germany peasant life

8/20/2019 Germany Peasant Life

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LITERATURE OF PEASANT LIFE IN

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY GERMANY

The rise of peasant literature as a genre belongs to the nineteenth century, to the

middle years of the so-calied

Biedermeierzeit

However, aimost throughout the

eighteenth century iiterary works, usuaiiy lyric or epic poetry, on the subject of the

peasant or peasant life enjoyed wide currency in Germany. Eighteenth-century

Germ an literature of peasant life is remarkable for the uniformly sympathetic view it

offers of its subject. Although a number of works include some degree of empirical

deta il of rural life, in general the actua l condition of the G erman peasantry receives

only marginal attention. Nor does such literature offer a programme of social,

political, or economic reform, despite the fact that abuses of the peasantry do figu re

in it and that most of it was written during a time of intense interest among public

figures in the problems of

the

agrarian economy. Germ an literature of peasant iife

owes much to the pastorai poetry of classical antiquity and to its modern European

imitators in Engiand, France, Italy, and Spain. But it has a topicality of its own,

none the less, and a political dimension of a characteristic kind: in the curiously

obiique manner typicai of much poiiticai comment in German iiterature,

eighteenth-century German literature of peasant life offers both a critique of

contem porary society and a vision of an idealized society, a Utopian com munity such

as the bourgeois inteilectual of limited m eans, social mobility, and influence might

envisage it.

The central feature of this literature is the raising of the standing of the peasant in

moral, political, and aesthetic terms. While it could include both major works of

hterature and also what were virtually no more than rhymed almanach articies,

literature of peasant life enjoyed considerable popular success and it undoubtedly if

indirectly made an important contribution to informed political discussion on the

subject of the peasant class. The process of restoring the status of the German

peasant, his moral and political rehabilitation as it were, found expression, broadly

speaking, in three ways.

The first concerns his literary status. Traditionally a comic figure, the peasant

became in the eighteenth century the subject of serious literature. In a rejection of

Gottsched s strictures on his suitability in that cap acity , the peasant was shown in

prose idylis and in lyric and epic verse as capable of deep feelings, of sentiments of

love, honour, and generosity, capable of feeling pain, both physical and m ental, and ,

at a iater

date,

of patriotism. Secondty, the peasant

was

represented

as

the repository

of tru e or natu ral hum an goodness. His mental and morai attitudes and his

manner of iiving were shown to be fundamentaily different from and supierior to

those of civilized society, whether this is understood to signify the court and the

ruling classes, or simply the town-dwellers. (At the end of the century, the

iniiabitants of small towns came to be accepted as pa rt of rura i culture, extending

In his Versuch einer critischen ichtkumt (Leipzig, 1751), p. 582. I should point out that I have no

attempted to deal with one central aspect of this problem that has attracted much interest in recent

scholarship, namely, the rhetorical tradition . Friedrich Sengle s pioneering article, W unse hbild L an d


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8 o Literature of Peasan t Life

the scope of literature of peasant life and incidentally, providing nineteenth-century

German writers with one of their most popular subjects.) Closely linked with this

aspect of peasant life and an important constituent of its literary presentation was

the rejection of French urb an culture and manners as being not merely artificial,

bu t socially divisive. The association of the rural world with a specifically Germ an

life-style, implicit in much eighteenth-century German iiterature on the peasantry,

was however developed only in the nineteenth

century.

The na tural goodness of the

peasant was presented as expressing itself in a natura l piety, which giadly acknow-

ledged divine providence a t work in the world, and made him a dutiful subject of his

master, or a loyal member of the village community, according to the jjolitical stance

of the w riter. Moreover, the peasan t s sense of wonder and his delight in Go d s

creation were also seen as endowing him with a new aesthetic sensibility, a capacity

for the perception of goodness and beauty not exceeded by any other estate or social

group.

Th irdly, the peasant worid is shown in eighteenth-century German iiterature to

be one of natu ral social harmony and usefulness. If this is seen not to be the case in

any particuiar region, the fault is cieariy attributed to the irresponsibility of the

authorities rather than to peasant brutishness. Particuiariy in the work oiSturm und

Drang w riters, not only are the authorities shown on occasion to harm the peasant

personally if they ill-treat him or restrict his freedom, they also stultify the

development of his naturai talents which, the writers imply, are traditionaliy

empioyed for the good of the community and of society.

To consider each of these points in greater detail: in the process of transforming the

herdsman and the tiller of the soil into a human being iike the rest of

u s ,

in the

presentation of the peasant as a major literary personage, the Svtass writer, painter ,

and publisher Salomon Gessner played a vital part. In his first collection oildyllen

(1756), which were published in his native Ztirich when he was twenty-six and

which founded his extraordinary fame in eighteenth-century Europe, Gessner

presented his sylvan shepherds primarily as people of deep and delicate feeling. It is

of course obvious that his Damons, Chloes, Milons, and Mirtils have no more than a

tenuous relationship w ith the contemporary wiss or German peasant — in contrast

to the Swiss peasants in A lbrecht von Haller s majestic epic poem Die lpen

{1

729),

we never see Philiis or Chioe dirtying their pretty hands to make aus Miich der

Alpen Meel .̂ But what they did do was to establish in the minds of the sophisticated

European reading public, including Rousseau, Turgot, and Mirabeau, as well as

Swiss and German readers, the notion of an ideal human comm unity set in a local

landscape.* The persuasivenMS of Gessner s peasants lay in the comm unal

organization of their world. They are not mere love-sick swains and maids, but are

social beings, always mindful of famiiy and comm unai bonds, affectionate in their

care for their children and aged and in their readiness to aid the poor and the sick,

and they are faithful in love. Phiiiis replaces the iost goats of her poor neighbour,

Idas prays to Pan to increase his flock so tha t, as he says, ich sie mit meinen armen

Nachbam teiien [kann] , and Aschines refuses the offer from Menalkas, a courtier,

^ Haller and Saiis-Seewis, edited by Adolf Frey, Deutsche National Lilieratur (hereafter referred to as


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EDA SAGARRA 81

whom he has rescued in the mountains, of gorgeously-robed girls, contrasting them

with his 'braunes Madchen . . . [geschmiickt] mit frischen Rosen und einem bunten

Kranz'.* The statistics of Gessner's literary success, with sixty editions and transla-

tions into some twenty languages in the eighteenth century, followed by a sudden

and enduring neglect, are indeed extraordinary.^ The reasons cieariy have much to

do with the iyric expressiveness of his prose, and with the critique, perhaps more

evident to Gessner himseif than to most of his readers, of contemporary society.* His

Idytlen estabiished the country-dweiler (as against the Roman topios of the

statestnan-philosopher-turned-countryman)'' as a moral person and an emotional

being, a fit subject for discriminating as well as for didactic pens. His influence is

discernible on those poems where the writer has his peasant swain use Petrarchan

conceits or other traditional conventions of European love poetry in singing praise of

the beloved.* Although in contemporary peasant society economic interest con-

tinued to determine the marriage partner, in Gessner, Schubart, Voss, and others

the love relationship of these literary peasants is charged with the kind of feeling

normally reserved in literature for the relationships of tbe upper classes; at the same

time their behaviour is characterized by the kind of virtuous restraint and delicacy of

feeling of an idealized society, one which would become widely characteristic of

peasant literature in the Biedermeier era.

The contribution of J. H. Voss to peasant love poetry is a significant one, for he

was the first to integrate it into socially critical idylls and odes. The central

importance of his work in the present context lies in his having established the

capacity of the 'authentic' peasant for emotional experience, indeed in his having

helped give expression in his idyils and odes to the peasant's capacity for physical

and emotional suffering, as weii as for human happiness. It is hard for us to realize

how radical this was. The traditional social hierarchy in eighteenth-century Europe

rested on the assumption of a corresponding hierarchy of physical and emotional

sensibility. Just as in earlier times educated people might not (in theory at least) be

tortured, whereas it was thought necessary in the case of the uneducated to do so in

order to 'get through to them', to extract the truth, so too in the eighteenth century

people still believed that peasants actually felt physical pain much less acutely then

their social superiors.' A Pomeranian cleric expressed this view somewhat crudely

in 1684 when he suggested that peasants, like salt cod, were best when beaten soft.''

Similarly, peasants were believed to be virtually incapable of any but the most

primitive emotions, feeiing iust rather than iove,^^ a primitive hunger and greed for

Gessner,

Idyllen,

Kritische Ausgabe, edited by E. T. Voss (Stuttgart, 1973), pp. 23, 25, 48.

'

See John Hibberd,

Salomon Gessner

(Cambridge, 1976), especially pp. 127-43.

* For a critical reassessment of Gessner's work and its modem reception, see E. T. Voss, 'Salomon

Geflner', in Deutsche Dichter des 16. fahrhunderts, edited by Benno von Wiese (Berlin, 1977), pp. 249-75,

especially pp. 264 ff.

^

Illustrated in the case of Germany by the poems of Freiherr von Canitz (1654—99), highly thought of

by his contemporaries.

* As in H a g e d o m , Der verliebte

Bauer,

C. F. D. Schubart, Winteriied eines schwabischen auemjunge or

Fischerlied (both 1783, when he was a prisoner in the Hohenasperg), or J. H. Voss, Die Wassertragerin

(1793).

See Erich Trunz, 'Der Spathumanismus um 1600 als Standeskultur', in Barockfbrschung, edited by

Richard Alewyn, second edition (Cologne, 1966), p. 150.


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82 Literature of Peasant Life

food and drink, and imposing harsh discipiine on their children and other depen-

dents. Voss,

however, and many of his contemporaries, particularly those associated

with the Sturm und Drang showed the peasant as capable not just of suffering

physically, but also of experiencing the pangs ofiove; moreover he showed him as

being capable of tender emotions towards wife and family, of concern at the

sufferings of

others,

of gratitude to overlord and to neighbours, and of righteous

anger a t injustice, whether inflicted on himself or on others.^^ Voss was primarily

concerned with poiiticai issues in his poetry of peasant

life,

hut he was also sensible

of the innovatory literary character of his work, and the problems to be overcome. In

a letter to H. Chr. Boie, fi-om whom he had taken over the editorship of the

Gottinger

Musenalmanach

in 1774, he co mm ented o n his poe m.

Die

KirschenpfiUckerin: 'Mein

Id y l le .. . ist fertig und gefallt m ir sehr. Es ist ein Versuch, wie weit man die Denkart

der Landmadchen veredeln kann, ohne unnaturlich zu werden.'^^ A few years iater

M atth ias Claudias, presenting a GenreitW of contemporary peasant life in Schleswig

in

Paul

Erdmanns

Fest

{1782 , has the narrator comment: 'Mein Vetter und ich war

wie vom Himmel gefallen, denn solche Bauern waren uns noch nicht vorgekom-

men.'^* The irony of the comment is here directed, not at the idealization of peasant

iife, which is undoubtediy there, but rather at the traditionai iiterary stereotype of

the peasan t. I t was Voss too, in that innovatory decade, the

1770s,

which was also a

time of acute rural economic crisis and human suffering in many regions of

Germany, who portrayed the peasant in German iiterature as a tragic figure, the

victim of his social and poiiticai circumstances. In the first of two importan t idyils.

Die Leibeigenen (1775), the plight of

the victims

of feudal tyranny (and stupidity, as i

Junker

Kord

some twenty years iater (1793)) is reveaied. Sensitive to the sufferings of

their companions, to the bitter anguish of iovers forcibiy separated, protest brings

brutal vengeance. None, not the young nor the aged, the sick, the old, nor the

maimed, is spared. The peasants are shown as sensitive to the feelings of one other,

respecting individuality in a way unknown to the ignorant establishment, brutalized

by generations of tnindless power. In

Die Freigelassenen

(1775), by contrast, Vo

offers a harmonious portrait of peasant life under the guidance of an altruistic and

visionary lord, the peasants no less virtuous or indeed 'authentic ' in their prosperity,

based on free endeavour and following the paternal advice of their former master

{Idyllen pp.

79-83).

T he theme of the 'good' master is of course a common one in the

1770s and 1780s, reflecting to some extent the preference of proponents of the

ptopular enlightenment for paternalist reform over radical social change.^ '

An interesting subsidiary aspect of the literary rehabilitation of the peasant in

eighteenth-century German literature — and one, it must be said, on which much

work remains to be done — is the portrayal of the peasant woman and

giri.

At a time

when the so-called popular morai philosophers, such as Camf>e, Ehrenberg , Ew ald,

Pockels, and others,^* were demanding feats of submission an d moral endurance

of

'^J . H. Voss, Idyllen edited by E. T. Voss (Heidelberg, 1968) (reprint of 1801 Konigsberg edition),

pp. 84, 26 ff., 87 f., 149 f.

' ' Voss, Briefe

3

vols (Hildesheim , 1971), m , 149.

'* From Der Wandsbecke r Bote in Claudius, Samtliche Werke edited by Hannsludwig Geiger (Wiesbad

n.d.),

p . 193.

' ' As, for example, E. von Rochow, Pcstalozzi, or Chr. Salzm ann.


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EDA SAGARRA 83

vreimen both in the single and in the married state, deeming these to be preordained

by divine and/or natural law, writers on peasant life offered something very

different. Peasant women, whether farmers, cottagers, or day labourers, were shown

as having a certain authority in their own sphere, based on their useful life and the

self-esteem arising therefrom.^' Some were even shown as exercising a certain

authority over their men-folk, though its nature was not 'mannishness' but rather

what is caiied in Irish the 'sugain sneachta' (= rope of

snow),

nameiy, the power of

proven affection. The pretty, seif-confident no-nonsense peasant girl is a not

uncommon iiterary type in the poetry of the last decades of the century, pert as in the

poems of

the

Wiener Almctrmch, triumphant, as she pours a bucket of water out of her

bedroom window over the head of Junker Wenze auf Schmuriachsbuttei, coquett-

ish but affectionate in the iove poems of the Kempten collection, Vermischte

Bauem-

Lieder (1776).^* The anacreontic proets allowed their female peasant protagonists a

certain erotic provocativeness not quite in keeping with the natural virtue now

commoniy attributed to them.'* But the women's capacity for love is seen by

virtuaiiy ail writers on the subject as at least equai to that of their male partners.

Perhaps the most powerful example of this, and a work which had a formative

influence on the Biedermeier peasant heroine, not always fully acknowledged, is

Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea (1797). The endlessly-quoted line, made familiar

from Buchmann's ubiquity in the later nineteenth century, 'Dienen lerne beizeiten

das Weib nach ihrer Bestimmung',^" has led commentators to overlook the inde-

pendence of spirit, the impressive moral and physical strength of Dorothea, which is

seen to be anchored in her rural background. Reading her iong iast speech, which

begins, 'O nie weiB der verstandige Mann, der im Schmerz uns zu raten / Denkt

. . .',^^ where she confesses her passion for and renunciation of Hermann and the

home offered her, we can perhaps see the prototype of the strong and passionate

heroines of Beidermeier literature of rural life, such as we encounter notably in

Gotthelf,

but aiso in Immermann, Stifter, and Auerbach.

The presentation ofiove and marriage in eighteenth-century German literature of

peasant life," schematic though it is, differs substantially from that of hterature of

upper-class or burgher circles, suggesting a freedom of choice governed by inciina-

tion, an essentiai equaiity of the sexes, based on their mutually important contribu-

tion to the famiiy home and community. The truth or accuracy of this portrait was,

however, hardiy bome out by a comparison with actuai circumstances of rural life.

This is an aspect of the poiiticai function of such literature, namely, an attempt on

the part of its bourgeois authors £0 offer and to win public support for a vision of a

S e e Uli B r a k e r , Lebensgeschichte

and

natiirliche Ebenteuer des Armen Mannes

in

Tockenburg (1789 , r e p r in t ed

Ber l in and W e i m a r , 1 9 6 6 ), pp. 259 If., or

Hermann

und

Dorothea,

vm, I. 60: 'Die t a t i g e M u t t e r b e l e b t im

G a n z e n die W i r t s c h a f t ' ( G o e t h e , Gedenkausgabe

der

Werke, Briefe

und

Gesprache, ed i t ed by E. Beu t l e r ,

24 vo l s (Zu r i ch , 1948 -63) , IX, 221).

' J . A. B l u m e n a u e r , Wundersame

Klage

eines Landmadchens

in der Stadt,

D NL 135/2 , pp . 7 0 - 7 2 ; V o s s ,

Idyllen,

p. 1.42; see also Leopo ld Schm idt, 'L ieder far den Landm ann: Ein K apitel Aufklarung und Volkslied', in

Die osterreichische Literatur:

Ihr

Profit

d Wd 8

J h h d t

S ) d i d b H b

4 p , p uklaru ng und Volkslied, in

Die osterreichische Literatur:

Ihr

Profit an

der

Wende vom 18.

tum ig.

Jahrhund ert ly^o-lSjo), ed i t ed by H e r b e r t

Zeman (Graz, 1979), pp. 873-90, especially p. 885.

M . J . Prandstetter,

mn r̂r/ierf,

DNL 135/2, pp. 3

f.

^ VII,

1. 114,

quoted

in G.

Biichmann, eJiHgelte We

., o

•

WorU,

26th edition (Berlin 1918),

p. 148. (The

first

edition appeared in 1864.)

Goethe,

G edenkausgabe,

ix, 236 ff. (ix, 11. 134-81).


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8 4 Literature of Peasant Life

new and just society, as the aiternative to, or perhaps in many cases only as an

escape from, the prevailing system of political, social, and moral constrain ts.

As

par t of

the

generai eievation of the image of

the

peasan t in the eighteenth century,

the notion of

him

as the embodiment o f'natu ral human goodness' proved persua-

sive. Almost

a

generation before Rousseau, the

Swiss

doctor and polymath Albrecht

von Haller (1708-77) presented the Alpine peasants in his epic poem Die lpen

(1729)

as

exemplary for their hard work thrift, and

love

of God and their fellow men,

showing them to enjoy a fulfiiied and contented existence. Hailer discovered the

Swiss landscape for eighteenth-century Europe, not least as a resuit of a long trip

undertaken

in 728

in search of botan ical and other specimens, though the empirical

awareness of his most famous work also owes much to hterary sources, such as

Brockes's Irdisches VergnHgen in Gott and English pastoral po et ry . Yet his prais

the mountain landscape and its inhabitan ts was no straightforward Swiss patriot-

ism, but was rather part of a forthright and bitter critique of contemporary Swiss

urban government.^* In that remote landscape he sought and found the original

form of republican Switzerland. While the influence of the Horatian topos is clearly

evident in

Die

Alpen a new and significant element has been added to the iiterary

tradition, namely, tha t the protagonists were now peasan ts. Moreover, despite the

elevated tone and substance of the poem, there is much reference to the actual tasks

which peasants performed.

In Salomon G essner's work, on the other hand, the 'au then tic' peasant is absent.

The focus of his work is on nature and on natu re's power over those who would hear

her voice. Those who live close to nature,

figments

of his poetic imagination, as he

confesses them to be in his Preface, are virtuous and kindly beings: 'Sie sind frei von

alien den Bedtirfnissen, die nur die ungiuckiiche Entfernung von der Natur notwen-

dig machet, sie empfangen bei unverdorbenem Herzen und Verstand ihr Gliick

gerade aus der Hand dieser milden Mutter.'^^

Gessner was, after Hailer, the first German poet to write a major literary work on

the subject of Nature versus Culture, and the happy accident of his European

success^* greatly encouraged his imitators,

as

weil as identifying Switzerland in the

public mind as the home ofsimple rurai virtue .^' The na rrator in G essner's

Idyllen

is

not a countryman; he learns through his encounter with nature and the inhab itants

of his Utopian landscapie

to

despise what passes for civilized iiving: 'Oft

reiB

ich mich

aus der Stadt ios und fliehe in einsame G egenden, dann entreifit die Schonheit der

Natur m ein Gemiit allemdem Ekel und aiien widrigen Eindrucken,

die

mich aus der

James Thomson , The Seasons (1730) and Bodmer's translation of Milton's Paradise Lost (1732)

admired and influential works in eighteenth-century Germany, were published after Die lpen was

written.

Com pare his two poem s, 'Die Falschhcit mensch licher Tug end en' (1730) and 'Die verdorbenen

Sitten' (1731) with itsj uv en alia n superscription, 'Difficile est satiram non scribere'.

Gepiers Werke edited by Adoif Frey, DN L

41/1,

pp. 63 f.

^' It was the future father-in-law of Therese Forster-Huber, Michael Huber, who translated Gessner

into Frenc h. He rightly felt that Gessne r's lucid prose was adm irably suited for teaching purposes and he

used the idylls to instruct h is Parisian pupils, among them Dide rot's friend, the physiocrat T ui^ ot.

Th is view was confirmed and publicized by the 'discovery' of a genuine example o f Socrate rustiq ue'

in the person of a Swiss peasant known as Kleinjogg (= Jakob Gujer of Wermatswili). J. C. Hirzel of


7/13

EDA SAGARRA 85

Stadt verfotgt haben' (

Gefiners Werke

p. 63). Piety, the Virgilian

pietas

is singled out

by Gessner as the special characteristic of his shepherd figures. This is a recurrent

tlieme in subsequent iiterature of peasant life, where the actual speaker is himself a

peasant, as for exampie in the dawn and evening

songs,

the seasonai songs and work

songs of the 1770s and 1780s.̂ *

While the literary influence of the pietas

motif,

duty towards God, one's master,

community, family, and feliow-men is evident,^' criticism of contemporary poiiticai

and sociai structures is cieariy present in literature of peasant life, not least in

Gessner. The peasants in the work songs and seasonal songs express wonder at

God's creation, they manifest their own readiness to co-operate with the divine plan

or with nature to make the earth fertile. The contrast with the upper classes is ciear

enough even without being made explicit, as Leon makes it in his

Morgenlied:

Und nicht

wie

unsre groBen Herrn

So faul und muBig ruh'n.

* (DNL

135/2,

p. 98)

The inciusion of so many aspects of the peasant's iife in the work songs, the overall

impression of meaningful and productive labour, given in these simple rhythmical

verses, which were published in the various almanachs and therefore achieved wide

geographical distribution and were read by a relatively wide sector of the educated

ranks of society, helped overcome the traditionai literary stereotype of the idle

self-induigent peasant and offered instead a dignified human being with whom the

reader might identify.' The physiocratic teachings on the prime importance of the

land for the wealth of the nations, and the widespread food shortages in the second

half of the eighteenth century, the actuai experience of hunger by many German

inteilectuals in their childhood and as students,^' helped make the life and work of

the peasantry meaningful and reievant to their own iives.

Individually and collectively the writers of the

Sturm und Drang

greatly enhanced

the moral stature of the peasant in hterature. Thus in his idiosyncratic but highly

interesting idyll.

Die

SchafSchur (1775), set in the Palatinate, Maler Muller shows

his genial central figure, the peasant Walter, as possessing an intuitive understand-

ing of central moral issues. A popular theme in Sturm und Drang writing, infanticide,

is discussed by the sheep-shearers after they listen to an old folksong.^^ Waiter, who

is presented as a rough but kindly soul and a loving father, sharply criticizes punitive

justice, showing concern for the ignorant criminal without condoning the crime, and

suggesting instead prevention through adequate social supptort:

^* Many tried their hand at this genre: M atthias Clau dius, Schubart, the A ustrian von Leon; Voss wrote

many work songs, as did minor poets. A number of Voss's songs were set to music by well-known

composers, such as C. P . E. Bach and J . A. P. Schulz. ee H. Voegt in

Voss, Werke

second edition (Berlin

and W eim ar, 1976), p. 412; also Schm idt, 'Lieder fiir den L and m ann '.

'And an air of piety to the Gods should shine through the Poem, w hich so visibly appe ars in all the

parks of antiquity' — Alexander Pope in A Discourse an Pastoral Poetry (1717), quoted in J. Barrell and

J. Bull,

English Pastoral Verse

(London, 1974), p. 253.

^ For a reassessment of the popular Enlightenment view, see R. Wittmann, 'Der lesende Landmann:

Zur Rezeption aufklarerischer Bemiihungen durch die bauerliche Bevolkerung im 18. Jahrhandert ' , in

D a n B e r e n d e i and o t h e r s , Der

Bauer Mittel-

und Ostdeutschlands im so^io okonomischen

Wandel des 18.

und ig.

Jahrhunderts ( C o l c ^ e and Vienna, 1973), pp . 142-96, with extensive references; but see also L. Schm idt,

'Lieder

fur

den Landm ann',

and

his 'Vom *'Baucmlied zum Volksiied : Aus dem Zeitraum von

1779

bis 1819', in Zeman, pp.

865-71.


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86

Literature of Peasant Life

WeiS auch, was das

ist

Betriibnis und Pein, und wohin einem

[.fie]

Traurigkeit bringen kan

Hab'

einmal mussen helfen ein Madel zum Gericht fiihren. Vergess' mein Lebtag

nicht

wie s

da ausgeseiien. Das arme Ding Wie sie da hinging im TodesschweiB, den hitteren Marter-

weg »

This

was

in fact

a

peculiarly relevant

issue

in contemporary peasant

society,

where

it

was becoming increasingly difficult for economic reasons, and in certain areas

because of rural over-population, for young peasants to set up home and marry.

Waiter's kindness and concem for the young is shown here and in Mulier's iater

work. Das

Nufikemen

to be the product of experience and of reflection on his own

social environment, where the interdependence of individuals is seen to be essential

to the prosperity of aii. Another, more overtly political example is the peasan t who

challenges the moral authority of his overlord, regardiess of the consequences to

himseif.

The naturai courage of the peasant, his inborn sense of iionour, is

contrasted, as in Burger's poem An seinen durchlauchtigen Tyrannen (1776 i

Lauenburger Musenalmanach

or Voss's satirical idylls, with the alieged

Ehre

o

Junker. Since

Ehre

was traditionaiiy accepted as being the product of

nobie

biood,

thus determining the immutability of feudal society, it was a particularly sharp

satiric comment on V oss's pa rt when he transferred to the East Elbian Junkers the

stupidity once considered characteristic of the peasant estate: Junk er Kord (1793) is

presented as a typicai product of the species; he is so stupid that he cannot even

envisage the possibility of his being cuckolded, that 'des Kutschers Tuck ihm einen

Kuckucksstreich spielen'

{Idyllen

p. 142), which by impiication would expose the

aristocratic pretensions to power and privilege based on Ehre for what they are

worth.

The natu ral sociai harmony of the peasant worid as presented in eighteenth-century

German (and other) literature is both a iiterary topos, derived from the idyils of

Theocritus and the Eclogues of Virgii, and aiso implicit in the classical tradition, a

form of social criticism of contemporary life and morals. The history of pastoral

fioetry in westem Europe in the early modern period has demonstrated the genre's

potential for direct poiiticai comment, as weii as emphasizing a fact which escaped

many nineteenth-century commentators, nameiy, the receptivity of audiences for

such criticism.^" Thus it was a centrai feature of what at first reading might seem

innocuous poetry of German rura l life in the second half of the eighteenth century, to

draw attention to the destruction or the undermining of that 'natural social

harmony' by an unjust authority or by the abuse of inherited

power.

Gessner, so long

dismissed as a 'naive' poet, was in fact one of the first to make this point expiicit,

when in the preface to his Idytlen {1756) he referred to the Goiden Age, associating

the heroes and heroines of his work with that period, and explicitly distancing them

from the peasants of his own time, in marked contrast to the view expressed by

Haller in Die

Alpen.

Peasants today, he writes polemicaiiy, are 'ungesittet und schiau

und niedertrach tig', but they are so because of the economic and political thrali of

their

lives;

where 'der Landmann mit saurer Arbeit unterthanig seinem Fursten und

den Stadten den UberfluB liefern muB', it

is

'Unterdruckung und Armut' that have

made the peasant what he is {Gefiners Werke p. 64). Such a view, it must be added


9/13

EDA SAGARRA 87

did not fit in at all with the new reputation of Switzerland as the country of the free.

It was however an accurate comment on certain regions of the country, namely,

those areas where the peasants were under the direct authority of the local Stadtrat or

overlord. Gessner, like Haller before him, and Voss, Muller, and other German

poets of the later eighteenth century, showed awareness of the political aspect of the

peasant problem , in stressing that the happiness, prosperity, and the virtue of the

rural community depended to a large extent on the degree of freedom, especially the

conditions of

tenure.

Many writers therefore set their poems of idyilic contentment

in regions where tenure

was

thought favourable to the peasant, or where a stratum

of

small farmers existed, as in the Palatinate or in parts of Schleswig-Holstein, Tyrol,

Swabia, or Baden, where the long-reigning margrave, Friedrich Karl (1738-1811)

was the leading proponent of French physiocratic thinidng and the only prince to

attempt to apply such ideas systematically. Those depicting peasant suffering and

deprivation were set primarily in the regions of manorial tenure in East Elbia,

especially Mecklenburg and Prussia, and in aristocratic estates in Austria. ^

Adelskritik therefore plays a prominent role in the literature of

the

late eighteenth

century — and indeed it remained a characteristic of iiterature oi peasant life,

including the Dorfgeschichte, in the Biedermeier period, despite the radically different

political function of such literature. The criticism was both specific and general. It

was specific in the sense that the demands made by the landowning aristocracy on

the peasants were seen as a prime cause of their wretchedness. Moreover, opposition

by the landowners to the efforts of various territorial rulers, such as those of Prussia

and Austria, to emancipate the peasantry made them, the aristocracy, rather than

the monarch, the object of attack. It was generai in the sense that German iiterature

of peasant iife was in fact a form of bourgeois critique of the whole social, legal,

economic, and poiiticai system which had been designed to exclude the bourgeoisie

from participation, and which by the last decades of the century seemed to so many

educated Germans not merely unjust, but corrupt and antiquated.^*

As has already been mentioned, the naturai sociai harmony of the peasant estate

and the sociai usefuiness of

the

peasantry are shown in literature to be impaired by

the inefficiency, greed, or even viciousness of their masters. Common grievances

against the nobility, the spoiling of crops through hunting, taxation, forced iabour,

or miiitary service, are featured, mainiy in poetry, between 1770 and 1800.^ Much

play is made, as for example by Claudius in Paul Erdmanns Fest or by Voss in Die

Freigelassenen

and

Die

Erleichteten

{1800),

of

the

material effects on peasant work of a

kindly or liberal master. Bourgeois masters too can be the object of resentment or the

butt of satire — in the eighteenth century as in the twentieth, the social divide

between nobility and upper bourgeoisie was hardly as great as that between the

^ Eva Kon ig makes this point in a letter to Lessing (14 Octob er 1770) when she contrasts the a pathy of

labourers n an A ustrian 'Herrschaftlicher We inberg' with the peasantry of her native Palatinate Lessings

Briefifoeduel not Eva Konig tj^o i^yS

(Munich, 1979), p. 31). By contrast the Tyrolean peasant, generally a

figure of fun in eighteenth-century Viennese p opula r comedy, comes off well in any encounter with city

folk. His self-possession unconsciously reflects the tradition of relative political

and

social independen ce

enjoyed

by

the Tyrolean peasantry since the late Middle Ages.


10/13

88

Literature of

Peasant

Life

latter and the

Kleinburgertum to

which many intellectuals

belonged.̂ * y

contrast th

free peasant community, whether of iiberated serfs, or of the indejjendent tenants of

the Paiatinate, Bavaria, or Swabia, are shown to be not jus t happy and prosperous,

but socially responsible. Peasant society, left to its own devices, is shown to resemble

a family. Love ra ther than assertive authority educates and acts

as a

sociaily binding

force in Pestalozzi 's Lienhard und Gertrud or J . H . M erck 's Geschichte des Herm Oheim

(1778). Herr Oheim, once a state minister and now iiving as a simple farmer, treats

both his children and his servants with affection and trust. The servants sit at the

table w ith the family^' and are allowed to express their views freely. The

Knecht

by

contrast with the visiting merchant, can afford to marry, since a weli-run farm

provides a decent if frugai living for all. Merck's prose tale — it is a kind of extended

Genrebild

of rural life

— is

a good example of why the rehabilitation of the peasant as

a social and human being should appeal to middle-class authors.

Herr Oheim illustrates the popular notion of Nature versus Civilization in his own

life; more importantly, he demonstrates the roie which the burgher of education

might hope to piay in the actuai rurai scene. H err Oheim 's education and experience

have given him the basis to acquire the necessary technicai skills, which, applied to

the derelict farm he takes over, help to make the whole region prosperous. The

educated man is shown to have an important function in initiating and implement-

ing social reforms, of modernizing

society.

(In the

sequel, Herr Oheim der Jungere

als

published in W ielands

Teutscher

Merkur

{

1781—82 , Oheim's son is forced off the la

by taxation and the general chicanery of court officials.) In the writings of a number

of Merck's contemporaries, as in Biedermeier peasant literature, it is the educated

man of hum ble origin, usually a local clergyman or school teacher, who acts as the

friend and counsellor of the peasant, helping him to use more rational methods of

husbandry, sustaining him in times of trial, whether through bad harvest and

pestilence, or through the malpractices of the powerful.* Eighteenth-century

literature of peasant life can therefore be seen in the context of contemporary

political and social thinking on agrarian matters. There was however a marked

difference between the judgement of imaginative hterature and the writings of

political philosophers, economic theorists, iawyers, and the authors of

the

widely-

read

Hausvaterliteratur

which encompassed in tlie latte r decades of the century both

husbandry and domestic morals. Of the latter groups, many of whom were actively

concerned to remedy abuses in the interests of more rational government or

husbandry and some of whom were actually familiar with the conditions of the

peasantry, few showed any tendency to idealize them. The lawyer von Beckendorff

expressed a widely-held belief among his kind when he wrote in his eight-volume

Oeconomiaforensis published in Berlin the same year as Voss's ie F reigelassenen

traditional custom and thus exacerbate social divisions within the peasant ranks. See

W.

von Groote, ie

Entstehmg des NationaHsm us in Nordw estdeutschland 1790-1840 (G o t t i n g e n , 1 9 5 5 ) , p . 1 0 5 . K o s e g a r t e n ' s

Jucunde (1805) incidentally offers an interesting contrast at a time when the function of literature of


11/13

EDA SAGARRA 8 9

Die Tugend und deren gliickliche Folgen, sind dem Bauemvoike bey ihrer Unwissenheit und

schlechten Erziehung, gemeiniglich eine unbekannte Sache, und es scheinet ihm die Aus-

ubung der Laster . . . weit angenehmer und vortheilhafter zu seyn. . . . Der Bauer h at fast

durchgehends ein fuhflosra Herz, wetches durch vemiinftige Vorsteilungen sehr schwer zu

bewegen und folgsam zu machen ist.**

Even Schlozer, scourge of tyrants, who laid the blame for the poor economic

performance of the pezisantry, and fbr their uncouth habits, on the shoulders of

unjust overlords, while rem inding

his

hearers and readers tha t 'Apathie ist Wirkung

der Sdaverey, kein Grund fur dieselbe', showed little inclination to idealize.*^ By

contrast, the image of

the

peasant which emerges from imaginative literature from

the time of Gessner onwards is uniformly sympathetic and positive. A broad

agreement

as to

the high m oral character and sympathetic mien of the peasant exists

across genres and generations. Such differences of emphasis as do exist are con-

cerned with the environment of the peasant. Even in extreme poverty and human

degradation, his hum anity remains unaffected, as is epitomized in Ho lty's poem of

1775, which later acquired the character of a folksong: 'Der alte Landmann an

seinen Sohn' ('U b imm er treu und Redlichkeit')

. Yet

although a num ber of writers

attack specific abuses and one or two build their fiction around contemporary

economic theory (as Merck does in

Herr Oheim ,

eighteenth-century Germ,an

literature of peasant life bears little real relation to contemporary peasant life or

agrarian problems. Nevertheless, to suggest that the literary topwi

oi tht frohlicher

Landmann

and of Nature versus Civilization determined the idealistic image of the

peasantry would be only partly true. For it is clear that such hterature had the

character of a cypher. In other w ords it stood for an ideal society, orderly yet free, in

which each

socia

element has its meaningful function. In their representation of the

peasant and his world, eighteenth-century German writers, the majority of burgher

or

Kleinbiirger

origin, present their bourgeois^* readers with a vision of society 'wie

ein Dichter davon traumen mag' (Kleist), in which all talents could

be

meaningfully

used, and one which was in clear contrast with the system under which they lived.

Belief in the rationality of man and in m an's powers to order the universe, a belief

which most of

these

writers shared, contrasted harshly with tbe actual practices of

society, and their own potential to change

it.

Here a Lessing could

be

humiliated by

the whims of a petty princeling or a Voss tricked by a highly-placed cleric who,

promising him a university scholarship, persuaded him to give up his source of

livelihood, and then as casually forgot all about

it.

But the selflessness and indeed

the ingenuity of bourgeois friends (compare Boie's efforts on Voss's behalf or the

support of Claudius's friends after the collapse of the

Wandsbecker

ole

in 1775) could

achieve what powerful patronage or 'the system' could not be depended on to do.

There

is a

parallel with the Utopian vision of the caring peasan t community, whether

of Swiss shepherds. Palatine nutgathere rs, or Bavarian farmers. The ideal society is

based on concern and skills, not on privilege, but needs the discerning vision of the

writer to discover it: such was the collective message of the literature of the peasant

^' Quoted in Wittmann , p. 166.


12/13

g o Literature of Peasant Life

life.

That i ts function was poii t icai throughout is made clear in the correspondence

or prefaces of i ts au tho rs, a p oint aptly i l lustrated by the case of Ge ssner, w ho wa s so

long regarded — and in the Dem ocrat ic Republ ic is s ti ll regarded — as an exam ple

of es ca pis t l i tera ture . I t is , however, true that only a mino rity of writers po ssessed

the p olitical w ill or self-confidence to endo w their view of th e pe as an t w orld w ith a

programmatic poli t ical character, of the kind that Schlozer outl ined in his riefe

us

Eichstadt 1785 and tha t gave him such infiuence over his studen ts:

Ein Schriftsteller ist ein unberufener, unbesoldeter Diener der burgeriichen Geseiischaft, ein

Volontair von Ratgeber der Na ti o n .. ..

o

haben die Britten ihre Contracte erhalten, und so

will (auch durch die SchHftsteller) will s Gott, in funfiig Jahren kein Leibeigener m ehr in

Deutschland sein. **

Bu t this is not peculiar to the li terature of pea san t life, but is pa rt of the m uc h m ore

fun da m en tal prob lem of the Ge rm an poe t s function in his society, and of his

perception of that function, both in the eighteenth century and later.

TRINITY CO LLEGE, DUBLIN

E D A

SAGARRA

Schlozer;

der Kaiser zugegei

Rosenberg, p. 369),


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germany peasant life

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