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.

Tacitus On Nero's Persecution Of Christians

Sometimes something's right in front of you for a long time before you notice it. I think I may (finally) have come across a reason to doubt Tacitus' account, in book 15, paragraph 44 of his Annals of how Nero blamed the great fire in Rome in AD 64 on the Christians, who were generally disliked, in order to divert suspicion from himself:

"Sed non ope humana, non largitionibus principis aut deum placamentis decedebat infamia, quin iussum incendium crederetur. ergo abolendo rumori Nero subdidit reos et quaesitissimis poenis adfecit, quos per flagitia invisos vulgus Christianos appellabat. auctor nominis eius Christus Tibero imperitante per procuratorem Pontium Pilatum supplicio adfectus erat; repressaque in praesens exitiablilis superstitio rursum erumpebat, non modo per Iudaeam, originem eius mali, sed per urbem etiam, quo cuncta undique atrocia aut pudenda confluunt celebranturque"

People eager to establish that Jesus existed -- too eager, in my humble opinion -- point to that passage, by Tacitus, who not only was not a Christian but disliked Christians, as evidence that he existed. Other people, who actually want to investigate the matter as opposed to declaring it settled, more reasonably characterize the passage as evidence of the existence of Christians, in Rome, during Nero's reign.

That's how I'd always thought of the passage. I wasn't convinced by arguments that the passage is a later Christian interpolation, or that "Christus" is a misprint and should read "Chrestus," some other guy, not Jesus. [PS, 5. August 2015: My bad, "Chrestus" appears in Suetonius' biography of Claudius, not in Tacitus.]

And I'm still not convinced by those arguments, I still find it reasonable to believe that the passage above is reasonably close to how Tacitus wrote it, (The oldest manuscripts we now have containing the passage are from the 15th century, so reasonably close is as close as we're going to get unless and until some much older evidence of Tecaitus' text appears.) and I still see no reason to presume that Tacitus was referring to anyone other than Christians.

And Tacitus has a very good reputation, entirely well-deserved, I think, for being a careful and accurate historian.

But we should never assume that it's certain that any assertion made by any historian is accurate, without looking into the matter a bit for ourselves. What had been staring me in the face for a long time concerning this passage in Tacitus, one of the most closely-inspected and thoroughly-discussed texts concerning the question of Jesus' historicity, without my noticing it, are the following reasons to wonder whether Tacitus may have been mistaken:

Tacitus was about 8 years old in AD 63 when the great fire occurred, and most likely he was not in Rome at the time. In all likelihood there is nothing first-hand about his account of the fire, which was written after AD 100, and maybe as late as 125 or later. Also, many scholars have conjectured that, meticulous and scrupulous as he was, he may have been prejudiced against Nero, and eager to make him look worse than he was. This prejudice may have coincided with a desire on the part of the Christians -- a perennial desire on their part -- to cast themselves in the role of victims. Also, the Christians may have wanted to exaggerate the size and early date of their presence in Rome. I'm picturing Tacitus eagerly taking dictation while a Christian witness eagerly exaggerates things: "Tortured and killed all of you he could find in the most cruel ways he could think of, did he?! Tell me more!"

What really makes me stop and think is that after AD 100, perhaps after 125, writing for an audience many of whom lived in the city of Rome, Tacitus describes who Christians were and where they came from and who their first leader, Christ, had been, and how Christ had died -- in short, he seems to have assumed that his readers hadn't heard of Christians. Does it make sense that in 100 or 125 practically no one in Rome knew who Christians were, while back in the year 64 they were so widely known and disliked that they suggested themselves as natural scapegoats for a disaster?

I'm not sure it does make sense. Perhaps not as much sense as the possibility that Tacitus is an early example of someone taken in by a Christian falsification of history.