THE ANNOUNCER: “Where he sleeps.”—I, the Announcer, will take up this sentence. And with it send this small society you have just been hearing to their rest. And now, I have a few things to say about Germany, where I collected these voices for you. For whatever Deputy Headmaster Moritz might say about the Gray Cloister School, these voices are not just from Berlin but also from Germany.42 But they didn’t know it, because Germany slept, and the lower the class of the inhabitant, the deeper the sleep. Germans still existed almost completely under the sign of manufacture, cottage industry, and agriculture: everything or almost everything they needed was produced locally. This gave rise to narrowness of horizon, psychological insularity, and intellectual inertia, but also to a warm intimacy and noble self-sufficiency. Three-quarters of the population lived in the country; most cities were not much more than large villages, rural cities, and big cities like Paris, London, or Rome didn’t yet exist. Further, there were no machines or only machines similar to tools, and that meant no exact, abundant, and inexpensive production of commodities and no light, fast, and extensive transportation. The unreliability of transport, international commerce, and political circumstances were offset by the great reliability of small proprietors and local commerce, based on the uniformity of the area of distribution, the lack of competition, and the uniformity of the means of production and consumer base. The human being of that time was asked to spend his whole life wool-gathering and fantasizing, just as today he is prevented from doing so. From these conditions arose the Classical Era of German literature. While others sweated and hustled — England panting after bags of gold and sacks of pepper, America on the verge of transforming itself into the desolate mega-trust it is today, France laying the political groundwork for the triumph of the bourgeoisie on the European continent — Germany slept an honest, healthy, refreshing sleep.
The following Voice of Romanticism should be spoken by the actor playing the Second Man of Letters.
THE VOICE OF ROMANTICISM: But what dreams it had in this sleep!
THE ANNOUNCER (after a pause): This voice is familiar to me.
THE VOICE OF ROMANTICISM: I should think so. While in the dense smoke of a Berlin coffeehouse the voice of Romanticism could reach you but dimly, now it should ring out more clearly.
THE ANNOUNCER: I would be glad to know your name.
THE VOICE OF ROMANTICISM: I imagine that you would be comfortable with Bernhardi, Hülsen, or Steffens, not to speak of Novalis and Ludwig Tieck.43 But the voice of Romanticism has no name.
THE ANNOUNCER: The voice of Romanticism…
THE VOICE OF ROMANTICISM:… comes from the enchanted horn on which Clemens Brentano44 blew, and from the impertinence with which Friedrich Schlegel offered his deepest discoveries, from the labyrinth of thoughts Novalis traced in his notebooks, from the laughter of Tieck’s comedies that terrified the petit-bourgeois, and from the darkness in which Bonaventura45 held his night watches. Therefore the voice of Romanticism has no name.
THE ANNOUNCER: It seems to me it just doesn’t want to spit out its name, this voice. It’s afraid to expose itself, and with good reason. I’d like to propose the name Jean Paul.46 This darling of German readers around 1800, the most overblown, lachrymose, undisciplined, and rudderless writer who has ever written a novel.
THE VOICE OF ROMANTICISM: That a poet should write pedagogy need not bespeak aimlessness.
THE ANNOUNCER: You are speaking of Levana.47 Listen to how Jean Paul describes a young boy. You will have to admit, he doesn’t have the stuff of an educator. He’s an incorrigible dreamer, nothing more.
The following text is read by the Announcer in an especially flat and uncomprehending manner up until the sound of the gong. After the gong the Second Man of Letters takes up the reading, expressively, though in afine monotone.
He burst into a mingling flood of tears at once of joy and sorrow, and the past and the future simultaneously stirred his heart. The sun with ever-increasing swiftness dropped down the heavens, and the more swiftly did he climb the mountain, the quicker to follow its flight with his eye. And there he looked down into the village of Maienthal, that glimmered among moist shadows … Then the earth, tuned by the Creator, rang with a thousand strings…48
The sound of a gong.
SECOND MAN OF LETTERS: “… the same harmony stirred the stream, divided into gold and gloom, the humming flower-cup, the peopled air, and the waving bush; the reddened east and reddened west stood stretched out like the two rose-taffeta wings of a harpsichord, and a tremulous sea gushed from the open heavens and the open earth …”49
HEINZMANN: This can’t be the place, Mr. Unger. They are reading aloud in there.
UNGER: I know my way around Leipzig, my dear Heinzmann. That’s the basement of Breitkopf’s. You can see the signboard with the titles of new arrivals.
HEINZMANN: You will not run across Breitkopf so early in the morning.
UNGER: Could be that he is himself already out after commissions. Then we’ll wait for him. Given the voices within, we are not the first.
SECOND MAN OF LETTERS (reading): “At his feet, and on this mountain …”50
UNGER: If we’re disturbing you, I beg your pardon.
SECOND MAN OF LETTERS: Mr. Unger, it is no surprise to see you in Leipzig, but it is a great pleasure.
UNGER: May I introduce a business friend, Mr. Heinzmann from Bern. Distinguished Scholar.
We hear the murmured exchange of greetings, compliments, etc.
UNGER: Are we disturbing you, my most esteemed sir? What were you reading?
SECOND MAN OF LETTERS: What I prefer to read in the morning, an evensong.
HEINZMANN: That doesn’t look at all like a prayer book.
SECOND MAN OF LETTERS: It is also more than a prayer book.
HEINZMANN: More?
SECOND MAN OF LETTERS: Hesperus, by Jean Paul. But hear for yourself:
At his feet, and on this mountain, lay, stretched like a crowned giant, like a transplanted spring-island, an English park. This mountain toward the south and the one toward the north met and formed a cradle in which the peaceful village rested, and over which the morning and the evening sun spun and spread out their golden veil. In five gleaming ponds trembled five duskier evening heavens, and every wave that leaped up painted itself to a ruby in the hovering fire of the sun. Two brooks waded, in shifting distances, darkened by roses and willows, over the long meadow-land, and a watering fire-wheel, like a pulsating heart, forced the sunset-reddened water through all the green flower-vases. Everywhere nodded flowers, those butterflies of the vegetable world, on every moss-grown brook-stone, from every tender stalk, round every window, a flower rocked on its fragrance, and scarlet lupines traced their blue and red veins over a garden without a hedge. A transparent wood of gold-green birches climbed, in the high grass over there, the sides of the northern mountain, on whose summit five tall fir-trees, as ruins of a prostrated forest, held their eyrie.51
A brief pause, following which the Second Man of Letters continues:
I am pleased to see that you have made yourselves comfortable.
UNGER: Yes, you have found a good corner. I think we can wait for Breitkopf here in peace. If it’s alright with you, Mr. Heinzmann.
HEINZMANN: Of course. What does not sit well with me is Jean Paul.
IFFLAND: You won’t want to say anything against Jean Paul … Do you know the epigraph of Hesperus? “The Earth is the cul-de-sac in the great city of God, — the camera obscura of inverted and contracted images from a fairer world, — the coast of God’s creation, — a vaporous halo around a better sun, — the numerator to a still invisible denominator, in fact, it is almost nothing at all.”52