Genius, Power and Magic

A Cultural History of Germany from Goethe to Wagner

Roderick Cavaliero

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781780764009
• eBook ISBN: 9780857733283
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: European Art

Before unification, Germany was a loose collection of variously sovereign principalities, nurtured on deep thought, fine music and hard rye bread. It was known across Europe for the plentiful supply of consorts to be found among its abundant royalty, but the language and culture was largely incomprehensible to those outside its lands. In the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries- between the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648 and unification under Bismarck in 1871 - Germany became the land of philosophers, poets, writers and composers. This particularly German cultural movement was able to survive the avalanche of Napoleonic conquest and exploitation and its impact was gradually felt far beyond Germany's borders. In this book, Roderick Cavaliero provides a fascinating overview of Germany's cultural zenith in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He considers the work of Germany's own artistic exports - the literature of Goethe and Grimm, the music of Wagner, Schumann, Mendelssohn and Bach and the philosophy of Schiller and Kant - as well as the impact of Germany on foreign visitors from Coleridge to Thackeray and from Byron to Disraeli.
Providing a comprehensive and highly-readable account of Germany's cultural life from Frederick the Great to Bismarck, 'Genius, Power and Magic' is fascinating reading for anyone interested in European history and cultural history.

CHAPTER ONE

Fitzboodle in Pumpernickel

Thackeray goes to Learn German

The prince did not inhabit his capital but imitating in
every respect the ceremonial of the court of Versailles,
built himself a magnificent palace and a superb aristocratic town,
inhabited entirely by his nobles and the officers of his sumptuous court.

(W. M. Thackeray, Barry Lyndon, chapter x)

Pray fag at your German. If you have enjoyment of old ways,
habits, customs and ceremonies, look to court life.

(George Meredith, The Adventures of Harry Richmond, chapter 22)

IT WAS SOME years after the Battle of Waterloo that a small party, made up of Major Dobbin, Amelia Osborne, née Sedley, young George Osborne then in his teens and his uncle, Joseph Sedley, the ex-Collector of Bogglywallah, India, set out for a tour of Europe. The Channel packet was full of rosy children, nursemaids and pink-bonneted ladies and gentlemen in travelling caps and linen suits, for this was the annual invasion of the watering places of Europe. They were bound for Rotterdam, after which the party transferred to a steamer that took them down the Rhine to Cologne. They luxuriated in the pleasant Rhenish gardens, among the purple-clad, castle-crested mountains, the old towns and their quaint, protective ramparts, listening to the jingling bells of the lowing cattle returning from sweet pastures. The ex-Collector was gratified that in the daily gazette he had been promoted to Herr Graf Lord von Sedley. Everything was idyllic.

During their journey, they went often,

to those, snug, unassuming dear old operas in the German towns, where the noblesse sits and cries and knits stockings on the one side, over against the bourgeoisie on the other, and His Transparency the Duke and his Transparent family, all very fat and good-natured … occupy the great box in the middle and the pit is full of the most elegant, slim-waisted officers with straw-coloured mustachios.

At last they reached a comfortable little town, the seat of the Duke of Pumpernickel. It had a good hotel and a better table where the young George Osborne tucked into lavish quantities of ‘schinken and braten and kartoffeln, cranberry jam and salad and pudding and roast meats and sweetmeats’.¹

They were in the realm of His Transparency Duke Victor Aurelius XVII, sovereign of a dukedom some ten miles in breadth, bordered on one side by Prussia and on the other by the river Pump and the territory of the Prince of Potzenthal. The Duchy of Pumpernickel had its own army, with a rich and numerous staff of officers and few men, who spent much of their time ‘marching in Turkish dresses with rouge on and wooden scimitars, or as Roman warriors with ophicleides² and trombones, or playing to the café society in the Aurelius Platz’. The Duchy had diplomatic representatives from both France and Britain; the latter, the British chargé d’affaires, Lord Tapeworm, succeeded in persuading the party to linger some months in such a delightful spot. Joseph (Jos) Sedley, having persuaded Major Dobbin to bring his ceremonial uniform, donned his East India Company court dress for the inevitable honour of being presented to His Transparency, after which all the court ladies called on the Sedley caravan. An earlier duke, ‘a perfect wonder of licentious elegance’³ had attempted to build his Versailles but ran out of money; the gardens however had impressive fountains which spouted water and made dreadful groans from their lead Tritons – on feast days only – to which all were invited. To pay for the palace and gardens, everyone had been ennobled for a fee. Pumpernickel was the very model of a modern state. It had a constitution and a Chamber that may have been elected or it may not, but it did not matter as it never met. The theatre, however, was open twice a week, and there were receptions and salons practically every other night so that a man’s life was a perfect round of pleasure.

Great power rivalry provided a certain spice to quiet and unpretending Pumpernickel, the chargés of France and Britain championing one or other of the divas of the opera. Tapeworm espoused the sweet little Mme Lederlung, his rival the greater singing range of Mme Strumpff, who had three more notes. But she was middle aged and so stout that in Bellini’s La Sonnambula she had difficulty in sleepwalking out of her window across a narrow mill plank, which creaked and trembled under her weight. Mr Titmarsh, visiting at the same time as the Sedleys, thought that the hero was lucky not to be suffocated by La Sonnambula’s final embrace but, then, partisan politics were no judges of voice.

A royal wedding took place during the stay of the Sedleys, between the Hereditary Prince of Pumpernickel and the Princess Amelia of Humbourg-Schlippenschlop, to which all the neighbouring princes and grandees were invited. Bushels of each prince’s noble orders of chivalry were exchanged, the French chargé appearing covered in ribbons like a prize carthorse – at which sight Lord Tapeworm was grateful for the royal edict that members of the British diplomatic corps might not accept any foreign chivalric decorations without their sovereign’s express licence.⁴ The fountains ran with sour wine or beer, there were contests for sausages suspended from slippery poles, and gaming booths were erected for all those ready to lose money, in which the amiable Jos was to cover the bets of a domino-masked Becky Sharp.

* * *

William Makepeace Thackeray, alias Mr Titmarsh, actually arrived in Weimar in September 1830, with the intention of learning some German in case he decided to become a member of the foreign service. At the same time, George Savage Fitzboodle of the estate of Boodle, held in the Boodle family since the reign of King Henry II, arrived in his travels through Germany at the Grand Duchy of Kalbsbraten-Pumpernickel. George Fitzboodle, despite his boasted heritage, was an indigent second son, who had flunked out of Cambridge, been persuaded to resign his commission in the army, and was now in need of an affluent wife. He had an eye for pretty if buxom girls but his appetite for tobacco had so far successfully nauseated any likely spouses. The Grand Duke himself had been present – indeed accidentally knocked down – in the haste of Fitzboodle’s escape from the reception that was to announce the fulfilment of his vow to give up tobacco for six months, whereafter his affianced bride-to-be, Mary McAlister, would announce their betrothal. The reception had ended dramatically with the discovery that Fitzboodle had smoked a cheroot that very morning.

The Grand Duke’s father had, as Grand Duke of Kalbsbraten-Pumpernickel, married his cousin the Princess of Saxe-Pumpernickel, so that Duke Philibert Sigismund Emanuel Maria now ruled a city of 2,000 people from a palace which would accommodate twice that number, with an army headed by a General, two major-Generals and 64 officers, all Knights Grand Cross of the ancient Order of the Potato (Kartoffel) (as indeed was almost everyone else in his dominions.) Most of the foot soldiers had been cut to pieces at Waterloo.

George Fitzboodle could not resist the pleasures of a court where the Grand Duchess numbered so many beauties among her maids of honour. He fell wildly in love with two in rapid succession, first the daughter of the Herr Oberhof und Bau-Inspector of the Duchy, and second the muse, the Corinne of Kalbsbraten-Pumpernickel, Ottilia von Schlippenschlop. Neither beauty was either slender or ethereal, this not being a physical characteristic of the Pumpernickel ladies. Dorothea, the daughter of the Herr Bau-Inspector was ‘of the earth earthy and must have weighed ten stone four or five pounds if she weighed an ounce’. The first fell from grace at a ball while dancing the waltz with Fitzboodle, collapsing in a heap of arms legs and bountiful flesh to the fury of her parents and the amusement of the men who thought Fitzboodle far too pleased with himself. His physical and Platonic attraction for Ottilia was dimmed first by the gradual conviction that she ate far too much and was finally killed by her eating at least nine oysters that were clearly ‘off’. She also proposed to eat Fitzboodle’s share of the contaminated delicacy, sent by the free city of Hamburg to Grand Duke Philibert to mark the signature of a commercial treaty between them.⁵

* * *

Thackeray was visiting Europe under licence from his mother, having left Trinity College, Cambridge, early without taking a degree. He had only a vague idea of what he wanted to do in life but was 19, dilettante, devoted to the theatre, probably sexually experienced, and heir to comfortable expectations. So he decided to go to Germany to learn German, and to hone his journalistic skills by producing a German sketchbook – which he never did, unlike his Irish and Paris Sketchbooks and his From Cornhill to Grand Cairo. The sardonic memories of his time in Germany were however to surface in The Fitzboodle Papers, in Barry Lyndon, in Vanity Fair, and in The Rose and the Ring.

By chance, Thackeray met an old acquaintance in Weimar studying German for the Foreign Office, and was persuaded to prolong what would otherwise have been a fleeting visit to immerse himself in the life of the tiny state which extended 20 miles from Jena to Erfurt, and which had survived the Napoleonic wars as one of the 33 (now reduced by 1830 to 32) states which made up the German Confederation. Actually its great days were over. Grand Duke Charles-Augustus, who had patronised music and letters and numbered not only Goethe, but Schiller, Herder and August von Kotzebue among the State luminaries, had died a year earlier. Weimar’s army was slightly larger than that of Grand Duke Philibert of Kalbsbraten-Pumpernickel, numbering 100 men under arms. Its magnificent theatre had put on the best of German classical and contemporary drama and it had as many bookshops and concert halls as Bath. Its greatest attraction by far was Goethe, still alive and only too willing to show off his knowledge of the work of Scott and Byron to the 20 or so English studying German in Weimar. The last he thought undoubtedly the greatest genius of the century, the one true representative of the modern poetical era.⁶

Thackeray found he had an easy entrée to the social life of Weimar, to its balls and parties, cutting a dash with his great height (six feet, three inches) in the uniform of the Devon Yeomanry of which he asked his mother to buy him a commission and a uniform. Despite his reception by Goethe in a very ‘kindly and rather in a more distingué manner than he used to the other Englishmen’, Thackeray was not impressed by the encounter. Goethe might be ‘a noble poet and an interesting old man to speak to … but I believe he is little better than an old rogue’, for Goethe was not held in England to be the great man he was considered elsewhere in Europe.⁷ His not wholly sentimental passions for otherwise married young women, the sorrows of Werther whose remains his chaste innamorata had watched, ‘borne before her on a shutter, (when) like a well conducted person (she) went on cutting bread and butter’; all inspired a cool contempt for so self-celebrating a literary lion.

The Fitzboodle Papers appeared in Fraser’s Magazine in 1842–3, but Thackeray’s opinion had softened by 1855 when he wrote to George Lewes, contributing his mite to Lewes’s monumental life of Goethe. He then recorded that his reception by the great man had been kindly and his daughter-in-law’s tea table was always spread for English visitors. Goethe and he passed hour after hour together, according to Thackeray that is, reading over novels and poems in English, in French as well as in German. He recollected that the ‘Great Man’s’ glittering eyes unnerved him as a young visitor for they resembled those of Melmoth the Wanderer who had made his bargain with a Certain Person. Their talk was always of ‘Art and Letters’. All in all, from the generosity and kindness of the Grand Duchess, to the respect and veneration in which Weimar held its foremost citizen, Thackeray thought he had never ‘seen a society more simple, charitable, courteous and gentlemanlike than the dear little Saxon city where the good Schiller and the great Goethe lived and lie buried’.⁸

This good feeling extended retrospectively to his relations with Ottilie, Goethe’s widowed daughter-in-law, who, for all Thackeray’s good memories of her, is the inspiration for George Fitzboodle’s Ottlilia von Schlippenschlopp, the Muse of Karlsbraten-Pumpernickel, ‘an historian, a poet, a blue of the ultramarinest sort’.⁹ This avatar of Lady Jane of Gilbert’s Patience was

pale and delicate, … wore her glistening black hair in bands, and dressed in vapoury white muslin … She sang her own words to her harp … suffered some inexpressible and mysterious heart pangs … and might look for a premature interment. ¹⁰

Ottilia’s ballades all had sad ends, either consumptive or suicidal. Thackeray’s unflattering portraits of the Weimar beauties were not wholly without substance. The Fitzboodle Papers owe everything to Thackeray’s experiences in Weimar, but whether they created or merely supported the mordant view of feminine achievement which he showed in his novels is debatable. Ottilie von Goethe welcomed visiting writers – in 1854 they included George Lewes and George Eliot – and she was always ready to talk about her father-in-law but, in Thackeray’s satirical portrait, she contributed to the creation of Pumpernickel.

* * *

Thackeray’s growing nostalgia for the Germany he had visited at 19 never eradicated his general belief that there was something absurd about the country, with its 33 sovereign courts, its dull but copious meals and its picture book history. The passion for things medieval and Gothic which Walter Scott had inspired struck him as harmless but basically comic, and inspired his pastiche of a German Romantic Legend of the Rhine, with its silly names, and chronological absurdities. The poem is set at the time of the Crusades but men nevertheless drank coffee and smoked cigars, and ate meals they might expect at one of the sophisticated chop shops of Jermyn Street. Ruined and haunted castles with ghosts of former castellans, clearly forerunners of the denizens of Gilbert’s Ruddigore and of J. K. Rowling’s Hogwarts, while the awful Count Rowski of Donnerblitz steps straight into Monty Python. The troop of peasants ‘chanting Rhine-songs and leading in their ox-drawn carts the peach-cheeked girls from the vinelands’ belong to the world of Euryanthe and other German Romantic operas. Nor is Thackeray above the onomatopoeic ‘whizz! crash! clang! bang! whang!’ of Dennis the Menace and children’s comics. At one point, to make doubly sure his readers know that he is guying the concept of chivalry, he refers his readers to Ivanhoe. There is a lot of swearing by local saints and feats of prodigious skill, terminating in a happy marriage between the hero, a dispossessed prince in mufti and a peachy princess, well within the class structure. Thackeray was stepping out of Pumpernickel into The Ingoldsby Legends.

* * *

Few people before the end of the Napoleonic wars visited Germany. Some might have sailed down the Rhine on their way to Italy, others like the indomitable Dr Burney, Fanny’s father, might...

Table of contents

• Author Biography
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• 1. Fitzboodle in Pumpernickel
• 2. A German Panorama
• 3. Genius: Germans in Search of God
• 4. Genius: Germans in Search of Man (1)
• 5. Genius: Germans in Search of Man (2)
• 6. Potentates and Patrons (1)
• 7. Potentates and Patrons (2)
• 8. The Catholic South
• 9. Magic: Musical Germany
• 10. Pumpernickel Discovered
• 11. Revolution Across the Rhine
• 12. The Return of ‘Pumpernickel’
• 13. Romance on the Rhine
• 14. The Tales of the Hoffmen
• 15. Harmony and Dissonance
• 16. Butterflies or Maggots
• 17. ‘Pumpernickel’ by Binoculars
• 18. Power over Genius and Magic
• Chronological Data
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Plates