Abstract
No other British writer except Shakespeare has seized so tenacious a hold on the German imagination; and even Shakespeare has not been more lavishly praised or more avidly imitated. Whether as poet, legend, portent of social change or symbol of the human predicament, Byron’s ascendancy in Germany is the more remarkable because it lacks that local connection which, in Greece, Italy, and Switzerland, gave his fame and after-fame an immediate appeal. Here, one accordingly feels, are works that must surely possess compelling genius if they can penetrate so widely into a culture to which Byron himself — despite the reiterated obeisances he paid to Goethe — remained largely unresponsive. A complementary argument suggests that the Germans themselves must be peculiarly susceptible to the blandishments of Byronism, in all its contradictory manifestations. There may well be truth in both these conjectures.
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Notes
E. M. Butler, Byron and Goethe: Analysis of a Passion (London, 1956).
See “Goethe im Briefwechsel zweier Freunde” (i.e. B. R. Abeken and J. D. Gries) by Hans Gerhard Gräf. Jahrbuch der Goethe-Gesellschaft, vol. V, 1918, p. 251.
For an analysis in depth, see Stefan Zweig’s study of Hölderlin, Kleist and Nietzsche, Der Kampf mit dem Dämon (1925). Zweig rightly sets the mature Goethe, “the opponent of all vulcanicity”, in a polar relationship to his three tragic protagonists; but he goes too far when he suggests that Goethe was “the arch-enemy of everything demonic”.
J. G. Robertson (ed.), Torquato Tasso, Introduction, p. lvi (Manchester, 1918)
Südöstlicher Bildersaal — Griechische Leiden, edited by K. G. Just, was republished in Stuttgart in 1968.
E. M. Butler, The Tyranny of Greece Over Germany. A Study of the influence exercised by Greek art and poetry over the great German writers of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Cambridge, 1935).
C. P. Magill’s “Young Germany: A Revaluation” was a contribution to German Studies presented to Leonard Ashley Willoughby (Oxford, 1952), pp. 108ff.
The Germans themselves sometimes concede that there can be too much Byronic literature: a verdict with which we must agree, if we stretch that elastic term so as to include the lachrymose attitudinizing of the lesser Weltschmerzler, who hailed Byronismus as an opportunity to agonise over sentiments originally portrayed with far greater skill in Werther. Cf. W. Leifer, Rhein und Themse fliessen Zueinander, (Stuttgart, 1964), p. 193: “Als Byronismus war diese Haltung der von Goethe vermittelten Werther-Stimmung nahe. Daher ist Deutschland überreich an Byron-Literatur.”
S. S. Prawer, Heine: The Tragic Satirist (Cambridge, 1961), p. 36.
W. E. Henley’s comments on Matthew Arnold’s Byron anthology, first published in the Athenaeum in June 1881, were reprinted in his Views and Reviews (1890).
See G. Wilson Knight’s assessment, “Byron: the Poetry”, in his Poets of Action (London, 1967), p. 238.
See Kretschmer’s Geniale Menschen, 4th edn., 1948, p. 18.
Harris had studied music at the Schott’sche Konservatorium in Frankfurt. For a full account of his Diaries and his connection with Stefan George, see Claus Bock, Pente Pigadia und die Tagebücher des Clement Harris (Amsterdam, 1962).
Hermann Türck, The Man of Genius, 1914, pp. 179–80; first German edn., 1896.
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© 1981 Paul Graham Trueblood
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Hentschel, C. (1981). Byron and Germany. In: Trueblood, P.G. (eds) Byron’s Political and Cultural Influence in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-05588-3_4
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