Friedrich Spielhagen

The once nationally and internationally prominent realist Friedrich Spielhagen (1829-1911) was decanonized and driven to the periphery of literary history in his own lifetime. Since then critical interest has ben sporadic and has often reflected the negative judgment passed on him by gatekeepers and tastemakers of his own time. Except for a very few specialists, most scholars have concentrated on his obsessively propagated >objective< narrative theory or the early novels up to Sturmflut (1877), when he had a quarter century of oppositional and partly satirical writing before him. Since he was not only a widely known realist and theoretician of realism, but exhibited an extensive knowledge of European, English, and American literature, today's revived interest in realism and in the international dimension of late nineteenth-century German literature suggests that he may have been chronically undervalued. This study comprehends his whole career, but leaves the theoretical efforts largely to one side as actually damaging to his creativity as a novelist, in order to accent the later novels and novellas, in which he measures the Wilhelminian Reich against his Vormärz ideals of freedom and democracy, while being driven, somewhat against his will, in the direction of Social Democracy and the harsher realism of such French writers as Emile Zola. Special attention is given to a number of thematic centres, such as the aristocracy; class identity, liberalism, and Social Democracy; the military and the dueling ethos; Jews; America; women and love; and his agonized engagement with the contemporary French novel.