Ordinary Disenchantment in Keller’s Der grüne Heinrich (1854/55)161
We are not at the beginning of any endless and expanding dawn, but only of the ordinary daily dawns each followed by its own darkness.
- G.K. Chesterton, “My Six Conversions”162 The pencil is conscious of a delightful facility in drawing a griffin—the longer the claws, and the larger the wings, the better; but that marvelous facility which we mistook for genius is apt to forsake us when we want to draw a real unexaggerated lion.
- George Eliot, Adam Bede163
After his career as a landscape painter has failed, Heinrich Lee meets the art collector who owns all of his paintings. The collector offers this insightful reading of Heinrich’s oeuvre:
Erst als ich sah, daß hier ein ganzer wohlbeordneter Fleiß [Heinrich’s oeuvre] stückweise zum Vorschein kam, vielleicht die heiteren Blüthenjahre eines unglücklich gewordenen Menschen, gewann ich ein tieferes Interesse an den Sachen und sammelte sie sorgfältig auf, seltsam bewegt, wenn ich sie so
beisammen sah und alle die verschwendete Liebe und Treue eines Unbekannten,
161 The first version of the novel was published in 1855, and is the object of the present reading.
However, Keller revised it and it was republished in 1880. Some of the most notable revisions were made to the narrative voice and to the ending. While in the first version, Heinrich narrates the story of his childhood and young adulthood (Jugendgeschichte) and a third-person narrator conveys the rest, in the second version, Heinrich narrates the entire story. Keller also altered the ending of the novel significantly. Instead of returning to Switzerland from Germany and
discovering that his mother has just died, in the revised version Heinrich returns to Switzerland from Germany in time to make amends with his mother before her death. Furthermore, instead of dying himself, Heinrich pursues a career in public service, having left his painting career, and re- establishes his friendship with one of his childhood sweethearts.
162 G.K. Chesterton, “My Six Conversions.” In The Well and the Shallows, (San Fransisco:
Ignatius, 2006): 37.
die Luft eines schönen Landes und verlorener Heimat herausfühlte; denn man sah wohl, daß dies nicht Reisestudien waren, sondern ein Grund und Boden vom Jugendlande des Urhebers.164
The collector traces a development in the experience of home as portrayed the paintings; he speculates about the ‘unglücklich gewordenen Menschen,’ ‘verschwendete Liebe und Treue,’ and ‘verlorener Heimat.’ A sad progression of loss. Even the words ‘Jugendlande des Urhebers’ suggest a place that the artist has somehow left behind as he matured into adulthood. Home is elusive in his interpretation. On the one hand, it seems ephemeral: ‘die Luft eines schönen Landes’. On the other hand, solid: ‘ein Grund und Boden’. The painted depiction of home in Der grüne Heinrich is the focus of this chapter. And as the quote above indicates, Heinrich’s depiction of home exudes a sense of loss and is fraught with both alienation and familiarity. Many scholars have characterized this tension as a struggle between revenants of Romanticism and Classicism and the burgeoning German Poetic Realism.165 Certainly, traces of both Romanticism and Classicism are plentiful in Keller’s novel and appear to hinder Heinrich from successfully developing a realist aesthetic of landscape painting.166 As a daydreamer, an avid reader of Goethe and Jean
164 Gottfried Keller, Der grüne Heinrich, (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985):
772.
165 Because of its indebtedness to Romanticism, Hugo Aust identifies Der grüne Heinrich as a
pre-realist text. See Realismus. Lehrbuch Germanistik, (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 2006): 168.
166 The claim that Heinrich fails as a realist artist is a reoccurring theme in the secondary
literature. See Gail Finney, “Poetic Realism, Naturalism, and the Rise of the Novella,” German Literature of the Ninetheenth Century, 1832-1899, (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2005); Günter Hess, “Die Bilder des grünen Heinrichs. Gottfried Kellers poetische Malerei,” Panorama und Denkmal. Studien zum Bildgedächtnis des 19. Jahrhunderts, (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2011); Todd Kontje, “Der gescheiterte Realist im Zeitalter der Abstraktion. Gottfried Kellers Der grüne Heinrich I (1855),” Medialer Realismus, (Freiburg: Rombach Verlag, 2011); Ernst Osterkamp, “Erzählte Landschaften,” Der grüne Heinrich. Gottfried Kellers Lebensbuch - Neu Gelesen, (Zürich: Chronos Verlag, 2009)
Paul, and a “sonderbarer Bursche,”167 Heinrich himself appears at times to be a revenant of an earlier aesthetic tradition. However, the dreams that most occupy his creative mind are not fantastical, but rather ordinary: above all, he desires friendship with his father who died when Heinrich was a young child. In the death of his father, Heinrich loses his feeling of belonging in his own home, giving rise to a homesickness that transcends his physical location: “so haben mich auch die langen Erzählungen der Mutter immer mehr mit Sehnsucht und Heimweh nach meinem Vater erfüllt, welchen ich nicht mehr gekannt habe.”168 Whereas in the first chapter we saw that the absence of love and belonging depicted in Storm’s Im Schloß (1862) is filled when the protagonist falls in love, for Heinrich, the sense of belonging is only revived in the imaginary realm of his landscape paintings, but never in his actual experience.
In the first chapter I claimed that painting offers resistance to the demystification that accompanies secularization. Im Schloß includes characters whose embrace of a primarily empiricist understanding of the world is thrown into question by the presence of paintings that do not adhere to the same logic. In the present chapter I take up the dichotomy between painting and secularization again, and argue that painting is comparable to religion, for it becomes the protagonist’s means of combatting the alienating effects of secularization. In the first section of this chapter, I lay out the alternative theory of secularization that Charles Taylor posits. It differs from the Enlightenment theory in several ways, but most importantly for my argument, Taylor takes into account the experiential reverberations of secularization. Namely: that for
167 See Keller, 25. 168 See Keller, 69.
people in modernity, ordinary life often feels meaningless, even alien – borrowing from Max Weber, Taylor calls this experience “disenchantment.” Here I show that, as a perpetual outsider, Heinrich is a paradigm of Taylor’s modern subject. Having this understanding of the modern subject as a foundation, I turn to the role of painting in the novel. First I examine its religious function to reckon with the challenges of
disenchantment. I demonstrate that in many ways, painting resembles the characterization of religion espoused by Ludwig Feuerbach, who influenced Keller profoundly. Finally, I show how this Feuerbachian understanding of painting as religion sheds light on the aesthetic phases of Heinrich’s career.
Scholarly discussions about painting in Der grüne Heinrich generally revolve around interpreting the aesthetic conventions that characterize Heinrich’s works of art. Andrea Meyertholen has recently argued that, although Keller does not advocate for unconventional art forms in this novel, Grüner Heinrich reveals important preconditions for the emergence of abstract art.169 Focusing on the paintings that reflect Romantic and Classical conventions, other scholars identify what appears to be Heinrich’s struggle to achieve a realist aesthetic. Günter Hess claims that the phases of Heinrich’s painting correspond to the state of visual art in the mid nineteenth century in which there was no dominant visual aesthetic.170 Gail Finney, however, identifies the multiple conventions as evidence of a struggle between idealism and realism within the text.171 Similarly, Ernst Osterkamp claims that Heinrich’s preference for Romantic and Classical conventions
169 Andrea Meyertholen, “It’s Not Easy Being Green: The Failure of Abstract Art in Gottfried
Keller’s Der Grüne Heinrich,” German Studies Review 39, no. 2 (2016): 241–58.
170 See Hess. 171 See Finney.
leads to his downfall as a realist painter.172 While Martin Swales also identifies a struggle between Romanticism and realism in Heinrich’s paintings, he believes that Heinrich fails on both counts.173 Eric Downing’s analysis departs notably from these approaches, in that – rather than examining the conventions that characterize the paintings – he examines their function within the text and concludes that painting taps into a magical force inherent in realist representation.174
Claims that Heinrich fails to achieve a realist aesthetic have not fully accounted for the religious subtext that undergirds his artistic output, and particularly for the response to Ludwig Feuerbach’s philosophy that the paintings express. Furthermore, by focusing on the differences and the ostensible tension between the aesthetic traditions represented in Heinrich’s painting, scholars have overlooked an important factor that unifies them; namely: Heinrich’s desire to experience the ordinary world as familiar helps explain his perpetual attempts to join the ranks of an aesthetic tradition – to belong somewhere, even within a community of artists. The role of convention in the experience of belonging will be further problematized in the next chapter on Stifter’s
Nachkommenschaften (1864), but here one of its primary functions is to further demonstrate Heinrich’s ongoing attempt to become a familiar part of his community. Thus, while my approach will consider the aesthetic conventions that Heinrich’s
paintings use, my claim is that the conventions are not primarily indicative of an aesthetic
172 See Osterkamp.
173 Martin Swales, “The Need to Believe and the Impossibility of Belief. Romantic and Realistic
Strategies in Gottfried Keller’s Der grüne Heinrich,” Realism and Romanticism in German Literature, (Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 2013)
174 Eric Downing, “Binding Magic in Gottfried Keller’s Der grüne Heinrich.” The Germanic
struggle, but of a religious and social one that emerges from his experience of his “disenchanted” world.