Modernismand the self - 1890-1924

Modernism and the self – when he could no longer appreciate it, he suddenly received recognitionthroughout Europe for his timely, cogent attacks on inherited pieties.A still g

), who adapted traditional forms for new purposes and exploredcontinuities between past and present They will be flanked by TheodorFontane (–), who confronted modernity in his novels of the s,

by the somewhat older naturalist writers, and also by the younger ation, including Franz Kafka (–) and Georg Trakl (–),who can be seen as early expressionists Their work reached a peak ofachievement in the early s: in  Hofmannsthal published his

gener-comedy Der Schwierige (The difficult man); in  Kafka wrote Das Schloß (The castle) and Rilke completed the Duineser Elegien (Duino elegies); and in

 Thomas Mann published Der Zauberberg (The magic mountain).

If we ask how the conservative modernists drew on philosophy, weencounter a problem The achievements of academic philosophy largelypassed them by The major movement in German philosophy, the neo-Kantianism based at Marburg and Heidelberg, received little attentionfrom literary figures; only in thes did neo-Kantian ideas filter intothe wider cultural sphere through the work of Ernst Cassirer (–)

on myth and Hans Vaihinger (–) on fictions The founder ofmodern mathematical logic, Gottlob Frege (–), was an obscureprofessor at Jena, ignored even by the few philosophers qualified to ap-preciate his work The originator of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl(–), made himself inaccessible to a lay public by his technicalvocabulary, though as we shall see he did try to explain his work toHofmannsthal Instead, we shall find that the philosophy they absorbed,

as ordinary educated people seeking to understand their lives, was that ofearlier generations Above all, theirs was the age of Nietzsche Nietzschedied in, having collapsed into hopeless insanity in January  Just



Modernism and the self – when he could no longer appreciate it, he suddenly received recognitionthroughout Europe for his timely, cogent attacks on inherited pieties.

A still greater time-lag marked the reception of Schopenhauer (–

) Though first published in , his Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The world as will and idea) found few readers till mid-century By thes,many of Schopenhauer’s and Nietzsche’s ideas meshed with a body ofthought, bearing the authority of natural science, whose key word, ‘life’(‘Leben’), gave it the name ‘Lebensphilosophie’ Darwin and his Germanpopulariser Haeckel helped to shape the thinking of a generation Whennew ideas did gain acceptance, as happened gradually with the lead-ing concepts of psychoanalysis, they often did so by seeming to fit intosuch familiar paradigms Thus Schopenhauer’s Will, Haeckel’s concep-tion of animate matter, and the Freudian unconscious, all matched theturn-of-the-century model of life as powerful unconscious striving Torelate philosophy and literature, we must ask which works were actuallyread, and how they were read This means descending from the peaks ofacademic philosophy to such influential works of popular philosophy as

Haeckel’s Die Weltr¨atsel (; The riddles of the universe), Wilhelm B¨olsche’s

Das Liebesleben in der Natur ( –; Love-life in nature), and Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (;

The foundations of the nineteenth century).

Even when philosophy is thus broadly defined, its relation to literature

is not straightforward The modernists professed little expert knowledge

of philosophy Rilke claimed to have read no philosophy except ‘a fewpages of Schopenhauer’. Kafka, we are assured by his friend Max Brod(–), had no head for abstract philosophy and thought mainly

in images. We should not wholly accept such disclaimers When Brodfirst met Kafka, they spent an evening arguing about the relative mer-its of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer Rilke read widely in biology and

‘Lebensphilosophie’; guided by the biologist Jakob von Uexk ¨ull (–

), he even struggled through the first fifty pages of Kant’s Kritik der

reinen Vernunft (Critique of pure reason). Thomas Mann and Hofmannsthal

knew Schopenhauer and Nietzsche But if we ask how they read, we find

that they might, like Thomas Mann, gather a broad general sense oftheir authors’ ideas, or, like Kafka, attend to striking images, or, like theyoung Hofmannsthal, absorb the mood rather than the content of thebooks that attracted them

Even in plausible cases of intellectual influence, we find pitfalls Thereflective letter of  August  where Fontane tells his daughter:

‘Schopenhauer is quite right: “the best thing we have is compassion”’

 Ritchie Robertson

might suggest that Fontane’s tolerance has a philosophical pinning.But Fontane has not grasped Schopenhauer’s doctrine of com-passion as the sole means of freeing oneself from a world doomed tosuffering; he considers compassion only in the familiar sense, as a socialvirtue. When Mann’s Tonio Kr¨oger talks about ‘the blonde and blue-eyed people’, we may think of Nietzsche’s famous passage comparingexponents of master morality to ‘the splendid blonde beast, roaminglustfully after prey and victory’ (NII,); Mann himself suggested thelink many years later (MXI,).But if the allusion really existed in,

under-it could only have been humorous – Hans Hansen as blonde beast! – and

it seems unlikely that the word ‘blonde’ would have sufficed to recall aspecific passage in Nietzsche It would rather have evoked a whole body

of contemporary quasi-racial assumptions, typified by Fontane’s Kantor

Jahnke (in Effi Briest,), whose Nordic enthusiasms include a likingfor fair-haired, blue-eyed people because they are ‘purely Germanic’(FIV,)

The intellectual historian does need to consider questions of influenceand reception, but also to be realistic about how that reception occurred

We should imagine authors as excitedly absorbing, reshaping and atively distorting their sources These sources are found not only on thepeaks of philosophy, but also among the foothills To understand theirreception, we need to examine, as Werner Michler has done in his re-cent study of Darwinism and literature, the intellectual and imaginativemodels which conceptual thinkers shared with creative writers.

cre-In exploring these interconnections, I want to use as a guide the cept of the self Charles Taylor has shown how much investigation ofthis concept can illuminate the history of philosophy and literature.Without directly following Taylor’s scheme, I will try to show how theGerman literature of this period stages a debate among several philo-sophical conceptions of the self Behind them, historically, stands the self

con-of rationalism Rationalism sets a purely intellectual reason, emotionallydisengaged from its surroundings, against the diversity of the empiri-cal world This conception of the self, further radicalised, appears in

the Essay concerning human understanding () by the empiricist John Locke(–), for whom the mind has ‘a power to suspend the execution

of any of its desires; and is at liberty to consider the objects of them,

examine them on all sides, and weigh them with others’.This rationalself, sharply divided from the emotional, desiring, embodied person, iscalled by Taylor the ‘punctual self ’: the self, conceived as a point without

Modernism and the self – extension, and critically disengaged from experience Empiricism, how-ever, turns the tables on the rational self by questioning its empiricalexistence This is the conclusion reached by David Hume (–) in

his Treatise of human nature (): ‘For my part, when I enter most

in-timately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular

perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain

or pleasure I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and

never can observe anything but the perception.’In what follows I willcall the modern version of this ambiguous subjectivity the ‘minimal self ’.Kant sought to escape from Hume’s aporia by the idealist construction

of a noumenal self which exercises authority over the actual, nal self But the relation between these two remained problematic: thetheoretical omnipotence of the noumenal self contrasted uneasily withthe phenomenal self ’s subjection to natural forces and impulses Fichte(–) sought to reconnect consciousness with empirical reality

phenome-by conceiving the self not as primarily a knowing subject but as an active

sub-ject Far from helplessly watching a world it cannot control, the Fichteanself follows a ‘Trieb zu absoluter, unabh¨angiger Selbstth¨atigkeit’ (‘anurge to absolute, independent self-activity’) by imposing its will on theworld. I shall call this conception of the self as will ‘the embattledself ’

As subsequent thinkers, especially Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, velop the concept of the will, it escapes from the control of the self andbecomes an impersonal, autonomous force by which the self is helplesslydriven along Given the prestige of biological science in the later nine-teenth century, such an impersonal force could readily be equated withthe laws of evolution, with various vital principles and life-forces, and withthe unconscious revealed by psychologists from the Romantics to Freudand Jung Such forces could, but need not, seem frighteningly alien Forone could imagine oneself as a part of these forces, immersed or rooted

de-in them by one’s de-innermost bede-ing, one’s very self After all, as Nietzscheproclaimed through his Zarathustra, the intellect, and the so-called soul

or spirit, formed only a tiny part of the self: ‘Aber der Erwachte, derWissende sagt: Leib bin ich ganz und gar, und nichts außerdem; undSeele ist nur ein Wort f ¨ur ein Etwas am Leibe’ (NII,; ‘But he who isawake and knowledgeable says: I am wholly body and nothing else; andsoul is only a word for a part of the body’) The self as reconceived byvitalism, mysticism, or psychoanalytic self-understanding will be called

‘the unconscious self ’

 Ritchie Robertson

But Nietzsche’s statement points to ways in which the unconsciouscould be made conscious, not through psychoanalysis, but through therecovery of bodily experience, and therefore I shall examine, not so muchintellectual constructions, but literary recreations of what I shall call ‘theembodied self ’ The embodied self, inhabiting and enjoying the physicalworld, is also the social self, and hence my account will end with ways ofreconceiving the existence of the self in what Taylor calls ‘moral space’:not society as studied by the sociologist (though the rise of sociology is

an important feature of this period) but the ‘webs of interlocution’, themultiple relationships with others, which are essential to humanity.The self exists within a framework of shared meanings and sharedvalues In this period, many people contemplated escaping from suchframeworks One escape was into scientific detachment, in which theself examines a universe from which human meanings and values havebeen excluded Another escape was proposed by Nietzsche: the strongperson, represented by his literary prophet Zarathustra and anticipat-ing the ‘ ¨Ubermensch’ (variously translated as Superman, Overman orOverperson), should discard current values, create his own, and imposethem on others by force of will The latter conception will concern uswhen we examine the embattled self I turn now to the former: to theimpersonal universe conceived by positivist science

S C I E N T I F I C N A T U R A L I S M

Any conception of the self had to find its place in the bleak universepresented by materialist science The Christian world order of earliercenturies felt unimaginably remote, thanks to the Enlightenment’s ag-gressive challenging of theism and to the historical researches into theBible pursued from Hermann Samuel Reimarus (–) to DavidFriedrich Strauss (–) and beyond But science had not just dis-pelled belief in God It had also undermined any absolute ideal ‘Wher-ever the spirit is now working rigorously, powerfully, and without fakery,

it has wholly discarded the ideal’, said Nietzsche; ‘the popular term forthis abstinence is “atheism”’ (NII,)

Hence the rational universe of Hegel seemed just as remote as theChristian universe His dictum ‘What is rational is real, and what isreal is rational’ was incompatible with modern science In contrast

to the ‘Naturphilosophie’ of Romanticism, which postulated an dwelling world soul behind appearances, positivist science achieved itssuccesses by concentrating on empirical data and explaining them solely

in-Modernism and the self – with reference to physical and chemical forces In philosophy, likewise,Nietzsche insisted that metaphysics – the belief in any non-empiricalprinciple, such as Plato’s ideas or the Kantian noumenon – was obsolete.The notion that anything existed besides the material universe sur-vived only as a wistful longing Wolfgang Riedel has argued thatthe Romantics, seeking to re-establish Christian faith on a post-Enlightenment, emotional basis with the ‘feeling of absolute dependence’formulated by F D E Schleiermacher (–), in fact surrenderedthe rational content of theology so thoroughly that later in the century

David Friedrich Strauss, in Der alte und der neue Glaube ( ; The old faith

and the new faith), could call it a matter of indifference whether one’s faith

were in God or in the physical universe.Strauss’s complacent doctrine

of progress, attacked by Nietzsche in the first of his Unzeitgem¨aße

Betrach-tungen ( ; Untimely meditations), was close to the liberal Protestantism of

Albrecht Ritschl (–), who thought that man’s moral and culturalprogress would gradually realise the kingdom of God on earth

To many observers, Christianity wilfully ignored the undeniable ings and the growing prestige of natural science The nineteenth centurywas a heroic age of science, when it was still possible for a towering figurelike the physicist and physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz (–) tocommand several scientific fields, while wealthy amateurs like CharlesDarwin could still make original contributions The drawback of posi-tivist science, however, was that its working method – the reduction ofphenomena to what could be reproduced, predicted and quantified –itself became the world-picture that it purported to reveal: a universegoverned by blind forces and mathematical laws Again, Nietzsche drewthe consequences most radically Man was no longer the measure ofall things, but simply a natural being, with no more claims to a higherdestiny than ants or earwigs had (NI, ) Nietzsche declared it hismission to translate man back into nature:

find-¨uber die vielen eitlen und schw¨armerischen Deutungen und Nebensinne Herr

werden, welche bisher ¨uber den ewigen Grundtext homo natura gekritzelt und

gemalt wurden; machen, daß der Mensch f ¨urderhin vor dem Menschen steht,

wie er heute schon, hart geworden in der Zucht der Wissenschaft, vor der anderen

steht (N II , )

to master the many vain and enthusiastic interpretations and connotations that

have hitherto been scribbled and painted over that everlasting text homo natura;

to ensure that henceforth man can confront man in the same way that, hardened

by the discipline of science, he confronts the other nature.

 Ritchie Robertson

Freud (–) similarly recounted the history of modern science

as three blows to man’s naive self-esteem Copernicus had shown thatthe earth was not at the centre of the universe; Darwin, that man wasnot at the apex of creation; and Freudian psychoanalysis, that the ego

(‘das Ich’) ‘is not even master in its own house’ (SEXVI,).

Nietzsche, however, went further than Freud was to do by ing scientific positivism itself He argued that the will to truth was theonly moral imperative that had survived its Christian origins; that thiscompulsion had disclosed a comfortless universe, and was now turningagainst itself by revealing that truth was unattainable What counted as

question-‘truth’ was merely a set of ideas that had adaptive value in the ary process but guaranteed no insight into the real nature of things Asearly as Nietzsche summed up human history as the story of cleveranimals who lived on a dying planet, invented knowledge (‘Erkenntnis’),learnt at the last moment that all their knowledge was worthless, andcursed their existence as they died (NIII,–)

evolution-Materialism could, however, be combined with other conceptionswhich made the universe, if not more homely, at least more intelli-gible The idea of natural forces seemed to have been prefigured bySchopenhauer’s theory of the will as the reality, the Kantian ‘Ding ansich’, concealed behind the world as we represent it The will has nopurpose, any more than the force of gravity has a purpose It is a blindforce which is most apparent in sexual desire and which condemns peo-ple to suffering, either from frustration or from satiety The only es-cape from suffering, Schopenhauer maintained, was to renounce the will

by silencing desire in a manner that he found prefigured in Buddhismand Hinduism Although Schopenhauer’s will might sound dangerouslymetaphysical, it could be assimilated to the concepts of natural sciencebecause it is not something transcendent, wholly different from phenom-

ena; it is the phenomena, but seen from inside rather than outside.

In all these conceptions, the self was helpless before a universe thatwas imagined either as an all-powerful machine or as a relentless force.There were philosophical attempts to reconcile the self with the scientificuniverse Thus Rudolph Hermann Lotze (–) sought to overcomethe mind–body problem – the absolute disjunction defined by Descartes

between matter (res extensa) and mind (res cogitans) – by arguing that both

were versions of the same thing Since atoms were indivisible, as wasmental reality according to Descartes, they must be spiritual as well asmaterial, and so the world could be conceived as unified by its spiritual

Modernism and the self – nature These ideas appealed to naturalist writers who turned to science,such as B¨olsche and the Hart brothers Instead of the dead universe im-plied by physics, they imagined themselves inhabiting an animated uni-verse where even molecules had sensations and consciousness ‘We mustbelieve in the sentient molecule’, declared Julius Hart (–).

Around  these beliefs were widely current under the name

‘monism’ Their leading propagator was Ernst Haeckel (–),who considered himself to be placing Spinoza’s conception of the world

as ‘deus sive natura’ (God or Nature) on a scientific basis According

to Haeckel’s most popular work, the universe is completely filled withsubstance (‘Stoff ’) The spaces between atoms are filled by ether, or im-ponderable matter, whose existence explains how action at a distance ispossible Everything is material, but matter is animated, and every bio-logical cell contains a soul, which Haeckel calls ‘psychoplasm’ or soul-substance; this cell-soul, however, is not a distinct spiritual entity, but avery rudimentary form of consciousness Consciousness is a biologicalfunction which extends from the simple power of sensation and move-ment shared even by cells up to the reasoning capacities of humanity.Thus humanity is naturally at home in a world full of low-level spiritualactivity, linked to the unconscious activity of nature Haeckel proclaims

a monistic religion, aesthetics and ethics To monistic religion, there is

no need for special places of worship, for the whole universe is a sacredplace Monism has changed our aesthetic standards by opening our eyes

to the beauties of large-scale and microscopic nature Monistic ethics(borrowed from Herbert Spencer, –) rest on the equivalence

of egoism and altruism: social duties are merely social instincts Manwas no longer a dual being, split between his spiritual and material orhis intellectual and animal natures, but a unitary being, matching themonistic cosmos around him

Those who were not attracted by the cult of the sentient moleculecould still find refuge from the indifferent universe of modern science

by invoking the concept of ‘life’ Like ‘reason’ in the Enlightenment,

‘life’ now seemed a fundamental concept which could stop any ment and beyond which there was no appeal Its authority extendedbeyond biology to philosophy, where it formed the central concept of

argu-‘Lebensphilosophie’, the school of thought associated especially withWilhelm Dilthey (–) and Georg Simmel (–)

Dilthey shared the positivist and Nietzschean disbelief in physics His starting-point, ‘life’, was not remote and abstract; it was

meta- Ritchie Robertson

immediate and concrete, and known best in moments of intense ence (‘Erlebnis’) On this concept Dilthey based a critical theory whichgave a supreme place to ‘Erlebnislyrik’, the poetry, typified by the lyrics

experi-of the young Goethe, in which moments experi-of heightened experience werepreserved and transmitted to readers But he also established principles ofinterpretation that were constitutive for the humanities While the natu-ral sciences demanded detachment, the humanities, said Dilthey, startedfrom involvement in life For example, the lyric poet always starts, notfrom an idea, but from a situation But he does not stay there He developsthe situation imaginatively to bring out its general features as experienced

in a living context, not by a specific individual, but by an ideal lyric self.Similarly, the historian should not start from an idea He should not, likeHegel, try to understand history as the expression of a universal principle

He involves himself in the actions of individual historical figures, stands them on the basis of his and their shared humanity, and arrives atgeneralisations Hence the study of history – and by extension of all hu-man affairs – consists in a circulation of experience, understanding, andgeneralisation Thus, after Nietzschean scepticism, a hermeneutic theorybased on ‘Lebensphilosophie’ restored the possibility of knowledge.More generally, the slogan ‘life’ was popular because, in contrast to thephysicists’ reliance on mathematical abstraction, it seemed to promise di-rect contact with reality Truth lay in experiences of intense, sensual, evenecstatic contact with nature In his much-read work of popular science

under-and philosophy, Das Liebesleben in der Natur, Wilhelm B¨olsche (–)

offered a world-view based on universal Eros Like Schopenhauer andFreud, B¨olsche sees life as governed by a ‘Trieb’, a drive; but instead ofwill or libido, it is love This universal force is illustrated by the mass cop-ulation of millions of herrings off the Norwegian coast Man is one withnature: the theory of evolution demonstrates our basic unity with therest of organic life Such primordial coupling, B¨olsche declares, is the ul-timate source even of our cultural conception of motherhood, illustrated

by Raphael’s Madonna ‘And you are linked with all these beings thataeons ago were you and yet not you, through the prodigious world-force

of love, of procreation, of eternal generation and change.’ In callinglove the universal force that binds created life together, B¨olsche updatesLucretius and also Dante. The demise of Christianity will be com-pensated for by an awareness of the love pulsating through the organicuniverse Even the dissolution of the individual in death may be a form

of love, symbolised by self-loss in orgasm B¨olsche occasionally envisages

a kind of neo-pagan future when those parts of the body now dismissed

Modernism and the self – 

by ‘fig-leaf fanaticism’ as indecent will be publicly displayed, celebrated,even worshipped as sacred.

Such notions drew on the conception of ecstatic Dionysiac unity

evoked by Nietzsche in Die Geburt der Trag¨odie ( ; The birth of tragedy) In

this powerful but fanciful work, which cost him his scholarly reputation,Nietzsche proposed the ancient Greeks as models for the present, but to

do so he had to represent them in anachronistic terms His Atheniansattended tragedies, which Nietzsche assimilated to Wagnerian musicdramas, and received a proto-Schopenhauerian message about the mis-ery of life and the illusory character of individuation Greek tragic the-atre was a religious occasion The truth about life, normally unbearable,was uttered by the chorus, and the spectators felt momentarily releasedfrom individuation into the unity promoted by the cult of Dionysus:

‘Despite fear and pity we are happy and alive, not as individuals, but

as the one living entity with whose procreative pleasure we are fused’(NI,)

For many writers the cult of ‘life’ could be a substitute for religion.Lou Andreas-Salom´e (–) wrote a poem entitled ‘Lebensgebet’(‘Prayer to life’) which Nietzsche set to music, beginning:

Gewiß, so liebt ein Freund den Freund, Wie ich Dich liebe, R¨atselleben –

Ob ich in Dir gejauchzt, geweint,

Ob Du mir Gl ¨uck, ob Schmerz gegeben.

Certainly, a friend loves a friend

as I love you, enigmatic life –

no matter whether I rejoiced or wept in you, whether you gave me happiness or pain.

We note how a personal relation to God has been transferred to anenigmatic abstraction; how the writer, whether ecstatic or suffering, still

feels herself to be comfortingly enclosed within life.

‘Lebensphilosophie’ was not only comforting, however The unity ofall life implied the removal of any distinction between man and animals

‘Along with the natural scientists I deny that there is any moral worldorder,’ wrote Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (–); ‘for me, man isnot the image of God, but only the most intelligent and therefore thecruellest of the beasts.’ Haeckel maintained that the most primitivehumans, such as the Veddahs of Ceylon, were closer to animals than to

a Goethe or a Darwin Nietzsche insists on man’s animality Kafka takes

 Ritchie Robertson

up this theme especially in his collection of stories Ein Landarzt (;

A country doctor) by blurring the difference between men and animals.

If man was an animal, society must be a jungle Popular Darwinismrepresented life as a naked struggle for survival The political theoryknown as Social Darwinism advocated ruthless competition which wouldbenefit the race by eliminating the weak Its milder exponents worried,

as Darwin had done, about these consequences of evolution, but othersfound additional support in Nietzsche Regarding modern civilisation

as a herd of domestic animals made sick by Judaeo-Christian morality,Nietzsche denounced compassion as the greatest threat to those fewsurviving healthy individuals who could in future reshape humanity likesculptors and operate upon it like surgeons (N II, –) His mostruthless disciple, Alexander Tille (–), who advocated the killing

of cripples and dismissed Christian ethics as an illusion of the weak,

synthesised these ideas in his book Von Darwin bis Nietzsche (; From

Darwin to Nietzsche).

When tested by the literary imagination, scientism contends with

com-passion In Vor Sonnenaufgang (; Before the dawn), Gerhart Hauptmann

(–) brings a Darwinian sociologist, Alfred Loth, into a family

of morally and medically degenerate nouveau-riche farmers, lets himfall in love with the apparently healthy daughter who is desperate toescape her milieu, and then has him abandon her on discovering thatany children they had would suffer from hereditary alcoholism. Asthe physician and cultural critic Max Nordau (–) noted in his

polemic Entartung ( ; Degeneration), Hauptmann’s science is as

implau-sible as that of his dramatic precursor Ibsen (cf Osvald’s ‘softening of the

brain’ in Ghosts) Loth typifies the shortcomings of a merely theoretical

or scientistic approach to human problems

Naturalist writers, despite their professed scientism, in fact demandour compassion for social suffering The unemployable craftsman in

Meister Timpe ( ; The master craftsman Timpe), by Max Kretzer (–

), and the Berlin proletarians in Die Familie Selicke (; The Selicke

family) by Arno Holz (–) and Johannes Schlaf (–) tug

at our heart-strings Rilke initially sympathised with Nietzsche’s

doc-trine in the story Der Apostel (; The apostle), with its sermon against

‘poisonous’ Christian love, but soon afterwards urged sympathy for the

nameless urban poor in the third part of his Stunden-Buch ( ; Book

of hours) A more complex attitude towards what Nietzsche called the

‘Schlechtweggekommene’ (‘those who have come off badly’) is found

in the early Thomas Mann Tonio Kr¨oger regrets that his readers are

Modernism and the self – 

‘people who always fall down’, i.e born losers for whom poetry is pensation, ‘a gentle revenge on life’ (M VIII, ) In ‘Der Weg zumFriedhof’ (‘The road to the cemetery’) the unfortunate Lobgott Piepsam,who despite his pietist forename has lost all his family and taken to thebottle, is on his way to visit his relatives’ graves when he is knocked down

com-by ‘Life’, personified as a healthy young cyclist

Although German naturalists produced no large-scale sociologicalstudy of modern life matching Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series, theyfirmly connected the problems of modernity to the transformation oflife by urbanisation Their hesitating analysis was developed by Georg

Simmel in Die Philosophie des Geldes (; The philosophy of money), a

power-ful analysis of how the money economy, by rendering life more abstract,both impoverishes and empowers the individual In the money economy,the individual is dependent on an immense number of other people, butthey are important to him only as functions, not as personalities Sincethe modern self exists at the centre of a huge variety of functions, roles,relationships, this dependence can be paradoxically transformed intofreedom Instead of merely being non-dependent, like a hermit, modernurban man can be truly independent: all his social relations are mediatedthrough money, so that while he needs the services of countless people,

he is not compelled to rely on any particular one of them For thosewith a less complex understanding of modern urban life, it was tempting

to retreat into nature as a more congenial setting for the self A cal example, praised in its day as a modern counterpart to the Song of

typi-Solomon, is Johannes Schlaf ’s prose-poem Fr¨uhling ( ; Spring), written

during the author’s recovery from a nervous breakdown Its rhythmicprose and dithyrambic verse derive from Walt Whitman and Nietzsche’sZarathustra From enjoying the spring sun, the speaker enters into otherconsciousnesses – those of an old man, a child, a beetle – and finally an-ticipates death as the dissolution of his personal identity into the monisticunity that already surrounds him.

Frank Wedekind (–) used nature similarly but more flexibly in

Fr¨uhlings Erwachen ( ; Spring awakening) The young Wedekind knew the

pessimistic thought of Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann, but inhis play he treats critically the world of human institutions (the family,the school, prisons) and connects his adolescent protagonists with na-ture We see them in woods, in gardens, in a hayloft, and beside the river(symbolising the stream of life) that runs through the play; their powerful,joyous, but sometimes sado-masochistic sexuality contends with adult at-tempts to repress it through miseducation, hypocrisy, punishment and

 Ritchie Robertson

abortion The born loser, Moritz, commits suicide; the predestined vivor, Melchior (significantly said to be a strong swimmer), passes intothe care of a Masked Man who embodies life

sur-T H E M I N I M A L S E L F

The self might confront a bleak, inhuman universe Or it might be sorbed into the surging life-force In either case, what was the self ? Had

ab-it any substance, depth, complexab-ity, resilience?

In thes, both the Berlin Naturalists and the Vienna ists tended to envisage the self as an extensionless point, a perspectivalstandpoint, or a mere fiction In the innovatory fiction of naturalism,

Impression-such as Arno Holz’s Ein Tod ( ; A death) and Der erste Schultag (;

The first day at school ), the characters behave with deterministic

pre-dictability, but the narrative perspective offered to the reader registers allevents with equal attention – the groans of a dying man, the conversa-tion of his unnoticing companions, the humming of a trapped bluebottle

as a sadistic schoolteacher beats a child to death The characters areautomata; the reader is the mere camera-like eye that observes them.Impressionism, as a form of writing that concentrated on conveyingsensations by accumulating adjectives, found its theorist in the Viennesecritic Hermann Bahr (–) In  Bahr urged his contempo-raries to move beyond naturalism by attending not only to external realitybut also to how it was apprehended by the nerves:

Die alte Psychologie findet immer nur den letzten Effekt der Gef ¨uhle, welchen Ausdruck ihnen am Ende das Bewußtsein formelt und das Ged¨achtnis beh¨alt Die neue wird ihre ersten Elemente suchen, die Anf¨ange in den Finsternissen der Seele, bevor sie noch am klaren Tag herausschlagen.

The old psychology finds only the ultimate effect of feelings, the expression finally formulated by consciousness and retained by memory The new psychology will seek their initial elements, their beginnings in the darkness of the soul, before they emerge into the clear light of day.

But in thus continuing empirical inquiry, Bahr found, as Hume had done,that its object vanished Hume ended by defining the self as ‘nothingbut a bundle or collection of different impressions, which succeed eachother with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux andmovement.’

Bahr found these ideas developed by Ernst Mach (–),who, like Helmholtz, belonged to the nineteenth-century tradition of

Modernism and the self – polymathic scientists While holding a chair of physics at Prague, hisinterests led him to the psychology and philosophy of perception He re-tained the conviction, which he claimed to have derived at an early

age from Kant’s Prolegomena zu einer jeden k¨unftigen Metaphysik (;

Prolegomena to any future metaphysics), that the contents of consciousness

could not be reliably connected with external reality In Die Analyse

der Empfindungen ( ; The analysis of sensations) Mach maintained that

consciousness consisted of sensations, and that the self which receivedthese sensations was simply a complex of feelings, moods and memo-ries, attached to a body By changing only gradually, this complex givesthe illusion of permanence; but in fact there is no permanent, sub-stantial self underlying the flux of sensations ‘The self is past saving’

(‘Das Ich ist unrettbar’), Mach proclaimed.There cannot, then, be anypersonal immortality; but neither is there any firm boundary separat-ing one person’s consciousness from another’s, nor any real continuitybetween my present self and my past selves The illusion of conti-nuity comes from the chain of memories connecting my present to

my past

Having read the second () edition of Mach’s book, Bahr sised it with other philosophical ideas The notion that reality is flux goesback to the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus and his maxim ‘All thingsflow’ Nietzsche took up this idea in his exposition of the pre-Socratics.And it seemed easily compatible with Haeckel’s monism, for which real-ity was a single continuum, neither material nor mental Nietzsche wasequally sceptical about the self, arguing that the ‘Ich’ was a mere fictionrequired by grammar: the sentence ‘ich denke’ (‘I think’) requires the as-sumption of an ‘Ich’ as grammatical subject; but that does not mean thatthe self has any real existence (NII,–) From all these componentsBahr concocted a philosophy of impressionism:

synthe-Alle Trennungen sind hier aufgehoben, das Physikalische und das ische rinnt zusammen, Element und Empfindung sind eins, das Ich l¨ost sich auf und alles ist nur eine ewige Flut, die hier zu stocken scheint, dort eiliger fließt, alles ist nur Bewegung von Farben, T¨onen, W¨armen, Dr ¨ucken, R¨aumen und Zeiten, die auf der anderen Seite, bei uns hier ¨uben, als Stimmungen, Gef ¨uhle und Willen erscheinen.

Psycholog-All divisions are here erased, the physical and the psychological fuse, element and sensation are one, the self dissolves, and everything is a mere everlasting flux that seems to pause in one place and flow more rapidly in another; everything is mere movement of colours, sounds, temperatures, pressures, spaces and times, which appear on the other side, to us, as moods, emotions and will.

 Ritchie Robertson

Even before Bahr discovered Mach, his Viennese contemporaries werethinking along similar lines Hofmannsthal’s notebooks of considerthe self as discontinuous and find continuity only in the physical bond be-tween the individual and his ancestors These ideas find poetic expression

in ‘Terzinen: ¨Uber Verg¨anglichkeit’ (‘On transience, in terza rima’),while ‘Manche freilich .’ (‘Many, indeed ’) expresses a cautious

monism:

Viele Geschicke weben neben dem meinen, Durcheinander spielt sie alle das Dasein, Und mein Teil ist mehr als dieses Lebens Schlanke Flamme oder schmale Leier,

ities of the self in Anatol and other early works Yet he read Mach only in

. If their conceptions of the self have a single source, besides the

monism derived from Haeckel and Nietzsche, then it is Walter Pater’s

‘Conclusion’ to The renaissance (), avidly read by Hofmannsthal.

Having quoted Heraclitus, Pater (–) describes how, on tion, experience dissolves into ‘a group of impressions – colour, odour,texture’, which are ‘unstable, flickering, inconsistent’ ‘Every one of thoseimpressions’, Pater concludes, ‘is the impression of the individual in hisisolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of aworld.’This image of the self as prison reappears in Hofmannsthal’s fic-tional dialogue on dramatic and novelistic characterisation () whereBalzac is made to say: ‘There are no experiences save the experience ofone’s own being’ (HVII,)

reflec-The illusion of the self was sustained, as Pater remarked, by language.The theory of the discontinuous self needed a new theory of language,and this was provided by the journalist and novelist Fritz Mauthner(–) in his Beitr¨age zur Kritik der Sprache (–; Contributions to the

critique of language) Mauthner was steeped in the scepticism of Nietzsche,

though he did not know the argument that so-called truths are merelydead metaphors, propounded in Nietzsche’s essay ‘ ¨Uber Wahrheit und

L ¨uge im außermoralischen Sinne’ (‘On truth and lies in a non-moral

Modernism and the self – sense’), which was published only posthumously in Mauthner takesempiricism and nominalism to an extreme by arguing that language doesnot exist as an abstraction but only as a social practice, an activity amongpeople Language does not express independently existing thought, nordoes it conform to any rules of logic or grammar Thought, logic andgrammar exist only within language, just as there is no abstract ‘blueness’independent of blue things Language is vague, elusive, ambiguous Mostconversation consists in misunderstanding: the word ‘tree’, for example,has different associations for everyone who uses it Language cannot be

a vehicle of knowledge Not only poetic language, but also everyday, entific and philosophical language are metaphorical, presenting ‘images

sci-of images sci-of images’. The history of language is a continual searchfor new metaphors to replace those that have been worn out; thoughoutside poetry their metaphorical character is soon forgotten Most lan-guage use is mere meaningless chatter Moral and philosophical terms(‘virtue’, ‘immortality’, ‘idea’, ‘category’) are empty; their use is mereinsolence Modern science is just another mythology composed of ab-stractions Nothing can be known except the unreliability of language.The only valid use of language is poetic, because poetry seeks only toarouse emotions and stimulate moods

Not surprisingly, Mauthner’s theory appealed especially to poets Itsphilosophical weakness is the self-contradiction of extreme scepticism: for

if non-poetic language is meaningless, then so are Mauthner’s argumentsfor the meaninglessness of language But Mauthner seemed to confirmthe special character of poetic language ‘People are tired of hearing talk’,wrote Hofmannsthal in ‘They have a deep loathing for words, forwords have placed themselves in front of things Hearsay has swallowedthe world’ (HVIII, ) Rilke in  contrasted the poet’s word withthe word as everyday currency (R IV, ) And Stefan George (–

), inspired by contact with the French Symbolists, devised not only

a new poetic diction but his own orthography and typography Thismuch-discussed ‘crisis of language’ (‘Sprachkrise’) did not, as is oftenclaimed, concern the inadequacy of language as such After all, languagecan only be adequate or inadequate in relation to a specific purpose Itconcerned the renewal of poetic language to express nuances of emotionand sensation And that in turn, as I shall argue later in this chapter,demanded a richer and more plausible conception of the self than thepunctual theory of impressionism

Literature often challenges philosophy by asking how its claims wouldlook if one tried to live by them Accordingly, Hofmannsthal and

 Ritchie Robertson

Schnitzler oppose the disintegrative implications of impressionist chology by stressing memory, continuity and responsibility The impres-

psy-sionist adventurer in Hofmannsthal’s first play, Gestern (; Yesterday),

on learning that his wife has been unfaithful to him, finds he cannotshrug off his betrayal as merely the experience of a previous self Conti-nuity is undeniable, and it implies morality The aesthete who lives frommoment to moment, from lover to lover, betrays others without satisfyinghis own emotional needs, as Claudio demonstrates in Hofmannsthal’s

Der Tor und der Tod ( ; The fool and death) Schnitzler treats the aesthetic adventurer humorously in his cycle of one-acters, Anatol (), ironi-

cally in Liebelei (; Dalliance), and satirically in Leutnant Gustl (),

an early experiment in stream-of-consciousness narration, where Gustl’snaive associative thinking, even when contemplating suicide, convincesthe reader of his shallowness

Both Hofmannsthal and Schnitzler endow memory with ethical

sig-nificance In Hofmannsthal’s Elektra (), the heroine refuses to get her father’s murder, even at the risk of self-destructive obsession

for-In Schnitzler’s novel Der Weg ins Freie (; The road to the open), Georg

von Wergenthin survives emotionally harrowing experiences, while hisJewish counterpart Heinrich Bermann risks being trapped in medita-tion on the past Both writers are examining a moral problem originallyexplored by Nietzsche Loyalty to the past is an attractive quality, asNietzsche admits in his essay on the uses and abuses of history; but healthrequires one to forget one’s experiences and move on to new ones, just

as one needs to digest one’s food (NII, ) In literature, it becomesclear that to live only in the present is to deny one’s responsibilities, butfixation on the past is deadly

T H E E M B A T T L E D S E L F

We have seen how Fichte resolved Humean and Kantian doubts aboutthe self by arguing that the self could reconnect itself to the world throughresolute action The ethics of activity with which Fichte inspired Berlinstudents in also seemed appropriate to the new Germany estab-lished by Bismarck’s ‘Realpolitik’ Appropriately, Fichte appears as an

invigorating lecturer in Fontane’s first novel, Vor dem Sturm ( ; Before

the storm).

Later philosophies also explore the will, but with different emphases.Schopenhauer’s impersonal will, present in human desires and in natural

Modernism and the self – forces, was reinterpreted by Nietzsche, who rejected Schopenhauerianpessimism, as will to power Organic beings were not motivated by anypurpose; such arguments belonged to an obsolete teleological outlook.Instead, they were animated by a will to power that invented purposesfor itself as it went along And this will to power was the key, not just

to organic activity, but to all energy of whatever kind The universalprinciple that Dante found in love, ‘the force that moves the sun and theother stars’, is for Nietzsche power-hunger Yet Nietzsche also attacksthe error of explaining perceptible events by hypothetical and invisiblecauses, and includes the will among the latter (NII,) His claim thateverything is animated by the will to power seems impossible to reconcilewith his campaign against belief in non-empirical, metaphysical entities.During the Nietzsche vogue at the turn of the century, however, suchcontradictions could pass unnoticed Nietzsche’s concept of the willhelped him to construct the image of the ‘ ¨Ubermensch’, foretold byhis prophet Zarathustra, who will create new values When he mentionsantecedents like Cesare Borgia or Napoleon, he encourages us to imag-ine the ‘ ¨Ubermensch’ as a heroic dictator, a supremely embattled figure,who will sweep away the democratic tyranny of modern herd-animals

A salutary comment on such fantasies is a somewhat neglected shortstory by Thomas Mann, ‘Beim Propheten’ (; ‘At the prophet’s’),which presents the embattled self humorously, but with undertones ofdistaste and warning The ‘prophet’ is based on Ludwig Derleth (–

), a Munich poet of cosmic pretensions, whose poems Mann hadheard read by a disciple The narrator ascribes the prophecies to ‘the self,despairingly enthroned’ (‘das verzweifelt thronende Ich’, M VIII,).When the prophet’s diatribes are read out, the narrator remarks: ‘A fever-ish and frightfully irritated self arose in lonely megalomania, threateningthe world with a torrent of violent words’ (MVIII,) The shrill tiradesand empty threats of this prophetic self are clearly overcompensating forits exclusion from ordinary life

The embattled self, evoked by Nietzsche or mocked by Mann, is ofcourse gendered as male Schopenhauer had laid the groundwork for thisconception in his ‘Metaphysik der Geschlechtsliebe’ (; ‘Metaphysics

of sexual love’), where he described the sexual urge as the principalexpression of the will to live The individual’s desire was as illusory asindividuality itself It was merely the vehicle for the determination of thespecies to survive (SIII,) The overriding good of the species accountsfor the apparent incongruity of many sexual partnerships, and for men’s

 Ritchie Robertson

frequent inclination to promiscuity contrasted with women’s monogamy.Thus Schopenhauer sees conflict built into the relation between the sexes.His misogyny, most bitterly expressed in his essay ‘ ¨Uber die Weiber’(; ‘On women’), pleased many readers Hence Schopenhauer’s phi-losophy of sexual love found a twofold response Many were grateful tohim for giving a central element of human experience a correspondingplace in his philosophy But his treatment of women tended to emphasiseconflict between the sexes and to portray man as intellectually superiorand woman as principally the instrument of the will to live

The male embattled self could be imagined not only as an ual but as typifying the race The adoptive German Houston StewartChamberlain (–), in his Grundlagen des  Jahrhunderts, portrayedthe ‘Germanic’ race in similarly heroic terms, but with an ambivalencethat increased his book’s appeal For while the triumphant Germanicrace could take credit for all the achievements of civilisation, it was nowunder threat from the swirling ‘racial chaos’ of mulattos, mestizos andmongrels that was threatening to submerge the modern world Similarfantasies dominate the extraordinary psychotic autobiography by thejudge Daniel Schreber (–), Denkw¨urdigkeiten meiner Nervenkrankheit

individ-(; Memoirs of my nervous illness)

Nietzsche’s conception of embattled masculinity also includes anaccount of femininity as cunning, pliable, anxious to yield to a manwho imperiously takes what is offered (NII, ) Ironically, Nietzschehimself was attracted to intelligent, challenging women like Lou Andreas-Salom´e, and supported the admission of women to Swiss universities Buthis literary fantasies suited readers who were alarmed by the growingwomen’s movement Some writers thought the intellect or spirit was gen-

dered as male, as in Stefan George’s poem from Der Stern des Bundes (;

The star of the covenant) beginning:

Die weltzeit die wir kennen schuf der geist

Der immer mann ist: ehrt das weib im stoffe,

Er ist kein mindres heiligtum.

Our epoch was created by the Spirit

Which is forever Man Honour womankind in Matter,

Modernism and the self – influential image of the gendered and embattled male self After ridicul-ing Hume’s dissolution of the self into a bundle of ideas, Weininger re-establishes, on logical and ethical grounds which he considers ultimatelyidentical, the Kantian conception of the noumenal, autonomous self.Every significant (‘bedeutend’) person must affirm the self (‘das Ich’),and discovers his individuality in a conversion-like event called the

‘Ich-Ereignis’ Acknowledging no higher authority than its innate sense

of duty, this self is solitary: ‘Man is alone in the universe, in immense,

ever-lasting solitude.’But the supreme self, that of the genius, escapes fromisolation because his self is infinite and universal, a microcosm of theuniverse This ideal is male Within Weininger’s basically bisexual psy-chology, beings in whom the M component predominates are masculine,those with dominant W are feminine The latter lack a Kantian intel-ligible self While the male wants to produce intellectual offspring, thefemale wants to reproduce her kind Hence sensual love is a trap for thegenius Woman, in the two basic types Weininger distinguishes – mother

or whore – seeks to drag him down

If, as Darwinism already suggested, the essence of life was conflict,then it was appropriate that the most unyielding conflict should be wagedbetween man and woman, with the intellectual man threatened by theunreasoning, instinct-driven female This conception, already present inStrindberg’s marital dramas, reappears in many naturalist and expres-

sionist works In Hauptmann’s Bahnw¨arter Thiel (; Linesman Thiel ), the

protagonist’s split sexuality draws him first to a delicate, sensitive woman,then, after her death, to a rawly physical woman who controls him by sat-isfying his powerful libido A similar conflict is presented allegorically inthe early expressionist drama by Oskar Kokoschka (–), M¨order

Hoffnung der Frauen ( ; Murderer hope of women), where man, the ascetic

bearer of the spirit, escapes from erotic slavery by destroying the alised civilisation embodied by the woman

sexu-It was, however, possible for male writers to reverse the signs andcelebrate this very conception of femininity Hence the response toWeininger by Karl Kraus (–): ‘An admirer of women assentswith enthusiasm to your arguments for despising women.’ For thesensual woman could seem the last repository of affection, spontane-ity, nature, instinct, in a world given over to the intellectual analysis andtechnological ‘progress’ which, in Kraus’s view, were put to shame by

the sinking of the Titanic The intellectual man would perish without the

sensual woman: ‘The sensuality of woman is the primal spring at which

 Ritchie Robertson

man’s intellectuality finds renewal.’ But the embattled male self alsorisked destroying this female source of life, and such a fatal conflict wasdramatised by a writer Kraus greatly admired, Frank Wedekind, in his

Lulu plays.

Originally planned as a single ‘monster tragedy’, Wedekind’s dramaticportrayal of Lulu became two separate but linked dramas with mythic

titles, Erdgeist (; Earth Spirit) and Die B¨uchse der Pandora (; Pandora’s

box) Lulu, an orphan kept by a male protector, Sch¨on, is based on such

nineteenth-century grandes horizontales as Liane de Pougy and Cora Pearl,

but also on archetypes like Eve, Helen of Troy and Pandora ‘Earth Spirit’implies both the uncontrollable, elemental being conjured in Goethe’s

Faust I and the ‘evil spirit of earth’ invoked in Schiller’s Wallenstein Hence

Lulu is ambivalent: a gifted dancer, she seems like ‘the embodiment oflife’s happiness’, but being also amoral and unfeeling, she causes thedeath of each of her husbands Yet any criticism of Lulu rebounds onthe society which treats artistic genius as a saleable commodity, passes awoman from one man to another, tolerates the double standard by whichSch¨on proposes to keep Lulu as his erotic mistress while marrying a puregirl, and finally gives Lulu the choice between two forms of prostitution –

in a Cairo brothel or on the London streets Wedekind shows a societypolarised between the rational calculation of the white-slave trader Casti-Piani and the physical humanity of the ultimately helpless Lulu Thedealer in women’s bodies is the most drastic, caricatural, and repellentversion of the embattled male self

In other ways, too, the embattled self seeks to command nature.Marshall Berman has identified the developer, the agent of technicalmodernisation, as a quintessentially modern figure, and has traced hisgenealogy from Goethe’s Faust (with the unrealised project for reclaimingland from the sea) down to modern city planners.We can include in hisfamily tree such figures as Melville’s Ahab and Storm’s Hauke Haien,who impose their will on nature by hunting the whale and buildingdykes Mann’s Thomas Buddenbrook attempts such ruthlessness when

he breaks with the probity (or just caution) of his family and buys theP¨oppenrade harvest while it is still in the ear This risky speculation isfor him a means of proving his (masculine) strength When the har-vest is destroyed by hail, however, nature symbolically avenges man’stransgression of the boundary between cultivation and exploitation.Nature and modern civilisation are perhaps most sharply contrasted

in a story which, by presenting this antithesis with textbook clarity, has

Modernism and the self – 

recently gained much attention, Die Ermordung einer Butterblume ( ; The

murder of a buttercup) by Alfred D¨oblin (–). The businessman

Michael Fischer, with his jerky movements, his black suit, and his habit

of bullying his apprentices, becomes obsessed with a buttercup which hecalls ‘Ellen’, thereby projecting onto it the repressed feminine side of hisown nature; eventually he decapitates it, only to be overcome with guiltand rush out to his destruction in a dark forest A funnier caricature of

a detestable bourgeois is Theobald Maske in the play Die Hose ( ; The

knickers) by Carl Sternheim (–) For the calculating and aptlynamed Maske, respectability is the ‘Tarnkappe’, the Wagnerian helmet

of invisibility, behind which he pursues his desires, and even his bi-weeklyadultery, where his physical nature finds satisfaction, is subjected to thedeadening routine which props up his life

The embattled self is solitary, not only in lacking relations with otherpeople, but sometimes also in being dissociated from the shared valuesthat make social life possible The embattled self can reject prior moralnorms and frameworks, as Thomas Buddenbrook does in his commercialspeculation, and as Nietzsche’s ‘ ¨Ubermensch’ will do on a grand scale

We find a disconcertingly Nietzschean moment in Fontane’s last novel,

Der Stechlin (), when Dubslav von Stechlin and Pastor Lorenzen cuss heroism To illustrate his conception of modern, individual heroism

dis-by contrast with the ‘herd courage’ of merely obedient soldiers, Lorenzenrecounts how a Polar explorer, Lieutenant Greeley, found that one of theparty was secretly stealing provisions and putting all their lives at risk,

so shot the thief from behind and thus saved the others’ lives AgainstDubslav’s misgivings, Lorenzen insists that it was admirable of Greeley

to perform a deed which ‘contradicts all divine commandments, all lawand all honour’; Greeley might have observed traditional moral sanc-tions and faced his death if he alone had been involved, but he was aleader, and therefore obliged to perform ‘a terrible Something’ (FV,).Despite the unfamiliar context, we can recognise a familiar motif fromGerman literature, that of the necessary crime, performed by embattled

selves in B ¨uchner’s Dantons Tod ( ; Danton’s death) and Hebbel’s Agnes

Bernauer ( ), and celebrated by Nietzsche in Die Geburt der Trag¨odie in

the person of Prometheus But one might wonder whether such crimesare as necessary as their perpetrators claim In Lorenzen’s story, Greeleydoes not remonstrate with the thief; he simply kills him

Although the embattled self may transgress moral boundaries, it feelsmost comfortable within established institutional frameworks, which

 Ritchie Robertson

provide an alternative to self-examination The embattled self fies with a historical process, a nation or an organisation Thus ThomasBuddenbrook identifies with the family firm and allows his own inner life

identi-to wither Aschenbach in Der Tod in Venedig ( ; Death in Venice) serves the

Prussian state by his writing, as his ancestors served it through istration or soldiering; he rejects self-analysis, turns his back on moralambiguity, denies the link between understanding and compassion, andadopts the motto of Frederick the Great – ‘Endure’ (‘Durchhalten’)

admin-He gains national popularity with a series of sternly moralising novels,only to discover unsuspected depths of inadmissible erotic passion withinhimself

In identifying with an institution and a historical process, the self avoidsinterpreting its own life as a narrative The history of the institution re-

places the biography of the self Thus Innstetten in Fontane’s Effi Briest

() has a career rather than a biography; Thomas Buddenbrook tifies with the family firm; in Aschenbach, the public figure has almost

iden-smothered the private self; and Josef K in Kafka’s Der Prozeß (; The

trial ) considers himself first and foremost the deputy manager of a bank.

The institutional self is incapable of change and growth It is cut off fromits past and its future

The self capable of change, by contrast, goes through a series of stageswhich are not sharply discrete Thus childhood should ideally survive

as the capacity of play which is part of friendship (as opposed to mereconsociation for some practical purpose) and of erotic companionship (asopposed to the mere satisfaction of physical desire) Fontane’s Innstettenturns his daughter into a priggish automaton Thomas Buddenbrookhas a hostile relationship with his son Hanno, vainly seeking in himcompensation for his own failures Josef K dislikes children and drivesthem away; his humour takes the form only of sour amusement at otherpeople’s disabilities (like the paralysed muscle in the face of one of hissubordinates); he associates with other professional men for the sake

of networking and supporting one another’s self-esteem; and his sexualrelations are exploitative

Faced with a crisis, the embattled self remains stuck in a frozen heroicposture It substitutes stoic endurance for change and growth Forcedinto introspection by the prospect of a duel, Innstetten discovers aninternalised and irresistible ‘social something’ (‘Gesellschafts-Etwas’).Later, isolated and unhappy after rejecting his wife, he can only take theadvice given by his colleague W ¨ullersdorf: ‘To stand in the breach and en-dure until you are killed, that’s the best thing’ (FIV,) – inhuman advice