4 German Novels on Classical Themes

The intense German interest in Classical culture had, by the late 18th century, extended into plays, poems and novels on Classical themes by Goethe (Iphigenie auf Tauris, for example), Wieland (Geschichte des Agathons and many other works) and others. In this post I will examine 4 German novels of the 20th century which use Classical subject matter in 4 distinctly different ways.

Lion Feuchtwanger, born 1884 in Munich, died 1958 in Los Angeles, published Der falsche Nero in 1936. An English translation by Willa and Edwin Muir, The Pretender,  appeared in 1937. Out of brief ancient accounts of several different men who claimed to be the emperor Nero after Nero had died, Feuchtwanger weaves the tale of Terence the potter, who bears a striking resemblance to the late Emperor, is used by powerful men who persuade him to lead an uprising, and then leave him to be exposed and crucified after he has served his purpose. 

 

The resemblance of Terence to Hitler, and of other characters to leading Nazis and German capitalists, is obvious, but Feuchtwanger's narrative skill and attention to historical detail make this novel fascinating.

Hermann Broch's Der Tod des Vergil, published simultaneously in June 1945 with Jean Starr Untermeyer's English translation The Death of Virgil, is one of the most highly-acclaimed German novels of the 20th century. Broch's prose style, employing stream of consciousness techniques, has been compared to that of his friend James Joyce. 

Broch was Jewish, and was arrested by the Nazis when they annexed his native Austria in 1938. It was during this period of arrest, assuming he would die soon, that Broch developed the concept of his novel about the death of Vergil: in Broch's version, Vergil is old and very ill when the Emperor Augustus summons him to an audience, and dies on the Journey home. In Broch's version of events, Vergil's determined to destroy his copy -- the only copy a that point -- of the Aeneid, but is prevented by the Emperor from doing so. Contemporary scholars debate whether Vergil saw Augustus and his new Empire in a positive or negative light. Broch's Vergil see the new state of things as a disaster, as the end of a world, and asks whether literature makes any sense in such a time. Broch asks the same questions, by clear implication, about writing fiction while the Third Reich is waging war. He's asking: aren't there mosre important things to do than to indulge in literature's vanity and hypocrisy?

It's ironic, and Broch clearly knows it's ironic: he's asking such questions in a literary work of the highest level of sophistication and exuberance. The fact that the novel exists and is written to the end may be seen as an answer. Maybe.

Ernst Schnabel published Der sechste Gesang (The Sixth Chorus) in 1951. I do not know whether there is an English translation. The novel is a fairly straightforward prose version parts of the Odyssey (and the last part of the fifth) in which Odysseus, shipwrecked, swims ashore on the beach of Scheria, is welcomed by the beautiful princess Nausikaa, and learns the inhabitants of the island have heard of his deeds, causing him to reflect on what it means to be a man, about fame, honour, duty, and all of that. 

Sten Nadolny's novel Ein Gott der Frechheit, published in 1994, with an English translation, The God of Impertinence, published in 1997, is somewhat different than the other three described in this post. In this story, in the year 1990, Hermes, the messenger-god, the god of merchants, thieves, frivolity and other things, breaks free from his confinement within a cliff in a volcanic Greek island, where he has been chained for over 2000 years, because he finally became too frivolous even for the Olympian gods, who, most of them anyway, never were known to be humourless. 

In Nadolny's version of things, the Greek gods, being immortal, are all still around, but they tend to hide themselves from humans. The newly-freed Hermes, true to form, does not conform to this, or to much else. 

This book is wonderfully full of many degrees of humor, from deadpan irony to unrestrained slapstick and back again, as gracefully as can be. It is profoundly funny. What is its message? I don't know. Maybe Nadolny's only intention was to amuse. Maybe there are messages here which can't be easily summed up. Maybe I'm just a bit slow. Maybe experts in Hermetic literature would say Aha and... I don't know. But I'm pretty sure most of you would enjoy this book.

"The Internet of[...]"

Quite frequently I hear historians referring to something as "the Internet" of a previous age. This really annoys me. There was no Internet before the late 20th century, and referring to railroads as "the Internet of the mid-19th century" or to ancient Roman roads as "the Internet of the ancient world" does not do a damned thing to help the reader understand what things were like in those bygone eras. Which, supposedly, is the historians' job.

Lion Feuchtwanger's novel Jud Süß, first published in 1925, begins with a description of the roads in the German state of Wuerttemberg in the early 18th century:

"Ein Netz von Adern schnürten sich Straßen über das Land, sich querend, verzweigend, versiegend. Sie waren verwahrlost, voll von Steinen, Löchern, zerrissen, überwachsen, bodenloser Sumpf, wenn es regnete, dazu überall von Schlagbäumen unterbunden." ("Roads formed a network across the land, crossing, forking, petering out. They were unmaintained, full of stones and holes, ripped up, overgrown with weeds, bottomless swamps when it rained, but on the other hand controlled everywhere by toll booths." My translation.)

Feuchtwanger goes on to describe how these streets which were impossibly muddy whenever it rained were choked with dust whenever the sun shone. He describes the traffic on these roads, from the luxurious travel of the Prince of Wuerttemberg and the Prince-Bishop of Wuerzburg and the Venetian ambassador, and the King of Prussia and his entourage, who had visited the southern German courts in "six solid but somewhat shabby coaches," to the couriers of the powerful on fast, frequently-changed horses, to the coaches of various sorts of post which carried mail and people and various rates of speed, to a long train of Jews who had been expelled from an unspecified Imperial German city and were on their way to Frankfurt, and all sorts of other people in wagons and on foot, apprentices, students, wealthy Jewish merchants and poor Jewish tinkers, a former professor at a Bavarian university, disheveled and on foot, who had been dismissed for rebellious and heretical speech, and others still.

You know what Feuchtwanger does not do? He does not call these roads "the Internet of the early 18th century." Perhaps you'd object that this novel was published in 1925, and that there wasn't any Internet in 1925, and you'd have a very good point. However, Feuchtwanger also does not call the roads in Wuerttemberg "the telephone network of the early 18th century" or even "the telegraph network of the early 18th century." No, he describes them as what they were: roads in miserable condition, covered with toll booths, traveled by a variety of people in coaches wagons, on horseback and on foot, and not a telegraph station, telephone or wireless device in sight.

That's how you do it. That's how historians who are skilled and not lazy do it. You take the reader back into those bygone eras and let them sense how different things were than they are today. And instead of writing that the best available means of communication at the time were "the Internet of" that time, if they want to emphasize that other means of the time were even more primitive, they actually describe those other, more primitive means. It takes more work to write in this more descriptive way, but it also accomplishes a lot more.