Winfried Sebald - A Place in the Country

Hebel’s cosmographical observations are an attempt, in the clear light of reason, to lift the veil which separates us from the world beyond. Weltfrömmigkeit [secular piety] and the study of nature take the place of faith and metaphysics. The perfect mechanism of the spheres is, for the Almanac author, proof of the existence of a realm of light which we may at the last enter upon. Hebel permitted himself no doubts on this matter; indeed, his office clearly precluded such a possibility. But in his dreams — beyond the reach of the controlling authority of consciousness — which for a while he was in the habit of writing down, we find not a few indications that he, too, was prey to troubling fears and insecurities. “I was lying,” he notes on the fifth of November 1805, “in my old bedroom in my mother’s house. There was an oak tree growing in the middle of the room. The room had no ceiling, and the tree reached up into the rafters. In places the tree was aflame, which was most lovely to look at. Finally the flames reached the uppermost branches and the roof beams began to catch fire. After the fire had been extinguished, a greenish resinlike substance, which later became gelatinous, was found at the seat of the fire, as well as a great number of ugly dirty-green beetles gnawing greedily at it.” Just as alarming as this transformation of the nursery with its glowing Christmas tree into a place teeming with horror is the dream image of the damned souls in hell, where in the shape of hot fishes and other sea creatures they lie among beech leaves in a warm room. Indeed, for Hebel the animal kingdom in general appears rather disturbing: whether it is the tiny mouse with a sky-blue patch on its back which hops around under his feet, or the African lion which enters his room and places its forepaws, disfigured by mange, on his shoulders — not to mention the pair of angels, one a pregnant female, who are kept in a chicken run together with the other domestic fowl. Proving his identity is something which also variously troubles Hebel in his dreams; one night he is seated at table with Christ and the Apostles and fears that they will notice that he is not quite kosher in his beliefs, and on another occasion he is unmasked as a spy in Paris and denies his origins. The surreal world of dreams, then, is far from the star-strewn Elysian Fields which Hebel creates by day in his imagination, pen in hand. The random and arbitrary way in which the most incongruous things are combined there may be seen as a reaction to an era when the last remnants of the medieval view of a divinely ordered universe were being torn asunder, while at the same time secular history, in the form of endless wars and revolutions, was beginning everywhere to extend its violent reach. The superstition that the appearance of a comet in the heavens was a portent of impending disaster our Almanac author, characteristically, dismisses lightly with the remark that unfortunately the number of calamitous events occurring between 1789 and 1810 exceeded by far the occurrence of stars with tails. “You, gentle reader,” he writes, “need only look back at the last twenty years, at all the revolutions and trees of liberty, the sudden death of Emperor Leopold, the death met by King Louis XVI, the assassination of the Turkish Emperor, the bloody wars in Germany, the Netherlands, in Switzerland, Italy, Poland, Spain, the battles of Austerlitz and Eylau, at Esslingen and Wagram; at the outbreaks of yellow fever, typhus and cattle plagues, the conflagrations in Copenhagen, Stockholm and Constantinople, and the rising cost of coffee and sugar” in order to understand that one can never know, first thing in the morning, what will happen by nightfall. The prime example of this is Das Unglück der Stadt Leiden [The Catastrophe of the City of Leiden], where life is going on as usual despite the fact that a ship laden with seventy barrels of gunpowder is lying at anchor in the harbor: “People were having their midday meal, enjoying it as they do every day, even though the ship was still there. But in the afternoon when the clock on the big tower stood at four-thirty — industrious people were sitting at home working, devout mothers were cradling their infants, merchants were going about their business, children were gathered for their evening lessons, people of leisure had time on their hands and were sitting in the inn with a game of cards and a jug of wine, a man full of care was worrying about the morrow, how he would eat, drink, clothe himself, and a thief was maybe just inserting a counterfeit key into someone else’s door — and suddenly there was an almighty bang. The ship with its seventy barrels of gunpowder caught fire and exploded, and in one instant whole long streets of houses with all that lived and dwelled in them were blown to pieces and collapsed into a pile of rubble or were damaged most terribly. Many hundreds of people were buried dead and alive under these ruins or gravely injured. Three schools and all the children in them were destroyed, people and animals who were outdoors in the vicinity of the disaster were thrown into the air by the force of the blast and came down to earth in a pitiable state. To make matters worse a conflagration broke out which was soon raging everywhere and could scarcely be extinguished, as many warehouses full of oil and blubber also went up in flames. Eight hundred beautiful buildings collapsed or had to be demolished.” In his evocation of the destruction of the city of Leiden, Hebel as it were sums up the experience of an entire epoch. Born in 1760, he lived through the collapse of the ancien régime just across the border in France, the outbreak of the Revolution, the years of the Terror, and the pan-European wars which followed, as a catastrophic escalation and headlong precipitation of history. Nowhere in Hebel’s work — not in the story of the disaster visited upon the Dutch city of Leiden, nor anywhere else in his writing — is there any evidence to suggest that he sympathized with the endemic political violence erupting everywhere in Europe between 1789 and 1814. Walter Benjamin’s wishful conjecture, that Hebel might have seen the French Revolution as an act of divine reason intervening in human history, is based — as Hannelore Schlaffer shows in the Afterword to her beautifully illustrated edition of the Schatzkästlein [ Treasure Chest ] — on an imprecise historical perspective which “confused the revolutionary turmoils on the Upper Rhine in the 1790s with the reforms of the early years of the nineteenth century.” Robert Minder, too — the most reliable witness in these matters — points out that Hebel only supported the Revolution, if at all, in its most restrained and liberal form. And the Hausfreund himself, in 1815, once the upheavals finally appear to have died down, tells his readers expressis verbis that he has never yet sported a cockade. Although hedged about with all kinds of ironies, this retrospective declaration on Hebel’s part is surely not to be ascribed to opportunistic motives, since at no point were his hopes and philosophy directed at a violent and bloody reversal of the status quo. His concern was only ever for the practical improvement of the living conditions of the people, such as was promoted by Karl Friedrich, Grand Duke of Baden, beginning with his abolition of serfdom in a decree of the twenty-third of July 1783, in the consequent reforms in education and health provision, of agriculture and administration, as well as by the local Baden adaptation of the Napoleonic Code Civil. Karl Friedrich was a follower of the French physio crats, whose principal advocates, François Quesnay and Jean Claude Marie Vincent, sought, in the face of the far-reaching changes affecting collective life in the eighteenth century, to achieve a lasting basis for a harmonization of society based upon natural law. Accordingly, the centerpiece of their economic philosophy was agriculture, which they saw as the only true form of production and of decisive importance for the common good. The processing of raw materials in manufacture, trade, and industry represented, for them, enterprises of a secondary nature. Simultaneously progressive and conservative, the physiocrats’ philosophy was determined by the attempt as it were to inculcate a bourgeois sense of rationality in the prevailing aristocratic régime, and by this means to protect it from precisely that end which was already inevitable, should it fail to replace the more or less ruthless exploitation of its inherited resources by a more enlightened practice. The ideal the physiocrats had in mind was of a country resembling a large and flourishing garden. Hannelore Schlaffer quotes a Zurich city doctor of the mid-eighteenth century who was of the opinion that there would be no deceit and no violence, and everywhere peace and satisfaction would reign, “if only all men would cultivate the fields and provide for themselves by the work of their hands.” In such nostalgic utopian views was the educated middle class wont to articulate its discomfiture at the rapid spread of the economy of goods and capital it had itself created, and which was now proliferating year on year. The adherents of the physiocratic school believed that the realization of their “natural” order of society could most readily be achieved within a state ruled by means of a so-called loyal despotism, which would enable their ideas for reform to be put directly into practice. Besides concurring with the substance of their ideas, it was this political line which meant that it made sense for a ruler like Karl Friedrich to follow the precepts of the physiocrats. As far as Hebel is concerned, it was in the benevolent régime of Karl Friedrich — and certainly not in the Revolution, transforming as it did a process of reform into a calamity — that he saw the blueprint for realizing a better future for human society. In the manner of a wise and benevolent monarch, so, too, the Hausfreund performs his office of narrator. The stories and reports he presents, the lessons he imparts, and all the other things he elaborates on in the all-embracing natural order, taken together add up to a kind of Solomonic manual for the lower orders, as well as a treatise on statecraft in which the local ruler may see himself reflected in role models intended not least as a guide to the proper fulfillment of the task entrusted to him by the grace of God. In this respect, Hebel’s political position is closely related to the one Goethe adopts in his Novelle , which of course is concerned with averting the dangers of fire (in other words, revolution) by means of a feudal system of government, which is nevertheless imbued with a bourgeois work ethic and sense of duty. Whereas Goethe, though, very nearly makes his young prince into a shining example of the new spirit of enterprise, whose main principle is “that one receives more than one gives,” Hebel, when talking of Kaiser Joseph, Frederick the Great, the clever Sultan, or the Tsar of Russia, prefers to hold fast to the tried and tested paternalistic system where any intervention on the part of the Landesväter or local sovereigns in the lives of their subjects invariably turns out to be a blessing. Nowhere in Hebel do we detect even the slightest hint of irreverence. Goodness and justice are the lodestars of the paternalistic order, the unquestioning acceptance of which is nowhere better illustrated than in the many variations on the set pieces in which the ruling prince goes unrecognized as he mingles amongst the people. Our Almanac author, too, presents us with a number of these, perhaps most strikingly in the story from 1809 which relates how Napoleon did not neglect to discharge his longstanding debt to the fruit woman in Brienne. In order that the reader may see the matter in its proper perspective, the Hausfreund merely sketches in the stages of Napoleon’s career since his time as a cadet in the military school at Brienne. “Soon,” he writes, “Napoleon was made a general and conquered Italy. Napoleon went to Egypt where the children of Israel once made bricks and he fought a battle near Nazareth where the blessed virgin lived eighteen hundred years ago. Napoleon sailed straight back to France over a sea swarming with enemy ships, arrived in Paris and became First Consul. Napoleon restored peace and law and order to the troubled country and became French Emperor.” And a few lines after the recapitulation of this meteoric career we see the Emperor, incognito like one of these legendary righteous souls who hold the world in equilibrium, stepping through a narrow door into the room in which the fruit woman is just preparing her frugal supper. One thousand two hundred francs’ capital and interest are counted out onto his creditor’s table, so that henceforth she will be provided for, and her children, too, whom one might now almost say he thought of as his own.