Franz Mehring - The Origins of German Middle Class Culture

Franz Mehring

The Origins of German Middle Class Culture

The Lessing Legend

(1892/1893)

1. Lessing’s Origins

The idea that Lessing was a second Luther must be avoided. Traces of this idea can be found even in Heine and Lassalle ; and even Lessing himself in his theological discussions once referred to the authority of Luther. Unless he did so for tactical reasons, he demonstrated in a curious way that even the clearest minds may not be clear as to the motives that determine their actions. As a matter of fact, from the beginning to the end of his career Lessing directed his hardest blows against Luther and Lutheranism. Luther fought for the class of the princes, while Lessing fought for the middle classes ; the two constitute the most direct opposites known to German history from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Lessing was by no means a Luther on a higher scale. The parson Goeze, Luther’s genuine successor, called Lessing the Anti-Luther, and rightly so. In Lassalle’s excellent words : “The great fault of the Goezes past and present consists in – being right.”

Yet the fact that Luther and Lessing came from the same state is not unimportant. In that part of Germany which shook off the domination of the Hapsburgs and the Pope, Saxony was by far the most developed economically, and consequently the most civilized. The returns from her mines gave the Saxon princes a great advantage in the beginning of capitalist development. In the first decades of the sixteenth century, there was no more powerful German territorial prince than the Saxon Elector Friedrich. The production of commodities advanced rapidly in Saxony ; the great trade route from the South to the North of Europe passed through Erfurt. The Lutheran movement was born of the struggle for this important commercial centre, which at the same time possessed the most important German university and was the main centre of German humanism. The city of Erfurt, which itself strove for independence from any princely power, had for long been an object of contention between Mayence and Saxony. When the Hohenzollern Albrecht was elected Archbishop of Mayence, the quarrel began again. Under these circumstances it could not be expected that the Saxon Elector Friedrich should allow “indulgences” to be sold in his state by a commissar of Albrecht ; half of the revenues of the sale were intended to pay the 25,000 ducats which Albrecht owed to Rome for his election.

The Elector Friedrich was a peace-loving gentleman. And more, he was an extremely bigoted Catholic, a believer to the same degree that his adversary Albrecht was an unbeliever. His highest ambition was to receive the Golden Rose from the Pope ; he undertook a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and bought for the Wittenberg Palace Church five thousand questionable bones of saints from all over the world. This was the same church on whose doors Luther had nailed his theses against the indulgences – and here these relics were exhibited on a certain day every year for the people to adore. When Luther, just before publishing his theses, had preached against indulgences, he lost the favor of the Elector, who feared that such preaching might lessen the attractions of his relics. However his most peace-loving attitude disappeared when money was at stake. For a long time the Elector had observed to his annoyance that the Roman vendors of indulgences gathered like a swarm of bees in his state, and for very good reasons. However much money he might have spent on the bones of dead saints, he was not inclined to use the money of his state to present the Roman Church with a new living saint in the person of Archbishop Albrecht, who intended to rob him of the rich city of Erfurt. Therefore he allowed Luther to continue, not as a “man of God” but as a tool of his financial policy. Nothing is more unfounded than to see a “world historical action” in Luther’s theses against indulgences and to date the beginning of the Reformation from them. The Anti-Roman movement had been in existence for decades in all classes of the German nation, and the fight against the abuses of the church had already found literary expression, for instance in the writings of the humanists. They were much more scathing than the rather tame theses of Luther. who did not even blame the indulgences themselves, but only their “abuses.” It is equally wrong to say that Luther dealt with the questions in a straightforward, vigorous, popular manner, while the culture of the humanists was beyond the reach of the people. Luther’s theses, too, were drafted in Latin, and written in the peculiar mysterious style of scholastic theology, which was absolutely incomprehensible to the masses. Luther himself often expressed his surprise at the tremendous consequences of his step. What he did not grasp, and what the bourgeois historians can explain only by some fantastic ideological assumption, is very simply explained by the economic situation of Luther’s time. Of the intellectual leaders of the Reformation, Luther, the narrowest mind among them, survived, while the more important intellects, Hutten, Münzer, Wendel Hipler perished. Behind Luther stood the power which was economically the most important – the princes. Behind the others stood the barons, the proletariat, the peasants and the burghers – classes which were either economically declining or just beginning to rise. Because their economic interests were mutually opposed, they could not unite in a common action against the princes. After the rebellion of the barons and especially after the Peasants’ War, Luther understood his role very well, as this glorious sentence alone demonstrates :

“That two and five equal seven you can understand with your reason ; but if your rulers say two and five are eight, you must believe it, against your own knowledge and instinct.”

With regard to his really fine achievement – that he, as a poor and unknown monk, recognized and fought the vices of the exploiting Roman Church – Luther neither stood alone among the proletarian part of the clergy of his time, nor in the front rank. Many of those priests honorably bore witness to their hatred of Rome and their faithfulness to their class by dying on the battlefield or on the scaffold. But as a “peasant’s son risen high,” a “leader of the nation,” Luther was the Great Man of usual stamp : the exponent of historical evolution tried to master and to check it. Luther could organize the new church according to the needs of German petty despotism ; he could make the very worldly territorial princes bishops of their states, and could attribute to them the right of disposing of the church and monastery demesne. But he could do all this only as a fanatical servant of the princes, as an intellectual champion of the irresistible decay which befell Germany, and at the price of making his name the symbol of the narrowest reaction as early as the middle of the sixteenth century.

The high economic development of Saxony was the most important factor in Luther’s rise, yet it imposed certain limits on the omnipotence of the princes which Luther advocated. In a still half-barbarian state like Brandenburg where – as a learned priest said, an educated man was as rare as a white raven – the Elector Joachim could half change over to the cause of the Reformation, in order to spend the revenue of the whole church demesne on his pleasures. In a civilized country like Saxony such a summary method was impossible. Here a more or less important part of the loot had to be devoted to the cultural tasks which the Roman Church had fulfilled, as well as it could up to that time. So the Saxon schools were founded, in Innaberg and Freiberg, in Dresden and Leipzig, in Naumberg and Merseburg, all of them famous in their way, but the most famous of them were the so-called “princes” schools of Grimma, Meissen and Pforta, which had grown out of monasteries.

In Saxony a school system was born that might be called classical, for German conditions. It did not maintain this standard, however, but shared the fate of Saxony’s economic prosperity that had brought about these institutions. Through Germany’s exclusion from the world market, through the discoveries of inexhaustible supplies of gold and silver in the New World, through the Thirty Years War, and so on, the middle classes in Saxony, as in the whole of Germany, declined economically and grew appallingly servile. The further this decline continued, the more fanatically the Saxon schools – and above all the universities of Leipzig and Wittenberg defended the ideological reflection of their wretched condition, that rigid and fossilized Lutheranism in whose shadow free scientific research could not possibly flourish. Nevertheless Saxony still remained superior to the rest of Germany in education and economic wealth. Dull mirrors as the Saxon schools had become, they were able to receive the first rays of a new culture which was reflected on Germany from abroad.

Lassalle has sharply repudiated Julian Schmidt’s assertion that Germany was temporarily struck off the register of European civilization by the Thirty Years War ; and he has enumerated the surprisingly large number of outstanding men which Germany nevertheless produced during and after that war. This argument against a remark inspired by shallow ignorance is quite justified, but it must not be extended to the statement that in the seventeenth century Germany was on the same level as other civilized European nations. A great, if not the greatest, part of those important intellects had to go abroad, permanently or at least for a time, in order to have the necessary scope for their talents ; those remaining at home were intellectually dependent on foreign influence, obedient disciples of greater masters, as Thomasius, one of the most important of them, candidly said. This fact is again explained by Germany’s economic decay. The great advance in mathematics and the natural sciences which mark the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the result of an international traffic which conquered more and more the whole earth.

This advance could have its real roots only in those nations which had an important part in this traffic, above all England and the Netherlands. The fundamental condition of this progress was a high development of the middle classes, and its consequence was the awakening of a political self-consciousness in these classes. But in Germany there was no middle class as an independent force, since the trade routes had moved from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic Ocean ; the ruling classes in Germany were the princes, and they certainly could not produce a national scientific life.

If one is to believe the patriotic Milites Gloriosi who set the fashion in Germany today, the German worship of foreign culture so predominant in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is something which a real patriot can remember only with horror. But the scientific conception which sees in the intellectual life of nations the reflection of class struggles, must distinguish between two quite different aspects of the question. Certainly the imitation of foreign manners by the German princes and aristocracy was a brutal denial of the extremely modest national consciousness ; it will always remain a stain on German history. It meant aping the foreigners, and was born of the vilest interests of petty despotism. But this shameless aping of foreigners did not have to wait for the patriots of today to condemn it, it was denounced already by serious contemporaries, to mention only Klopstock and Lessing. Logau wrote in the seventeenth century :

Servants wear their masters’ livery.
France as master, Germany as servant shall it be ?
Free Germany, be ashamed of this vile slavery !

The worship of foreign culture by German scholars calls for quite another and really a contrary judgment. It was the first attempt of intelligent middle class elements to drag their class out of a bottomless swamp. There was no other way to accomplish this aim ; the fruit borne by the native plant of orthodox Lutheranism was indigestible. But it is a difficult and ungrateful task to attempt to revive a dead stem, one that no longer receives any nourishment from its roots by grafting on it branches from foreign trees. Only when the old stem itself returned to life, only when the German middle classes began to recover a little economically, that is, after the middle of the eighteenth century, did the foreign branches grow on the native tree. Until then, no other course was open to German scholars save to seek their intellectual nourishment and even their motherland abroad. The more so as the princes who ruled Germany were either hostile or indifferent to German culture, or else regarded it with a very questionable interest, namely, to make it serve their petty despotism. The princes either allowed German scholars to starve or forced them to go abroad, or attached them to their courts. It is difficult to say which of the three was more disastrous to those concerned. Therefore it is easy to understand why the German scholars who stayed in Germany became rather peculiar characters, and why German enlightenment had such a half-hearted and ambiguous character, so repulsive to a man like Lessing. English and French philosophy were rooted in the middle classes of the English and French nations ; this origin was at once their fetter and their protection. German enlightenment had no such roots and floated in the air ; nothing prevented it from going as far as the “light of reason” shone, but nothing protected it either, when a ray of this light fell too revealingly on the cesspool of despotism ; hence the hypocritical mixture of smiling condescension and pious horror with which the German exponents of enlightenment thought to ridicule the English and French “materialists and naturalists, atheists and Spinozists.” But they made only themselves ridiculous. Bourgeois science has never wholly recovered from this ugly disease, because the German middle classes never dared to stand on their own feet. And since the German bourgeoisie has taken refuge behind Prussian bayonets, this illness has returned, and in an even worse form than ever.

Under such circumstances Saxony had to become the principal country for the intellectual awakening of the German middle classes. The Saxon schools were the only institutions or, at least, the most suitable ones for acquiring the middle class culture of foreign countries. They had fallen very far from their old level through orthodox Lutheranism. The ancient languages were taught only to enable the pupils to discuss endlessly every letter in the Bible. For all this, these languages were no less the keys to the treasury of European science, and from the end of the 17th century until far into the 18th, most exponents of German culture were Saxons, or came from Saxon schools, from Leibnitz, Pufendorf and Thomasius to Gellert, Klopstock, Lessing. Even more : with the entrance of Goethe and Schiller into Saxon culture a new period began in the lives of these Southern Germans. Weimar did not belong to the sphere of military Prussia but to the cultural sphere of Saxony, and Karl August, the duke of Weimar, was not a Hohenzollern, but came of the Wettin dynasty.

But this is already beyond the frame of this essay. Yet part of our task is to indicate briefly the social progress represented by these two groups of names. Leibnitz, Pufendorf, Thomasius stood already on bourgeois ground. It was in the interest of the middle classes that they tried to liberate science from the chains of theology. Leibnitz’s philosophical optimism, much as can be said against it, weakened the influence of the orthodox concept of the world as a vale of tears. Pufendorf and Thomasius taught the doctrine that all society was derived from a contract and that the individual had the right to resist against obvious injustice. They denied the divine origin of monarchical power and applauded the pamphlets published in the Netherlands against the despotism of King James II. And it was Thomasius who brought the German language back to the lecture hall of the universities. But the work of these men found no support nor echo in the middle classes. Leibnitz in his lasting achievements was more of a European than a German scholar ; Pufendorf and Thomasius themselves confessed to having taken their ideas from Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes. All of them were still dependent on the courts. During his lifetime Leibnitz already became famous for being able to prove anything that princes wanted to have proved. Pufendorf ended his life as a Brandenburgian and Swedish court historian ; Thomasius made the most incredible concessions to monarchical despotism in his later years, when he was a Prussian professor in Halle.

But about the middle of the eighteenth century, Gellert, Klopstock and Lessing not only stood on bourgeois ground, but were already rooted in it. Gellert was a very small figure compared with the other two, but his Fables gave the middle classes their first literary banner, and humble and loyal as Gellert was personally, the first faint sound of middle class opposition can be discovered in his harmless rhymes. Much prouder and more outspoken is this class-consciousness in Klopstock who, later on, was to be the bard of the French Revolution, and above all in Lessing, who disdained the fetters of an office in the service of any court or state, and tried to live for his literary calling in social liberty. It was an enormously bold venture in Germany, and its tragic outcome taught the lesson that the middle classes were not ripe for the boldness of their representative, and this self-confidence, half nonchalant, half defiant, showed the whole Lessing. It was the same whether he wrote as a twenty-year-old youth : “What do I care if I live in wealth or not, as long as I do live !” or as a fifty-year-old man : “I am too proud to think myself unhappy, and gnash my teeth and let the boat drive, as wind and water will ; let it suffice that I myself don’t want to overturn it !” It formed the strongest contrast to the anxious and greedy philistine worry about a `”good life,” so obviously displayed in the correspondence of the contemporaries, and something of this frank and free attitude was probably given to Lessing by his school.

2. The Prussian Monarchy

The historians who represent King Frederick as being related in mind and spirit to the bourgeois classics, and particularly to Lessing, usually adduce some of his utterances such as the following : “The sovereign is the first servant of his state” ; “I will be a king of the poor ;” “There should be no restriction on the Press ;” “In my state each can find salvation after his own fashion.”

However, those principles stand in more or less glaring contrast to Frederick’s whole reign, one is tempted to take them as a product of the noted liberalism of crown princes. The more so if it is borne in mind that these nice phrases were uttered shortly before or immediately after his accession to the throne – that is, at a time when the dreadful pressure under which his father had held him from infancy was released. As a matter of fact Carlyle takes them as such, and in spite of all his hero worship he remains a practical Englishman, saying : “This beautiful language aroused in the world of that time an admiration which is not immediately intelligible to us, since we have long been accustomed to it and know its usual outcome.” Obviously it did not occur to Carlyle then, in the fifties, that this unintelligible admiration would in the nineties be made the proper duty of every patriotic German !

Even Carlyle’s conception is still too favorable to the bourgeois Prussian historians, and far too unfavorable to Frederick himself. It is scarcely necessary to state that scientific historical research has as little to do with the anti-Prussian mythologists as with the pro-Prussian ones. To see in Frederick the source of all evil is the opposite pole of the same folly, namely, to see in his person the source of all good.

Whoever studies the history of this sovereign according to scientific principles will discover as his outstanding talent, as the main cause of his successes, a quality which should be especially appreciated by adherents of the materialist conception of history. Frederick was fully aware that he could not advance even one step more than the economic conditions under which he lived and reigned allowed. Not that his judgments surpassed his time ; rather they lagged far behind it, and were anything but inspired. Not that he never was deceived regarding economic conditions ; he was, often enough, and always paid the price for it.

During the Seven Years War he wrote to his always despondent brother Henry that he will win who has the last thaler in his pocket ; he called the finances the “nerves” of the state, and in his description of the Prussian state put them above everything else, even above the army. So we see that from the very first day to the last of his reign he adhered to this fundamental conception. It is difficult to say when this was most evident : on the day of his accession, when as a man not yet thirty he changed within a moment from an oppressed slave to an absolute despot, or on the last day, when after all his successes and fifty years of despotic reign he remained undeceived as to the limits set by the conditions of his time.

When he said that “the sovereign is the first servant of his state,” he did not mean to submit himself to this ideal, nor did he intend thereby to gain a cheap popularity. He was merely concerned with the free disposal of the country’s economic means of power. For this expression – uttered first by the emperor Tiberius – does not imply a limitation but an extension of absolutism, and although this might be a deep secret to the narrow vulgar minds of today, Frederick’s contemporaries were well aware of it. So writes Heinse in his Ardinghello :

“How can he be a servant whom nobody commands, who does not recognize a master above him, who makes laws as he likes, issues them and does not accept any, who punishes arbitrarily without law ?”

In effect, when Louis XIV said “I am the State,” a moral responsibility towards the state on the part of the sovereign was still recognized, and this was yet to be shown by the execution of Louis XVI. But if the sovereign makes himself only a servant, but the first servant of the state, this means, in an absolutist state, that he renounces such responsibility. For one cannot make oneself the slave of one’s own property, and how far Frederick considered the “state” as his property can be seen from his testament, in which he bequeaths to his nephew not only his “gold and silver vessels, library, picture gallery,” etc., but also “the Kingdom of Prussia,” as if it were an ordinary farm.

In asserting that he was the first servant of the state, Frederick pursued very practical aims. He made this remark about six times, first when he was crown prince, when he opened his Anti-Macchiavell with the statement that there are two kinds of sovereigns : those that see all with their own eyes, and govern their states themselves, and those that rely on the honesty of their ministers and are ruled by whoever gets power over their minds. The first kind are absolute masters, as if they were the souls of their states, they are the first keepers of justice, the high commanders of the fighting army, the directors of the financial administration, in short, the first servants of the state. These Frederick will emulate. The others refer obviously to his father, who in the tragedy of young Frederick had been the blindly raging tool of the Austrian partisans Grumbkow and Seckendorf. And, in general, however strange a tyrant Frederick William I [1] might have been, he created and favored the civil service class, allowing them a more or less important part in the government. Frederick detested the civil servants, considering them an obstacle to his enlightened despotism, and was always trying to remove them.

We shall later deal with the question whether he really succeeded in this or whether his father did not prove the more enlightened despot. Here it only matters to know what Frederick intended. It was his desire that all civil servants blindly execute his despotic will, and the phrase that the sovereign is the first servant of the state was his guide to action. In this he always remained faithful to himself. Forty years after the Anti-Macchiavell he writes that although the sovereign is a “human being” like “the lowest of his subjects,” yet he is at the same time “the first judge, the first financier, the first minister of society,” and has the same interest as the people. This, Frederick argued, would not be the case with an aristocracy of generals and ministers, if he were to surrender to them. Frederick governed without the civil servant class altogether ; he saw the ministers officially only once a year at the so-called “Review of Ministers” in June ; he disposed of all government acts himself, using three so-called Chamber Secretaries, whom he chose almost without exception from subaltern clerks, condemning them to a life of monk-like solitude, or even, as a foreign diplomat said, holding them under guard like state prisoners.

It is somewhat different with “the king of the poor,” for a documentary attestation of this sentence does not exist at all. Treitschke, too, is not quite right when he says : “The most human of the royal duties, the protection of the poor and oppressed, was for the Hohenzollerns a commandment of self-preservation ; proudly they carried the name ‘kings of beggars,’ bestowed by French scorn.” This “most human of the royal duties” had no meaning for Frederick. The wealthy and oppressing class, the large landowners and Junkers, were subsidized by the exchequer and were granted licentious privileges. And as for “French scorn,” it really has nothing whatsoever to do with the subject. It rather refers to a remark which Frederick made some months before his accession to the throne at a dinner of the Duke of Brunswick in Berlin : “If once I mount the throne, I shall be a real king of beggars.” By this he sought either to pave his way with good intentions, or – what is more likely – to hit back at his father’s financial art in fleecing the people. It was in this sense that his father himself interpreted the remark ; when informed of it, it brought on his last fit of fury against his son. In any case, this utterance had no practical consequences : financial methods under Frederick remained where Frederick William had left them, and after the Seven Years War they were made infinitely more oppressive.

We come now to the “gazettes,” which “must not be embarrassed” [2], and here we shall witness a little interlude of foreign policy. Through his attitude towards the press Frederick wished to secure for himself another weapon against the European powers. That this is so is apparent from the fact that the historical source of this saying is a letter written by the cabinet minister Count Podewil on the 5th of June 1740, the sixth day of Frederick’s reign. It runs as follows :

“His Royal Majesty, after rising from the table, ordered me most graciously to make known in His High name to the ministers of State and War, that an unlimited liberty shall be granted to the Berlin journalists, to write in their articles on the events here, whatever they like, without being censured ; for this pleases His Highness, and then foreign ministers would not be able to complain if they encountered occasionally in the local press passages that might displease them. I took the liberty to suggest that the Austrian court would be very ‘particular’ on this subject ; but His Majesty replied that gazettes, to be interesting, must not be embarrassed.”

This glorious “liberty of the press” was nothing but an old and yet eternally new diplomatic trick, making it possible to say all sorts of unpleasant things to foreign powers and yet disclaim responsibility. Besides, the strict press law, repeatedly insisted upon by Frederick, remained, and stipulated “that in public nothing may be printed without higher permission,” and any criticism of the government or administration, even “any discussion of public conditions,” was considered “absolutely impermissible.” In the political sections of the Berlin journals of that time one finds only news of fires, earthquakes, monsters, etc. ...

On principle, Frederick always professed to be opposed to liberty of the press, even in his literary correspondence with French writers, to whom he was wont to display his liberalism ; as, for example, in his letter to d’Alembert dated April 7th 1772 : “One has to suppress everything in books which endangers the general security and the welfare of society.” Even at the close of his life, in a cabinet order issued October 14th 1780, the king rendered homage to liberty of the press in his own peculiar way, by inflicting military service as punishment for “unauthorized journalism that stirred up the subjects and caused insolent vexations.”

Actually there is no more classical witness against the press system of Frederick than Lessing himself, who in the bitterest poverty of his early years was averse to editing a political paper in Berlin under a censorship which suppressed every independent expression ; and who in his mature years characterized with bitter words “the Prussian liberty to think and to write” as being “only and exclusively the liberty to make as many gibes against religion as one likes. The honest man should be ashamed to use this liberty.”

Here we come to the religious policy of Frederick and to the most famous of his winged words. In the phrase : “All religions must be tolerated, and each one must find salvation after his own fashion,” Stahr sees the “fundamental idea of Nathan,” and who knows how many have credulously repeated his wisdom. One might wonder why Stahr and his followers did not prefer to quote another cabinet order issued at the same time on the same question, an order that might even remind one of the parable of the three rings, namely his reply to the request of a Catholic for citizenship in Frankfort : “All religions are equally good, if only the people that profess them are honest people, and if Turks and heathens would come and populate the country, then we would build mosques and churches for them as well.” This indeed would be something like the “three rings,” but – the despairing phrase “and would populate the country” prevented this cabinet order from being developed into another patriotic fable. Frederick wanted to “populate” his poor and sparsely-settled country in order to get recruits for his army and taxes for his exchequer ; and for this purpose Christians, Turks, heathens and – for financial purposes at least – even Jews were highly welcomed, and were granted immediate recognition of their service and protection of religious liberty. As a matter of fact, he never dreamed of granting equal civil rights to all religious bodies ; nothing was ever further from his thought than to consider the Jew, the Turk, the Mohammedan as being equal to the Protestant. Such equality was demanded by Locke in his book on tolerance, and after him by the whole school of bourgeois rationalism.

The Protestant clergy considered Frederick’s accession to the throne to be a convenient opportunity to get rid of the Roman Catholic schools established for soldiers’ children by Frederick William I. They asked the king to suppress these schools, referring to a report of the chancellor of the exchequer accusing their clerical teachers of subversive propaganda ; but Frederick wrote on the margin of this petition : “The religions must all be tolerated, and the only thing the chancellor has to keep in mind is that no religion prejudices the other, for in this country each one must find salvation after his own fashion.” The so-called “fundamental idea of Nathan” consists thus in nothing more than the maintenance of an institution already established by his father, a sovereign of the most limited church-faith, who did not even recoil from ill treatment of his oldest son, the later king Frederick, for having a different view of some subtle Calvinist dogma than he should have had according to the paternal will. Nevertheless Frederick William I established Roman Catholic schools for soldiers’ children, and also maintained in the town of Brandenburg a Russian pope for the Russian soldiers in his army ; he even allowed them, no matter where they were stationed, to journey to Brandenburg for the satisfaction of their religious needs, thus incurring the risk of desertion, which he feared like the pest. It actually happened once that twenty costly-gained Russians took advantage of this to desert from their regiment, which was garrisoned at Halle under the “old Dessauer.” [3] What Stahr and his blind followers took for “the fundamental idea of Nathan” was nothing other than the first commandment of the Prussian military state. The foreign recruiting, in itself already difficult, would have become altogether impossible if the resistance of the governments and the people had been backed by the churches. This was especially true in the case of Prussia, whose chief fields of recruiting were the clerical states of Southern and Western Germany. The Roman Catholic clergy considered Prussia the most heretical state not so much on account of the pronounced “Protestant convictions of the Hohenzollerns,” as represented by the obliging historians, but rather because the kingdom of Prussia proper – the province of East Prussia of to-day – had been expropriated from the Catholic church. The military state of Prussia had every reason to treat the Catholic church delicately, for its very existence depended upon it ; and Frederick, who saw this quite clearly, protected the Catholic soldiers’ school from Protestant persecutions and prohibited any attack on Catholicism by Protestant chaplains. He decreed that every regiment should have regular services for the Catholic soldiers and ordered that in all field hospitals a Catholic priest should be present to give religious comfort to his adherents. In 1751 he made known to the “Holy Father” that the Catholics were not only tolerated in his states, but even preferred.

There was another very important military consideration. In spite of every vigilance, and the bloodiest of articles of war, desertion continued rife among his hired troops, and against so obstinate an evil even religious means were not to be despised. The military regulations decreed that “the boys should fear God,” that on Sundays they were to be led to church twice, and they “should always silently and with reverence listen to God’s word.” To make the military oath effective, its “holiness” had to be pumped into “the boys” by a clergyman of their own faith. It is characteristic that Frederick held the Jesuits, with their strict discipline, in highest esteem ; and he cruelly punished a priest of this order who dared to doubt the “holiness” of the military oath. After the abolition of the Jesuit order Frederick sent word to Pope Clemens XIV through his Roman chargé d’affaires : “I never found better priests than the Jesuits, in any respect.” He maintained the Jesuits without frock as “priests of the royal schools” in his country. Perhaps the liberal Jesuit-haters and culture-mongers of to-day call this “Frederickian tradition” ! But when a certain recaptured deserter declared that the Jesuit father Faulhaber had explained to him in Glatz at confession that although desertion was a great sin still it was a sin that could be forgiven, then Frederick without trial, even without confession, ordered that this priest be hanged next to a deserter who had already been rotting for half a year.

Frederick treated the Protestant clergy more contemptuously. He used them also for his military and educational purposes, to keep the army and the people in humility, obedience and ignorance ; but he had a much lower estimate of their efficiency, and whenever these poorly-paid people asked for a small increase in salary or any other improvement of their situation, he used to fob them off by pointing to the apostles who had preached for nothing – in short with remarks that Lessing might rightly call “gibes at religion.”

To the superficial observer Frederick’s religious policy presents a contradictory picture, but in fact it is linked up logically with the possibilities of existence of the Prussian state of that time.

The development of the Prussian state brought Frederick into the strongest opposition to the Catholic church, and accordingly, Frederick took care that those admitted to the important administrative posts of the state and municipalities were Protestants ; but the maintenance of this state forced upon him a military and population policy the first condition of which was the toleration of all religious faiths, and even to a certain degree the favoring of the Catholic church. And as supports of his despotism he preferred the Jesuits to all other priests.

In all this there is not to be found the least shred of Frederick’s personal liberalism.

But what has this to do with Nathan, what has Frederick to do with Lessing ? About as much as, or even less than the emperor William II had to do with Lassalle and Marx. In a narrow sense parallels can be found between Frederick and the young William II : “The sovereign is the first servant of his state” – William dismisses Bismarck ; “King of the beggars” – February decrees ; “Freedom of the press” – abolition of the anti-socialist laws ; “Each one must find salvation after his own fashion” – Prussian draft of law for primary schools. In each case there was a peaceful separation of the faiths, but every faith in its realm had to hold spiritual domination over the masses.

However, nowadays one who called the emperor William II a “collaborator and fellow-combatant of his great contemporaries” Lassalle and Marx would be entrusted to the care of a lunatic asylum, provided he did not find himself within prison walls for lèse-majesté.

It is still more absurd to paint Frederick and Lessing as being akin in mind and spirit. They had nothing in common ; being the most gifted representatives of their respective classes, they embodied the most acute differences of their time in the most acute way. Frederick deeply despised the “roture,” whose advocate Lessing was, and with his own hands expelled every bourgeois element from the ranks of his officers. Lessing, in absolute agreement with his spiritual kinsmen Herder and Winckelmann, loathed Frederick’s state as “the most servile country in Europe.”

Footnotes

1. Frederick II’s father.

2. Frederick’s literal words.

3. Leopold of Dessau, Prussian general.

3. Minna von Barnhelm :
A Satire on the Prussian State

Earlier than any Frenchman, Lessing so to speak discovered the English bourgeois tragedy. Lessing, however, merely remained subject to its immediate influence. In the meantime Diderot had further developed and popularized this tendency in France. He was the first to show that the serious conflicts of honorable characters arising from the circumstances of bourgeois life – even if they are not tragic – provide a new and rich source for dramatic subjects. Lessing was further stimulated by the practice as well as the theory of Diderot. Already in 1760 he had translated in two volumes the Theatre of Monsieur Diderot, containing Le Fils Naturel, Le Pere de Familie and the essay on dramatic poetry. While Minna leans aesthetically on a French model, and her “plagiarisms” are generally believed to be borrowed from English comedies, nevertheless it is an out-and-out German play. What could be more German than that the classical bourgeois comedy should deal with military life ?

This is not only meant satirically, it touches the very essence of Minna. One should not be mystified by the bourgeois critics of literature who allege that Minna glorifies king Frederick or the Seven Years War. Even Goethe in a weak moment succumbed to this absurd idea ; but the same Goethe later said :

When people compare the pieces of Lessing with those of the ancients, and call them paltry and miserable, what do they mean ? Let them rather pity the extraordinary man who lived in a time too poor to afford him better materials ; pity him because he found nothing better to do than to meddle with Saxon and Prussian transactions in his Minna. [1]

Again Lessing is too badly judged. Lessing was really capable of finding better subject matter than the quarrels between Saxons and Prussians, or even the glorification of Frederick. But in order to portray serious conflicts of honorable characters he was forced by the meanness of German affairs to deal with army life ; yet he saw the social aspect of this life, and here too waged the struggle against social oppression. Lessing’s comedy is so little a glorification of Frederick that it scourged his despotism precisely where it was most mortal.

It is in the very nature of despotism to take revenge upon every insurmountable resistance to its tyranny by inflicting malicious vexations upon the individual resister. Thus Frederick, unable to shake the economic basis of the Prussian army, and forced to exalt an officer caste, tormented and tortured the individual officer. The length to which he would go in this respect is almost incredible, as can be seen from his cabinet-orders, to quote only one example. If he was obliged to grant leave to an officer because of serious illness, he would least satisfy his despotic temper to the extent of ordering a different cure or a different bath than that ordered by the doctor. Or, he just drove him out of the service. Frederick in a bad mood would use the least occasion to dismiss an officer. At every inspection the individual officer had to fear immediate dismissal, and once dismissed it was rarely possible for him to enter the army again. It was one of the inviolable principles of Frederickian despotism that the king could never be wrong, and Frederick clung to this principle even in those cases where he himself was afterwards forced to recognize his injustice. “My army is no brothel” was his standing answer to all petitions of dismissed officers for re-entry into the army, and his refusals increased in scorn the more the personal feelings of honor and justice of the individual officers had been the cause of dismissal, as in the case of Blücher and of Yorck.

The king never tortured his Prussian officers more subtly than before and after the peace of Hubertusburg. It was at this time that Lessing lived with the army. The king kept his winter-quarters during 1761-62 in Breslau, in monk-like solitude, in gloomy despair, for the last ray of hope seemed to have vanished ; but suddenly, in January 1762, the death of the Czarina Elizabeth brought redemption. However, Frederick’s feeling of relief was mingled with shame that chance rather than his own might had been his saviour, by bringing a fool to the Russian throne. It is easy to understand that in reaction to this he behaved more than ever like a despot and conqueror, as far as his power reached. By holding superfluous parades he spoiled the recreation of the harassed troops at winter-quarters. He deprived the officers of the so-called douceur-money, which in reality was no present, but rather an indispensable aid towards equipping them for the new campaign. He demanded such enormous contributions from the town of Leipzig, already drained of the last penny, that the major and adjutant von Dyherrn, charged with enforcement, felt impelled to make serious objections ; these objections being unavailing, the major awaited only the peace to throw his sword before the king’s feet. When in February 1763 peace was made, Frederick inflicted anothur judgment on the army : he turned away all the troops he could no longer use during peace-time and pitilessly threw all the bourgeois officers on the street, although their courage and loyalty had just saved him his crown. In their place he put foreign adventurers of noble extraction – their nobility being often as dubious as that of Riccaut de la Marlinière. [2]

It was under these conditions that Lessing lived, and out of them arose his Minna von Barnhelm. Here he glorifies a spirit by no means military, but very bourgeois ; a spirit that even in the face of royal despotism clings inflexibly to its sense of justice. It is in this spirit that Tellheim [3] thinks and acts. For Tellheim, “the service of the great is dangerous, does not repay the trouble, the restraint, the humiliation which it costs.” He does for the great little by inclination, not much more by duty, but all for his own honor’s sake ; and at best he cannot regret having become a soldier. “I became a soldier for party-feeling – I do not myself know on what political principles – and from the whim that it is good for every honorable man to try the profession of arms for a time, to make himself familiar with danger, and to learn coolness and determination. Extreme necessity alone could have compelled me to make this trial a fixed mode of life, this temporary occupation a profession.” (V, 9, Vol.II, p.404.) To go soldiering for its own sake, “is only travelling about like a butcher’s apprentice, nothing more.” Certainly in Tellheim the Frederickian officer is much idealized, and a good portion of Lessing is contained in him. Yet no other German has been able to present on the stage such a finished and solid personality. What does it matter then if Lessing for the theme of his comedy did borrow this or that small feature from foreign models ?

Have the bourgeois historians of literature at all understood the story of Minna ? On the basis of shadowy analogies they look for its origin in Shakespeare, in the Spanish plays of cape and sword and even in Plautus ; yet in fact the truth was near at hand for these patriots ! The story of Minna is nothing else but a sharp satire on the regime of Frederick. Tellheim, the major, has been discharged after the peace, and subjected to a painful inquiry. He had been required to enforce with the utmost severity a contribution in cash from some Thuringian estates ; but as they could not pay, he had advanced the sum from his own pocket. When peace was signed he intended to have this bill entered “amongst the debts to be rectified” : but it is alleged that he was bribed by the estates to accept the lowest possible contribution. Frederick learns from his brother that Tellheim is “more than innocent” of bribery, and informs him that the court’s treasury has ordered that the bill in question be tendered and the money refunded to Tellheim. Tellheim is asked to re-enter the service.

Lessing could not have satirized more grimly the real practice of Frederick’s regime than by this innocent idyll. The reference to “the debts to be rectified” is pure irony ; for out of Saxony alone Frederick had squeezed during the Seven Years War more than 50 million thalers, of which, of course, not one penny was “rectified.” Far from making “advances” from the court’s treasury, Frederick in reality refused every petition for compensation of war damages with the notorious stereotype remark : “Perhaps next the petitioner would like to have his damages from the Great Flood refunded as well.” No less ironical is the king’s spontaneous invitation to a discharged officer to re-enter the army !

Friedrich Schlegel has already referred to the fact that the characters in Minna speak rather “Lessingish.” This is just as true of Emilia and Nathan. Lessing as a dramatist was all reason ; he lacked the poetical imagination from which image after image arises independent of its creator. The heroine of his comedy, too, is infused with his spirit, and, as Goethe says, the “subalterns” make the poet ; and as Lessing made classical a petty despot in Emilia and an orthodox zealot in Nathan, so in Minna he immortalized two despicable types of Frederickian despotism : the shallow foreign-aristocrat adventurer, for whose sake bourgeois blood is ill-treated by the sovereign, and the spying innkeeper. The inn-keepers and the managers and proprietors of the restaurants in the big towns were Frederick’s informers. He paid all or half their rent, in return for which they had daily to report to the police all conversations and meetings held in their rooms, and to deliver “as reliable as possible a protocol-summary” of the “papers carried” by suspicious personalities.

Lessing’s contemporaries of course understood the comedy differently from the bourgeois critics of today. Nicolai complained, “as a Prussian subject,” of “the many pricks against the Prussian government” ; but when Döbbelin put Minna on the stage in Berlin in 1768 it received loud applause and was played ten times in succession. In Hamburg the Prussian Consul General Hecht at first objected to the production, and Herr Erich Schmidt therefore called him “a narrow man.” Frederick fortunately was still narrower, for if he had read the play, or even understood its implications, he would have bestowed upon it the same “simple eloquence” which he bestowed upon Voltaire’s Akakia [4], and it would have been burned by the executioner on the Gendarmen-Market ! [5]

Footnotes

1. J.P. Eckermann : Gespräche mit Goethe [7 February, 1827], Vol. I, p.243, Leipzig : Reclam : 1884. In S.M. Fuller’s translation, Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe, p.208, Boston 1852.

2. Character of Lessing’s play Minna von Barnhelm.

3. Leading character of Minna. Quotations following from Act V, Scene 9, and Act III, Scene 9, in the translation of Ernest Bell, The Dramatic Works of G.E. Lessing, Vol.II, pp.404 and 374, London 1909.

4. Doctor Akakia, a satire by Voltaire on Frederick II and his protege Maupertuis.

5. Square in Berlin.

4. Lessing and the French Classics
Emilia Galotti

It is impossible to understand Lessing’s “dramaturgie” [1] unless its social aspects are considered. It is no theory of the drama valid for all time. Applied by the hands of aesthetic dullards, this fine and elastic weapon has done much harm. How often has poor Lessing himself been attacked with it, sometimes out of intentional malice, sometimes – which was still more dangerous – out of well-meaning stupidity. He to whom nothing was more foreign than senseless chauvinism is supposed to have hoisted the banner of German against that of French art, to have critically destroyed the French drama in order to lead German drama “towards a better glory,” “in the steps of the Greeks and the British.”

Schiller’s meaning in the following epigram is quite sensible, although he expressed these ideas much more strongly than Lessing ever did :

The French must never become a model for us,
No live spirit speaks from their art.

To be sure, Lessing’s Dramaturgie was the greatest national manifestation Germany had seen since Hutten’s broadsides. But the national point of view is always determined by the social interests of the classes representing it, in Hatten’s case the German aristocracy, in Lessing’s the German middle class. It never occurred to Lessing to attack Molière and Destouches in the same strain as he attacked Corneille and Racine, or to throw Voltaire the writer of middle-class comedies overboard with Voltaire the author of court tragedies. Like all ideology, aesthetic and literary criticism is in the last analysis determined by the economic structure of society. Under fundamentally changed economic conditions, we have now arrived at aesthetic and literary views different from Lessing’s. His Dramaturgie is neither an infallible revelation nor a faulty stylistic exercise : it must be judged from the social aspect to which it belongs historically. Regarded from this point of view, it is most delightful to read this work, and everywhere one feels the manly and courageous spirit of Lessing, to whom dramatic art was not an idle game but, like all art, a lever of human culture.

The wretched conditions in Germany forced any “National Theatre” to live mainly on foreign plays. With a few mediocre or bad German plays no attractive program could possibly be created ; with Lessing’s Sara and Minna at least not a varied one. Among foreign plays the French stood in the front rank, through Gottsched’s endeavors and through the great number of translations as well. In this state of affairs only Lessing’s Dramaturgie caused a certain change. In the main, it still had to settle accounts with French dramatic art. Thus Lessing wrote his famous condemnation of the French court tragedy, which would have been like poison to the middle class if transplanted to Germany. Lessing overlooked that Corneille and Racine must somehow have been rooted in the national soil in order to become the classical authors of a great nation ; he overlooked that their tragedies were rich in theatrical effects and full of powerful tension for their contemporaries. He made fun of the “monsters” of women that Corneille liked to show, and yet Corneille’s contemporaries had seen these “monsters” in reality – the princesses of the Fronde. In an even more biased manner than against Corneille, Lessing proceeded against Voltaire as a writer of tragedies – often not without some malice, due to his experiences in Berlin. Lessing’s prejudice seems the greater for the very reason that in his tragedies Voltaire had begun a certain reaction against Corneille and Racine. Nevertheless essentially Lessing was right in fighting against French tragedy. Whatever roots it might have had in a certain historical soil, for all that as a model it was disastrous to middle class art in Germany. And Lessing speaks as an advocate of this art, not as a critic, enthroned above the clouds, above all times and all nations – none such has ever existed anyway.

It might seem, though, as if in the Dramaturgie itself Lessing had presented Aristotle as such an eternally infallible judge. But here again one must know how to make distinctions. Corneille founded the court tragedy on Aristotle’s rules ; it was the last echo of the appalling treatment that had made the ancient Greek the canonical philosopher of the middle ages. Lessing swept away all this ; he opposed to the wrongly understood Aristotle the correctly understood Aristotle. Indeed, he contrasted the Greek tragedy with the French, and never tired of repeating that rules do not create the genius, but genius makes the rules, and that any rule can at any time be brushed aside by a genius. In the triumphant progress of his victorious polemics, he remarks insolently that the aesthetics of Aristotle are as infallible as mathematical truths, and that he could improve any play of the great Corneille according to Aristotle’s rules. But he adds at once that for all that he would be no Corneille, and would not have created a masterpiece.

Already in the Letters on Literature Lessing had pointed out that according to Greek standards Shakespeare was a much greater tragic writer than Corneille, that he always achieved the aim of the tragedy, while Corneille never did so, even though he followed the path marked out by the ancient Greeks.

Thus Lessing understood that all aesthetics are historically conditioned, and if he did not grasp this fact theoretically, it is implicit in all his writings.

It is quite true to say that in Germany Lessing was the first to point out Shakespeare’s greatness ; in the Dramaturgie especially he praises Shakespeare in many marvellous comparisons. But he always contrasts Shakespeare’s historical tragedies solely with the historical tragedies of the French, and it is quite incorrect to trace the German “Shakespearomania” to Lessing ...

Not the historical tragedy but the middle class drama is the ideal of this aesthetician. Diderot is his man, not Shakespeare. Nobody who has really read the Dramaturgie can doubt this, and Lessing prefers the French comedy to the English as decidedly as he prefers the English tragedy to the French. It is clear then how hopeless it is to regard aesthetics as a purely intellectual matter. Of course Lessing knew that from an aesthetic point of view it was ridiculous to mention Diderot and Shakespeare in one breath. He refuted such an equalization, at least indirectly ; he did not think of giving Diderot the honor which he attributed so generously to Shakespeare.

But if aesthetics, too, belongs to the superstructure of the class struggle, the connection is quite clear. Shakespeare was no court author, but still much less a middle class writer. He occasionally paid homage to the court in Henry VIII, but whenever he lets the Lord Mayor of London appear, he invariably portrays him in a manner either ridiculous or contemptible. This is understandable considering that the Puritans hated the theatre bitterly while the court granted it a certain protection. The theatre found its real support in the aristocratic youth, which was vigorous and manly, and – all its limitations granted – still the leading class of a great nation in a period of powerful advance when new horizons were appearing. [2] In Shakespeare’s tragedies the surge of the sea is heard, while in Corneille’s the fountains of Versailles murmur. But how could Shakespeare be a model to Germany, whose aristocracy was as decadent physically as mentally ? Lessing therefore unswervingly pointed to the English and French middle class plays as models for German tragedy and drama. The French comedy, however, was much superior to the English : the middle class opposition in England had long had its Parliament and its periodical press, while in France it still had to concentrate its whole intellectual vigor in the comedy. Because of Shakespeare’s hostile attitude to the middle class of his time, his comedies moved in a world of fairies and fairy tales, adventures and romanticism, with one exception : the Merry Wives of Windsor.

Though second-rate as comedy, historically this is a highly important satire. Shakespeare portrayed the aristocrat who has come down in the world and is ridiculed even by the women of the middle class. But what sort of model could this be to the German middle classes, the great majority of whose women did not as yet know a greater honor than to be ridiculed by decadent despots ? [3]

Probably Shakespeare did not intend Merry Wives of Windsor to be a historical satire ; it would be the only occasion on which he scorned the aristocracy to the greater glory of the middle classes ! According to an old account, his only middle class comedy is supposed to have been written for a very harmless reason : to grant the wish of Queen Elizabeth to see the brave Sir John as a lover for once.

When in 1757 Lessing conceived the first plan for his middle class Virginia, Emilia Galotti, he did not imagine what a scathing satire on German conditions posterity would see in the catastrophe of his dramatic masterpiece.

Emilia implores her own father to kill her, as she cannot rely on her senses and her blood in the struggle against the amorous advances of the despot who had ordered her fiancé to be murdered just before their wedding ... Emilia does not love the prince. But the fact that she and her father know no way to escape the despot’s power other than the murder of the daughter has a ghastly effect on the spectator. It can cause neither fear nor pity. It cannot have any tragic effect, even if it can be traced to real history. Lessing himself has convincingly demonstrated this in Chapter 79 of the Dramaturgie.

From the point of view of tragic art the end of the play is indefensible, the reason being that it can be defended only too well from the point of view of history ...

In Livy’s famous story, the young Lessing saw first the most revolting and striking accompaniment of social oppression : the attack on virginal honor which was as topical in the eighteenth century as it had been two thousand years before, as it still is to-day and will be as long as social oppression exists.

Lessing revealed his dramatic instinct in recognizing the general historical import of this tragic problem as far more important than the single case which had been the cause of a political revolution. He wished to write a middle class Virginia, since “the fate of a daughter who is killed by her father, to whom her virtue is worth more than her life, is tragic enough and has sufficient power to impress the whole soul, even if no political revolution follows it.”

Compared with the original story, Lessing’s treatment of the subject is not shallower, as Dühring asserts, but deeper.

In eighteenth century Germany a middle-class author who wished to write a middle class Virginia with a really tragic ending would have faced an impossible task. A short time before Emilia Galotti was published, in Lessing’s Saxon state, an aristocratic family had solemnly celebrated the “wedding” of their daughter whom the ruling despot had chosen as one of his mistresses. On German soil neither an Emilia nor an Odoardo could be imagined ; here one of the most tragic motives of world history challenged the pen of an Aristophanes rather than a Sophocles.

But Lessing would not have been the champion of the middle classes if he had been scornful of this shame rather than incensed by it. In order that his play might be psychologically true, he had to move the scene of action from the half boring, half libertine world of the philistines of his country to the country of the more passionate nation from which the Roman Virginia sprang. Still, if circumstances are otherwise equal, the social forms of life never depend on frontiers ; in disunited Italy petty despotism ruled no less than in disunited Germany, though thanks to the ancient culture of the country, in finer and more polished forms.

But essentially petty despotism remained everywhere what it was and was bound to be. There was no punishment for its grotesque and ghastly crimes, and if it is doubtful whether Emilia Galotti is a real tragedy, nevertheless the play is rooted in the economic structure of the society in which Lessing’s figures lived. And the author could not go beyond those barriers ..

Outstanding contemporaries understood the social meaning of the tragedy at once. Herder called the author “a real man” and proposed to him to give the tragedy the motto : “Discite moniti. “ Goethe saw in it “the deciding step towards a morally inspired opposition against tyrannical autocracy,” and even in later years he praised it as an excellent work, a piece full of intelligence, of wisdom, of deep understanding of the world, the expression of an admirable culture “compared with which we are already barbarous again,” and one that would appear new in any epoch.

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Footnotes

1. A book of dramatic criticism written by Lessing when he was dramatist to the German National Theatre in Hamburg.

2. The question – For whom did Shakespeare write ? is excellently treated by Rümelin, Shakespeare-Studien, pp.34ff. Among bourgeois historians of literature Rümelin is by far the most advanced in recognizing that poets do not write in heaven and wander in the clouds, but that like other people they live and create in the class struggles of their times. – F.M.

3. It would require a separate treatise to show in detail how German bourgeois aesthetics since Lessing’s time has been continually built in the shape of bourgeois class interests. But we cannot refrain from introducing an illuminating example. Gustav Freytag, the classic man of bourgeois literature at the time when the German bourgeoisie was going from its idealistic to its mammonistic epoch, wrote in his Technik des Dramas, p.57 :

“If a poet wanted to dishonor art so completely as to use the social perversion of real life, the tyranny of the rich, the tormented plight of the oppressed, the position of the poor who get from society almost nothing but suffering, in a polemic and propagandistic manner as the plot of a drama, he would probably arouse the vivid interest of his audience, but at the end of the play this interest would disappear in a tormented depression of spirits. The depiction of the spiritual processes of a common criminal belongs in the court room, care for the improvement of the poor and oppressed classes should be an important part of our practical interest in life, the muse of art is no merciful nun.”

In this passage Freytag takes the same position toward the working class as Gottsched took toward the bourgeoisie. One sees, too, in these sentences, Freytag in the process of casting off the shell of the idealistic period of the bourgeoisie for the shell of the mammonistic period. He is still honest enough to admit that the poor get from society almost nothing but suffering, but he is not ashamed of the unpretty act of seeing in the lives of the working class nothing but a subject for the attention of the overseers of the poor and the sick. That was a generation ago, and how things have changed since then ! The mammonism of the bourgeoisie has completely defeated its idealism, and the most famous piece of literature of our day, the touching novel of economical Agnes, pictures the raptures of joy and delight which the poor get from present-day society, while the “revolutionary” poetasters of the bourgeoisie empty into “art” all sorts of “social perversions, “ brothels, bar-rooms and jails. – F.M.

5. Lessing and Religion

The instinct of bourgeois class interest determined Lessing’s thoughts and actions ; and from this point of view his philosophical struggles appear as one undivided whole. [1]

Lessing, a cheerful child of this world, did not possess any theological streak at all. When only twenty he already began “to doubt wisely,” striving to come to a conviction in religious questions, but he never arrived at a positive conviction. Indeed we are informed that in the last year of his life he became an ...ist, that is, a Spinazist. But even then all he said, according to Jacobi’s report, was : “If I must follow someone, I know nobody else whom I could follow other than Spinoza ... the orthodox notions of divinity convey nothing to me, I cannot stand them.” Not long before, Lessing had written in the preface to Nathan : “Nathan’s opinions against all positive religion have always been mine,” [2] and this was absolutely correct. Already a generation earlier the young Lessing had called “all positive and revealed religion equally true and wrong,” and stated that for his part “man is created to act and not to subtilize.”

It was bourgeois class instinct that led Lessing to adopt an attitude which proletarian class consciousness formulated in the words “religion must be a private affair.”

He troubled nobody with his religion, and did not interfere with the religion of others. Although he always fought orthodoxy, he fought it only as implying social oppression, as restraining scientific research, and as an ideological symptom of royal despotism. Rationalism meant for Lessing that the bourgeois classes came to understand their life interests. Everyone may believe what he likes, but no belief entitles anyone to persecute and oppress others because they hold different beliefs. This is directed principally against orthodoxy as a despotic means of power, but in practice even orthodoxy as religious doctrine benefited by it. Lessing never participated in dogmatic quarrels ; as a religious system dogmatism was as good as any other, and he always detested cheap jokes against religion. He would have assisted a persecuted orthodoxy as readily as he opposed a persecuting one, and he denounced as unjust the prohibition of the Jesuit order by the pope. Religion was for him simply a private affair, and should not interfere with bourgeois legal conditions. His tolerance was very distant from the “tolerance” of Frederick, representing bourgeois as against despotic tolerance ...

As might be expected, Lessing dealt his chief blow against shallow rationalism, which spoiled religion as well as philosophy, and which impeded alike liberty of thought and of belief. In a very different and more profound sense than Frederick he wanted everyone to find salvation after his own fashion, but he fought every religion as soon as it began to restrain liberty of scientific research and as soon as it degenerated into an instrument of Frederickian or any other despotism. For him every religion was right as far as it constituted a step forward in the mental development of humanity, every religion was wrong as far as it wanted to fetter the further mental development of humanity. Lessing conceived religions not as logical but as historical categories, to use a modern expression ; they were not imperishable but indispensable steps in the evolution of the human mind.

He saw during his own lifetime how the orthodoxy of despotism gradually entered into the philosophy of the bourgeoisie ; and he knew well that a historical process cannot be hastened by external means, still less by forcible ones. The cowardly and lazy rationalists interfered clumsily in this mental process, they purposely obliterated the demarcation which had become clear between philosophy and religion ; they represented a supposedly purified but actually falsified Christianity with much greater intolerance ; they made the orthodox system seemingly a bit more reasonable but actually even more senseless. This “refined error” was a heavy impediment in the current of free thought and endangered the mental development of the German bourgeoisie, which now threatened to become absolutely stagnant. Even the plain old orthodoxy appeared firm against these “rationalists” and it was against this fatal error that Lessing warned.

... Lessing calls his Nathan the Wise a son of his old age, born of controversy ; and of the verse of this dramatic poem he says that it would be much worse if it were much better. One should be contented with this criticism of the great critic. Nathan is a play most characteristic of Lessing, an enduring possession of our literature, a precious vessel into which he poured the still magnificent though vanishing power of his heroic spirit ; but it has the traces of age and polemic. Unfortunately Jacob Grimm is not quite wrong in saying that it compares with Emilia as Don Carlos compares with Fiesco. [3] Nathan is rich in beautiful and profound words, though sometimes one would prefer to have them in the classical prose of Lessing rather than his awkward verse. Some secondary characters, like the dervish, the friar and the patriarch, representing classically orthodox fanaticism, have become classical figures, not to forget the scene between Nathan and Recha, written with the whole warmth of his heart ; but the absolutely unhistorical assumptions and the comfortable manner of the discussion on tolerance between the Jew, the sultan and the Knight Templar brought upon Nathan the worst fate that could have befallen a play of Lessing ; it became the banner of the garrulous and bumptious rationalist, the very type whom Lessing always challenged.

One must be careful not to judge the value of this dramatic poem by its present followers. It remains the solemn accord in which Lessing’s greatest struggle ended. Lessing wrote to his brother : “It will be anything but a satirical play, ending in ironical laughter. It will be the most touching play I ever wrote.” He says, too : “My play has nothing to do with our present blackfrocks ... though the theologists of all revealed religions will always abuse it, they will know better than to declare themselves publicly against it.” Lessing wrote Nathan under the most difficult conditions, the deadly disease already in his lungs, paralyzed in his literary activity by police persecution, broken by the death of his beloved wife, tormented by worries over his daily bread. Regarding the royalties from his poem, he wrote that maybe “the horse will have died of hunger before the oats have ripened.”

From all this misery his high spirit rose to the serene naiveté which Goethe had already praised in Nathan. On the best of his contemporaries the play acted like an overwhelming revelation.

“For a long, long time,” wrote Elise Reimarus, “no drop of water, drunk in a dry desert, could have been more refreshing than the Nathan was to us ... What a Jew, what a sultan, what a Recha, Sittah, what men ! If there were to be many such as these, who would not like to live on earth as much as in heaven ?”

In spite of the defects claimed by famous and non-famous critics, the shortest and best criticism remains Herder’s words to Lessing : “I do not say a word of praise ; the work praises the master, and this is a man’s work.”

Nobody, not even the cleverest man, can surpass the possibilities of his time ; what we know to-day on the basis of modern science, namely that historical religions only reflect different economic levels in the development of human society, Lessing could only feel intuitively. He viewed religious quarrels from a bourgeois idealistic standpoint as the causes rather than the results of social struggles. He remarked : “I do not know any place in Germany where this play could yet be performed, but good luck to him who first performs it.” Well, two years after his death Nathan was performed in Berlin, but this did not signify very much. Frederick remained the enlightened despot, using the positive religions as means of power. The Jewish usurer continued to enjoy “the liberty of a Christian banker,” but the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn was merely tolerated, and after his death his daughter Recha did not even know where to put her head. Lessing could not see to the very bottom of things, his understanding being limited by the conditions of his time. Nonetheless admirable is the clarity with which he expressed a point of view which the best men of our time have failed to surpass : the view that religious belief is the private affair of each individual ; and therefore all religions whatever their designation which restrain scientific research and are used for social oppression must be relentlessly fought. The young Lessing considered all revealed religions equally right and wrong, the aging man gave expression to the same trend of thought in the parable of the three rings, already known in world literature since the days of the Crusades : No ring is the true one, the true ring possibly was lost, but he who believes his ring to be the true one should reveal its power by hearty tolerance and by good deeds.

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Footnotes

1. The essential blame for the one-sided, distorted conception of Lessing’s theological controversies is due to the intellectual flatness of the German bourgeoisie. Individual writers are scarcely to be made responsible for it, but the conception finds an especially glaring expression, as one might expect, in Protestant theology, as in Karl Schwarz, Lessing als Theologe. Then Röpe turned the tables in his work on Goeze ; he is followed by Redlich in the article on Lessing in the Allgemeine deutsche Biographie, XIX, pp.756ff, and by Christian Gross in Lessing’s Werke, XV, pp.9ff. Gross makes the glorious discovery of Lessing’s “unclear, yes, in the deepest sense, untrue position” ; he also attacks in an unworthy fashion Johann Jacoby’s excellent essay on Lessing as a philosopher. The most penetrating and thorough work in this direction was done by Hehler in his Lessing-Studien and by Zeller in his essay on Lessing as a theologian in the Historische Zeitschrift, XXIII, pp.343ff. – F.M.

2. Italics are Lessing’s in both cases. Translation by E.K. Corbett, ed. Lessing’s Nathan the Wise, p.xix, London 1833.

3. Plays by Schiller.

6. Lessing and the Proletariat

In the year of Lessing’s death there appeared three sharply contrasting publications.

Frederick the Great’s pamphlet on German literature [1] made clear to all what an insurmountable barrier lay between German intellectual life and Prussian despotism ... Frederick’s ignorance serves to excuse him, to a certain extent – he had not the slightest conception of the development of the middle class ; nor is it possible to deny that his “omniscient despotism” thereby demonstrated its impotence. But it is equally undeniable that in a mood of despotic megalomania his intention was to pour abuse on German literature. In all dutiful humility, but still candidly enough, the minister Hertzberg had pointed out to the king the most serious errors of the pamphlet, but he had answered “ungraciously” enough : “I shall make no such trifling alterations.” It is no wonder that the champions of the middle class regarded the pamphlet as a de-liberate insult. Herder spoke contemptuously of a “ghost that walks in broad daylight,” and Klopstock attacked the despot in angry odes. Goethe’s answer to the king’s insult was, unfortunately, influenced by considerations regarding his position at court. We know nothing about Lessing’s opinion of the pamphlet except that a few days before his death he read the shallow reply of the abbot Jerusalem. The king, about whose despotism Lessing had no illusions left, could no longer take him by surprise ; he found it quite in order that the Muse of Germany went unhonored and defenceless from Frederick’s throne, as Schiller later wrote. It was largely due to Lessing that German literature acquired its worth by its own efforts. In vain are attempts to draw the loyal conclusion from a rather apocryphal remark made by Frederick to Mirabeau some five years later to the effect that the king had decided to leave German literature to itself so that it might develop more vigorously. The conclusion of this pamphlet can have no other meaning but that literature can reach its highest development only through the patronage of the court. “Give us Medicis and we shall see geniuses flourishing. An Augustus will produce a Virgil.” And a despot like Frederick could hardly think otherwise.

One must not be deceived on this point by the byzantinism with which present-day literary historians try to cast a better light upon it. Scherer calls it “indescribably touching,” and Suphan curtsies like a debutante : “Against the stubbornness of the king nothing could be done. It belonged to his greatness.” The lack of intelligence that stares out of every page of the pamphlet may belong to the greatness of despotism ! Yet no one can deny that there was an irreconcilable contradiction between despotism and our classical literature, and that Frederick’s booklet destroys the Lessing legend. One has to be more of an idiot than a patriot to be touched to tears by Frederick’s sentimental talk on the future flourishing of German literature.

In the year of Lessing’s death Schiller’s Bandits was also published. With his first work – and it was a work of genius – Schiller took up Lessing’s life work : the struggle against tyrants. Soon Fiesco and Luise Millerin [2] followed, inspired by Lessing’s spirit and borne on the wings of a much more powerful talent. But the middle class had no ear for this voice that spoke of such great things ; after a short but brilliant beginning Schiller had to exchange the “narrow circle” of middle class life for a so-called “higher plane” which was in reality a much lower one. [3]

The reconciliation with German philistinism was fatal to German literature. Its decline was slow, but steady. The sword of a foreign conqueror achieved what the middle class could not : the domination of Napoleon swept away the worst feudal debris from German soil. But this foreign ruler was himself an intolerable burden for all classes of the nation. And Romanticism mirrored this curiously ambiguous situation. The national and social interests of the German middle class found themselves in opposition to each other, in irreconcilable antagonism. This class could not throw off the foreign yoke without submitting again to the heavy yoke of native despotism. In vain did the leaders of Romanticism try to bridge the abyss by artificial imitation of the ways of genius, and by their famous “romantic irony” ; in vain did they search the literature of all nations and all times for ground in which to gain a footing. Romanticism had to seek this ground in the “magic night” [4] of the middle ages ; only in this tradition were national ideals to be found for Germany. But the middle ages had been the epoch of the most blatant class-domination by the Junkers and priests. There was no escape from this antagonism between national and social interests. The most gifted writer of Romanticism, Heinrich von Kleist, perished in madness and suicide.

Thanks to the immaturity of the middle class in Central Europe, feudal legitimacy won in the struggle against the modern era which began to dawn over Europe in 1789. There were good reasons for Byron’s burning hatred of the victors of Waterloo, for Heine’s enthusiastic cult of Napoleon, and Platen’s biting question : “Wars of liberation, indeed ! Was Miltiades allied to the barbarian Tartars when he defeated the Persians ?”

The greatest sacrifices had proved fruitless ; the bitterest struggles had won neither political freedom nor national unity ; a dull, stupid, petty reaction, that would have liked to set a bailiff on the track of every thought, oppressed men’s minds. Romanticism lost itself in a ridiculous cul de sac. It was in the struggle against these unbearable conditions that Platen learned to use his shining weapons ; in his Romantic Edipus he made fun of “the last of the romantic whining we have been hearing for decades.” But Heine sang “this last free song of Romanticism” in “the fanciful dreamy manner of that romantic school in which I whiled away my happiest years of youth, and then wound up by thrashing the schoolmaster.” [5]

German literature received new impetus when the middle class stirred again after its deepest wounds had healed. But the confusion that still reigned is apparent from the ugly quarrel between Heine and Platen, who failed to understand each other – not to mention the mass of middle class philistines who did not understand either of them. Heine was buried in Paris and Platen in Syracuse ; and the brilliant men who followed them in the Thirties and Forties had to go into exile. In the end the German philistine proved incorrigible, and so he was defeated in 1848 after all.

After that he no longer thought of fighting for the advancement of his class by means of thought or literature or the sword, but only by means of the winged angels of Prussian banknotes. He devoted himself completely to his material interests. Middle class literature ceased to be the intellectual leader of the nation ; instead it became the obedient servant of the bourgeoisie ...

In his most famous novel, Debit and Credit, Gustav Freytag showed the self-satisfied and solvent morality of the German philistine in glittering contrast to bankrupt Polish aristocrats and unscrupulous Jewish usurers. The respectable youth, sitting for countless years in his office chair, writing letters and invoices in quiet servility, became the ideal embodiment of the German “worker.” The fiery songs of Platen, Lenau and Herwegh addressed to the Poles were forgotten ; instead the middle class novelist calculated how many bales of merchandise might be lost in the useless disturbances of the Polish rebellions. In Freytag’s novel Mr. Anton Wohlfahrt, clerk to the firm, demonstrated how amidst the desperate death struggle of a nation the German as “worker,” hero and patriot knew no higher task than to recover outstanding debts to the last cent.

The same spirit inspired the drama. Otto Ludwig’s Forester [6] comes to his tragic end because he does not understand that being an employee he may be thrown out into the street by his employer at any moment. But dirty scoundrels express the ideology of the bourgeois revolution in the words :

Now men know that those who are in prisons are martyrs worthy of veneration, and that the noblemen are rascals, be they ever so honest. And the industrious people are rascals, for it is their fault that honest people who do not like to work are poor. [7]

In 1866 and 1870 the possessing classes and especially the German bourgeoisie found their refuge in the protection of Prussian bayonets. In all corners of the German Reich it was said that the political advance could now be followed by an unparalleled literary advance. As if great thinkers and writers could have been produced by a class which was proud of having for a backbone the sabre of the Prussian officer ! Instead of the expected giants there appeared an inane mob the like of which has never dishonored and corrupted the literature of a great nation. Capitalist business enterprise brought under its rule all branches of literature, and the theatre was not the last. The proscenium of Lessing and Voltaire became a speculative investment, if it did not fall to the level of a brothel ...

Only the rapidly rising star of the working class movement threw light on bourgeois literature. Such bourgeois writers as had some talent began to revolt against all this unspeakable meretriciousness and falsity. They wanted to get back to nature and truth, but since in bourgeois society nothing but sham is to be found, the new naturalist movement fell a victim to hopeless pessimism. Everywhere they seek for decadence and rottenness ; a younger writer, Kurt Eisner, who himself approaches the naturalist school, has rightly jeered at the “disciples of decadence and pirates of decay, sniffing for rottenness and boasting of syphilis to prove their virility.” Apart from the skilled literary artisans who follow naturalism because it is fashionable and piquant, the few naturalists who are better and more vigorous only know how to describe things that are dying down, and never those that are rising. Their future depends on whether they are able to cross the broad moat between the capitalist and the proletarian world. Bourgeois society cannot and will not produce a new hey-day of literature ...

Also in the year of Lessing’s death, Kant’s epochmaking magnum opus, the Critique of Pure Reason was published. With this book “there begins in Germany an intellectual revolution which offers the most striking analogies to the material revolution in France ... It developed itself in the same phases, and between both revolutions there exists the most remarkable parallelism.” [8] Strangely enough, all the great German philosophical revolutionaries, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, have done their work in that same Prussian state which the classical authors of the German middle class loathed so intensely. The Prussian state persecuted Kant “for distorting and disparaging some of the fundamental teachings of the Holy Scripture and of Christianity,” it categorically ordered him “not to publish any more such writings and teachings,” and was pleased by the wise man’s wise answer :

“Disavowal and renunciation of one’s convictions is despicable, but silence is the duty of the subject in a case like the present. Everything one says must be true, yet duty does not force us to speak every truth in public.”

Classical philosophy did not speak the truth so publicly that the Prussian officer’s sabre would have understood it. When it culminated in Hegel’s philosophy it even became the official Prussian religion, with which, for example, candidates for the teaching profession had to be thoroughly acquainted, while the Ministry of Education warned them expressly against other “shallow systems of philosophy.” Whatever was real, was reasonable [9] ; and since the Prussian state with its fortresses and dungeons was real, it was reasonable as well ; whoever doubted this was converted to reason and reality by the methods applied against “demagogues.”

But what Hegel had said of the French Revolution was also true of his own philosophy : it turned everything upside down. It had to be turned back again, to show its core of reason and revolution under its husk of reaction and realism. Out of the Prussian state philosophy was born revolutionary socialism. Marx concluded the epoch of classical philosophy with the hopeful struggle of the working class, while Lessing had begun this epoch after the hopeless struggle of the bourgeois class. Engels says rightly that the German working-class movement is the heir of classical philosophy. With the publication of the Communist Manifesto in 1848, German middle class philosophy was dead. Its representatives as the universities continued dishing up eclectic soups that became more and more indigestible from decade to decade. The philosophical needs of the bourgeoisie were supplied by a succession of fashionable philosophers who came one after another according to the changing development of capitalism.

From the beginning of the Fifties to the middle of the Sixties, the man of the day was Schopenhauer, the philosopher of the frightened philistine, the furious hater of Hegel, the man who denied any historical development, a writer not without paradoxical wit and not without his share in the splendor of classical literature. But in his sneaking, egoistic and slandering manner he was the true intellectual representative of the middle class, which, frightened by the clash of weapons, had withdrawn trembling to its private income and passionately disavowed the ideals of its greatest period.

From the middle of the Sixties to the beginning of the Eighties, his place was taken by Eduard von Hartmann, who taught that liberal ideas were but a nineteenth century rash. He discovered that the boom of industrial enterprise – and financial swindling following 1871 paved the way to higher forms of economic life and constituted a step towards the solution of the social question. He praised Bismarck’s anti-socialist laws as an excellent way of educating the working class. Finally he declared that he “followed in the footsteps of those three philosophers whose greatness had inspired the historic world mission of Prussianism : Kant, Fichte and Hegel.”

But at the beginning of the Eighties Hartmann was superseded by Nietzsche, the philosopher of the grande bourgeoisie. “The historic world mission of Prussianism” had done its duty. In its essence this bourgeois slogan expressed the satisfaction felt by the German bourgeoisie on the elimination of bonds which had hampered the expansion of capitalism, namely the small German states with their outdated institutions. But in the course of a development proceeding with unparalleled speed and vigor, the “national idea” became a fetter which the expanding power of capitalism sought to shake off. In the age of cartels and trusts on the one hand and class movements on the other, the national colors on the national boundary posts grew paler. Capital bred a new caste ruling Europe, and this caste is the same in London as in Rome, in Madrid as in Moscow. Nietzsche became the German philosopher of this caste. He saw in the “historic world mission of Prussianism” nothing but “entr’acte policy.” He scorned the so-called “greatness” of statesmen, who made the spirit of a nation “narrow” and its taste “national.” He made fun of the politicians “of short sight” and “rash hand” who set the barrier of “nationalist madness” between nations. But he did not care for the people, for “the herd creatures of Europe” who pretended to be the “only legitimate kind of human being,” who praised as virtues their own attributes : “social sense, benevolence, consideration, industry, moderation, modesty, indulgence.” He praised the lonely minds, the supermen, the free spirits, the noble souls to whom the “exploiter nature” belongs as the organic functions belong to life. They live “beyond good and evil,” they consider it “pure justice” if others must be sacrificed for them. It is corruption if an aristocracy sacrifices its privileges out of an extravagance of moral feelings. The “essential thing in a good and healthy aristocracy is this : with good conscience they receive the sacrifices of an immense number of people who for their sake have to be degraded to stunted creatures, to slaves, to tools.” And so on. Nietzsche was not only the herald but the victim of capitalism. A fine and rich mind like his felt horror and loathing for the immense misery created by capitalism. But grown up in wealth, spoiled by women, he was unable to discover the hope for tomorrow in the misery of to-day. Therefore he searched feverishly for the inherent reason of capitalist society. It only caused him to lose his own reason, in the saddest sense of the word. But the mad talk of this pitiable man is praised as final wisdom by the hacks of the same bourgeoisie which could once call Lessing its first representative.

The work of Lessing’s life does not belong to the bourgeoisie, but to the proletariat. In the middle class of the eighteenth century both classes were still united. But the nature and the aim of Lessing’s struggle have been relinquished by the bourgeoisie and taken up by the proletariat ; the bourgeois class struggle for which Lessing found the refuge of philosophy was taken out of this sphere by Marx and became the proletarian class struggle. As the bourgeoisie rejected the intellectual work of its representatives, this precious inheritance had to become the arsenal from which the working class took their first keen and shining weapons. This world is not so devoid of all sense that the Lessings fight and suffer only for the amusement of the philistines. Lessing belongs among the intellectual patrons of the proletariat, his life and work has gone over into the flesh and blood of the fighting and suffering workers, little as they may know of Lessing’s work – thanks to our “magnificent” popular education.

But all this will change. When Gervinus wanted to stir the political consciousness of the bourgeoisie, he concluded his work with the words : “The contest of art is finished ; now we must set ourselves another target, never yet hit in our country. We must see whether Apollo will grant in this sphere the glory he did not refuse us in another.” [10] The target to which Gervinus alluded has not yet been hit and the glory which Apollo granted “in another sphere” has also waned. In the rough and difficult days of conflict the Muses are silent, but for all that their wreaths will not be denied. Those will be the gifts for their day to come, and then Lessing, too, will be vindicated of every sin committed by his contemporaries and posterity against this noble fighter for the freedom of humanity.

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Footnotes

1. De la Litterature Allemande, 1780.

2. The earliest title of the play later known as Kabale und Liebe.

3. Schiller turned from writing middle class plays to writing historical tragedies.

4. Quotation from a play by one of the leaders of German Romanticism, Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853).

5. H. Heine : Atta Troll (Preface), translated by H. Scheffauer, p.30, London 1913.

6. Christian Ulrich, chief character of The Hereditary Forester, translated by A. Remy in The German Classics, Vol.IX, pp.280-376. New York 1914

7. Ibid., p.327 (Act III, Scene 2).

8. H. Heine : Religion and Philosophy in Germany, translated by J. Snodgrass, p.102. London 1882.

9. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.

10. Allusion to the necessity of a democratic revolution in Germany.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/mehring/1892/lessing/index.htm