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 Continuity of the Classical Tradition

Joel and Ethan Coen have famously said that neither of them has ever read Homer's Odyssey, and implied that the credits to their film O Brother Where Art Thou?, which say that their screenplay is "based on Homer's Odyssey," should be taken with a chuckle. And yet, even if the credits had not mentioned Homer, anyone with a passing familiarity with the plot of the Odyssey could've seen the big obvious parallels, from the protagonist being named Ulysses, to the many adventures suffered by Ulysses and his companions on their way home, to the characters clearly based on the Sirens and the Cyclops, to Ulysses' having to to defeat a suitor to win back his bride once he's home, to name but a few.

Some might see it as a sign of the collapse of Western civilization that Joel and Ethan Coen, two of the most well-respected artists in contemporary culture, have not read Homer -- but look at it another way: Homer is still so much a part of our culture that they didn't need to read the Odyssey in order to make a great film based upon it.

In 1997 Charles Frazier published his first novel, Cold Mountain, the story of a man who deserts the Confederate Army near the end of the American Civil War and embarks on a long and hazardous journey to return to the love of his life -- a novel based on the Odyssey, and perhaps the best-reviewed American novel of the past 25 years. Since then, many books based on the Odyssey have been published, notably Margaret Atwood's novel The Penelopiad, which re-tells the story from the point of view of Odysseus' Penelope. In 1922 James Joyce published Ulysses, one of the most highly-regarded novels of the 20th century, and one very self-consciously and minutely following the plot of the Odyssey.

And those are just a few of the most prominent imitations of the poem. Just to name every well-received novel, poem, film, play, ballet and other work of art made in the 20th or 21st century based on the Odyssey would fill up a longish blog post, even if I stuck to just the US, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Germany, Austria and Switzerland, whose 20th- and 21st-century culture I happen to know somewhat better than that of the rest of the world. I'm not well-acquainted with the literature of the Caribbean, but I do know that the Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott, of Saint Lucia, wrote a book-length poem, Omeros, which is based on the Iliad.

Looking at the cream of recent Western culture, it would seem that the continuity of the Classical tradition is mightily strong indeed. (And by the way: in the abundance of re-tellings of Homer, recent Western civilization resembles every single earlier epoch.) But some might say that it has declined drastically, and point to academia, always closely related to ambitious fiction and poetry, but never identical to them, to make that case. But I am not so sure. It's a matter of how you look.

Up until about a century ago, Western academia was with very few exceptions the preserve of affluent white men, a fairly small club which saw itself as the inheritors and preservers of, among other things, ancient Greek and Latin literature. Since then, much greater numbers of people have been going to college, primarily from groups which had been mostly excluded from it before: women, ethnic minorities and people who aren't quite so rich. Understandably, not everyone in these groups new to academia shares all of the same opinions about what is important as the traditional core of rich white guys. Some lament a decline of the study of the Classics, and compared to academia as a whole, there's no doubt that Classics have a smaller place than they had a century ago. But in terms of the actual numbers of people studying ancient Greek and Latin, writing books about it, teaching it to others and editing Classical texts -- well, there, I don't know how the actual total numbers today compared to those of a century ago, and I don't know whether anyone else knows either. If you know, please tell me! If you think you know, well, don't feel compelled to share your opinions. I have my opinions and am familiar with those of some other people. What I don't have are actual numbers.

It may well be that there is one huge advantage enjoyed by Classical Studies today compared to a century ago: it may be that the general level of enthusiasm in Classical departments is much higher today -- when no study of the Classics is required in most universities, meaning that the Classics departments are filled with students who have chosen to be there -- than a century ago, when a certain amount of Classical study was required of every single rich white guy, in college and before college, and to many of them, perhaps most, the Classics were a loathsome chore, to be endured and then, if possible, forgotten.

Why Aren't Homer And The Pentateuch Mentioned More Often In The Same Breath?

They come from the same part of the world. Greece and the Western coast of Turkey aren't so far from Egypt and Israel. They each occupy a central, dominating place in a culture, first the Greek culture in the one case and through it the Graeco-Roman and its heirs; and in the other case the Jewish culture, and then through it Christendom and Islam and very many of the same cultural inheritors. The events portrayed by each of them occurred, if they occurred, in the 13th century BC or thereabout. They each existed as oral epic passed down for some time before they took written form. Each one took roughly the written form with which we're familiar no later than the 6th century BC.

In hindsight, we can see both Greece and Israel for the first time after what is called the Ancient Near East Dark Age or the Late Bronze Age Collapse: a period of chaos and destruction in Egypt and the Hittite and Canaanite civilisations in the 13th and 12th centuries, from which we have very few written documents. As with the European Dark Ages between AD 476 and 800, this period in the ancient Near East is sometimes called a Dark Age because very little contemporary writing sheds light on what happened, and also because what we do know about the era seems to have been very desolate and bleak and bloody. After this gap in the historical record, we can see Greece in what had been the territory of the Mycenaeans, and Israel in what had been Canaan. It's unclear to what extent the Greeks were descended from the Mycenaeans, and to what extent the Israelites were descended from the Canaanites. The Mycenaeans and the Canaanites had written with a syllabic script, and the Greek and Israelites both wrote with alphabets which both came from some original alphabet. We don't know exactly when or how the Greeks and the Israelites began to write.

Homer and the Pentateuch both describe events which may or may not have actually happened -- the Trojan War and its aftermath, and the Exodus -- but which if they did were no doubt significantly altered in the written versions. It's debatable whether there ever really was a Moses or Joshua, or an Achilles or Helen. Or a Homer. The parallels just don't stop.

Can it really be that these parallels are not often remarked upon and investigated?

Well, they should be mentioned in the same breath, for countless reasons, and if it's really the case that nobody before me has done so, then it's high time someone did and I'm someone and I'm mentioning them, so there!