STEFFAN DAVIES

Geschichte Wallensteins: Ranke’s Problem of Narrative – and Schiller’s Solution?1

This essay examines a tension in Ranke’s writing of history between universal developments on the one hand and the individual historical phenomena which manifest such developments on the other. Ranke’s Geschichte Wallensteins (1869) is seen as an attempt to resolve this tension by narrating seventeenth-century German history through biography. The ambiguities woven in to the Wallenstein figure by Schiller, in his history of the Thirty Years’ War (1790-92) and drama Wallenstein (1800) are suggested as valuable precursors to Ranke’s narrative technique.

In 1813 a schoolboy at the prestigious boarding school in Schulpforta wrote the following, in a draft of the essay on Greek tragedy with which he would graduate from the school the following year:

Ein Dichter muß nach der Hauptidee seines Werkes den Charakter seines Helden modi- fizieren: auf ihm allein liegt die ganze Schuld der erzielten Wirkung: ja er darf sogar, wenn er geschichtliche Personen bearbeitet, ihren ganzen Charakter umändern. Schiller durfte seinen Wallenstein zu einer Höhe, zu einer Seelenhoheit erheben, die ihm die Geschichte niemals zugestanden hat, denn er war ohne poetisches Vorbild, das in aller Munde wäre: in diesem Falle hätte er es durchaus nicht wagen dürfen. – Aber dies war bei den Griechen nicht so. Homer war nicht nur in allen Händen, er war in aller Munde. Nahm nun der Dichter ein homerisches Sujet oder nur eine Fabel, bei der homerische Personen vorkamen, so konnte er durchaus ihren Charakter nicht ändern, höchstens nach seinem Zwecke modifizieren. (AWuN III, 78-79)

1 This article is based on work in my doctoral thesis on ‘The Wallenstein figure in German literature, culture and historiography, 1790-1920’ (University of Oxford, 2007); the argu- ments in this essay are elaborated more fully there. Ranke’s Geschichte Wallensteins is quoted from Leopold von Ranke, Geschichte Wallensteins (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1869 [Leipzig: Reprint-Verlag, 1999]), identified as GW; other texts by Ranke are quoted from Leopold von Ranke, Sämmtliche Werke, 54 vols (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1867- 90), identified as RSW. Leopold von Ranke, Aus Werk und Nachlaß, ed. by Walther Peter Fuchs and Theodor Schieder, 4 vols (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1964-75) is identified as AWuN. Texts by Schiller are quoted from Friedrich Schiller, Sämtliche Werke, ed. by Gerhard Fricke and Herbert G. Göpfert, 5 vols (Munich: Hanser, 1959), identified as SSW. The text of Schiller’s Wallenstein is quoted from SSW, vol. II, using the abbreviations Lager for Wallensteins Lager, Picc for Die Piccolomini and Tod for Wallensteins Tod. Translations of Schiller’s Wallenstein are from Friedrich Schiller, ‘The Robbers’ and ‘Wallenstein’, trans. by F.J. Lamport (London: Penguin, 1979); other translations are my own except where oth- erwise noted. 90 Steffan Davies

A poet has to modify the character of his hero according to the dominant idea of his work: he, and he alone, determines his work’s intended effect: indeed, if he is dealing with historical personalities, he can even go so far as to alter their characters com- pletely. Schiller could exalt his Wallenstein to a height and a majesty of spirit that history has never granted him, because there was no literary precursor to Schiller’s Wallenstein on everyone’s tongues: if that had been the case, he could not have ventured to do it. – But this was not the case for the Greeks. Homer was not only in everybody’s hands, but on everybody’s tongues too. If a poet now took a Homeric subject, or even just a plot in which Homeric characters appeared, he could not alter their characters at all; the very most he could do was adjust them according to his pur- pose. The schoolboy was one Leopold Ranke, and he describes Schiller’s historical drama Wallenstein, first performed in 1798-99 and published in 1800, in not one but two regards. First, Schiller promoted a historical figure to new great- ness and prominence. Albrecht von Wallenstein, Duke of Friedland, was not obscure: indeed, he was one of the foremost actors in the conflict that would remain Germany’s formative historical trauma in popular perception until the Second World War.2 Yet as Ranke observed, he was still sufficiently unused as a literary character for Schiller to interpret him freely. After Schiller on the other hand, Schiller’s drama immediately became the foremost point of refer- ence for subsequent writers; Schiller became a ‘Homer’ of Ranke’s descrip- tion too, leaving his own indelible mark on the figure. Wallenstein was born into a noble but not wealthy Bohemian family in 1583; by the mid-1620s, shrewd politics and two advantageous marriages had brought him land, riches and power.3 In 1625 he raised and took command of an independent Imperial army for Habsburg Emperor Ferdinand II; in 1627- 28 he was rewarded for his early victories with the duchy of Mecklenburg, confiscated by the Emperor from its Protestant, pro-Danish dukes. Yet re- sentment of this upstart was not long coming. His military strategy quickly won him enemies on his own side, and his opponents campaigned success- fully for his dismissal in 1630. He was recalled in 1631 after the Catholics were routed at Breitenfeld, but despite spectacular successes – the Swedish king, Gustav Adolf II, killed in November 1632 and the Swedes trounced at Steinau in October 1633 – opposition grew again. The terms on which Wallenstein had retaken the command had given him an unprecedented free hand in matters such as ceasefires and peace treaties, but his negotiations

2 On subsequent attitudes to the War, see The Thirty Years’ War, ed. by Geoffrey Parker, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 192-94, and Geoff Mortimer, Eyewitness Accounts of the Thirty Years War, 1618-48 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 1-2. 3 Accounts of Wallenstein’s life include Josef Polišenský and Josef Kollmann, Wallenstein. Feldherr des Dreißigjährigen Krieges, trans. by Herbert Langer (Cologne: Böhlau, 1997), and Hellmut Diwald, Wallenstein. Biographie (Frankfurt a.M.: Ullstein, 1987). In English, see Golo Mann, Wallenstein: His Life Narrated, trans. by Charles Kessler (London: Deutsch, 1976 [German original 1971]), and Francis Watson, Wallenstein: Soldier under Saturn (London: Chatto and Windus, 1938).