Kuno Francke - The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 11

His admiration for American literature was very great, as his own words will show: "But upon this wide, entirely original, field of poetry what abundance, what variety of production! Palmettos grow by the side of gnarly oaks, and the most charming and modest flora of the prairie among the garden flowers of magic beauty and intoxicating perfume." The American poems were followed by translations of Michelet's L'Amour and other French and English works.

Spielhagen connected himself with Gutzkow's Europa and devoted himself for a time to criticism. Among the essays of this period are Objectivity in the Novel , Dickens , Thackeray , etc. At the suggestion of Kolatschek, an Austrian Forty-eighter, who had returned from America and founded the periodical Stimmung der Zeit in Vienna, Spielhagen wrote a severe criticism of Freytag's historical drama The Fabians . This attack upon Freytag was occasioned by the severe criticism of Gutzkow's Magician of Rome , published in the Grenzboten , edited by Julian Schmidt and Gustav Freytag. It was Spielhagen's demand for fair play as well as his admiration for Gutzkow that drew him into the conflict.

The old home in Pomerania had been broken up by the death of his father and the marriage of his sister, and the events of his early life could now be viewed as history. Out of these events and his later experience grew his first great novel, Problematic Characters (1860, Second Part 1861). This novel deals with the conditions in Pomerania in particular, and in Germany in general, before 1848. The title is drawn from Goethe's Aphorisms in Prose : "There are problematic characters which are not adapted to any position in life and are not satisfied with any condition in life. Out of this arises that titanic conflict which consumes life without compensation." The hero, Dr. Oswald Stein, is the poet himself in his rôle as family tutor and implacable foe of the institutions of the nobility, "a belated Young German" and an incipient socialist. He falls in love with Melitta von Berkow in her Hermitage, with the impulsive Emilie von Breesen at the ball, and with Helene von Grenwitz, his pupil. Because of the latter he fights a duel with her suitor, Felix, and then goes off with Dr. Braun to begin anew at Grünwald. In the second part of this novel this unfinished story is carried to its tragic and logical conclusion, when Oswald dies a heroic death at the barricades. Although most of the chief characters drawn in the novel are types, they are modeled after prototypes in real life. Oswald, the revolutionist with a suggestion of the Byronic, echoes the poet in his early career. Dr. Braun (Franz), the man of will, is modeled on the poet's young friend Bernhard, and Oldenburg, the titanic Faust nature, is taken from his friend Adalbert of the Gymnasium days at Stralsund. Albert Timm was his boon companion at Greifswald, and Professor Berger is a composite of Professor Barthold, the historian, and Professor M – , who later became insane.

In the years 1860-62 Spielhagen was editor of the literary supplement of the Zeitung für Norddeutschland , doing valuable service as a literary journalist. In this position he had opportunity to prepare himself for the wider activities as editor of the Deutsche Wochenschrift and later (1878-84) of Westermann's Monatshefte . After 1862 he was identified with the surging life of Berlin.

In The Hohensteins (1863) the story of a declining noble family, recalling the historical novel of Scott and Hauff's Lichtenstein , the socialistic program of Lassalle begins to appear. Lassalle's doctrines find their spokesman in the hero, Bernhard Münzer, the fantastic but despotic agitator and cosmopolitan socialist; while the idealist, Baltasar, voices the reform program of the poet himself in the words: "Educate yourselves, Germans, to love and freedom."

In the next novel, In Rank and File (1866), the program of Lassalle is reflected in Leo Gutmann, a character of the Auerbach type. The mouthpiece of the poet is really Walter Gutmann, who sums up the moral of the story in these sentences: "The heroic age is past. The battle-cry is no longer: 'one for all,' but 'all for all.' The individual is only a soldier in rank and file. As individual he is nothing; as member of the whole he is irresistible." Father Gutmann, the forester, is evidently an echo of the poet's family traditions, while Dr. Paulus is an exponent of the philosophy of Spinoza. Leo's career and fall illustrate the futility of the principle of "state aid" in the reform program. Even the seven years of residence in America were not sufficient to rescue him from his visionary schemes.

In Hammer and Anvil (1869) the same theme is treated in a different form. The poet teaches here that the conflict between master and servant, ruler and subject, must be reinterpreted and recognized as a necessary condition of society. "The situation is not hammer or anvil, as the revolutionists would have it, but hammer and anvil; for every creature, every man, is both together, at every moment." Thus the "solidarity of interests" is the aim to be kept in view, and is shown by Georg Hartwig, who having learned his lesson in the penitentiary now appears as the owner of a factory and gives his workmen an interest in the profits.

The most powerful of Spielhagen's novels is Storm Flood (1877), in which the inundation caused by the fearful storm on the coast of the Baltic Sea in 1874 is made a coincident parallel of the calamity brought about by the reckless speculation of the industrial promoters of the early seventies. As the catastrophe on the Baltic is the consequence of ignoring the warnings of physical phenomena in nature, so the financial crash and family distress which overwhelm the Werbens and Schmidts are the result of the violation of similar natural laws in the social and industrial world. The novelist has here reached the highest development of his art. The course of the narrative gathers in its wake all the elements of catastrophe, to let them break with the fury of the tempest over the lives of the characters, but allows the innocent children of Nature to come forth as the happy survivors of this wreck and ruin. The characters of Reinhold and Else, who find their bliss in true love, are his best creations. The poet has here proved himself a worthy disciple of Shakespeare and Walter Scott.

After this blast of the tempest, the poet turned to the more placid scenes of his native heath in the novel entitled Flat Land (1879), in which he describes the conditions of Pomerania between 1830-1840. The wealth of description and incident, the variety of motive and situation, make this story one of the most characteristic of Pomeranian scenery and life.

In the novel What Is to Come of It? (1887), liberalism, social democracy, nihilism, held in check by the grip of the Iron Chancellor, contend for the mastery. And what shall the result? The poet answers: "There is a bit of the Social Democrat in every one," but the result will be "a and lofty one and a new, glorious phase of an ever-striving humanity." Here are brought into play typical characters, the Bismarckian Squire, the reckless capitalist, the particularist with his feigned liberalism.

Spielhagen's pessimism finds vent in A New Pharaoh (1889), which is a protest against the Bismarck régime. The ideals of the Forty-eighter are represented by Baron von Alden, who comes back from America to visit his old home only to find a new Pharaoh, who knows nothing of the Joseph of 1848. Finding the Germans a race of toadies and slaves, in which the noble-minded go under while the base triumph, he turns his back upon the new empire for good and all. "Nothing is accomplished by the sword which another sword cannot in turn destroy. The permanent and imperishable can be accomplished only by the silent force of reason."