THE HUMOUR OF GERMANY.

INTERNATIONAL HUMOUR.

Edited by W. H. DIRCKS.

THE HUMOUR OF GERMANY.

THE HUMOUR OF GERMANY

SELECTED AND TRANSLATED, WITH INTRODUCTION AND BIOGRAPHICAL INDEX, BY HANS MÜLLER-CASENOV: WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY C. E. BROCK.

LONDON 1892

WALTER SCOTT LTD.

[vii]

CONTENTS.

[xi]

INTRODUCTION.

In endeavouring to bring together examples of so significant and at the same time elusive a phase of national character—literary as well as psychological—as a nation’s humour, it were of course vain to seek to make each selection typical in itself—typical, that is, in the sense of referring to the broad basis of a nation’s individuality in respect of its humour as distinguished from other nations.

A general idea can only be obtained by scanning a broad field; here, as elsewhere, details have little meaning unless considered in their relation to the broader outlook. A constant interplay of varied influences has to be taken into account. The purely national aspect is obtruded upon by the individuality of each author, which nowhere expresses with such effect as in the literature of humour. The time of writing, considered historically, with its political tendencies, has also to be considered; its church dependence perhaps, and the peculiar trend of its social interests. It is intruded upon also by the time considered in its relation to literature as a whole, to the tendencies of form and style predominant at given periods.

Furthermore, there are strictly local peculiarities, subdividing Germany itself. It is more especially these that the student of literature, unless he be also a student of ethnological influences, is likely to wrongly estimate, while it is of the utmost importance that they be borne in mind to arrive at a just view of qualities that oversway minor differences, which are often the first to catch the eye. The more the Comic Muse is bound within the narrow limits of place, time, and personality, the more is she in her element. She of all muses is a painter[xii] of detail, versed in the art of reproducing punctiliously those petty traits which disengage her subject from all broader problems, and make it effective in proportion to its unimportance to the world’s general affairs.

Writers upon the theory of humour are apt to deplore the absence of just such local land-marks in Germany as are strongly characteristic and still recognisable to the foreigner. It would appear to me that they have done so with some injustice. The Volkscharacter of southern and northern Germany, of the lowlands, and the Franco-Bavarian and Suabian districts, even of the various centres of civilisation, the large towns, is abundant in those differentiating qualities which go to make up originality of manner. The modes of thought and feeling characterising the population of different districts bear a stamp so distinct that one is inclined to consider them more strongly marked by provincial locality than by nationality.

In these days dialect proper, having gained the prestige of comparative rarity, like a peasant’s national costume, or a bit of bric-à-brac, has been favoured by the humorist, although its reproduction in our literature has well-nigh insurmountable difficulties to cope with. The Low German, one of the most interesting of German dialects, because, historically, the most intact, and the most incapable of amalgamation with the language that has superseded it, had been left to grow rusty so far as literature was concerned, until Fritz Reuter rescued it from threatening oblivion, and made it the vehicle of a naïve and spontaneous genre of humour, to which it lent itself with singular charm and appropriateness.

The cause of the former neglect of Low German as a means of literary expression was very obvious, and there was no gainsaying the justice of it—viz., that it is used to-day only by the lower classes of Northern Germany, and that among readers there is but a very limited number to whom it is more comprehensible than a foreign language would be. It is this fact also which explains why Fritz Reuter, the most intimate and sympathetic of German humorists, although extensively read, has never attained the widest popularity.

Fundamentally, the German character appears to be averse to humour. Its mirth does not come to it spontaneously, a gift[xiii] of the gods, arising out of the mere exuberance of being. This nation shares the temperament of all northern races, it moves more to the minor strains of feeling, to the Adagio which Richard Wagner found so aptly expressive of its character. It is quick to respond to things mystic, and yearns over the vague grace of twilight moods. It worships at the shrine of the hapless Prince of Denmark.—I say fundamentally, for, looking at the life of the nation as it appears to-day, in those pleasures of the lower and middle classes which have their scene of action in the out-of-door world, there would appear to be in plenty a spirit of merry-making and pleasure-seeking inherent in the German character. The mere primitive love of a good time, however, is inseparably connected with those classes representing, in a manner, a child-like stage of intellectual development the world over, and is not characteristic in any special sense of the German people.

It is safe to admit that a certain lightness of disposition, which seems indispensable to the humorous attitude, is absent among those race-qualities which go to make up the German nature pure and simple. If the nation has developed within itself those germs which have blossomed into a sense of the humorous; if it has passed through all those early stages of perception and expression which have culminated in a humorous literature of sturdy strength; if it has found at length a humorous literature (with Gottfried Keller for its prophet, and F. T. Vischer for its critic and exponent), it is due probably to a complexity of influences somewhat difficult to determine.

However free in its purely literary aspect humour may be from all ulterior purpose and aim, the tale of its growth with us is largely interwoven with impulses received from outside sources and sources didactic and philosophical. Outwitting the devil, the theme that recurs again and again as the oldest form of farcical expression in mediæval Germany, meant dealing with the stresses of adverse circumstance. This was the first step taken on the road to humour in Germany. The Powers of Evil had all the brute force upon their side; there was no coping with them, except by sharpening one’s wits and irritating them by practical jokes until they might yield. The laugh that followed had all the hard ring of the victor’s triumphant[xiv] scorn. Early satirical writings were imbued with a like spirit. There was the lash to be swung at some enemy, and derision at his downfall was tempered by no kindlier emotion. There was a grim attitude of self-defence throughout it all. Indeed, it is only in going back painfully step by step that one is

enabled to discern in this early literature the germs of humour at all.

The farces and puppet-shows at country fairs and the burlesques at the early theatre began to make room for the idea of retaliation. It became a question of clown against clown. The supremacy was never yielded long to one side. Laying aside all personal interest in the matter for the time being, there was an impartial shout of laughter at him who got the most kicks and cuffs. The popular mind began to rise above the situation, to put itself in the position of an unbiassed spectator, and to take delight in merely putting down whatever asserted itself. As an instance of this may be counted the practice of granting the devil, or a person disguised as such, a hearing in church on certain days of the year instead of the parish priest.

Then the sense of discrepancy between things great and small, things important and unimportant, the world of the senses and the world of the spirit, began to enter the popular perception, the impossibility of reconciliation, and, as a consequence, the pleasure of turning this world topsy-turvy, and so demonstrating the supremacy of the individual.

Side by side with this development, or partly perhaps based upon it, went the philosophic development. Thinkers, dreamers, and philosophers went on constructing a universe according to the laws of their individual minds, a universe containing nothing at all to be laughed at, and for many decades scholars were deeply buried in obstruse problems and finely-spun theories and systems, the lighter muse of poetry and art for the most part following but humbly and timorously from afar. But when philosophy and theology had spoken at large, and the mystery and fatal contradiction at the heart of things had not been unravelled, the pale brooding of some turned to melancholy, with others it turned to boisterous living and philosophic indifferentism.

[xv]

Then it was that irony, directed upon the inordinate intellectual ambitions of man, removed him half imperceptibly into the sphere of the ludicrous. Self-irony may be the result of misanthropy, but it is certainly the beginning of a cure. One finds oneself to be made up of two absurdly contradicting hemispheres, as well as the rest of the world; the sense of the universal incongruity seems to make the case less tragic. To pass through this stage into the clearer atmosphere of conscious reconciliation with the actuality of things, of placid acceptance of the ups and downs, the shortcomings inherent in things, and in human nature withal,—into the atmosphere of pure humour, unperturbed by the possibility of personal disappointment, is a long step, easy to some, to others impossible. And it would seem that German Humour—taking the term in its widest sense as signifying subjective apprehension on the one hand and artistic expression on the other—is less the result of a temperamental predisposition than the culmination of a development. With a turn for

flaccid sentimentalism, and by nature inclined to take themselves very seriously, it was a reaction, a bankruptcy in metaphysical methods that inaugurated and established something of a humorous Weltanschauung. The often oppressively heavy Zeitgeist has borne along its own corrective in the literature of two centuries as on an ever-strengthening under-current. There have been silent forces at play working imperceptibly through the innate robustness of the national character. It was this undeniable robustness which could not for long brook the extravagancies of weak emotionalism. Revolt was opened upon it on the one hand by the spirit of exact science, on the other by the need of æsthetic equilibrium. These two tendencies, the æsthetic and the scientific, are still contending for the field with much ado and bustle in some quarters.

Though a nation counting Heine and Lichtenberg among its own, it is not in the spielende Urtheil, as Jean Paul has called inspired sallies of wit, that German humour specially distinguishes itself; now and again there it has its moods of riotous absurdity; but where it is most characteristic is in the telling of the humorous tale, lovingly handled in its details, the pathetic verging very near upon the comic, finally succumbing[xvi] in a ripple of good-natured laughter at somebody or other who is really not so very bad, but only very human, and for whose misfortunes—poor devil!—we may have a kindly feeling. Then we have a mastership in spectral stories, uncanny and imaginative, leaving the reader’s mind in a delightful condition of doubt as to their actual meaning and significance; and we have also the expression of the spirit of poetic adventure,—a determination to have fun at all hazards, either with the public or else at the public, if perchance it should prove too dull to be taken into partnership. There is much of this in Chamisso’s Peter

Schlemihl, which, in the face of many dizzy structures of elucidation that have been based upon it, remains so truly humorous and so profoundly touching.

It is by no means always the funny element that predominates in German writings of a humorous tendency. Their office seems to be more to suggest the effect which these lighter moods of fancy have upon the serious affairs of life, and in studying the humour of Germany in a spirit of literary criticism it is indispensable to take these two aspects in their action and reaction upon each other. There is a psychical development of the individual which runs parallel to that of the nation. In confirmation of the theory of humorous development here faintly outlined, it may be said that in Germany, humorous perception is for the most part not the possession of youth. It is not until the need of a corrective to a habit of speculative brooding has been felt that imperceptibly and unconsciously healthful minds rise to those dispassionate heights whence the Occidental Brahmin gazes upon a motley world.

HANS MÜLLER-CASENOV.

[For Acknowledgments to Authors and Publishers, see page 430.]

[1]

THE HUMOUR OF GERMANY.

MASTER FOX, THE CONFESSOR.

Hugo von Trimberg (1260-1309).

[4]

ST. PETER’S LESSON.

Hans Sachs (1494-1576).

[6]

A RAID ON THE PARSON’S KITCHEN.

THE commandant at Soest looked at me with approval, and said, “Tut, little huntsman, you shall be my servant, and wait upon my horses.”

“Sir,” I replied, “I should prefer a master in whose service the horses wait upon me. As it is not likely I shall find such a one, I am going to be a soldier.”

“Hoity-toity,” he said, “you have no more hair on your lip than a tree-frog. You are too young.”

[7]

“Oh, no,” I replied, “I will venture to brave any man of eighty. The beard does not make a man, else the he-goats would be in high esteem.”

He said, “If you can show courage as well as you can wag your tongue, so be it.”

I answered, “The first opportunity shall furnish the proof.”

And so the commandant made over to me my dragoon’s old trousers, in which my master had sewed a goodly number of ducats. Out of their vitals I provided myself with a good horse and the best fire-arms I could get; I thereupon polished up my belongings to their utmost possibility of brightness. I got me a new suit of green, for I delighted in the name of “huntsman,” and gave my old garments to my boy, as they had grown too short and too tight for me. I sat on my horse like a young nobleman, and did not think small beer of myself. I took special delight in decorating my hat with a smart bunch of feathers like an officer. There were enough to envy me, and soon words and blows were the order of the day. But no sooner had I given proof to two of my enemies as to the nature of the thrusts I was skilled in, than I was left in peace, and my friendship was much sought for. In our raids upon the enemy I threw myself forward like bubbles in a boiling kettle, to be always the first in the fight. Whenever it was my good fortune to lay hands upon a desirable bit of pillage I shared it freely

with the officers. The consequence was that I was allowed to plunder even in forbidden places, and could be secure of protection under all circumstances. So I was soon looked up to by friend and foe, and my purse grew as great as my name; even the peasants I managed to keep upon my side by fear and love, for I took vengeance upon those that tried to hinder me, and gave rich rewards to all who were helpful. I did not confine myself to large[8] schemes, and never despised small ones if there was praise and admiration to be won thereby.

At one time we had been vainly hoping for some waggons with provisions to come into our way at the Castle of Recklinkhausen, and the pangs of hunger were upon us. And when I and my comrade, a student just run away from school, were leaning out of one of the windows, and hungrily gazing out into the country, my companion sighed after the barley-soup of his dear mother, and said: “Ah, brother, isn’t it a shame to think that after having studied all the arts, I should not be able to supply food for myself? Brother, I know for certain, if I were only allowed to visit the parson in yonder village—you can see the church steeple just beyond the poplars—I should find a most excellent feast.”

After a short parley the captain gave us permission; I exchanged my clothes with those of another, and the student and I betook ourselves to the village on a very roundabout way. The reverend gentleman received us civilly. When my companion had greeted him in Latin, accompanying his words with a profound bow, and briskly conjuring up a fine array of lies how the soldiers had robbed him, a poor student, of all his provisions, the parson gave him bread and butter and a drink of beer. I passed myself off as a painter’s apprentice, and acting as if my companion and I had never met before, I told them both I should go down the village street to the inn for refreshment, and would then call for him, as we seemed to be going the same way. So I went away in search of anything that might be worth the trouble of coming for the following night, and I was so fortunate as to meet a peasant who was plastering up an earthen oven in which large loaves of brown bread were to lie and bake for twenty-four hours. I thought, “Go ahead; plaster away! I’ll find you a customer for these

delicious viands.” I made but a short stay at the inn,[9] knowing this cheaper way of getting bread, and returned to my companion, who had eaten his fill, and had told the parson that I was on my way to Holland to perfect myself in my art. The parson asked me to go and see the church with him, as he would like to show me some paintings that were in need of restoration. As it would not do to spoil the game, I consented. He conducted us through the kitchen, and when he opened the night-lock on the strong oaken door which led to the churchyard, I saw a wonderful sight. From the black heavens of this kitchen violins, flutes, and cymbals were pendent—in reality they were hams, sausages, and slices of bacon. I looked at them with happy forebodings, and they seemed to smile irritatingly upon me. I wished them in the castle to my comrades, but in vain; they were obstinate, and remained hanging where they were. I mused on ways and means of bringing them under my plan regarding the peasant’s loaves of bread, but there were serious difficulties in the way, as the yard of

the parsonage was surrounded by a stone wall, and all the windows were well protected with iron bars. Moreover, there were two large dogs in the yard that certainly would object to having that stolen the remnants of which was, in the course of time, to be the reward due to their watchfulness.

Once in church, it appeared that the parson generously intended to entrust me with the restoration of his old pictures. As I was exerting myself to find some plausible subterfuge, the sexton turned to me and said: “Fellow, you look more like a disreputable soldier-lad than like a painter.” I was no longer accustomed to such speeches, and yet there was nothing for it but to swallow the taunt. I shook my head softly and replied, “Oh, you knave! give me a brush and colours, and I will paint a fool in a twinkling who shall resemble you throughout.”

The parson made a joke of the matter, and reminded both[10] of us that it is not meet to tell each other unsavoury truths in so holy a spot. Then he gave us another drink, and we departed. But I left my heart with the sausages.