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 19th-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."