Dinner in Husum with Rudolf Eucken

I had a second literary encounter in Husum, a surprise, one that reinforces a common Wuthering Expectations theme.

An attractive brick high school from the 19th century has been turned into a luxury hotel, the Altes Gymnasium Hotel.  One night we went to the hotel restaurant, the Gourmetrestaurant Eucken.  The restaurant is so fancy that its menu is just two pages.  One page is the Menu “Theodor Storm,” of course, what else, and the other is the Menu “Rudolf Eucken.”  The menu is, for now, here as a PDF – perhaps you can guess what I ordered.

Who is Rudolf Eucken?  The menu had a biography.  He was a philosopher who had taught in this very high school in Husum for several years, before receiving prestigious university appointments in Basel and later Jena.  He eventually won the 1908 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Really?  No kidding?  Who?  (I am pretending I am in the restaurant, struggling with the biography, asking meine Frau if I had made some mistake with the German).  I have at least glanced at the list of Literature Prize winners several times, but Eucken’s name meant nothing to me.

He was recognized for “his earnest search for truth, his penetrating power of thought, his wide range of vision, and the warmth and strength in presentation with which in his numerous works he has vindicated and developed an idealistic philosophy of life,” which could hardly be more generic except for the last clause, which matches Alfred Nobel’s original “idealistic” conception of the prize.

His Nobel Lecture, the only work of his I have read, is titled “Naturalism or Idealism?”  I know better than to judge a writer by his dreary Nobel Lecture, and since Eucken is a philosopher I am in more trouble than usual.  Eucken is a Christian Kantian, so idealism is good, naturalism, meaning something more like utilitarianism or materialism or scientism, is not bad but insufficient for a good life.  Literature has a special role in the struggle – note that “naturalism” now seems to refer to Zola’s writing:

Naturalism cannot give to literature an inner independence or allow it an initiative of its own; for if literature is only a hand of life on the dial of time, it can only imitate and register events as they happen. By means of impressive descriptions [Zola, right?] it may help the time to understand its own desires better; but since creative power is denied to it, it cannot contribute to the inner liberation and elevation of man.  At the same time it necessarily lacks dramatic power, which cannot exist without the possibility of an inner change and elevation.   

Literature should instead “help to shape life and to lead the time, by representing and simultaneously guiding what is rising in man's soul” and thereby “raise our life to greatness above the hubbub of everyday life by the representation of eternal truths.”  No wonder, given this guff, so many contemporary writers were trying to  burn literature down and start over.  All hail King Ubu!

I do not really know why Eucken’s name meant nothing to me.  Despite his Prize, he got left behind somehow.  Checking library catalogs, his books have not appeared in English since 1924 (The problem of human life as viewed by the great thinkers from Plato to the present time).  The Harvard University library catalog shows a few recent hits, books tagged with his name, three in the last ten years, including a twelve volume set of his collected works.

So he is not a forgotten writer, not quite.  There are some limits on how much a Nobel Prize can do for a writer.  The lobster soup made in his name was good.

I guess I am going to run off for a couple more days.  Back Monday with some Trollope, maybe.

The insular Theodor Storm

Theodor Storm wrote on a small scale - novellas and short tales, and lyric poems, mostly set in and around the country where he grew up. He was a regionalist, and a miniaturist. So were most of his German-language contemporaries, or at least the ones who are still read, or at least the ones I have heard of. Gottfried Keller and Jeremias Gotthelf in Switzerland, for example, or Adalbert Stifter in Austria, or Eduard Mörike in his corner of Germany, or Annette von Droste-Hülshoff in hers. I'm leaving out one or two key figures - give me a minute.

I don't think this is a coincidence. It's some sort of reaction to the earlier generation of German Romantics. The fairy tale weirdness of E. T. A. Hoffmann and many others is being domesticated; the visonary worlds of Novalis and Hölderlin are being cut down to a human scale; the incomprehensible achievements of Goethe are being sifted by more ordinary geniuses. Reduce the scale, make it small, look carefully at what is right around you - every one of these writers picked up that message somehow.

Thinking about Storm and his peers reminded me of the recent comments of Horace Engdahl, secretary of the Nobel Prize jury, to the effect that American readers, or writers, or literature, or all three, are "too isolated, too insular," and that they don't "participate in the big dialogue of literature." I can only guess what he might have meant. But Storm, Gotthelf, Mörike - these guys were insular. They did not write the big books (Keller's Green Henry may be a bit of an exception).

I'm not sure what the "big dialogue" of literature is, exactly, or why I should attach a special value to it. Immensee is not a big book, in scope, ideas, or ambition. It is merely perfect. Gotthelf's The Black Spider is imperfect and small, but it takes a wild leap into the unknown. It's a marvel. Insular has its good side. My position is strongly pro-insular.

The two mid-century German exceptions to the rule: The contemporary fame and current reputation of Heinrich Heine dwarfs that of every other writer I have mentioned here. Heine was the great cosmopolitan, the citizen of the world, politically engaged yet a lyric poet of the highest caliber, a master of multiple genres. He would have been a sure thing for the Nobel Prize if he had only lived another fifty years, to the age of 110 or so. My other position is strongly pro-non-insular.

The second exception: Theodor Storm's first published book was a poetry anthology that he shared with two brothers, friends at the University of Kiel, Theodor and Tycho Mommsen. Theodor Mommsen did live long enough to receive, at the age of 85, the second Nobel Prize in Literature, not for his youthful poetry but for his 1854 History of Rome. Mommsen is more or less the founder of the modern study of Roman history. I don't know if that counts as insular or not. I don't think it's what Engdahl meant.