The Analyst of Manners, Money and Masks. August Lewald in the Vormärz
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1 The Analyst of Manners, Money and Masks. August Lewald in the Vormärz Submitted by Veronica Helen Butler to the University of Exeter as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in German in October 2013 This thesis is available for Library use on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. I certify that all material in this thesis which is not my own work has been identified and that no material has previously been submitted and approved for the award of a degree by this or any other University. (Signature)____________________________________________________ I would like to thank Professor Martina Lauster and Professor Gert Vonhoff for their stimulating supervision and unfailing support. 2 Abstract Writers of the 1830s and 1840s sought to interpret their changing society in an explosion of new forms, developing an all-inclusive aesthetic that saw writing as a direct expression of individual experience, without boundary between life and page and without hierarchy of genre or subject matter. Analyses of social types and behaviour proliferated in which two current preoccupations stood out: the materialist motivation of an industrialising society with an expanding middle class, and the degree of theatricality involved in manoevring for a place in that society. Often groundbreaking, the analyses of August Lewald (1792–1871) were informed by his broad experience which included commerce and the theatre, and for which he was renowned. Contemporary reviews acknowledge the innovativeness of his writing and his sure eye for key issues of the day. In the new conditions after 1848, however, his popularity soon vanished, and he has been largely overlooked since then. My thesis aims to demonstrate that such a strong representative of the period in both his life and works calls for reinstatement as significant writer and personality. Three of Lewald’s works have been selected to support this aim. After an Introduction which tries to place Lewald within the experimental context of the Vormärz, Chapters 1–3 will offer a close reading of each work, contextualised by reference to other works, contemporary reviews, and biographical detail where it seems relevant. Sketches from Album aus Paris exemplify Lewald’s early and influential innovativeness in their humorous scrutiny of social behaviour through observation of its external manifestations, in the style of French Physiologies. Memoiren eines Banquiers exploits fictionalised life-writing as a cover behind which to confront controversial issues around money, Jewish emancipation and prejudice. Theater-Roman plays with the metaphor of society as theatre, conveying the ultimately futile illusoriness of contemporary society’s values, and foreshadowing Lewald’s own increasing rejection of his Vormärz life- and writing style after 1848. My Conclusion claims for Lewald’s life and writing individuality and originality as well as qualities that make him exemplary of his time. It proposes, as a project among other topics for further research, that a new edition of his sketches in particular, enjoyable in their own right, would be a valuable contribution to knowledge of the Vormärz period. 3 List of Contents List of Illustrations Page 4 List of Abbreviations 5 Introduction 7 Chapter 1. Album aus Paris 32 1. ‘Der Boulevard’ 43 2. ‘Savoyarden’ 54 3. ‘Schicksale eines namenlosen Bühnendichters’ 60 4. Style and social analysis in Lewald’s sketches 71 Chapter 2. Memoiren eines Banquiers 77 1. Life writing as mask 77 2. Commerce 90 3. Jewish issues and their broader resonance 107 4. On- and off-stage acting 138 Chapter 3. Theater-Roman 142 1. Varieties of theatre governance in Theater-Roman as reflections of political and social models 145 2. Theatre, society and theatricality 159 3. Theater-Roman and experimentation i) The form of Theater-Roman 174 ii) Experimentation as adventure 199 4. Illusion 213 5. From Vormärz to Nachmärz 226 Conclusion 233 Bibliography 1. Nineteenth-century sources: 1.1 Works by August Lewald 248 1.2 Correspondence 251 1.3 Reviews of works by August Lewald 251 1.4 Other texts 252 1.5 Paintings and caricatures 259 2. Pre-nineteenth-century texts 260 3. Research publications 3.1 Printed texts 261 3.2 Websites 265 4 List of Illustrations i. August Lewald, engraving by Wenzel Pobuda, Munich, Deutsches Theatermuseum ([no date, artist unknown]) Page 6 ii. Carl Spitzweg (1808–1885), ‘Zeitungsleser im Hausgärtchen’ ([between 1848 and 1858]), Kaiserslautern, Museum Pfalzgalerie 55 iii. Carl Spitzweg, ‘Der arme Poet’ (1839), Munich, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Neue Pinakothek 195 iv. E. Hochdanz, pen drawing, in August Lewald, Theater-Roman, Vol. 1, opposite p. 265 198 v. E. Hochdanz, pen drawing, in August Lewald, Theater-Roman, frontispiece to Vol. 2 198 vi. Honoré Daumier, ‘Das Drama’ (‘Le Drame’) ([c. 1860]), Munich, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Neue Pinakothek 199 5 List of Abbreviations DHA Heinrich Heine, Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe der Werke (Düsseldorfer Heine Ausgabe), ed. by Manfred Windfuhr, 16 vols (Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe, 1973–97) GWB,DG Gutzkows Werke und Briefe. Kommentierte digitale Gesamtausgabe, ed. by Editionsprojekt Karl Gutzkow, <http://www.gutzkow.de> (Exeter, Berlin, 2000–) HSA Heinrich Heine, Säkularausgabe, Werke, Briefwechsel, Lebenszeugnisse, ed by Stiftung Weimarer Klassik and Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, 27 vols (Berlin, Paris: Akademie Verlag, 1970–) MEGA Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels, Gesamtausgabe, ed. by Günter Heyden (Berlin: Dietz,1975–) 6 This image has been removed by the author of this thesis for copyright reasons i. August Lewald, engraving by Wenzel Pobuda, ([no date, artist unknown]), Munich, Deutsches Theatermuseum. 7 Introduction Derjenige, welcher wahrhafte Uebung in der Wissenschaft des feinen gesellschaftlichen Benehmens erlangt hat, [ist] nur sehr schwer zu täuschen [...]. Er besitzt Fühlfäden, Sinne und Nerven von solcher reizbaren Beschaffenheit, daß er den Abenteuerer durch die dichteste Maske herausspürt. August Lewald, Das Buch der Gesellschaft. Für angehende Weltleute (1847).1 Introducing Das Buch der Gesellschaft. Für angehende Weltleute, a young people’s guide to the achievement of effective functioning in modern society, August Lewald refers to knowledge of refined social manners as a science, and implies that it is acquired through practical experience in observational skills. One becomes an adept social analyst not by applying theory but as a participant, by developing a living intelligence that enables the correct reading of appearances through finely attuned antennae, senses and nerves — physiologically, as one animal might get the measure of another, and also as an alert spectator interpreting the performances that constitute social behaviour. The assumption is that behaviour will be driven by ulterior motives of self- interest, whether in pursuit of money or status: the materialist ‘every man for himself’, in which detection of the adventurer — here implying the manipulative charlatan — is essential if one is to avoid exploitation and play one’s own cards to advantage. One must expect misleading or deceptive appearances and become expert at detecting what lies beneath surface phenomena, behind even the most cunning and impenetrable disguise. Lewald’s own Vormärz writings present just such analyses of contemporary manners, focusing on their materialist drive and concomitant element of performance — on the ubiquitous influence of money and prevalence of masks. 1 August Lewald, Das Buch der Gesellschaft. Für angehende Weltleute (Stuttgart: Müller, 1847), p. 5. 8 Concepts embodied in Lewald’s definition of social competence transfer more broadly to aesthetic ideas and writing of the 1830s and 1840s. The greater importance of engagement over theory informed a new aesthetic and generated forms of writing in which an immediacy from life to page — from experience to analysis — was paramount. The popular French Physiologies of the period presented studies of society as if it were a living body made up of numerous species capable of being analysed by observation of externals in quasi-scientific terms. These humorous sketches identifying and characterising social types were highly influential in Germany, and Lewald was in the vanguard of that influence. New approaches to writing grew out of Europe-wide upheaval in the decades following the 1789 French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, when a society in flux saw an expanding middle class striving to assert itself as established forms and beliefs were eroded and new were both sought and resisted. In Germany, the term Vormärz has tended to replace the designation Biedermeierzeit for the period, and to be framed variously by the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and the March events of the 1848 revolution, or by the two years of revolution, 1830 and 1848.2 In contrast to the resonance of stolid, home-grown respectability that attaches to Biedermeier culture, Vormärz literary culture — most notably from the decade that began with revolution and marked the end of the Goethezeit with Goethe’s death in 1832 — is associated with intense experimentation, an openness to new influences, and the explosion of new kinds of writing. Peter Stein refers to the period as ‘“Labor”-Zeit’, a time of reassessment of aesthetic values and a necessarily model-less search for forms of expression that felt more relevant. Enlightenment idealism and Romantic idealising seemed