 “Erbarmen.” The Disputed Authorship of a term 158 Part Two. “Da! Dahin!” The Motif of Pointing in Dantons Tod 167 Conclusion 181 Conclusion 183 Bibliography 189 ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank first of all the German Department at Columbia for the support it has provided my studies by being my intellectual home the past seven years. I am grateful to my dissertation advisers, Andreas Huyssen, Dorothea von Mücke, and Oliver Simons, who have read and commented on my dissertation at every stage of its development. Their guidance in assembling this text has been invaluable. Alisa Solomon from Columbia’s Journalism and Department and Willi Goetschel from The University of Toronto served on my defense committee and I am grateful for the comments they made to help me with my final revisions. Harro Müller very generously read my chapter on Georg Büchner and gave me helpful suggestions regarding my presentation of citational practices. I also thank the graduate students who participated in the German Department’s dissertation colloquia, where I presented excerpts of my work. Their interest in what I was writing motivated me to continue this project. In addition, I want to thank Victoria Campbell, Alyssa Greene, Vincent Hessling, Ross Shields, Max Shmookler, and Neil Ziolkowski. I have been grateful for their intellectual camaraderie over the past seven years, but most of all, I am grateful for their friendship. iii To my parents. iv INTRODUCTION The present seemed amorphous in the early days of post-Napoleonic Europe, being at once burdened by the legacy of revolutionary history and on the verge of radical political and aesthetic developments. In his 1836 novel, The Confession of a Child of the Century, Alfred de Musset described this period as a post-heroic moment that followed the successive “wounds” of 1793 – the beginning of the so-called Reign of Terror in France that undid the revolutionary movement – and Napoleon’s defeat by the Holy Alliance in 1814 (de Musset 19).1 According to Musset’s protagonist Octave (a name suggesting his position at a historical interval with its reference to musical scales), the generation coming of age in the period of restoration had been raised to regard its highest ideals as futile: the revolution had promised liberté, égalité, fraternité ou la mort, and death and disappointment had won out; Napoleon, the “one man [who] was truly alive in Europe,” gave purpose to the life of his subjects, despite that purpose’s being to shed their blood in foreign lands for the expansion of the French empire (ibid. 6). The youngest generation, “ardent, whey-faced, and morbidly sensitive” was stuck in a historical moment that had inherited all the disappointments of a formerly great age and that could only glimpse the faintest sign of a better future: The life that was offered to the young was made up of three elements. Behind them lay the past, now destroyed and gone forever, but still dancing on the ruins and the fossils of centuries of absolute monarchy. Before them lay the dawn of an immense horizon, the first glimmerings of the future. And between these two worlds was something resembling the Ocean which separates the old continent from young America, something vague and elusive, a heaving sea of many shipwrecks traversed at intervals by a distant white sail or a ship huffing with the heavy breath of steam, in short, the present century which separates the past from the future, which is no longer one nor yet the other but is simultaneously both; and being in it we do not know, with every step we take, if we are stepping out on the seeds of the new or the rubble of the old (ibid. 9-10). 1 De Musset, Alfred. The Confession of a Child of the Century. Translated by David Coward, Penguin Books, 2012. 1 While the future offered faint glimmerings of a new day, the past was in ruins and provided no guide to it. The youngest generation in Europe found it difficult to be hopeful for the newness of the future because of the oceanic, formless present across which they first had to persevere. The present was also a fraught subject in restoration Germany, where the French Revolution and Napoleonic occupation had left a conflicted political and aesthetic legacy. The present, as we know, can be a distracting place. Following the French Revolution, Ingrid Oesterle writes, Goethe, Schiller, and other proponents of German classicism began to recognize the present as “beängstigend, friedlos, aktualitäts- und neuigkeitsversessen und dadurch beschränkt auf das unmittelbare Heute, ohne Sinn für ein dem Zugriff der Zeit Entzogenes” (Oesterle 94).2 The problem had to do in part with the various media of representing the present. Regulated by an increasingly standardized calendar and clock time, the present fixed one into a pattern of superficial attention to the detriment of sustained meditation. Such concentration, this characterization suggests, was only possible if one could pull away from the day’s chatter. One thinks of contemporary anxiety around the effect of social media or web content in general on concentration; how will the future of thought look if the jittery temporality of one’s newsfeed continues to intrude on the sustained attention required to read literature, philosophy, or just follow one’s own train of thought? Escaping the pull of the present’s distracting conflicts was key for Goethe and Schiller to the cultivation of freedom, humanity, and art (ibid.). The writing of those who attempted to engage with the present on its own distracting terms, who did not 2 “[…] Frightening, without peace, intent on daily relevance and novelty, and thereby limited to the immediate present, without a sense for accessing timelessness.” Oesterle, Ingrid.