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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Notwithstanding the existence of innumerable and scattered bits of information and comment on the reception of nineteenth-century French realism in Germany, the general history of the subject has been curiously neglected. Only one comprehensive study, that of Flaubert's fortunes in Germany, has been published; German criticism of Stendhal prior to 1918 has been examined in an unpublished dissertation; the reputation of Zola has not been traced beyond 1893. Balzac, the Goncourt brothers, Daudet, Maupassant, and Huysmans have virtually been ignored. Even the longer studies are almost exclusively concerned with the vicissitudes of one single author; few or no comparisons are drawn with German echoes of other French realists, and therefore no conclusions of wider significance could be secured, no total picture emerges.
1 This article is an enlargement of a paper presented before Comparative Literature vn (Franco-German Literary Relations) at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association of America in Detroit on 29 December 1951.
2 Ernst E. P. Freienmuth von Helms, German Criticism of Gustave Flaubert, 1857-1930 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1939); Henry H. H. Remak, “German Criticism of Stendhal, 1818-1918,” Univ. of Chicago diss., 1947. A rapid survey covering the high points only had previously been undertaken by Charles Simon in “Le Sillage de Stendhal en Allemagne, ”Revue de littérature comparée, vi (1926), 608-637. Winthrop H. Root, German Criticism of Zola, 1875-1893 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1931). Felix Bertaux, “L'influence de Zola en Allemagne,” RLC, iv (1924), 73-91, limits himself to the same period of time.
3 Among the works and articles in which Balzac's influence in Germany or Austria is touched on but does not occupy a central place are Friedrich Hirth's introduction to Balzac, Lebensbilder (Munich: Müller, 1913), i, i-lii, which concentrates on the 1830's; Ernst Robert Curtius' masterly Balzac (Bonn: Cohen, 1923), pp. 511-519; Fernand Baldensperger, Orientations étrangères chez Honoré de Balzac (Paris: Champion, 1927), pp. v-xviii; Jean-Marie Carré, “Balzac dans le monde,” RLC, xxiv (1950), 162-163; and Fernand Baldensperger, “L'Etape maîtresse de Vienne dans la carrière de Balzac,” ibid., pp. 166-180. More general references to the German response to French realism are made in such works as Virgile Rossel, Histoire des relations littéraires entre la France et l'Allemagne (Paris: Fischbacher, 1897), Auguste Dupouy, Les Littératures comparées de France et d'Allemagne (Paris: Delaplane, 1913), and Louis Reynaud, Histoire générale de l'influence française en Allemagne (Paris: Hachette, 1924), as well as in two more recent articles: Derek van Abbé, “Some Notes on Cultural Relations between France and Germany in the Nineteenth Century,” MLQ, viii (1947), 217-227, and Stuart Atkins, “Mirages français—French Literature in German Eyes,” Yale French Studies, vi (Dec. 1950), 35-44. Specific acknowledgments to these and other scholars will not be made in the further course of this study; frequently one sentence will contain the fruits of research of several investigators in addition to the writer's own, thus making repeated references impractical.
4 Most of the statistical figures adduced in this study are based on the Bibliographie deutscher Übersetzungen aus dem Französischen, 1700-1948, ed. Hans Fromm (Baden-Baden: Kunst und Wissenschaft, 1950-53, in 6 vols.). There are, of course, lacunae even in this painstaking work. Its figures required, for the purpose of this study, a certain amount of adjustment and interpretation, since some distinction, often very difficult, had to be made between titles, volumes, reimpressions, revisions, editions, adaptations, and imitations, not to mention the size and success of the printings, the greatly varying quantity of individual literary productions, or the relative importance of each work. It is to be understood, therefore, that all figures cited in this paper are approximate. I have endeavored, however, to ensure the greatest possible proportional accuracy by applying substantially identical criteria of selection to all writers involved in comparisons.
5 The number of actual tomes of Dumas would be much higher still, since some of his longer works were chopped up in order to fill as many as 40 and more very small German volumes.
6 It is encouraging to note that despite the far greater severity of World Wars I and II and the increased magnitude of the stakes involved in their outcome, nationalistic prejudices as reflected in wartime and postwar German criticism of French literature (and vice versa) ebbed much faster after 1918 than after 1871, and still more speedily after 1945 than after 1918.
7 Although Thomas Mann's great novel did not appear until 1901, its conception and much of its execution date from the last years of the 19th century.
8 Regional predilections for or aversions to French realism in Germany and Austria offer a little cultivated and promising though difficult subject for investigation. During his lifetime, Balzac already enjoyed the particular favor of discriminating Austrian readers. A very fine biography of Balzac (1926) comes from the pen of another Viennese, Anton Bettelheim.
9 This is not to suggest that the action of French realism, though potent, was more decisive than certain other realistic and naturalistic influences, domestic or foreign, such as Ibsen's. Nor must the impression arise that the path of French realism was smooth from now on, even among its German well-wishers. Ethical, moral, political, and esthetic objections, more subtle and better motivated though they be, compared to previous decades, have continued against it down to our own day, regardless of literary currents. Special groups (Catholics, Protestants, socialists) have rather consistently stuck to certain obvious reservations or preferences.
10 Ernst Wilhelm Fischer, Friedrich von Oppeln-Bronikowski, Artur Schurig, and Wilhelm Weigand, all cosmopolitans of refinement, have been the most active translators, editors, and champions of French realism in Germany in the 20th century.
11 The works of the two Russians had been increasingly efficacious factors in the decline of naturalism in Germany since about 1890.
12 As late as 1939, there is the wise and penetrating book of Hugo Friedrich, Die Klassiker des französischen Romans: Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert (Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut).
13 The eminent critical studies of Stendhal, Balzac, and Flaubert by Friedrich, and of Balzac by Curtius, are re-edited in 1950 and 1951 respectively without any changes. But Curtius' essay, “Wiederbegegnung mit Balzac,” on the occasion of the centenary (1950), displays a reverence whose intense conviction is, if anything, even more marked and prophetic than his 1923 interpretation. Another, quite different glorification of Balzac (as well as of Stendhal) at the expense of Flaubert, the Goncourt brothers, Daudet, Maupassant, and Zola is promulgated in the now brilliant, now painfully doctrinaire essays on European realism by Lukács (1948), which may be expected to set the tune for relevant studies in Eastern Germany.
