Germany and being German

Grimms' German Dictionary
Grimms' German Dictionary

When Franz Schubert was born in 1797 he was a subject of the Holy Roman Emperor of the German Nation, but that Empire disappeared while he was still a child (in 1806). After the ‘Wars of Liberation’, in 1815 the Congress of Vienna established a new German Confederation.

These years corresponded with Schubert’s musical apprenticeship in the multi-cultural and multi-lingual city of Vienna. His main teacher was the Italian speaking Antonio Salieri, who encouraged the development of an Italianate style. He demanded that his pupil set the Italian texts of another Vienna resident, Metastasio, but there is evidence that the young Schubert soon wanted to break out of these restrictions and he insisted on setting German poems (mainly by Schiller).

We can only speculate about what the adjective ‘deutsch’ meant to the young Schubert. It clearly referred to his native language and to the literature which became so central to his life and his artistic development. In the context of the defeat of Napoleon and the French army, it referred to the German speaking forces that had united with Russia and England. Although there was no Deutschland, those fighters were deutsch. We have to be careful how we understand the word, though. Yes, they were German, but they were not Germans. It was an adjective not a noun, definitely not a nationality or a race.

In 1807 and 1808, at the high point of Napoleon’s control of Europe, after the abolition of the Holy Roman Empire, the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte gave a series of ‘Addresses to the German Nation’ (Reden an die deutsche Nation) even though there was no such nation. Fichte advocated the development of a distinct Germanic education as the basis of a fully independent spiritual and political sphere that no longer aped alien cultures. The title of the lectures was partly a deliberate echo of one of Martin Luther’s most important publications at the beginning of the Reformation, the 1520 tract ‘To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation’ (An den christlichen Adel deutscher Nation).

What Luther meant by ‘the German Nation’ was not very different from what Fichte was talking about. They were both primarily thinking about the ‘Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation’ (Heiliges Römisches Reich Deutscher Nation or, in Latin, Sacrum Imperium Romanum Nationis Germaniae). This formal title had only recently been established in Luther’s day. It was first officially used at the Imperial Diet of Regensburg in 1471. The phrase ‘of the German Nation’ was added to the previous title ‘Holy Roman Empire’ mainly because scholars had recently unearthed a copy of  Tacitus’ Germania (written in 98) and this was seen as helpful to those who wanted to emphasise the Germanic rather than the Roman nature of the Empire. Holy Roman Emperors were no longer crowned by Popes in Rome.

For Luther and his followers, being German was about not being Roman and not being subject to Roman rules and ideology. But there was an even more basic meaning to being ‘deutsch’, which we can hear in the verb he used to refer to his translation of the Bible: verdeutschen. He made the Biblical text deutsch. He Germaned it. He brought it down to earth, he made it familiar. He wanted the Bible to be accessible to anyone and he insisted that Latin translations made it alien and complex. (He gave many examples of this in his 1530 Open Letter on Translation, Ein Sendbrief von Dolmetschen). To speak ‘deutsch’ is to speak clearly and directly, to avoid circumlocution and complexity.

This hardly applied to Fichte’s use of the German language, though. Taking his cue from Kant, in the ‘Addresses to the German Nation’, Fichte constructed carefully balanced sentences whose elaborate sub-clauses were intended to reflect the need to consider all aspects of a topic before making a judgement on it. Here is an example of a single sentence from early on in the First Address:

Ich setze voraus solche deutsche Zuhörer, welche nicht etwa mit allem was sie sind, rein aufgehen in dem Gefühle des Schmerzes über den erlittenen Verlust, und in diesem Schmerze sich wohlgefallen, und an ihrer Untröstlichkeit sich weiden, und durch dieses Gefühl sich abzufinden gedenken mit der an sie ergehenden Anforderung zur Tat; sondern solche, die selbst über diesen gerechten Schmerz zu klarer Besonnenheit und Betrachtung sich schon erhoben haben, oder wenigstens fähig sind, sich dazu zu erheben.

I envisage that my audience will consist of the type of German people who, though possibly not with everything they truly are, have simply emerged from the feeling of pain over the losses they have suffered or who even take pleasure in this pain and put aside any idea that they might be inconsolable, using this feeling to dismiss any consequent demand calling them to action; rather I envisage an audience of those who have already risen above this justified pain and attained a clear level-headedness and willingness to reflect, or at the very least those who are capable of rising to this.

It is sentences like this that are all too easily now associated with ‘German philosophy’. Yes, it seems dense and far too long, but we should not lose sight of the intention. The aim was simply precision. In any case, the original audience was used to listening to long sermons and waiting for subordinate verbs at the end to appear.

As well as being a crucial period in the development of post-Kantian German philosophy, the years when there was no German ‘Nation’, ‘Empire’ or ‘Confederation’ (1806-1815) were also the years when two famous German brothers began one of the major projects that became central to later ideas of Germany. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm spent this time collecting traditional fairy stories and folk tales. The first edition of their Kinder- und Hausmärchen was published in 1812. Although it has now been shown that there was considerably more literary editing of these stories than was originally believed, the desire to build a Germanic culture based primarily on folk traditions was genuine enough. The contrast in style with contemporary German philosophy is stark.

How can anyone now think about German culture without Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty and Rapunzel? Even Cinderella turns out to be German (Aschenputel). The stories, rooted as they are in the forests and cottages of Bavaria and Thuringia, Saxony and the Rhineland, seem to have a more universal echo in the fears and dreams of people elsewhere. There is nothing exclusive about this cultural treasure. Although easily and frequently translated, there is no doubt that the stories are German.

Sitting somewhere between (or even spanning) the ‘popular culture’ of Grimms’ tales and the complexity of the post-Kantian philosophers (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel etc) is the giant figure of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose masterpiece Faust Part One was first published at the same time (1808). Goethe’s Faust is explicitly German. Most of the play is set in Leipzig, and the witches meet on the Brocken in the Harz Mountains. Doctor Faustus himself has elements of Paracelsus (Swiss, but a German-speaker) and Martin Luther himself (as he attempts to translate John’s Gospel). Gretchen is usually portrayed as a dirndl-wearing blue-eyed blonde. Yet nationality and what it is to be German play no part in the drama. The specific setting does not alienate readers or audiences from other places and cultures.

In Vienna on 19th October 1814, as delegates were assembling for the Congress that was to redraw the map of Europe after the Napoleonic Wars, a teenage composition pupil read one of the scenes of Faust Part One and decided to set the poem to music: Gretchen am Spinnrade (D 118). Franz Schubert, heir of the German musical tradition of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, created the Lied. There was still no Germany but this was surely something German.

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