Theodor Fontane
While some German novelists, for example Gustav Freytag in his novel about North German merchants, Soll und Haben (1855; Debit and Credit), did heed the economic circumstances of social development, German realism was not greatly concerned with this central theme of European realism. The novels of Theodor Fontane, however, owe much to Sir Walter Scott’s extensive use of conversation as a way of moving narrative forward and Gustave Flaubert’s methods of enabling the reader to enter the minds of his characters. Fontane’s novels of Berlin life—Irrungen, Wirrungen (1888; Entanglements), Frau Jenny Treibel (1892; Eng. trans. Jenny Treibel), and Effi Briest (1895; Eng. trans. Effi Briest)—are dazzling examples of social criticism and psychological observation. The tension between modern marriage and public life is depicted with a fine sense of irony. In Effi Briest, for example, a young woman who has imagined that marriage will fulfill her social ambitions is frustrated when she discovers that her husband, a Prussian official who is part of Otto von Bismarck’s inner circle, is constantly drawn away from domestic life by his political duties. Like the Bourgeois Realists, Fontane also depends on close description of detail and repeated images that acquire the significance of a leitmotiv; like the Bourgeois Realists, too, he imbues his works with a poignant sense of resignation in the face of forces too vast to counteract. A famous phrase in Effi Briest, repeatedly uttered by the heroine’s father—“Das ist ein zu weites Feld” (“That is too big a subject”)—epitomizes this spirit of capitulation. Der Stechlin (published posthumously in 1899; The Stechlin), the great novel of Fontane’s old age, mourns the decline of the aristocracy through the lens of a narrative about a single family that bears the same name as a lake. The continued existence of nature (i.e., the lake) is seen as a consolation for the prospect of the family’s demise. At the same time, Fontane’s novels also criticize excessive conservatism, as in the complex discussion in Effi Briest, a novel about adultery, as to whether the wronged husband is obliged by the code of honour of his class to challenge his rival to a duel even though considerable time has elapsed between the adulterous affair and its discovery. Similarly, in several of his novels Fontane criticizes the conservative restrictions on women’s education, which he condemns as superficial, riddled with gaps, and fraught with superstition. 19th-century drama
The tendency toward slowly unfolding plot that characterizes much 19th-century German literature was not especially conducive to the development of drama. Nonetheless, at least three dramatists from the period have found a place in the literary canon. Reacting against Weimar Classicism and aspiring to accede to the position that had been occupied by Goethe and Schiller, these playwrights of the 1820s to ’50s experimented with historical drama based variously on Greek, biblical, or German themes. The patriotic drama König Ottokars Glück und Ende (1825; King Ottocar: His Rise and Fall), by Franz Grillparzer, and Napoleon; oder, die hundert Tage (1831; “Napoleon; or, The Hundred Days”), by Christian Dietrich Grabbe, are examples of this genre. These works can be seen as precursors of an entire series of 20th-century history plays, beginning with those of Bertolt Brecht, in which political and social issues are explored through displacement into an earlier historical period. Continuing a tradition established largely by Lessing, the third important 19th-century dramatist is Christian Friedrich Hebbel, who wrote, among other plays, a bourgeois tragedy, Maria Magdalena (1844). Naturalism
In the last two decades of the 19th century, the influence of French realists and naturalists such as Flaubert, Honoré Balzac, Guy de Maupassant, and Émile Zola gave rise to a new concern for social problems, the life of the lower classes, and the driven nature of the human psyche. The two main centres of the German naturalist movement were Munich and Berlin, where its programmatic declarations were published in small periodicals. The Freie Bühne (“Free Stage”) in Berlin became the arena for new controversial plays presented only to private audiences in order to escape censorship. Arno Holz and Johannes Schlaf published three prose sketches under the title Papa Hamlet (1889), in which the characters’ actions are captured in minute, realistic detail. The technique was known as Sekundenstil (“second-by-second style”). The novella Bahnwärter Thiel (1888; Lineman Thiel), by Gerhart Hauptmann, explores the psychology of a railway-crossing guard who is driven to insanity and ultimately to murder by the death of his young son. Hauptmann’s dramas, most notably his play about the Silesian weavers and their futile rebellion, Die Weber (1892; The Weavers), with its emphasis on lower-class figures and their struggle for bare existence, are the best examples of the deterministic views of German naturalism. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1912. Fin de siècle movements Friedrich Nietzsche
Writing at the same time as the later realists and the naturalist writers but forming a bridge to German Modernism, Friedrich Nietzsche developed a philosophy that understood art as the result of a fundamental conflict between two opposing forces—the Apollonian, or the desire for Classical form and serenity, and the Dionysian, or the ecstatic and quasi-religious search for liberation from formal constraints. His Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (1872; The Birth of Tragedy) was a significant influence on 20th-century literature and aesthetic theory. Nietzsche’s later works combined cultural pessimism with a vitalistic philosophy that called for the development of the “superman,” or titanic personality, capable of providing a new and more forceful type of cultural leadership. Rejecting mediocrity, Nietzsche believed that the ideal personality was in a constant state of development, affirming its identity by continually enlarging its sphere of experience. Also sprach Zarathustra (1883–85; Thus Spoke Zarathustra) and Jenseits von Gut und Böse (1886; Beyond Good and Evil) proclaimed the new ideals. In these works, Nietzsche also questioned the value of truth and knowledge, espousing the view that “facts are precisely what there is not, only interpretations.” Nietzsche’s perspectivism, reflected in the composition of some of his works as an assemblage of aphorisms and essays, and his insistence that objectivity is a fiction provided an important basis for Modernist presentations of reality. Aestheticism
In the final decades of the 19th century the literary scene was divided between naturalism and its opposites, variously collected under terms such as Neoromanticism, Impressionism, Jugendstil, and Decadence. Aestheticism—the belief that the work of art need have no moral or political use beyond its existence as a beautiful object—may prove to be the most appropriate overarching term for this period. In a series of essays written between 1890 and 1904, the Austrian critic and playwright Hermann Bahr explained the unsettling effects of Impressionism, which appeared to dissolve the boundaries of objects and make even the perceiving subject little more than a fluctuating angle of vision. Hugo von Hofmannsthal presented a fictional analysis of the Impressionist philosophy in his influential essay Ein Brief (1902; “A Letter,” commonly known as “Chandos-Brief,” Eng. trans. The Lord Chandos Letter), a fictive missive from Lord Chandos to Sir Francis Bacon. In the Letter, Chandos describes an experience akin to sickness or paralysis. Language, he feels, has become a depleted and meaningless medium. He feels himself pulled into a whirlpool of words that have lost all coherence. At the end of the Letter, Chandos expresses his longing for a new language that has no words as such, a language “in which dumb things will speak to me.” Sometimes regarded as a personal testimony to the “crisis of language” that accompanied the Aestheticist movement, Ein Brief is in fact a diagnosis and critique of that crisis. It became a central document that initiated some of the most important experiments of German literary Modernism.