The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 11
Kuno Francke
Ewald Eiserhardt
The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 11 Masterpieces of German Literature Translated Into English
EDITOR'S NOTE
The illustrations in this volume, devoted to the writings of Spielhagen, Storm, and Raabe, are from paintings by Michael von Munkacsy, Jacob Alberts, and Karl Spitzweg. Munkacsy may be called an artistic counterpart to Spielhagen, inasmuch as he shared with him the conscious striving for effect, the predilection for striking social contrasts, and the desire to make propaganda for liberalism. Spitzweg was allied to Raabe in his truly Romantic inwardness, his joyful acceptance of all phases of life, his glorification of the humble and the lowly, and his inexhaustible humor. Alberts is probably the most talented living painter of that part of Germany which forms the background of Storm's finest novels: the Frisian coast of the North Sea.
В В В В Kuno Francke.
THE LIFE OF FRIEDRICH SPIELHAGEN
By Marion D. Learned, Ph.D
Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, University of Pennsylvania
The struggle for liberal institutions, which found expression in the Wars of Liberation, the July Revolution of 1830, and the March Revolution of 1848 – with visions of a German Republic, with bitter protest against the Reaction, with a new hope of a regenerated social State and a renovated German Empire – marks only the stormy stages of the liberalizing movement which is still going on in the German nation. Since 1848, radical revolt has taken on forms very different from the dreams which fired the spirits of the Forty-eighters. The sword has yielded to the pen, the scene of combat has shifted from the arsenal and the battlefield to the printed book and the Council Chamber; while the necessity of an active policy of military defense has saved the German people from the throes of bloody internal strife.
In the transition from the armed revolutionary outbreak of 1848 to the evolutionary processes of the present day, the novel of purpose and of living issues (Tendenz-und Zeitroman) has played an important part in teaching the German people to think for themselves and to seek the highest good of the individual and of the classes in the general weal of the nation as a whole. In the front rank, if not the foremost, of the novelists of living issues in this period of social and economic reform was Friedrich Spielhagen, whose novels were almost without exception novels of purpose.
Friedrich Spielhagen was born in Magdeburg in the Prussian province of Saxony, February 24, 1829. He was the son of a civil engineer, and descended from a family of foresters in Tuchheim. His seriousness and precocity won him the nickname of "little old man," and also admission to the gymnasium a year before the average age of six. In 1835, when he was six years old, his father was transferred to the position of Inspector of Waterworks in Stralsund. It was here by the sea and among the dunes that the young poet spent his most plastic years, and became, like Fritz Reuter, his contemporary and literary colleague of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, the poet of the Flat Land, which he made so familiar to the German public of the '60s and '70s. Spielhagen has given his own account of the first years of his life in his autobiography entitled Discoverer and Inventor which is evidently modeled after Goethe's Poetry and Fact. Here we learn with what delight the boy accompanied his father on his tours of inspection about the harbor city, with what difficulties he contended in school, which he says was to him neither "stepmother" nor "alma mater," what deep impressions his vacation visits at the country homes of his school friends left upon his sensitive mind. Although his family never became fully naturalized in the social life of Stralsund, but remained to the end "newcomers," Spielhagen says of himself that, in his love for Pomeranian nature, he felt himself to be "the peer of the native born of Pomerania, which has come to b