Erich Heller - The Disinherited Mind: Essays In Modern German Literature And Thought

First published in 1952 by Bowes and Bowes Publishers Limited, Cambridge

Made and printed in Great Britain for BOWES & BOWES PUBLISHERS LIMITED by A.R. MOWBRAY & Co. LIMITED in the City of Oxford

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To R.B.H.

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ANYONE engaged in the study, teaching and criticism of literature as a University discipline is likely to become at some time or other aware of one fundamental problem raised by his own pursuits, of a difficulty that is all his own and is not, or at least not to the same extent, shared by his colleagues in other subjects. For however sincerely he may struggle against bias and prejudice in his own approach and appreciation, his work will still be very intimately related to his experiences in wider fields. It is true that his devotion to literature is capable of purging his affections of too narrowly subjective and emotional elements; yet his comprehension will remain largely determined by his own character, his spontaneous sympathies or antipathies, the happiness he has enjoyed or the disasters that have befallen him. And this, he will see, is no shortcoming of his own discipline, to be conquered in scientific campaigns or disguised by scientific masquerades, but is in fact its distinctive virtue. For the ultimate concern of his subject is neither facts nor classifications, neither patterns of cause and effect nor technical complexities. Of course, strict honesty in the face of facts and a certain mastery in dealing with their manifold interconnections are the indispensable qualifications of the literary scholar. In the end, however, he is concerned with the communication of a sense of quality rather than measurable quantity, and of meaning rather than explanation.

Thus he would be ill-advised to concentrate exclusively on those aspects of his discipline which allow the calm neutrality of what is indisputably factual and 'objective'. His business is, I think, not the avoidance of subjectivity, but its purification; not the shunning of what is disputable, but the cleansing and deepening of the dispute. As a teacher he is involved in a task which would appear impossible by the standards of the scientific laboratory: to teach what, strictly speaking, cannot be taught, but only 'caught', like a passion, a vice or a virtue. This 'impossibility' is the inspiration of his work. There are no methods that comprehend his subject; only methods, perhaps, that produce the intellectual pressure and temperature in which perception crystallizes into conviction and learning into a sense value. Goethe tells of a Greek nobleman who was asked

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about the education of his children. 'Let them be instructed,' he said, 'in that which they will never be able to learn.'

The unifying theme of this book, then, is the sense of values as shown or embodied in the works of some modern German poets, writers and thinkers from Goethe to Kafka. Perhaps it would be more correct to say: the sense of the value of life. For I have stressed what appears to one of the distinctive symptoms of modern literature and thought: the consciousness of life's 'increasing depreciation. If Thomas Aquinas saw the link between poets and philosophers in their preoccupation with the marvellous, their modern successors seem united in the reverse; either they try systematically to strengthen, or desperately to ward off, the predominance of the prosaic. I deal with this problem in its most direct form in the essay 'Rilke and Nietzsche' (particularly in the discourses on the relation between thought, belief and poetry) and in the second section of the essay 'The World of Franz Kafka'.

I do not wish to suggest that the selections of this book can be justified on any other but personal grounds. Yet its choices are, I believe, representative enough to avoid the charge of arbitrariness. Arbitrary are merely its omissions. For I could have included, without losing sight of the central theme, many more names. In fact, I can hardly think of one major writer or thinker within this period of German literature, whose works would not reflect the situation of mind and spirit which I have tried to describe within the limits of my choice. In a way it is even true to say that the silent centre of this book is Hlderlin; its theme and its hesitant hope are certainly contained in Hlderlin's lines:

Und nun denkt er zu ehren in Ernst die seeligen Gtter, Wirklich und wahrhaft muss alles verknden ihr Lob.

Aber wo sind sie? wo blhn die Bekannten, die Kronen des Festes?

Warum zeichnet, wie sonst, die Stirne des Mannes ein Gott nicht, Drckt den Stempel, wie sonst, nicht dem Getroffenen auf? Oder er kam auch selbst und nahm des Menschen Gestalt an Und vollendet und schloss trstend das himmlische Fest.

Aber Freund! wir kommen zu spt. Zwar leben die Gtter, Aber ber dem Haupt droben in anderer Welt. Endlos wirken sie da und scheinens wenig zu achten, Ob wir leben, so sehr schonen die Himmlischen uns.

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Denn nicht immer vermag ein schwaches Gefss sie zu fassen, Nur zu Zeiten ertrgt gttliche Flle der Mensch.

Traum von ihnen ist drauf das Leben. Aber das Irrsal Hilft, wie Schlummer und stark machet die Noth und die Nacht.

Indessen dnket mir fters Besser zu schlafen, wie so ohne Genossen zu seyn, So zu harren und was zu thun indess und zu sagen, Weiss ich nicht und wozu Dichter in drftiger Zeit?

[Now will he strive in earnest to honour the dwellers in Heaven, Everything living must utter their praise, in word and in deed.

Where, though, where are they, the famous, those crowns of the banquet?

Why does a god no more inscribe the brow of a mortal, Setting his seal, as of old, on the victim chosen above? Or he would come himself, assuming the shape of a mortal, Thus with solace and peace to crown the celestial feast.

But we, my friend, are too late. The gods, it is true, are living, Yet far above ourselves, away in a different world. There they are endlessly active and seem but little regardful Whether we live or no, such is their tender concern, Knowing that fragile vessels like us cannot always contain them, Only at times can man endure the abundance of gods. Life thereafter is but to dream of them. Yet our wanderings Help, like sleep, and anguish and night give strength.

Meanwhile, it seems to me often Better to slumber than live without companions, like this, So to linger, and know not what to begin or to utter, Or, in such spiritless times, why to be poet at all?]

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MY thanks for permission to reprint previously published material are due to The Cambridge Journal, The Listener and The Times Literary Supplement. The Hogarth Press and Messrs. Secker & Warburg Ltd.