A Place in the Country

DEATH DRAWS NIGH, TIME MARCHES ON. Some remarks on Gottfried Keller

In no other literary work of the nineteenth century can the developments that have determined our lives even down to the present day be traced as clearly as in that of Gottfried Keller. When he started writing in the Vormärz, hopes for a social contract were beginning to blossom, there was the governing of the people by the people still to be looked forward to, and everything could still have turned out differently from the way it actually did. True, republicanism was already starting to lose something of its former heroic character, and in many places those of a freethinking disposition were beginning to succumb to the narrow-minded provincialism and petty parochial concerns which Nestroy pilloried so mercilessly in his dramas. Johannes Ruff’s hand-colored caricature of 1849 showing a well-organized Freischar, a troop of volunteers setting out on patrol, is, after all, scarcely a testament to political radicalism. Only two of the doughty men portrayed here have brought their weapons along; one, probably to help keep up his courage, is carrying a bottle of schnapps, while the mouselike standard-bearer carries a ledger under his arm, and embroidered on his flag, as a fitting emblem for the entire movement, is a brimming jug of ale. The short man beating the drum in the center is the poet himself, in the guise of an oddly civilian drum major wearing

a top hat. Indeed, the whole scene has something distinctly unmilitary and buttoned-up about it. It is difficult to imagine that these five heroes are off to storm the barricades. Nor can it be a coincidence that the motto inscribed in the upper-left-hand corner of the picture reads “By the right, quick marrrrch!” The comic aspect of this scene, then, in a sense already anticipates the failure of the revolution. When Keller was working on the first version of Der grüne Heinrich [Green Henry] in Berlin in 1850, progress and freethinking had not been part of the Prussian agenda for quite some time. The bourgeoisie had relinquished their political aspirations, and from then on concentrated exclusively on their business interests, only engaging with the struggles for independence of other nations in their leisure time — if at all. Nevertheless, as Adolf Muschg has noted, from this north German perspective Switzerland could still be seen as “the last bastion of European progress” and as “the home of democracy, everywhere else misappropriated, betrayed and driven into exile.” Here in Switzerland, according to Muschg, “March had been followed by a constitutional May, and economic and political liberalism (otherwise to be found only in the United States and in England) had successfully become established as guiding principles of the State.” When Keller returned to Zurich in the mid-1850s and was able to study this exemplary society at first hand, despite unreservedly identifying with the principle of the sovereignty of the people, he occasionally — and as time went on increasingly — began to have doubts about the direction events were taking, even in a state in which personal and political freedoms were guaranteed as of right. Among the outstanding German writers of the nineteenth century, Keller — along with the young Büchner — is perhaps the only one who had any grasp of political ideals and political pragmatism and was therefore able to see that the gap between self-interest and the common good was growing ever wider, the emerging class of salaried workers was de facto excluded from the newly won rights and freedoms of the bourgeoisie, the term “republic,” as it says in Martin Salander, had become nothing more than “a stone given to the people in lieu of bread,” and even the middle classes were being dealt a poor hand; inasmuch as the more political disillusionment increased, so, too, in this phase of unregulated capitalism, did the constant anxiety as to the means of existence. Keller summarizes the history of the bourgeoisie synoptically, so to speak — from its fairy-tale and martial origins, via the age of Enlightenment, philanthropy, and the self-confident citoyen, right down to the bourgeoisie concerned first and foremost with the preservation of their material possessions — in the well-known passage in which the tailor Wenzel Strapinski, wandering around the streets of Goldach, reads in amazement the names on the houses. The Pilgrim’s Staff, The Bird of Paradise, The Water Nymph, The Pomegranate Tree, The Unicorn, The Iron Helmet, The Suit of Armor, The Crossbow, The Blue Shield, The Swiss Dagger: thus read the inscriptions on the oldest houses. Then, in beautiful gold lettering, come the names Eintracht [Harmony], Redlichkeit [Honesty], Liebe [Charity], Hoffnung [Hope], Recht [Law], and Landeswohl [National Prosperity], while the more recent villas of the factory owners and bankers bear whimsical names straight out of an autograph album, such as Rosental [Rose Valley], Veilchenberg [Violet Hill], and Jugendgarten [Garden of Youth], or names which seem to hint at a substantial dowry, like Henriettental or Wilhelminenburg. Our tailor with his pinpricked fingers feels very much a stranger in this small town, which the narrator describes as a kind of moral Utopia where the process of reification of our higher ideals and aspirations may literally be read from the walls and door frames of the buildings. The obverse of such prosperity, with its promise of happiness and enjoyment, so Wenzel Strapinski realizes as he stands at the crossroads looking back at the golden orbs on the towers gleaming enticingly through the trees, is freedom — so easily lost — but also work, privation, poverty, and obscurity. Specters such as these are everywhere in Keller’s work. Acquainted with hardship from an early age through the death of his father, in retrospect his mother’s meager housekeeping, essentially consisting of almost nothing save frugality, becomes the epitome of an existence reduced to the barest minimum. “The day after my departure, more than three years ago now,” writes the eponymous protagonist in Der grüne Heinrich, “my mother had immediately altered her domestic arrangements and very nearly reduced them to the art of living on nothing. She invented a peculiar dish of her own, a species of black soup, which she made at midday, year in, year out, day after day the same, over a tiny fire, which likewise burnt practically nothing, and made one load of wood last an eternity. She did not set the table anymore on weekdays, as she only ate alone now, to save not the trouble but the cost of washing the linen, and she placed her little dish upon a simple straw mat which always stayed clean, and while she dipped her worn three-quarters spoon into the soup, she regularly invoked the Almighty, asking him to give their daily bread to all, but particularly to her son.” The art of making do with nothing which Keller describes here seems halfway to saintliness, and almost has the makings of a legend. Nevertheless, as the subtle ironic tone indicates, it does not so much present an alternative to the now all-pervasive principle of the accumulation of capital as serve precisely to exemplify it, albeit on the most modest of levels. Keller’s critique of the economic system of laissez-faire was kindled by the fact that he was obliged to experience at first hand how what has been painstakingly saved up by means of self-denial is carried over to the next generation as debt, but it goes far beyond any personal sense of resentment and is, rather, directed at the dangers — growing ever greater in proportion to the rapid increase in money in circulation — of a universal state of corruption. The Ackerbürger [city farmer] leaves his inherited property and comes to grief in the city, where — as one can read in Martin Salander—land and stock market speculation, mortgages and swindling are rife, like vine weevil and cholera, and every day clever folk are made fools of by the dozen and fools made into scoundrels. The semiallegorical characters of Weidelich, Wohlwend, and Schadenmüller stand for an entire class which now, hovering between rapidly acquired wealth and sudden ruin, threatens to sink wholesale into a hitherto unknown form of criminality. Toward the end of the novel, Martin Salander tells the story of a man sitting in a barbershop who claims that while he was having his beard trimmed, no fewer than four good acquaintances passed by on the street outside, “each of whom at the present time had a relative in prison. That,” continued the barbered one, “was rather too many during a single shave. And yet he had not, by far, seen all the people who passed by because the barber had pulled his face, by his nose-tip or chin, to one side every moment. He had perhaps overlooked several or had not recognized them because the blue screen on the window obscured the figures somewhat.” Looking at this episode, we can begin to form an idea of the dubious state of affairs prevailing in Zurich at the time. The benightedness of the citizens alluded to here, like the grating in front of the windows, is ominous enough. If anything more sinister, though, are the effects of such rampant capitalism on the natural environment. The very first page of Martin Salander informs us of “the relentless building over of the earth,” so that one now seeks in vain “the traces of the old shady friendly paths which earlier had led upward between gently rolling meadows and gardens.” A little farther on in the text we learn that of the great trees which used to stand on the land adjoining the Salanders’ house, only a single plane tree remains. “What’s become of the many fine trees which used to stand around the house?” Martin Salander, returning after a long absence, asks his wife. “Did the owner have them cut down to be sold? The fool!” and she explains the matter to him as follows: “Someone had taken the land away from him, or rather forced him to make building sites of it since several other landowners had had an unnecessary street laid. There it is, every green shade has disappeared and the ground changed into a sand and gravel surface. But no one comes to buy the lots.” Whereupon Salander comments: “They are really scoundrels to wreck the climate for themselves like that.” It is almost as if one were reading a report from yesterday’s newspaper. Not the least of Keller’s achievements is that he was one of the first to recognize the havoc which the proliferation of capital inevitably unleashes upon the natural world, upon society, and upon the emotional life of mankind.

Friedrich Engels, in The Origin of Private Property, published in 1884, put forward the view that the transition — long predating our historical memory, in an era shrouded in myth — from a matriarchal and polygamous society to a patriarchal and monogamous one was determined by the acquisition of property whose inheritance could only be assured with certainty by means of a system of monogamy. In accordance with this theory, in many ways still extremely plausible today, one might say that even as high capitalism was spreading like wildfire in the second half of the nineteenth century, Keller in his work presents a counterimage of an earlier age in which the relationships between human beings were not yet regulated by money. In one of his childhood reminiscences, Heinrich Lee recalls how, as a boy, he often used to spend time in a dark hall or warehouse filled with every kind of junk and bric-a-brac imaginable. And, as always when Keller has the opportunity of indulging his love for all things antique, there follows an incomparable description of all the outmoded, useless, and arcane objects piled high on top of and in front of each other, beds and tables and all kinds of assorted implements, and how sometimes on the upper planes and slopes, and sometimes on the perilous lonely peaks of this bric-a-brac mountain, here an ornate rococo clock and there a waxen angel lead a quiet and as it may be posthumous existence. In contrast to the continuous circulation of capital, these evanescent objects have been withdrawn from currency, having long since served their time as traded goods, and have, in some sense, entered eternity. The sovereign and soul of this empire of junk is a stout, elderly woman in an old-fashioned costume who always sits in the same spot in her ill-lit emporium and from there oversees a white-haired old man and a whole host of other underlings coming and going around the hall. She always wears snow-white sleeves pleated in the most artful way, after a fashion no longer seen. Not only in this does she somewhat resemble a priestess: the to-ings and fro-ings before her armchair throne on the part of the male assistants and of the customers suggest that law and order are invested in her very person. As to a governor or to an abbess, we read, “the people … would bring the most diverse gifts … field produce and tree fruit of every kind, milk, honey, grapes, ham, and sausages are brought to her … and these stores are the foundation of a life of dignified ease.” Wonderful, too, is the passage in which Keller describes how Frau Margret, who is scarcely able to decipher the printed word and has never learned to reckon in Arabic numbers, using no more than four Roman numerals does her nonexistent books with a piece of soft chalk on a large tabletop by setting up long columns and, by means of a complicated series of transmutations, converts large sums of small amounts into smaller sums of larger denominations. Her system of signs and symbols, so the narrator tells us, would have appeared to any other observer like ancient heathen runes, and in truth Frau Margret, who is interested in the Christian religion only for its intercalated apocrypha and the speculations of the sectarians, seems to embody a much earlier stage of social development than that which had already been attained in her day. For this reason, the concept of capital is entirely alien to her. Any surplus she accumulates and does not need for immediate outgoings is taken out of the current purse, changed into gold, and put away in the treasure chest. It never occurs to her to let the capital work for her. It is true that she sometimes gives credit, but she does not lend money for interest. In the vaults of her emporium, then, we are a long way from the effects, so lamented by Keller, of the money market on the economic and moral constitution of his compatriots. The preference Keller shows here, in his portrait of Frau Margret, for a system of barter over trading for profit reveals the extent of his aversion to the pace of developments taking place pell-mell all around him. It is, too, a particularly attractive trait in Keller’s work that he should afford the Jews — whom Christianity has for centuries reproached with the invention of moneylending — pride of place in a story intended to evoke the memory of a precapitalist era. In the evening, when the warehouse is closed, Frau Margret’s house becomes a kind of hostelry, offering shelter not just to favored local people but to itinerant traders, for example the Jewish peddlers, like nomads still traveling with their wares from place to place, who, after setting down their heavy packs, without a word being spoken or a written pledge exchanged, entrust their purses to the landlady for safekeeping and stand at the stove brewing a coffee or baking a piece of fish. If then talk should turn among those present to the misdemeanors of the Hebrew peoples, to the abduction of children or the poisoning of wells, or if even Frau Margret herself should claim that she once saw the restless Ahasaver in person leaving the Black Bear where he had spent the night, the Jews merely listen to these scaremongering tales, smile good-humoredly and politely, and refuse to be provoked. This good-natured smile on the part of the Jewish traders at the credulity and foolishness of the unenlightened Christian folk, which Keller captures here, is the epitome of true tolerance: the tolerance of the oppressed, barely endured minority toward those who control the vagaries of their fate. The idea of tolerance, much vaunted in the wake of the Enlightenment but in practice always diluted, pales into insignificance beside the forbearance of the Jewish people. Nor do the Jews in Keller’s works have any dealings with the evils of capitalism. What money they earn in their arduous passage from village to village is not immediately returned to circulation but is for the time being set to one side, thus becoming, like the treasure hoarded by Frau Margret, as insubstantial as gold in a fairy tale. True gold, for Keller, is always that which is spun with great effort from next to nothing, or which glistens as a reflection above the shimmering landscape. False gold, meanwhile, is the rampant proliferation of capital constantly reinvested, the perverter of all good instincts. Keller warned early on against its temptations, and one can only speculate as to what he might have had to say about the shady deals perpetrated by the Swiss banks a mere two generations after his death, let alone about the gold, purchased at the expense of the immeasurable suffering of the Jews, which was to serve as a christening present for the generation of Swiss children born after the Second World War.

There is another way, too, in which the history of the Jews, as depicted in Keller’s work, mirrors that of the people they live among. As a result of the political upheavals and the expansion of the market economy — which created at least as many bankrupts as it did nouveaux riches — all through the nineteenth century a growing number of Germans and Swiss found themselves forced to emigrate for a life in the diaspora, ending up just as far from home as any of the guests from the East in Frau Margret’s house. For this reason, no doubt, in Ferdinand Kürnberger’s novel of emigration the Germans are referred to as the Jews of America. Only on foreign soil is it brought home to them what it means to be cut off from one’s homeland and treated with contempt abroad. The fact that after the failure of the 1848 revolution, eighty thousand people emigrated to America from the region of Baden alone shows that the emigrants of that time were not merely adventurers, fortune seekers, or a few desperate individuals. Keller’s analysis of this social phenomenon, too, is more accurate and more sympathetic than that of most of his literary contemporaries. While Heinrich Lee is learning about hardship firsthand abroad, back at home meanwhile his uncle has died, his children long since scattered in the bustle and confusion of the highways, along which, he notes with characteristic irony, they went dragging their little ones in carts behind them as in former times the Children of Israel in the wilderness. Then there is the famous scene in which, standing to attention on the parade ground, Heinrich can only look on, his heart lurching in his breast, as the coach carrying the emigrants passes by, among them the woman who could have been mother, sister, and lover to him. The chapter is entitled “Judith Goes Too” [“Auch Judith geht”]. The fact that this episode follows immediately upon Anna’s funeral makes it clear that for those left behind, Judith’s departure, too, is like a death. Indeed, at that time it was generally as rare for emigrants to return home as for the dead to come back to life. For every one who, like Martin Salander, succeeded in making his fortune in Brazil, there were dozens who never managed to scrape together enough money working in the coffee plantations to pay their fare back home. Even Salander pays no small price for his success. Or we need only think of the young unmarried Swiss women, many of whom, as we know from the autobiographical writings of Conrad or Nabokov, could only find positions as governesses or tutors in lands far distant from their home cantons. Imagine their isolation as they stood gazing out of their windows at dusk, year after year, on some estate in the Ukraine or outside St. Petersburg, for a moment believing that they could see, in the gathering clouds, a glimpse of the far-distant snow-white Alps. Fräulein Luise Rieter, for example, to whom Keller fruitlessly declared his affection, spent a long time in Paris and in the household of a doctor in Dublin. And how many more, down to and including Robert Walser and his siblings, did not end up scattered Lord knows where. In Keller’s own case, his stays in Munich and Berlin were quite enough to give him a taste of the bitterness of exile. For this reason, Heinrich Lee’s dreams of home, which take up a whole chapter and more in Der grüne Heinrich, are filled in equal measure with beauty and fear. He sees himself walking along the highway, staff in hand, and in the distance, on an interminable road which intersects with his own, catches sight of his long-dead father with a heavy knapsack on his back. Exile, as Keller describes it, is a form of purgatory located just outside this world. Anyone who has visited it will forever after be a stranger in his own country. When, in his dream, Heinrich finally arrives back home and mounts the steps hand in hand with his childhood sweetheart, he finds all his relations assembled in the living room, his uncle, his aunt, all his cousins, the living and the dead together. Without exception they all wear contented, cheerful expressions, and yet this homecoming is anything but reassuring. Oddly, all those present are smoking long clay pipes filled with sweet-smelling tobacco, as a sign perhaps that in this in-between region, different customs prevail. The way, too, in which they cannot stay still for a moment but are compelled to wander ceaselessly up and down and back and forth while an assortment of animals — hunting dogs, martens, falcons and doves — scurry along the floor in the opposite direction: all of this strange and restless to-ing and fro-ing would seem to suggest that these poor departed souls are anything but quiet and at one with their lot. Keller did, though, seek in another passage to rise above his fear that the return from exile, like exile itself, amounts to a premature encounter with death, in the wanderer fantasy in which we see Heinrich Lee heading for home through a nocturnal Germany. “I went through woods, across fields and meadows,” Lee writes, “past villages whose dim outlines or faint lights lay far from my path. At midnight, as I was going over some wide open fields, the deepest solitude reigned over the earth, and the skies, interspersed with the slowly turning stars, became the more full of life, as invisible swarms of migratory birds passed high overhead with an audible rustling of wings.”

What is remarkable about this passage is the way in which Keller’s prose, so unreservedly committed to earthly life, attains its most astonishing heights at precisely those moments where it reaches out to touch the edge of eternity. Anyone traveling along this path as it is unrolled before us, sentence after lovely sentence, over and over again senses with a shudder how deep is the abyss on either side, how sometimes the daylight seems to fade as the shadows gather from afar and often is almost extinguished by the suggestion of death. There are many passages in Keller which could pass for the work of a baroque poet of mortality and vanitas. We need only think of Zwiehahn’s wandering skull in Heinrich’s luggage, the little ivory skeleton on the table of the Landvogt von Greifensee, and the poet’s mania for collecting, which sees him furnishing almost all his stories with a kind of treasure chest (or Schatzkästlein), in which, as in the cabinets of curiosities and jewel caskets of the seventeenth century, the most improbable relics coexist side by side: a “cherry stone carved with the passion of Christ, and a box made of filigree ivory inlaid with red taffeta, containing a little mirror and a silver thimble; further … another cherry stone wherein rattled a tiny game of ninepins, a walnut which when opened revealed a little image of the Virgin behind glass, a silver heart with a small perfumed sponge inside, and a bonbonnière made of lemon peel

with a strawberry painted on its lid, containing a golden pin on a piece of cotton in the shape of a forget-me-not, and a medallion with a monument of hair; further, a bundle of yellowed papers with recipes and secrets, a bottle of Hoffmann’s drops, another of eau de Cologne and a box with musk; another with a scrap of marten dropping in it, and a little basket plaited from fragrant palm leaves, as well as one made of glass beads and cloves; finally a little book with silver edges bound in sky-blue ribbed paper and entitled Golden Rules of Life for the Young Woman as Bride, Wife and Mother, and a small book of dreams, a guide to letter writing, five or six love letters, and a lancet for letting blood.” We find all of this in the story of Die drei gerechten Kammacher [The Three Righteous Combmakers], in a lacquered chest belonging to Züs Bünzlin, which Wolfgang Schlüter, in his essay on Benjamin as collector, refers to as a microcosmic intérieur. If the baroque imagination, which we see here once more dwelling upon the insignificant trifles we fashion and hoard during our brief time on earth, itself already embodied a kind of vogue for death, then its afterlife, as shown to us by Keller in this miniature world within a world belonging to a Swiss spinster, is determined by a narrative position which, as Wolfgang Schlüter writes, is circumspect even in its mockery, and whose underlying ironic perspective — as Schlüter also notes — is derived not from distance but from painfully focused images viewed from the closest possible proximity. For this reason it would be wrong to see Keller as a latter-day preacher of death and damnation in disguise, even though there can be no doubt that his inspiration derives from the baroque tendencies still latent within him. What is unique about Keller’s philosophy of transience is the serene glow with which it is suffused, stemming from the particular brand of Weltfrömmigkeit [secular piety] the young scholar from Zurich had become acquainted with during his time with the Heidelberg atheists. There were few things Keller could abide less than the self-righteous authority of religion, nothing he loathed more than the bigotry that seeks to wield the rod to make of poor little Meret an honest Christian child. This liberation from the age-old prison of religion is what lets in the light which he sees illumining even the darkest hours. There can scarcely be a brighter eulogy than Heinrich’s funeral oration for his young cousin Anna, who passed away long before her time. When the carpenter is rubbing down her newly finished coffin with pumice, Heinrich recalls, it becomes “as white as snow, and only the very faintest reddish touch of the fir shone through, giving the tint of apple blossom. It looked far more beautiful and dignified than if it had been painted, gilded, or even brass-bound. At the head, the carpenter had according to custom constructed an opening with a sliding cover through which the face could be seen until the coffin was lowered into the grave; now there still had to be set in a pane of glass which had been forgotten, and I rowed home to get one. I knew that on top of a cupboard there lay a small old picture frame from which the picture had long since disappeared. I took the glass that had been forgotten, placed it carefully in the boat, and rowed back. The carpenter was roaming about a little in the woods looking for hazelnuts; meanwhile, I tested the pane of glass, and when I found that it fitted the opening, I dipped it in the clear stream, for it was covered with dust, and clouded, and with care I succeeded in washing it without breaking it on the stones. Then I lifted it and let the clear water run off it, and when I held up the shining glass high against the sun and looked through it, I saw three boy-angels making music; the middle one was holding a sheet of music and singing, the other two were playing old-fashioned violins, and they were all looking upward in joy and devotion; but the vision was so thinly and delicately transparent that I did not know whether it was hovering in the rays of the sun, in the glass, or merely in my imagination. When I moved the glass, the angels instantly vanished, until suddenly, turning the glass another way, I saw them again. Since then I have been told that copperplate engravings or drawings which have lain undisturbed for a great many years behind glass communicate themselves to the glass during these years, in the dark nights, and leave behind upon it something like a reflected image.” The solace Heinrich derives from this chapter of his life story has nothing to do with hope for eternal bliss, as might perhaps initially appear to be the case. The angels with their gaze turned heavenward are only an illusion, virtual vignettes giving the appearance of a miracle which is in fact merely the result of a chemical reaction. Rather, Keller achieves this reconciliation with death in a purely earthly realm: in the satisfaction of work well done, in the snowy gleam of the fir wood, in the peaceful boat journey across the lake with the pane of glass, and in the perception, through the gradually lifting veil of mourning, of the beautiful clarity, undimmed by any hint of transcendence, of the air, the light, and the pure shining water.

This attachment to earthly life is borne out by the fact that nowhere in these stories of Keller’s does the desire for redemption emerge more clearly than in the repeatedly imagined evocation — quite contrary to Keller’s own experience — of the consummation of love. Just as Heinrich, on his nocturnal walk with Judith, listens eagerly to the rustle of her dress and every few moments feels the need to glance furtively across at her “like a fearful pilgrim at whose side walks a specter of the woods,” so, too, Keller’s gaze, as he writes, is always directed at the unknown and mysterious nature of woman, who only becomes truly familiar to him as a figment of the imagination. The scenes in which the lovers are united, which he pictures in such loving detail, are not only among the most touching in literature; they are unique, too, inasmuch as in them desire is not immediately betrayed by the fixed masculine gaze. It says much that in Keller’s work the true lover is barely more than a child — for example, the young Heinrich Lee in the chapter in which, locked in the theater overnight, still wearing his monkey costume and with Mephistopheles’ cloak around his shoulders, he wanders around by moonlight on the stage amid all the rustling paper splendors, raising the curtain, and in the orchestra pit, at first tentatively and then with increasing force, begins to make the kettledrums roll until finally a veritable crescendo of thunder echoes through the darkened auditorium and rouses the beautiful actress who shortly before has breathed her last upon the boards. “It was Gretchen, just as I had last seen her,” thus Lee’s account in his recollection of his theatrical adventures as a monkey: “I shuddered from head to foot, my teeth chattered, and yet at the same time a powerful sensation of joyful surprise flashed through me and made me glow. Yes, it was Gretchen, it was her spirit, although the distance was too great for me to distinguish her features, making the apparition seem even more ghostly. With mysterious gaze, she appeared to be searching the hall; I pulled myself upright, I was drawn forward as if by powerful, invisible hands, and, my heart beating audibly, I stepped over the benches toward the front of the stage, pausing at every step. The fur covering muffled my footsteps so that the figure did not notice me until, as I climbed up to the prompter’s box, the first moonbeam fell like a streak across my strange costume. I saw how she fixed her glowing eyes on me, horrified, and then shrank back in alarm, but silently. I trod one quiet step nearer, and halted again; my eyes were opened wide, I held my trembling hands aloft while, a glad fire of courage running through my veins, I made for the phantom. Then it called out imperiously: ‘Halt! You little creature, what are you?’ stretching out its arms threateningly against me so that I stood still, rooted to the spot. We looked fixedly at each other; I recognized her features now. She was wrapped in a white nightdress, her neck and shoulders were bare and gleamed softly, like snow by night.” Adolf Muschg has said of Keller that it would have required a miracle of empathy and consideration to overcome the feelings of social and physical inferiority from which he suffered. This scene in the theater presents us with just such a miracle. The actress removes the little creature’s mask, enfolds him closely in her arms, and kisses him repeatedly on the lips, because, as she says afterward, he has not yet become the rogue he will turn into later, just like all the others, once he has grown up. The tender consummation of this childlike desire for love is soon followed by a scarcely less easeful death. Gretchen takes the monkey into her bed, where the two fall peacefully asleep, she shrouded in a royal velvet cloak and Heinrich sewn into his fur costume, thus bearing, as the narrator says, no small resemblance to those monumental tombs “where a knight of stone lies at full length, his faithful dog at his feet.” The vision here is of the body turned to stone at the moment of utmost happiness, a petrifaction which is a symbol not of punishment or banishment, but an expression of the hope that the moment of supreme bliss might last forever. Another, scarcely less peaceful end seems assured for the tailor Strapinski, far from home in Switzerland, when, his secret having been revealed by the charade acted out by his Doppelgänger, filled with a sense of shame he walks out into the winter night where presently, overcome by “the fiery drinks consumed and his grievous stupidity,” he sinks down by the side of the road and falls asleep “on the crisp frozen snow, while an icy wind begins to blow from the east.” Wenzel Strapinski’s rescue from an already certain death, as Keller then describes it, runs counter to all the prevailing erotic conventions of bourgeois literary tradition. Whereas, in the Novelle from Kleist to Schnitzler, it is invariably the male hero who, in an attitude of macabre lust, is to be found bending over the unconscious or lifeless body of a woman, in Keller’s tale it is the female gaze of Nettchen which is permitted to rove uninhibitedly over the graceful and noble body of the tailor with his slender, supple limbs and (as it tellingly says) tightly laced form. And when, by means of energetic rubbing, Nettchen finally succeeds in massaging the limp and almost lifeless tailor back to life and he slowly sits up, it becomes abundantly clear that Keller’s erotic longings were directed toward a reversal of the prevailing gender roles as prescribed by society. Possibly for this reason we are informed, in the following passage, that Wenzel Strapinski had, during his time in the military, served with the Hussars and worn one of those splendidly colorful uniforms as sported by that ideal masculine type for which women have pined right up to the twentieth century. The source of Keller’s identification with feminine desire cannot, though, be determined with any certainty. Walter Benjamin believed that “Keller’s gloomy composure is based on the profound equilibrium that the masculine and feminine sides of his being have reached,” arguing that this also relates to the poet’s facial appearance. In this context Benjamin goes on to comment on the history of the androgynous type in Greek antiquity, referring to the figure of Aphroditos — the bearded Aphrodite — and the Argive women whose custom it was to adorn themselves with a false beard on their wedding night. If we look closely at the drawings which Johann Salomon Hegi made of Keller at twenty-one, his eyelids lowered in sleep, with his long eyelashes and uncommonly sensual lips, it is not difficult to agree with Benjamin when he states that the idea of such androgynous faces “brings us closer than anything else to the face of this poet.”

Keller’s love stories, though, do not always end so happily (or so hopelessly) as that of the Polish tailor who, after his fortunate rescue, still has a long and by no means enchanted career ahead of him. Indeed, the two “village children” Sali and Vrenchen, lacking the slightest means of support, really do forfeit their lives. The barge laden with hay on which, after their journey on foot through the homeland in which they are now strangers, they finally consummate their love, toward the end of the story swings out into the current and floats, slowly turning, downriver toward the valley. “Sometimes the river glided through tall dark forests that laid their shade upon it; sometimes it flowed past open fields; now silent villages slid by it, and now a lonely hut; here it widened into an expanse like the bosom of a lake, and the boat almost ceased to move; there the current rushed around great rocks and sped on swiftly by the sleeping shores. In the first flush of dawn a town with many towers rose up out of the silvery waters, while low down in the sky a red-gold moon laid its path upon the river. Down this path the boat drifted slowly sideways, and as it neared the wharves of the town, in the frosty autumn mist two figures, closely clasped, slipped over the side of the dark hulk and were swept beneath the bitter current.” Glide, flow, rush, pause, rise up, clasp, slip — these are the verbs by means of which, in this passage, a metaphor is gradually crafted for the physical act of love being consummated with every twist and turn of the boat and of the sentences, a love which Keller, who on paper at least can determine their fate, bequeaths to the youngsters from the village as their rightful due, even though — so far as anyone can tell — he never experienced such fulfillment himself. From the very beginning, despite a deep need of and evidently inexhaustible capacity for love, Keller’s life was marked by rejection and disappointment. The ladies whose hand he sought were not easily able to overlook his short stature, not Fräulein Rieter, nor the beautiful woman from the Rhineland whom he so admired as she rode along the Berlin boulevards, nor the Heidelberg actress Johanna Kapp. And Luise Scheidegger, the only one who was prepared to share her life with Keller, a few weeks after their engagement drowned herself in a fountain in Herzogenbuchsee. In his darker moments, Keller may well have seen this as proof that he was not wrong to be ashamed of his ill-proportioned body, so to speak not fully developed from the waist down, and that he was destined to bring despair upon those to whom he declared his love. The actress from Heidelberg, too, ended her days in mental darkness. In the Zurich Central Library there is a small watercolor by Keller of an idealized landscape with trees, which — via the painter Bernhard Fries, a member of the Feuerbach circle — came into the possession of Johanna Kapp, who during her illness cut away, in a minute and detailed operation, approximately a quarter of the lower part of the picture. What moved her to this drastic incision we do not know, nor what Keller’s feelings were when, after its return to him following Johanna’s death, he held the thus disfigured picture in his hands once more. But perhaps he may have sensed that the snow-white space which opens up behind the almost transparent landscape is even more beautiful than the colored miracle of art.

At any rate, the antithesis to this glimpse into a beyond consisting of pure nothingness, revealed by the unfortunate Johanna’s scissorwork, is the colossal scrawl which Heinrich Lee one day, in a melancholy moment, begins to execute on a large piece of cardboard, and which he continues each day with countless strokes of the pen until a vast gray cobweb covers almost the entire surface. “If you observed,” writes Heinrich, “the tangle more closely, you could discover therein the most commendable coherence and application, as it formed a labyrinth which could be followed up from the starting point to the end, in a continuous progression of strokes and windings which perhaps amounted to thousands of yards. At times a new style manifested itself, to a certain degree a new epoch of the work; new designs and motifs, often delicate and graceful, appeared, and if the amount of attention, sense of the appropriate, and perseverance that was required for this absurd mosaic had been applied to a real task, I certainly should have produced something worth looking at. Here and there only, hesitations, smaller or greater, appeared, certain twists in the labyrinths of my distracted soul, and the careful manner in which the pen had sought to extricate itself from the dilemma proved how my dreaming consciousness was caught in the web. So it went on for days and weeks, and the sole variation, when I was at home, would be that, with my forehead leaning against the window, I would watch the progress of the clouds, observe their shape, and in the meantime let my thoughts rove afar into the distance.” This description of the distinctly melancholic scrawl is reminiscent of the blue sheets of paper that Keller used as blotters as he toiled over

his Bildungsroman at his desk in Berlin, and which over and over again repeat the name of his unrequited love in long intricately entwined lines, swirls, columns, and loops in a myriad variations — Betty Betty Betty, BBettytybetti, bettibettibetti, Bettybittebetti [Bettypleasebetti] is scrawled and doodled there in every calligraphic permutation imaginable. And around and between these five or six letters there is nothing, save here and there a sketch of a gateway to a walled garden, also with Betty inscribed above it, a Betty-mirror, a Betty-room, and a Betty-clock and next to it a Reaper, and another skeleton playing the fiddle, a funeral bell, and a kind of miniature coat of arms in which, through a magnifying glass, something can be made out which looks like a heart pierced through with pins. The art of writing is the attempt to contain the teeming black scrawl which everywhere threatens to gain the upper hand, in the interest of maintaining a halfway functional personality. For many years Keller subjected himself to this difficult task, even though he was aware early on that it was to no avail. The “somewhat melancholy and monosyllabic official,” who says at the end of his novel that nothing can now lighten the shadows which fill his desolate soul, already suspects that even the best arrangement of letters and sentences on the page, like the generosity he showed toward his characters, in the long term counts for little when set against the heavy burden of disappointment. Looking back on his career, he feels that all of this “was no life, and could not go on thus.” He speaks of a new imprisonment of the spirit in which he has become entrapped, and broods as to the means of escaping it, but so hopeless does his situation appear that from time to time, and ever more distinctly, as he says, there stirs in him the wish no longer to exist at all.