Introduction and survey of research

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2 15 Introduction and survey of research From an article on a Turkish family living and working in the German Federal Republic, 1977: 1 Heimweh hat Saime, solange sie hier ist. Anwesend scheint sie nur physisch zu sein ihr Herz ist im Hochland, ihr Herz ist nicht hier. From an article on experimental forms of psychotherapy in the German Federal Republic, 1977: 2 So war es auch [ ] als wir etwas pathetisch Abschied nahmen, uns um die Schultern haltend. Einige heulten. Ich habe heute die idiotische Erinnerung, daß wir dabei das Lagerfeuerlied Auld Lang Syne gesungen haben. Die Rührung jedenfalls war groß. From the introduction to a collection of Burns translations published in the German Democratic Republic, 1974: 3 Eines von ihnen [diesen Liedern] floß ein in den Hauptstrom deutscher revolutionär-demokratischer Kultur Trotz alledem. From the sleeve of a record produced in the German Federal Republic, 1978: 4 Trotz alle dem und dem und dem [ ] Es ist ein dialektisches, ein radikales Wort, denn zu einem Zorn, der politisch fruchtbar werden soll, der nicht modisch-müde werden soll, gehört ja grade auch diese große Portion Schmerz, die dem eindimensionalen Idiotenoptimismus fehlt. Trotz alledem. These few examples from recent publications document the fact that Burns and his work are known and drawn on in Germany and give at the same time a first indication of traditions he is seen to belong to: patriotic poetry, sentimental song, revolutionary rhyme. Many similar instances of knowledge of Burns in Germany initiated an interest in the history of his general and critical reception. Can a poet as firmly rooted in his native soil, as untravelled and apparently provincial as Burns acquire a lasting international reputation, and what mechanisms are at work if he does? Burns is one of the few poets whose names are known the world over, familiar both to Russians and Japanese, Italians and Danes. These and many other nations can read him in their own languages. While critical opinion on him has varied, the general public has consistently acclaimed his work, and today against the background of a renewed interest in regional, dialect and folk literature as well as political poetry Burns is being discovered and investigated from fresh angles. 1 Die Zeit, December 16, Zeit Magazin, November 4, 1977, p Robert Burns Gedichte und Lieder (Berlin-Weimar, 1974), p Wolf Biermann, Trotz alledem! CBS Schallplatten GmbH, Germany, 1978.

3 16 Introduction and Survey of Research How did Burns acquire his reputation in Germany? What has been the course of his general and critical reception, and what has helped and hindered it? Has it run parallel to the course of British Burns reception or taken a specifically German course? Who exactly is the Burns so widely known in Germany today? These questions formed the initial line of inquiry of this thesis. Previous publications dealing with the subject of Burns s German reception have been few and limited in scope. In the Burns centenary year 1896, William Jacks published Robert Burns in Other Tongues, the first attempt to make the many Burns translations known in Britain. Jacks pointed out that the similarity of Scots and German enabled translators to achieve a closeness to the original not possible for example in French, where metrical renderings of Burns had hardly ever been attempted. Jacks criticised the unrepresentative selection from Burns made by his numerous German translators, a point that must be followed up in more detail (see Sect ). Samples from the work of nine German-language Burns translators were given, including Swiss German versions. It is now over fifty years since William Macintosh published Burns in Germany (1928), a work which attempted to document at least in part the course of Burns s German reception. The subtitle of the volume, Scoto-German studies, and its preface indicated an interest in establishing racial parallels between Scots and Germans, and Burns and his work were seen as a means to this end. Macintosh pointed to early knowledge of the poet in Germany, contending that in Goethe s time he was better known in Weimar than in England or Ireland, 5 and noted the earliest Burns editions published in Germany as well as a number of translators. Much of Macintosh s material was entertainingly anecdotal: the German-born Queen of Romania reciting Burns in the original by heart, Otto von Bismarck quoting a Burns song to his bride-to-be on a picnic. 6 Part II of Macintosh s work was entitled Scotch and German: Their Original Identity, and here the author recorded numerous similarities between the languages, sketching their history and quoting from their poetry to demonstrate their integral unity. 7 The parallels between Scots and Low German were shown to be closest. The author tended to minimise the linguistic differences, asserting that the language problem was hardly a barrier to enjoyment of Burns in Germany. Here Goethe for one would disagree with him. (See Sect ) 5 Macintosh even claimed the influence of Tam O Shanter on Goethe s Faust I, but this is hardly likely (see Sect ). 6 Macintosh, Burns in Germany, pp Op. cit., p. 46.

4 Introduction and Survey of Research 17 But Macintosh s encouragement to potential Burns readers must be seen against the background of his aim to promote German-Scottish relations within the framework of the Society for International Friendship founded in Dresden in 1911; Part III of Burns in Germany was in fact addressed to members of the society, and here Macintosh named Carlyle and Goethe, Goethe and Byron as examples of friendships across national boundaries. He discovered similarities in the Scottish and German characters too, comparing their frugality and perseverance, their honest independence and patriotic bravery. Macintosh s work is of particular value as the first collection of previously scattered evidence of German Burns reception, but it remained fragmentary and anecdotal in character. More detailed evidence of Goethe s appreciation of Burns was provided in James Boyd s Goethe s Knowledge of English Literature (1932). Boyd noted diary entries and letters by Goethe referring to Burns. These were listed too by L. M. Price in English Literature in Germany (1953), where a few Burns translators were listed in a by no means exhaustive account. Rüdiger Reitemeier traced in a doctoral thesis of 1957 the history of British Burns reception (Die Geschichte der englisch-schottischen Burns-Kritik ) and attempted to explain the Burns myth resulting from early misunderstandings and uncritical criticism of the poet as well as deliberate distortion of his work and malicious misrepresentation of his life. The material itself was not new, but was here collected and evaluated for the first time. It was symptomatic of Burns reception that up to the publication date of Reitemeier s thesis and even a decade later not a single genuinely critical edition of Burns s complete works was available. Reitemeier was concerned exclusively with British views of Burns but his work, published only in German, remained inaccessible to most British Burns scholars. In an article for Die Neueren Sprachen in 1960 Reitemeier summarised the results of his 1957 publication under the title Das Bild Robert Burns : Tradition und Wandel. In the same year a contribution by A. Gillies to the Modern Language Review recorded a particular instance of early Burns reception in Germany: Emilie von Berlepsch and Burns (see Sect ). In apparent contrast to the wealth of British material investigated by Reitemeier, Horst Oppel found in his study of English-German literary relations that no more than scant light 8 fell on Burns in Germany, in spite of Scottish efforts by Thomas Carlyle and James Macdonald to create a German Burnsreading public. This thesis will show that knowledge of and interest in Burns in Germany was by no means as limited as Oppel and others have assumed, and certainly began earlier and extended further than Ferdinand Freiligrath s anthol- 8 Englisch-deutsche Literaturbeziehungen (Berlin, 1971), Vol. II, p. 44.

5 18 Introduction and Survey of Research ogy The Rose, Thistle and Shamrock or the Low German versions of Burns by Klaus Groth, the only instances given by Oppel. A recent study appears from its title to be covering similar ground to this thesis: Hans Jörg Kupper s Robert Burns im deutschen Sprachraum (1979; see Sect ). But the subtitle reveals that Kupper s chief interest is in a particular corner of the German-language area and a particular translator of Burns: Unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der schweizerdeutschen Übersetzungen von August Corrodi. The work of other translators and commentators is discussed in the opening section ( Burns in deutscher Übersetzung ) before Kupper concentrates on Corrodi and his work, examining his translations in five case studies. Other versions are dealt with briefly and the texts not given in full. The volume has a valuable table of translations of Burns s best-known works as well as a list of musical arrangements of the translations. Knowledge of Burns is common in all parts of Germany, but much of the evidence of it has until now remained scattered, on occasion buried in the dusty corners of libraries and archives up and down the country. Burns s name is known, his songs are sung, but often independent of each other; his work has been frequently translated, but some of the collections saw only one edition and are now hard to come by. So it has been the purpose of this thesis first to gather the diffuse evidence of Burns s reception in Germany, then to categorise, evaluate and analyse the findings with a view to answering the questions posed on page 16. In Part 1, evidence for this purpose included every possible instance of general or critical reception. Reviews and sketches, obituaries and studies, editions and translations, creative responses in verse, in prose, in music have been examined. 9 Burns s place in the German histories of British literature is recorded and compared with British opinion. Burns s suggested and in some cases recorded and proven influence on German writers and their work is investigated, and Burns s continental counterparts such as the French poet Pierre Jean de Béranger and the Hungarian poet Sándor Petöfi examined in some detail in order to establish Burns s European significance. Part 1 Phases of Reception falls into broad chronological divisions encompassing periods of approximately thirty years. These phases are placed under general headings that indicate the trend and emphasis of reception in each period. A brief introduction to each section notes the general social and literary situation as well as the trends of British Burns reception. Each section ends with 9 Musical responses in Germany have proved so numerous that it is quite beyond the scope of this thesis to do more than mention them. A useful though not comprehensive list of compositions for German translations of Burns is given by Kupper, Robert Burns im deutschen Sprachraum (Bern, 1979).

6 Introduction and Survey of Research 19 a brief summary. The main nineteenth-century section (Sect. 1.2) covers a period of over sixty years but is divided into two halves culminating in the revolutionary year 1848 and the Burns centenary year The subsections 1.1.1, etc. and their headings are governed by a common view of or a comment on Burns, in most cases as expressed by one of those represented in the subsection. In Sect for example an opinion of Burns by Emilie von Berlepsch provides the heading The only truly individual popular poet of recent times. These headings are subsequently cited in context and discussed in the subsection. In Part 2 a selection from the vast fund of German Burns translations is studied in detail in the form of analytical case studies that bring together and compare with the original and with each other the available versions of a number of representative translated texts. Translations into Standard German and into various German-language dialects are included. Part 3 draws together the threads of the preceding sections and focuses on the present and future of Burns s German reception. Here the final justification for examining historical Burns criticism is apparent: past comment has been not only descriptive but evaluative, and against the background of former evaluations the poet s present status and future potential can be explored. What might be the next moves in German reception? What should be corrected, what corroborated? What has not been investigated so far? Has Burns a future in Germany and indeed in Europe? The final section attempts to answer these questions and points to possibilities of further research and criticism.

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8 21 1. Phases of Reception 1.1 Early Reception In 1786, the year of publication of the first, Kilmarnock edition of Burns s Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, his German contemporary Friedrich Schiller wrote to a friend discouraging him from the translation of British drama: 10 Es gab eine Epoche in Deutschland, wo es Verdienst hätte heißen können, aber jetzo verachtet der Luxus der Literatur diese Beisteuer aus fremden Landen. This single sentence epitomised the German attitude to British drama prevailing in the last two decades of the eighteenth century. It had been the merit ( Verdienst ) of Lessing, Wieland and others to promote the development of German drama by referring it to British sources and models. Drama had become the mainstay of the Sturm und Drang movement. The fertile production ( der Luxus der Literatur ) and consequent self-confidence of the German dramatists led to rejection of foreign contributions ( verachtet [ ] diese Beisteuer aus fremden Landen ). Less reliance on foreign aid, more on domestic strength: the literary aspect was not of course the whole story. European quarrels and wars, occupations and mutual suspicions in the second half of the eighteenth century, as well as the spread of industrialisation and the reverberations of the American and French revolutions all contributed to a growing German nationalism and concentration on native cultural and literary traditions. There was a growing consensus among German writers in the second half of the century that not much could be learnt from contemporary British literature. There was a feeling of coming level with and overtaking the British. In 1766 Klopstock expressed it in these words in the ode Wir und Sie (v. 4; wir are the Germans, sie the British): Sie haben hohen Genius! Wir haben Genius, wie Sie! Das macht uns Ihnen gleich! Acknowledgement and appreciation were now largely limited to retrospective homage to, for example, Shakespeare and Milton, without reference to their current British reception; British writers with a visible interest in German culture, such as Coleridge; works that proved public successes in Britain hence the popularity in Germany of all Scott s novels, as well as innumerable Gothic novels, Byron s work, and the poetry of Thomas Moore and Robert Bloomfield. 10 In a letter to Huber on May 17, See Schillers Briefwechsel mit Körner (Leipzig, 1878), p. 46.

9 22 Phases of Reception The strong traces of rationalistic thinking still evident in British literature and philosophy around 1800 were in such contrast to the emphasis on irrationality in German Romanticism that the literary gap between the two countries widened. Few of the British Romantic writers became widely known in Germany, and a poet much closer to the German concept of Romanticism, William Blake, had a very limited reception in the first half of the nineteenth century. The German Romantic poets found little inspiration in their British contemporaries (with the exception of those in the third category above): Novalis for instance showed an interest in Edmund Burke s philosophical conservatism but took no note of a poet influenced by it, William Wordsworth, and in this he represented a whole generation of German writers. What of attitudes to Burns? In order to understand and evaluate German reactions to him in the first decades of reception, early British opinion must be briefly outlined. The Poems of 1786 were meant primarily for a regional audience, even though Burns certainly had greater ambitions in mind. The poetry was written in a literary form of the vernacular of his native Ayrshire, on subjects most accessible and digestible to readers in his own area. Partly for this reason, and partly because of the poet s obscure low-class background, it was against all the odds that Burns became so widely known. Of course his own personal appeal had something to do with it, as he himself realised on his visits to Edinburgh, but above all it was the appeal of the poetry that made him famous in Scotland, in London and abroad. Eleven editions of the Poems were printed in English-speaking countries between 1786 and , and in 1800 a review of the work of Burns s editor and biographer James Currie submitted that 12 the poems of Robert Burns have for so long a period been unequivocally stamped with general admiration, that, in attempting to appreciate their merits, the reviewer necessarily becomes the echo of the public voice. That public voice was full of praise for the poems but knew little at first of the songs, a few of which were included at the rear of the Kilmarnock volume, and less still about the satires which for moral and religious reasons had been omitted and circulated for a time as underground poetry 13, made available by surreptitious printings. All over Britain in the early nineteenth century the erection of Burns monuments, the founding of Burns Clubs and the Bacchic birthday celebrations in January 11 By way of comparison: the 2nd edition of Keats s poetry was not published until 19 years after his death; Wordsworth s work sold very badly between 1807 and 1820, partly because of the critics recommendations of Burns. See Theodore Redpath, The Young Romantics and Critical Opinion (London, 1973). 12 The Critical Review, 30 (September 1800), p Alexander Scott, The Satires: Underground Poetry, Critical Essays on Robert Burns, ed. Donald Low (London/Boston, 1975), pp