Authors: Ian Buruma
In fact, Goethe seemed rather to despise the theater altogether, as something plebeian. Shakespeare, he said, was a poet who only happened to write for the theater. “The stage was not worthy of his genius.…” The only reason to stage his poetry as plays, thought Goethe, was that people were not yet cultivated enough to appreciate the text on its own. But he had no doubt that the “highest pleasure” was to “listen with closed eyes” to “a fine voice reciting” Shakespeare’s words.
That Goethe and Schiller put on the plays at all was a concession to the public as part of their aim to cultivate the German nation. But it is clear from their correspondence what these cultivated men thought of the German public. The Germans, Goethe wrote, “travel with platitudes, just as Englishmen are never without their pot of tea.” They were humorless, moralistic, and banal. It was the task of the theater managers to “control” this public, to show people not what they wanted but what they ought to see. No wonder, then, that the German public
stayed away from Goethe and Schiller’s static, stylized theater productions in Weimar. As one visitor to Weimar recalled: “Germany has two national theatres—Vienna with a public of 50,000, and Weimar with a public of 50.” Not that this mattered much, for Goethe’s theater was subsidized by the ducal court.
Goethe’s Weimar was an enlightened place in many respects. Goethe himself was a humane and able administrator who did much to improve the lives of the poor. As privy councillor he had roads built, bridges repaired, waterways constructed, and schools founded. And as long as the duke was able to have his parties, his girls, and enough boars to kill, he allowed Goethe to carry out these projects. But so far as the theater was concerned, Goethe’s Weimar was the precise opposite of Shakespeare’s London. Shakespeare’s art emerged from the metropolitan marketplace, catering to popular taste without aiming to improve or control. That is what gave it life and a universal appeal. Goethe’s theater in Weimar was a highly exclusive affair, more like a private club for aristocrats than a place of entertainment. The duke and his entourage would sit in their marked boxes, silently submitting to the lofty expressions of beauty and harmony and enlightenment. Once in a while a group of students, in leather riding trousers and tall caps, would arrive from Jena to liven up the house, but Goethe would have them removed by the hussars if they livened things up too much. “There will be no laughing!” was one of his famous exclamations.
In the end, even the duke grew impatient with the high-mindedness he sponsored, and he allowed an invitation to go out to a popular comedian whose main attraction was his performing poodle. The duke was fond of dogs. And this remarkable poodle was to perform the leading role in a well-known melodrama entitled
The Dog of Aubry de Mont Didier
. Goethe was so outraged that he stormed out of the theater after the first rehearsal. Upon which the duke wrote a letter, saying that since Goethe obviously wished to be relieved of his theatrical duties, the duke would be happy to grant his wish. But this was in 1817, some years after Schlegel’s new translations had turned Shakespeare into a German playwright.
The sad thing about Goethe’s theater projects in Weimar is not that he did not produce anything good. He did. Among other things, he wrote
Faust
. The sad thing is that a mania that began with a promise of artistic and political freedom ended up as an exercise in pedagogy
and cultivation of the self. Goethe’s Shakespeare had become a form of aesthetic idealism, of
schöngeisterei
, a refined retreat from the messy world of politics and commerce, a tendency that would be a mark of the educated German bourgeoisie for a long time to come. Schlegel’s translation was a reflection of this tendency and at the same time a reaction against Goethe’s classicism.
August Wilhelm von Schlegel, born in Bonn in 1767, was a generation younger than Goethe. He and his fellow romantics, including his brother, Friedrich, were repelled by the enthusiasms that had fired the young Goethe. They had been scared away from politics by the aftermath of the French Revolution. A. W. Schlegel became a conservative Catholic. He and his friends withdrew from public life into a circle of scholars, critics, and aesthetes, writing for small literary magazines, such as
Athenäum
, started by the Schlegel brothers. They worshiped art for its own sake, as though it were a religion. They yearned for the
Geist
of the Middle Ages, loved the dark mystery of German forests, worshiped genius, dismissed cool reason, and loathed the classicism of Goethe’s Weimar. Some wrote good poetry, others were great scholars and critics. Schlegel was a Sanskritist, among other things, but his genius went into translation. The romantics believed that the literatures of the world were all part of a single universe of pure art. In this way they were as universalist as Voltaire. As the fabulist Clemens von Brentano said: “Translation is all.”
Schlegel hated what his predecessors had done to Shakespeare. One famous translation (by Wieland) was dismissed as “poetic manslaughter.” Tampering with Shakespeare’s texts was like a house-painter attempting to “improve a Raphael by making the nose a bit longer here, and displacing an arm there.” The only Shakespeare translations Schlegel approved of were Herder’s, for like Herder, Schlegel loved Shakespeare’s art for its sheer intricacy, its filigreed construction, its tangled Gothic genius. And Schlegel, too, regarded Shakespeare as a Nordic bard. But Schlegel never thought he could improve Shakespeare. He told Wieland that no matter how much he, Schlegel, worshiped Shakespeare’s plays, and no matter how hard he worked on them, he knew “how much [Shakespeare’s] genius would lose in my translation.”
Schlegel believed that a translator had to erase himself, to allow the translation to remain as close as possible to the original. Nowhere
should the sensibility of the translator intrude; his language should be Shakespeare’s German, as though the English playwright had written it himself. This was of course an impossible ideal. Schlegel wrote in the German of his time, and you don’t have to be a mystic of the national soul to see that his language reflected the literary style, the historical associations, the romantic sensibilities of the early nineteenth century in Germany. His brilliant translation may have been the most accurate version of Shakespeare in German to date, but it also contained echoes of Goethe’s classicism and Herder’s poetry. It was, in short, a German text. A famous German Shakespeare (and Goethe) scholar tried to explain this in the following rather tortured formulation: the universal genius of Shakespeare could be reborn in Germany only after the universal genius of Goethe had infused the German language with a German
Geist
equal to the English spirit of Shakespeare.
Through the great Schlegel, then, a popular sixteenth-century English theater about politics and violence, money and sex, jealousy and love became a monument of nineteenth-century German bourgeois culture: elevated, high-minded, romantic. It was a culture that reached the summit of European civilization, that spoke of the finest sensibility and the highest degree of personal cultivation, but one that was unequipped in the end to resist the darker forces already evident in the first waves of Shakespearomania. For Voltaire’s seeds of constitutional liberty fell on less fertile soil in Germany than the “Saxon” racialism and the pull of the dark forest. The main legacy of
Shakespearomanie
was not political, but aesthetic: a taste, a
Kultur
, a mania, and a literary language of incomparable beauty.
T
HE ODDEST EPISODE
in the entire history of Shakespearomania came a little over a hundred years after Schlegel’s translation. Shakespeare was performed more often during Hitler’s Third Reich than Goethe or Schiller. Goethe was too humanistic and Schiller too revolutionary for Nazi taste. But Shakespeare remained the Nordic genius, and Hitler, who had always hoped for a Nordic alliance with Britain, was proud that German theaters paid more tribute to Shakespeare’s Nordic spirit than the British did themselves. In September 1939, the
Reichsdramaturg, Rainer Schlösser, officially declared that Shakespeare, in German translation, was to be regarded as a “German classic.” So even as German troops were preparing for an invasion of Britain in the spring of 1940, the Nazi elite gathered in Weimar to remember Shakespeare’s birthday.
*
Of course the Nazis had their favorites. Tragic heroes, such as Hamlet and Macbeth, playing out their fates in the cold and misty north, were popular. Othello, because he broke the racial laws, and Shylock, because he wasn’t evil enough, were banned—even though Werner Krauss was praised in the early 1930s for his Shylock, which displayed “the external and internal uncleanliness” of the “eastern Jewish racial type.” The Nazi paper,
Der Stürmer
, revived an old analogy between Hamlet and the German nation. Hamlet was deprived of his rightful inheritance, just as Germany had been at Versailles. Weak, treacherous Gertrude was like the politicians of the Weimar Republic, and like Hamlet, Germany would have its revenge. Also like Hamlet, the Third Reich would die—but
Der Stürmer
did not say that.
The strangest reversal of all was the idea of Hitler’s Germans as the New Elizabethans, young, vigorous, and ruled by a strong leader. In this view, contemporary Britain, far from being a model, had become a metaphor of its own historical enemies. Churchill was the Spanish king Philip II, and his Royal Navy the Armada. Shakespeare himself had been blessed to live in a nation that had been purged of its Jews. The transformation of Shakespeare was now complete. Two hundred years after the first German rendering of
Julius Caesar
, there was no more question of translation. Shakespeare, as a racial hero, had finally come home.
I
N THE WINTER OF
1945, when Germans were living in the rotting debris of the Third Reich, some people were busily scavenging the ruins for shards of their old
Kultur
, something to restore the national soul, or at least a little pride, something that could function as the foundation of a new, better Germany. The name that came up most often in
those days was Goethe: his enlightened humanism would lead Germany back into the civilized world. Britain’s role in this bout of cultural soul-searching was minimal, even though Stephen Spender was sent out by the British army to make notes about German intellectual life. British officials were busy doing other things: helping organize trade unions, for example, or monitoring free elections. Not all British officials believed this was right, but enough of them did. It was one of Britain’s finest achievements, this seeding of practical politics in a broken nation.
Weimar was then in the Soviet zone, as yet untouched by a democratic transformation. In 1949, Thomas Mann was invited to give a speech there on the bicentennial anniversary of Goethe’s birth. The greatest German writer of the twentieth century came, tipped his hat to his great predecessor, and said he recognized no zones, just one Germany. It was a tactless gesture, prompted perhaps by the great man’s vanity. For this was just one year after the Soviet Union tried to starve West Berlin, still a cold, hungry, isolated city, into submission. The Allied airlift to keep West Berliners alive was one of the most moving moments of the long cold war. But there was a cultural aspect to this battle of wills. Each of the occupying powers put on a show in Berlin. In the Russian zone, four hundred soldiers in a Cossack choir sang revolutionary songs on the Alexanderplatz. In the British sector of West Berlin, the British Council brought over a company of actors from London. They performed Shakespeare’s
Measure for Measure
, in his native tongue.
*
The idea of Shakespeare as a conservative promoter of class privileges has not entirely disappeared. Much prominence is given in
The Faber Book of Conservatism
(1993) to the speech by Ulysses in
Troilus and Cressida
where he extols the divine rights of kings and warns against the disorder that follows when the social hierarchy is challenged. The book was edited by Kenneth Baker, the former chairman of the Conservative party.
*
This extraordinary twist in Shakespearean fortunes was described wonderfully by Gerwin Strobl in
History Today
, volume 47, May 1997.
C
HAPTER
F
OUR
F
INGAL’S
C
AVE
T
HE LAUNCH BOUND FROM
M
ULL TO
S
TAFFA WAS CALLED
Ossian of Staffa
. The Isle of Staffa is a rocky speck in the Atlantic Ocean off the west coast of Scotland: five hundred feet wide, and barely a quarter of a mile long. Its attractions are a colony of puffins in the summer and a cave named after Ossian’s father, Fingal, the last of the Celts.
Fingal, or Finn, was the legendary chief of the Fenians, a band of warrior-poets in third-century Ireland. Since he was descended from the Druids and reared in a forest, he was a very wise man. Settled civilization, in the shape of kings and courts, was his enemy. His warriors were children of nature. With his sons Oisin (Ossian), Oscar, and Dermaid (Dermot) he defeated monsters and foreign invaders. But civilization got him in the end, for he was defeated by an alien king and his soldiers in a terrible last battle. Ossian, the bard of his father’s exploits, survived but was swept off by a fairy princess to the Land of Youth (Tir Na n’Og). Ossian’s epic tale has been recounted for a thousand years in Gaelic ballads that spread from Ireland to Scotland, where Fingal became a true Caledonian hero, especially after James Macpherson published
Fingal, An Ancient Epic Poem
in 1762.