ClassInfo

Young women struggling to escape their unhappy marriages, young men failing as artists but succeeding as citizens, a village boy returning to the Black Forest after an aborted emigration to the United States, an unattractive woman who against all odds becomes a happy wife and successful estate manager, a poor Swiss tailor mistaken for a Polish count, and even a dog who is passed between three masters: Many German narratives from the "Realist" period are obsessed with what could be called "the pursuit of happiness," and with the reasons for its failure or success, provoking the reader to reflect on gender roles, economic constraints, and ideological concepts.

By focusing on these connections, this course will demonstrate how wrong the still influential verdict of literary scholar Erich Auerbach is; namely that "there was no important realistic talent" in 19^th-century German literature. Nonetheless, German Realism was indeed quite different from the dominant realisms of England and especially France (Auerbach's favorite) in at least four respects: (1) Although there are some outstanding novelists (e.g. Gottfried Keller and Theodor Fontane), the most characteristic genre of German Realism is the novella whose structure was often likened to that of a theater play. (2) German authors had a special penchant for symbolic coherence inherited from Romantic literature and epitomized by the label "Poetic Realism." (3) German Realism was less concerned with urbanization and industrialization than other realisms, but did sensitively observe social change in the provinces and the geographical peripheries of the German and Austro-Hungarian empires. (4)
Many texts are marked by irony, humor, and techniques akin to caricature, a connection most evident in Wilhelm Busch's Bildergeschichten, which became a model for the early American comic strip.

In this course, we will discuss whether these characteristics were necessarily "backward" or might even hold modern potentials. In addition to the authors already mentioned, we will also engage with Berthold Auerbach, Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Gustav Freytag, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, Adalbert Stifter, and Theodor Storm. We will also address visual culture and discuss film adaptations. Finally, we will turn to an early German version of the Western genre that is still immensely popular in contemporary Germany and hardly known in the States: Karl May's novels on the Apache chief Winnetou and his German blood brother "Old Shatterhand."

This course deals with one of the most contradictory and fascinating periods of German literature; namely, the time between the defeat of French conqueror Napoleon and the first democratic German Revolution in 1848. The contradictions are manifest in the different labels for this epoch, especially
"Vormärz" and "Biedermeier". Seen through the "Vormärz" lens, this epoch is mainly a prelude to the "Märzrevolution" from 1848, meaning that scholars should focus on revolutionary political developments under the conditions of "restoration" (i.e., the attempt to re-establish the power of monarchs and nobility), and on subversive literary texts. Seen through the "Biedermeier"
lens, however, this period was viewed as a time of peace after decades of political turmoil and war. The middle-class strove to find some modest material well-being and sought all sorts of "Gemütlichkeit", with an emphasis on family,friendship, and conviviality. In literature, this favored a gradual transition from Late Romanticism ("Spätromantik") to Early Realism ("Frührealismus"), marked by keen observations of everyday-life, humor and psychological portrayals.

One of the aims of this course is to show that, apart from the obvious tensions between "Vormärz" and "Biedermeier" authors, there are many interesting, though somewhat hidden, connections. Sure enough, the Jewish journalist and poet Heinrich Heine, a friend of Karl Marx and emigrant to France, did transform Romantic irony into biting political satire - but he also nurtured and ridiculed his own life-long yearning for a peaceful "Biedermeier" existence. And surely, the ingenious short-lived physician and fervent socialist Georg Büchner introduced to modern drama Woyzeck, the first authentic proletarian, driven to murder by a repressive society. But again, all Woyzeck is longing for in vain is a happy Biedermeier family. On the other hand, supposedly typical Biedermeier poets like the homely country curate Eduard Mörike, or the noble catholic bachelorette Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, were also keen observers of political and social developments. Their beautiful, seemingly apolitical, poems and narrations combine keen observation of nature and society with a psychological self-examination that is reflective of political, moral and sexual oppression in Biedermeier society.

Maybe the best example of the "two faces" of this time - and its lasting legacy in the U.S. - is the Schurz couple. The revolutionary journalist Carl Schurz was put in prison after the eventual suppression of the 1848 revolution, but managed to escape, migrate to the States, befriend Lincoln, and become one of the most prominent
"Forty-Eighters", serving as a Union General, Senator, Secretary of the Interior, and political reformer. Meanwhile, his wife Margarethe was instrumental in establishing the kindergarten system in the U.S. The course will also cover lesser-known authors of this age, analyze objects of visual culture, deal with the legacy of this time in Germany and the States - and reflect on parallels to our time. As part of my series of period courses from the Age of Goethe to 1900, it will be followed by a course on German Realism in fall.