In a radio play from 1932 Walter Benjamin addresses an interesting issue in the history of literature: ‘Was die Deutschen lasen während sie ihre Klassiker schrieben’ (What the Germans read while they were writing their classics).
1 W. Benjamin, ‘Was die Deutschen lasen während sie ihre Klassiker schrieben’, Rundfunkarbeiten. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, 9:1 (Frankfurt, 2017), pp. 7–19. In the second half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century, when Germany’s literary giants Goethe, Schiller and Kleist wrote their ‘classics’, Benjamin suggests, most readers were engaging with completely different reading materials. Almanacs, miscellanies of ephemeral verse and short narratives as well as sentimental and shocking bestseller novels were much closer to what Germans actually read than Goethe’s
Collected Works.The holdings of German literature we find in Norwegian book collections paint a similar picture. We have only six entries for Johann Wolfgang Goethe across all book collections, while we find eleven for Christian Fürchtegott Gellert with his sentimental novel and educational fables, as well as fourteen for Johann Gottwerth Müller with his breezy entertainment novels and nine for August Lafontaine with his edifyingly Protestant narratives. Goethe ties with contemporaries such as the novelists Sophie von La Roche and Christian Friedrich Sintenis and the dramatists Gottlieb Stephanie and August von Kotzebue. Christoph Martin Wieland fares better as a German classic still recognisable today with fifteen entries. However, thirteen of these entries come from the book collection of Christiania Cathedral School library, perhaps bespeaking the good taste of one of the librarians or of a donor more than any particular trends among readers. If eighteenth-century Germans were not reading their classics, neither were the Norwegians.
Around 25 per cent of books held in Norwegian book collections were originally written in German – a substantial share compared to 30 per cent originally in French, 11 per cent originally in English and 15 per cent originally in Danish. Books in French are dominated by plays, with 151 entries ranging from classics such as Racine, Molière and Corneille to fashionable sentimental dramas from the 1780s and 1790s. The novel is represented with 86 entries, from Fénélon’s Télémaque to Diderot’s Jacques le Fataliste, while Marmontel (see Nøding in this volume) and La Fontaine are most prominent in the story collections. It is noteworthy that the classics of the French eighteenth-century novel are under-represented with only four copies of Prévost, none of Marivaux’ Marianne (though several of his plays are featured), none of Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse and only one copy of Laclos’ Dangerous Liaisons in German translation.
As seen, only few of the titles in German would actually be recognised today by non-specialists as German literature from the eighteenth century. It appears that Norwegian readers preferred educational and religious works of fiction (novels and fables) written by theologians or parish priests, such as Christian Friedrich Sintenis or Johann Martin Miller. Sintenis, for example, can be found in Diurendahl’s lending library as well as in the libraries of Christiania Cathedral School and Christiania Military School. Johann Gottwerth Müller’s collection of entertainment novels, called Komische Romane aus den Papieren des Braunen Manns (in eight volumes), can be found in Diurendahl’s lending library as well as the Bergen reading society (in Danish translation). Gellert’s Fabeln are in Christiania, Trondheim and Bergen, in the library of the Royal Academy, as well as in the lending libraries and the collections of the reading societies.
A relatively broad selection of popular German female authors such as Caroline von Wolzogen, Benedikte Naubert, Charlotte von Ahlefeld and Friederike Helene Unger could be found in the collection of the reading society for foreign literature in Bergen. Sophie von La Roche was also present in Bergen as well as in the lending libraries in Christiania and Drammen. However, female authors are massively under-represented in Norwegian book collections in German as well as in other languages. In French, only Madame d’Aulnoy and Madame de Genlis can be found in multiple libraries; in English only Clara Reeve has that distinction. Christiania Cathedral School library has the greatest diversity of female authors in English, notably dramatists. Only Charlotta Biehl, a translator and significant cultural broker in eighteenth-century Denmark, has a relatively high number of entries in Danish across collections. Benjamin’s observation that German readers were attracted to popular literature rather than the ‘classics’ throws new light on better known accounts of gender bias in canon-formation. While Norwegian collections are indicative of the strong presence of popular literature, they are not representative of the importance of female authors in European letters.
The book collection of Bergen’s reading society for foreign-language literature makes an almost ideal case for Walter Benjamin’s argument. Goethe is represented with Ältere Schriften und Neue Schriften in this collection, Gotthold Ephrahim Lessing with two collections of his plays and a single copy of Nathan der Weise and Wieland with Sämtliche Werke. The only German ‘classic’ who goes against this trend is Friedrich Schiller. Bergen did not actually hold a copy of collected works for Schiller, but copies of his plays Die Räuber, Die Verschwörung des Fiesco and Don Carlos as well as his novella Der Geisterseher. The selection indicates a general interest in historical fiction in the book collection, as evidenced by entries such as Naubert’s novels Barbara Blomberg and Thekla von Thun, Lafontaine’s Rudolf von Werdenberg or Madame de Genlis’ Chevaliers du cygne along with non-fictional works of history (not recorded in the database). However, it appears that Schiller was not just kept on the shelves of the collection as a ‘classic’ but was actually read in the Bergen society for another reason, namely the link between the selection of his texts and a general interest in Gothic novels and novels about secret societies documented in the reading society’s catalogue.
A genre of popular literature particularly well represented in the Bergen reading society for foreign literature is the ‘Geheimbundroman’.
2 M. Voges, Aufklärung und Geheimnis. Untersuchungen zur Vermittlung von Literatur- und Sozialgeschichte am Beispiel der Aneignung des Geheimbundmaterials im Roman des späten 18. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen, 1987). The generic status of the
Geheimbundroman is under discussion, but it appears from contemporary reviews that readers perceived the novels as a coherent trend largely modelled on Schiller’s
Geisterseher. Like Schiller’s novella, these texts often included conspiracies, secret societies and supernatural challenges to Enlightenment epistemology.
3 See ibid., p. 298. Novels about knights and robbers, sometimes in the Gothic vein, also belong to it. Entries for the trend in Bergen include Christian August Vulpius’
Rinaldo Rinaldini, Benzel-Sternau’s
Kamillo Altiera, Henrich Zschokke’s
Kuno von Kyburg, Johann Christoph Unzer’s
Geschichte der Brüder des grünen Bundes, Friedrich Maximilian Klinger’s
Fausts Leben, Thaten und Höllenfahrt, as well as
Der Faust der Morgenländer, Christian Henrich Spiess’
Die Löwenritter and Friedrich August Grosse’s
Der Genius. We find related titles among the few works translated into German from other languages in the Bergen collection, in particular Ann Radcliffe’s
The Italian and Matthew Lewis’
The Monk. These novels were not translated into Danish until the early nineteenth century, when they saw massive popularity in the first decade of the century.
4 See H. Stangerup, Romanen i Danmark, p. 405.Additionally, the Bergen book collection also held non-fiction titles such as Eberhard David Hauber’s
Magische Bibliothek (= Biblioteca, acta et scripta magica), Justus Christian Hennings’
Von Geistern und Geistersehern, Ernst Keller’s
Grab des Aberglaubens and Francois Xavier Pagès’
Geheime Geschichte der Französischen Revolution. It might appear that the Bergen reading society for foreign-language literature was assembling a starter kit for founding secret societies. However, as has been pointed out by Koselleck and others, the
Geheimbundroman was particularly relevant for new configurations of politics and morals in the new German public sphere.
5 R. Koselleck, Kritik und Krise: Ein Beitrag zur Pathogenese der bürgerlichen Welt (Alber, 1988). Norway was moving towards its own nation state at the end of the eighteenth century, and arguably many resonances with German
Sturm und Drang, in particular through Schiller’s drama, play a role in why Schiller appears to be the German classic who is actually read by Norwegians.
Moreover, Huitfeldt-Kaas reports that the Christiania dramatic society performed Schiller’s
Räuber across several seasons in 1797/8 and 1798/9 with great success.
6 H. Huitfeldt-Kaas, Christiania Theaterhistorie, p. 172. The play features not only a band of robbers who undermine established authorities, but also Gothic elements like a father buried alive and a young woman in distress in a castle. The play was not officially performed in Copenhagen before 1817.
7 P. Hansen, Den danske Skueplads, vol. 1 (Copenhagen, [1889]), p. 531. However, the Norwegian attraction to Schiller might be less subversive than it appears: even though Schiller paints a dramatic image of power abuse, his protagonist Karl Moor comes to realise in the end that his deeds as a robber have pushed him so far out of society that he cannot return to take his rightful place, even if he manages to triumph over his adversary Franz Moor. He gives himself up to an old, impoverished man so that the latter can claim the prize on his head. Poetic justice cannot be achieved on the terms of the rebel in Schiller’s tragedy. Similarly, other texts in the Bergen collection bespeak not only the robber’s rebellion against the social and political order, but also their desire to reintegrate themselves into it. Vulpius’ Rinaldo Rinaldini, for example, wishes for ‘a return to the bosom of bourgeois society’.
8 C. A. Vulpius, Rinaldo Rinaldini, der Räuberhauptmann: Eine Romantische Geschichte (Berlin, 2016), p. 53: ‘eine Rückkehr in die Arme der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft’. Rather than instructions to rebellion, the texts in the Bergen collection can be seen as support for a much more diversified debate.
Jürgen Habermas chooses Goethe’s
Wilhelm Meister to illustrate how the new public sphere no longer depended on theatrical representativeness of the old regime but on private persons coming together in public to negotiate their interests. ‘In this sense Wilhelm Meister’s theatrical mission had to fail. It was out of step, as it were, with the bourgeois public sphere whose platform the theatre had meanwhile become.’
9 See J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, p. 14. Not individuals acting on stage, but dramatic societies and public debate around plays serve as the foundation of subjectivity and identity in bourgeois society. Norway’s citizens at the end of the eighteenth century clearly had got that message, and they deployed plays and narratives about secret societies in order to redraw the boundaries of a public debate that until 1814 had no distinct political status in its own right. While the dramatic societies created a public within the private sphere, the imagined secret societies represented in the German popular fiction in Bergen moved what is public interest into the private, secret sphere. Indeed, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister tracks a similar path when he joins the secret ‘Turmgesellschaft’. It appears, however, that such a development needs to be traced through Schiller and his lesser imitators rather than through Goethe. when it comes to Norwegian readers.