Intervention at Home: Representing Migrants in German Romanticism

ABSTRACT

This article explores how German Romantic writing reflected on migration and thereby intervened in contemporary discourses about émigrés seeking refuge in German-speaking territories after the French Revolution in 1789. Discussing different representations of French exiles in both fiction and translation, I argue that some Romantics were participating in an “intervention at home:” staying put, observing both the unprecedented overthrow of the French monarchy and, later on, the aggression of French expansionism, Romantic writers contributed to contemporary debates about migration with stories and characters meant to reflect on, evoke empathy with, or create aversion to French migrants. German Romantic writing thus encouraged both emotional responses to and specific ideas about the intricate relationship between migration and nation-building in early nineteenth-century German-speaking countries.

German Romanticism and its post-Romantic afterlives have a dubious reputation regarding political agendas: nationalistic radicalism, a belief in ethnic superiority, ultramontanism, and reactionary monarchist-feudal positions harking back to a “romantische[r] Konservatismus” [“Romantic conservatism”] (Schwering 501)¹ have been linked to late-Romantic thinking, especially and most prominently to the writings of Friedrich Schlegel, Adam Müller, Achim von Arnim, and Joseph von Eichendorff.² Thomas Mann’s suggestion that National Socialism can be traced back to German Romanticism’s idealistic irrationalism and decadent, undemocratic attitude (Löwe, “Romantik” 271) has tarnished the frequently romanticized view on German Romanticism³ just as much as Carl Schmitt’s idea of “political Romanticism” as “eine Form des Occasionalismus” [“a form of occasionalism”] (8) has affected the perception and evaluation of Romantic aesthetic theory. According to Schmitt, German Romanticism was not interested in politics as such but rather in poeticizing the political and transforming the state (and indeed literally anything related to both public and private spheres) into art and affect.⁴ Apart from that, German Romantics such as August Wilhelm Schlegel and Bettina von Arnim have been hailed as a driving force of cosmopolitan thinking, comparative theory and modern socio-critical journalism (see Paulin, Strobel, Becker-Cantarino, and Bunzel). Evidently, the ambivalences and political dynamics of German Romantic literature need to be examined in both critical and differentiated ways to assess how the Romantics responded to the challenges of political transformations in a specific sociohistorical context. This calls for a nuanced approach to German Romantic fiction—an approach which acknowledges the aesthetics of Romantic literature as both visionary in terms of and commenting on the turbulent politics of the day.

Couched in “the age of revolutions” (Armitage and Subrahmanyam xii), the German Romantics witnessed the Coalition Wars and the end of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation; they experienced the French occupation of their states, promoted the so-called Wars of Liberation against Napoleon, and observed the Restoration. The counter-factual, self-reflexive, and meta-poetic practices of (early) German Romantic aesthetics have often been interpreted as modes of escapism—an attempt to avoid critical engagement and participating in the politics of the day. However, as Frederick Beiser and others have argued, Romantic imaginaries of pasts, presents and futures were intricately linked to contemporary politics and the Romantic idea(l)s of both state and community instilled by love and cultural exchange: “Far from making art an end in itself, the romantics subordinated it to the ethical and political. For they held that the purpose of art is Bildung, the education of humanity, which is achieved only in the state” (173).⁵ Literature was regarded as a means of both partaking in the envisioned progression towards socio-political harmony and disrupting the despotic, bourgeois-capitalist status quo:

On the one hand [the German Romantics] formulated political ideals and social fictions in the utopian “as if” mode of literature. On the other hand they intended their texts to perform pragmatically as interventions that would produce the desired community by literary means, and, through dialogue with the reading public, generate the “We” in whose name they pre-emptively spoke. (Matala de Mazza 192, original emphasis)

John Thomas Gill has recently affirmed Matala de Mazza’s proposition, finding that the German Romantics “qualitatively surpass Schiller’s ground-breaking intervention” of political education via aesthetic education: they both challenged and reconfigured “the status of contemporary life through the means of the imagination” (27). Although scholarship has critically investigated how Romantic authors identified with and transformed the ideas of the French Revolution, as well as how they became struck by and only hesitantly distanced themselves from Napoleon’s superpower charismatics (Schwering, Oergel), a particularly important aspect of aesthetic interventionism in German Romantic literature has not yet received enough critical attention: the approach to and analysis of migration. As I aim to explore in this article, Romantic intervention in the “age of refugees” (Jasanoff 38) cuts across different genres and affects.⁶ In the following, I trace Romantic responses to postrevolutionary migration by focusing on how the German Romantics engaged with different French émigrés in fiction. Showing that aesthetical differences depend on the varying sociopolitical backgrounds and stages of postrevolutionary migration, I argue that German Romanticism interpreted and interceded in migration politics in both private settings (crucially, in the home and via salon culture) and public spheres (crucially, via the book market). Romantic approaches to the (hi)stories of migration and the modes of representing French migrants in Romantic fiction speak to a wide range across the political continuum, from conservative to subversive positions, drawing on figurations that criticize and degrade but also victimize, show solidarity, and empathize with French émigrés. As I aim to illustrate with examples taken from the writings of Clemens Brentano, Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, Ludwig Tieck, and Joseph von Eichendorff, German Romantic writers—not themselves forced to be on the move—tried to mobilize or emotionalize their readers and affiliates. In this respect, they actively took part in and commented on the migrant politics of the day. I develop this argument in three steps, teasing out the ambiguities of Romantic responses to political migration. First, I contextualize how German Romanticism is entrenched in the “Age of emigrations” (Pestel, “Age” 206). Secondly, I analyze how some Romantic texts called for a critical stance towards certain types of French émigrés before finally exploring by what means Romantic fiction also appealed to readers’ consideration of and solidarity with “innocent” displaced persons and the struggles of diasporic life.

German Romanticism and the age of emigrations

German Romanticism spans two important migration events: the French Revolution and the “überseeische Massenauswanderung” [“transatlantic mass emigration”] (Rößler 148) of the nineteenth century. Following the socio-political upheaval after the seizure of the Bastille in July 1789 and the violent reconfigurations of political and territorial orders in and beyond Europe both during Napoleon’s imperial expansions as well as throughout the course of the Coalition Wars (1792–1815), a large number of people were on the move (see Aprile, Pestel, “French Revolution”, Reboul and Philip, and Diaz). Furthermore, in 1816, the climate and agricultural crisis that followed the so-called “year without a summer” (Stommel) prompted many people to leave their homes in Southwest Germany, confronting both state governments and the populations with administrative, social, and (especially with regard to the unsuccessful returnees) charitable challenges (see Moltmann, and my “R/Emigration”).

Modes of cross-border travel were increasingly restricted and bans on emigration were issued in various principalities. In July 1817, at the peak of German emigration, it was the Romantic theologian and philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) who publicly objected to legal regulations that made emigration punishable. In a lecture, Schleiermacher argued that freedom of movement was imperative, especially for those “von heimischer Noth gequält” [“constrained by misery at home”] (328). Schleiermacher naturalized and de-politicized the dialectics of “heimatliche[r] Triebe und Vaterlandsliebe” [“home drive and love of one’s country”] and “Auswanderungstriebe” [“emigration drive”] (341), and primarily referred to emigration made for economic reasons; “[Y]et forced migration and the means of dealing with migrants was a common theme of German legal debates, public discussions, and literary discourse in the aftermath of the French Revolution” (see Köthe, Zimmermann, and Pestel, Weimar 64–72). The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation was one of the most frequented exile spaces along with Britain and the U.S., yet fluctuation and longer sojourns of French emigrants persisted even after 1791, when émigrans (temporary exiles) and émigrés (permanent exiles) were no longer differentiated. The French Revolutionary Court confiscated the émigrés’ property, denounced their civil rights, and sentenced them to death on return to France.⁷

In the summer of 1791, a significant number of loyalists and royalists gathered around the two emigrated brothers of the overthrown Louis XVI, Comte d ’Artois and Comte de Provence, who had taken refuge at Koblenz in the north of today’s Rhineland-Palatinate, nestled at the confluence of the Rhine and the Moselle. They had been invited by their uncle, the elector of Trier, and soon set up counter-revolutionary emigrant armies to return to France by force. The princes and their followers almost doubled the number of inhabitants in Koblenz and soon became an object of suspicion in France and the subject of disdain in German states: while the French considered the emigrant armies in Koblenz a considerable threat to the revolutionary project, the citizens of Koblenz were appalled by the debauched Versailles-style practices that allegedly brought gluttony and drinking, prostitution and gambling to the small Rhine-Moselle town (Pestel and Winkler 138). The “Koblenz-Syndrom” (Hartig 47) determined negative perceptions and stereotyping of the émigrés even after the emigrant armies had dissolved and the princes had left for other countries that offered them exile. In political debates between 1791 and 1794, “Coblentz” became a “Kampfvokabel” [“combat term”] (Henke 178) used strategically in domestic and foreign affairs in France and the German states. As a political symbol, Koblenz and the princes became a catalyst for arousing political and social agitation. Geschichte der Deutschen in Frankreich und der Franzosen in Deutschland [History of the Germans in France and the French in Germany], written by the professor of the historical-statistical faculty of the Gutenberg University of Mainz and published in 1794, is a case in point for how popular historiography and the shaping of public opinion became intertwined in German perspectives on royal émigrés. The princes were considered both omens of French usurpation and stand-ins for a debauched “parasitical” abuse of “Gastfreiheit in Deutschland” [“hospitality in Germany”] (Nau 9). Nau’s contemporary account of the (post-)revolutionary events intertwines resentments against the princes at Koblenz with fears and anguish amidst the First Coalition War in which the allies Prussia, Britain, and Austria, among others, fought alongside the émigrés to safeguard monarchic rule and re-install the ancient régime. According to Nau, the Frenchman is inherently characterized by national hubris and hegemonic thinking: “selbst der emigrirte Franzose fand noch alles schöner und besser in Frankreich, als in Deutschland, weil ihm alle Sitten lächerlich scheinen die nicht die seinigen sind” [“the emigrant Frenchman found everything more beautiful and much better in France than in Germany since all customs that are not his own appear ridiculous to him“] (12). While Nau on the one hand hails “the Germans” as the epitome of a Kantian “hospitality,” he constructs the French royals on the other hand as the negative foil against which Germans can shine. In his account, the French princes sponged on their hosts’ generosity:

Die biedern Bewohner dieser Gegenden nahmen ihre unglücklichen Nachbarn in diesem Zeitpunkte als Freunde gütig auf, und erlaubten ihnen Unterkunft und Aufenthalt. Ihre Anzahl wuchs täglich. Städte und Dörfer von der Schweiz bis zur Nordsee nahmen von diesen französischen Flüchtlingen, theils mit größerer theils mit geringerer Theilnahme an ihrem unglücklichen Schicksale, in ihre Wohnungen auf. Artois und Conde [sic] verließen gleich Anfangs die umgestürzte Monarchie mit vielen andern vom königlichen Geblüte. … Die Prinzen suchten nach Möglichkeit die Auswanderungen zu vermehren: sie lockten eine Menge Menschen unter vielen Versprechungen aus Frankreich … Alle Gegenden von Schwaben Worms, Mainz, Koblenz, Trier, Brüssel, etc. waren mit Prinzen und ihrem Gefolge von Mätressen und Rittern so angefüllt, daß die Lebensmittel, Hausmiethen und die Fourage beträchtlich in ihrem Preise stiegen.

[The stout and righteous inhabitants of these regions received their unlucky neighbors with kindness as friends and allowed them shelter and residence. Their number increased by the day. More or less compassionate about the fate of the French, residents from Switzerland to the North Sea took up these French refugees in their homes. Artois und Condé left the overthrown monarchy right at the beginning with many other Frenchmen of royal blood. … The princes sought to facilitate emigration and with many promises lured a number of people away from France … The areas of Swabia, Worms, Mainz, Koblenz, Trier, Brussels, etc. were so filled up with princes and their entourages of mistresses and knights that prices for food, housing rent, and fodder increased considerably.] (Nau 9–10, 15–16)

Nau even goes so far as to suggest that the French Revolution would have taken a completely different, i.e., less bloody turn, if the French elite had not fled their country in such great numbers. And he identifies “Artois” as one of the first emigrants installing the French royal habitus in the Rhine-Main region.⁸ In Nau’s account, Charles-Philippe, Count of Artois (1757–1836) (who would become King Charles X of France in 1824) and his entourage figure as a financial, economic, and political burden brought about both by their extravagant lifestyles and their military exercises, despite the fact that any mobilization against the new leaders of France had been strictly forbidden by the German authorities and their European allies such as Austria, Britain, and Spain. As I will demonstrate in the next section, Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853), one of the most productive and well-remembered representatives of German Romanticism,⁹ paints a similar picture of Artois in a puppet play probably written in 1795 and only posthumously published as “Hanswurst als Emigrant” [“Hanswurst as Emigrant”] in 1855.¹⁰

Critical interventions: performing the royal emigrant (Tieck)

In his puppet-comedy, Tieck (infamous for his uncanny story-telling and satirical playwriting in the early phase of his career) merges Romantic irony, anti-mimetic aesthetics, theater criticism, and socio-cultural commentary into a political intervention proper. Satirically operating with an analogy drawn between the expelled Hanswurst and the exiled French prince Artois, the play uses the comic figure of Hanswurst, German version of the harlequin masqueraded as émigré, to insist on the significance of improvisation and the grotesque in dramatic performance and to subvert the conventions of classicist drama. At the same time, the entire satire hinges on the émigré performance, on acting out and revealing the “true nature” of the royal émigrés. In this respect, the play caters to but also reflects the creation of popular images of the French princes and propagates anti-loyalist sentiments.

About seventy years before Artois was driven from France in 1789, the professor of poetry and playwright Johann Gottsched, in close cooperation with the actress and theater director Caroline Friederike Neuber, had (theoretically)¹¹ banished the commedia dell’arte figure of Hanswurst (along with the technique of improvisation and other comic elements deemed “obscene,” “irrational,” and “immoral”) from the stage in an attempt to reform theater practices according to neo-classical drama theory (Goodman). The (re-)appearance of the banned Hanswurst disguised as the exiled Artois in Tieck’s play not only pokes fun at Gottsched’s theater reform,¹² its moral doctrine and rationalist ideal of verisimilitude; it also caters to a popular contemporary critique of the royal French refugees, which characterized them as being oblivious to their precarious status quo. Tieck introduces Hanswurst in a scene caricaturing the arrival of the French princes on German grounds: approaching an inn, Hanswurst believes himself entitled to be treated with royal honors and magnificence. When no one answers his call, he gets worked up and acts as Tieck thinks fit for a royal French masquerade:

Was ist das für eine Aufführung gegen einen Mann wie ich bin? … . Bin ich darum Conventsdeputirter gewesen, sechs mal guillotinirt … zu den Oesterreichern übergegangen, von fürstlichem Geblüt, um hier wie ein Maulaffe vor der Thür eines Wirthshauses zu stehen? Daß ich nicht hier genöthigt bin, den Degen zu ziehen, sonst möchte hier ein grausames Blutbad entstehen!

[What kind of conduct is this towards a man like me? … Is this the reason why I have been the deputy to the Convention, why I have been guillotined six times, why I have defected to the Austrians … why I am of royal blood to stand here in front of the door of an inn like a gaper? That I am not compelled here to draw the sword, otherwise purely cruel bloodbaths might ensue here.] (95)

Hanswurst soon reveals his incognito name in accordance with his princely demeanor: “Hanswurst. Er [der Wirt] wird vom Prinzen Artois gehört haben? … Nun, dieser weltberühmte Prinz bin ich” [Hanswurst. (The innkeeper) will have heard of Prince Artois? … Well, I am this world-famous prince] (98). Glamorous wannabe Artois presents himself not as a refugee supplicant in need of good will but as arrogant and aggressive, bumptious, and dim-witted. In his opinion, he was not forced to flee from France but is on a military mission in line with his political protocol: after successfully overthrowing the Jacobin rulers in France, he considers himself on the move to give the Poles “so recht nach meinem Sinn eine Constitution” [“a constitution that befits my opinion”], stopping in Berlin on his way (97). Tieck makes Hanswurst act as a fulsome megalomaniac Artois, out of touch with the reality of his sidelined position on the stage of world politics. Instead, Artois is dedicated to sustaining his princely standards, for example, by demanding to be served with delicacies such as “Schnepfen” [“snipes”], “ein Gericht Nachtigallenzungen” [“tongues of nightingales”] (98), “Gericht von dem seltenen Fisch, den die Römer Rhombus nannten” [“a dish of the rare fish the Romans called rhombus”], or “in Zucker eingemachte Canarienvögel” [“canary birds preserved in sugar”] (99). On being offered cold meat, he is offended: “ihr vergeßt wohl, daß ich ein Katholik bin? Es ist ja heut Freitag und also Fasttag für mich” [“you seem to forget that I am a Catholic? Today is Friday and thus a day of fasting for me”] (100). When the innkeeper reminds him that only seconds ago, he had wished for snipe meat, Artois/Hanswurst reveals his double standards: “Das sind ja Vögel, alter Narr, und kein Fleisch” [“These are birds, old fool, not meat”] (100). Tieck uses Hanswurst to expose and discredit the royal emigrant Artois, who remains dedicated to the life and politics of the ancient régime and refuses to accept his fall from grace in exile. This is consistent with scholarship findings of Artois and his followers attempting to stage a “‘France virtuelle’” as a “‘fiktive Monarchie’” [“fictive monarchy”] at the courts in Koblenz and Trier (Pestel, Weimar 15).

In Tieck’s play, Engelbrecht (Artois’s former cook, who had been turned into the prince’s riding horse) serves as a corrector of the prince’s delusional attitude and counters Artois’s self-fashioning as sophisticated master of global politics. Denoting himself “ein armer verkümmerter Bedienter, Engelbrecht mit Namen, im Dienst des Prinzen von Artois, ein ci-devant Mensch“ [“a poor stunted servant, Engelbrecht by name, in the service of the Prince of Artois, a ci-devant man”] (109),¹³ Engelbrecht makes plainly clear that Artois’s status as nobleman is no longer valid (101–02). Furthermore, he comments on the grotesque hierarchical structures and fundraising methods of the emigrant army which “the real” Artois had implemented during his exile in Koblenz in 1791. The princes had tried to set up the spitting image of the French court at Coblentz, with royal ceremonies, an executive government with diplomats, and a foreign policy claim to sole representation. In addition, they had formed an armée des princes mirroring status and hierarchies of a pre-1789 order; nonetheless, the princes soon needed to address their calamitous financial problems, and they did so by selling military ranks and offices to whoever could afford it (Pestel, Weimar 15–16). After Engelbrecht deserts Artois/Hanswurst to become a sentinel, the cook-turned-horse-turned-soldier sums up:

Kein großer Schritt vom Pferde zum Soldaten! Indessen ich bin doch jetzt noch besser daran als bei dem Emigranten, der in freier Luft freien Hunger und Durst und zwanzig Livres Lohn in falschen Assignaten gab.

[Not a big step from horse to soldier! But I am still better off now than with the emigrant, who gave free hunger and thirst in the open air and twenty livres in wages in false assignats.] (121)

Unveiling Artois’s “true colors,” his emigrant status, poor financial resources, and fraudulent monetary handling, Engelbrecht assumes the dramatic function of disclosing Hanswurst and reveals the true (and historically accurate) account covered by the lies Artois tells throughout the play, while the “real” Hanswurst is busy performing as Artois.

Tieck presents Artois/Hanswurst as a character keen to hide his “real” identity (as Hanswurst) and cover the bad reputation of his incognito (the glamorous, politically aspiring and militarily triumphant émigré who is, in fact, ostracized, broke, and defamed), and thus grossly exaggerates how Artois twists politics and perceptions according to his will and opportunities given. In this respect, Tieck builds on but also starkly exacerbates contemporary perceptions and popular opinions in the German states considering Artois’s character. When Artois/Hanswurst falls for the innkeeper’s daughter, for example, he promptly vows to mortgage “ganz Frankreich” [“the entirety of France”] for the hand of the young woman (110).¹⁴ And when asked how he aims to regain hold of France, he refers to the Russian queen, whom he claims will assist him in reaching his goal to resume power (110–11).¹⁵

Finally, Artois/Hanswurst is unmasked before he has the chance to make another escape:¹⁶ “Weil Sie mich also doch kennen, so will ich nicht länger incognito bleiben. Nun ja, Hanswurst, der bekannte, berüchtigte, verbannte Hanswurst, der jetzt wiedergekommen ist, um sein Vaterland zu besuchen” [“Since you know me after all, I don’t want to remain incognito any longer. Well, Hanswurst, the well-known, infamous, banished Hanswurst, who has now come back to visit his fatherland”] (124, 125). Tieck’s subtle fusion of ban and re-appearance, disguise and disclosure in the figures of Artois, the exiled prince aiming to regain power in France and restore Bourbon rule in France, and Hanswurst, the banned dramatic stock character returning to the stage in the disguise of an exiled “Narr” [“fool”], is an explicit comment on both Francophile neo-classical theatre and the émigrés’ attempt to take refuge, enrich themselves, and re-build French absolutist rule across Europe (see Tieck 77, 101, 113).

Evidently, Tieck's puppetry is well informed about current political affairs linked to Artois, his émigré government, and the exiles’ plans “to save Europe” (Mansel 19) and re-invigorate belief in monarchical power. In a Romantic-ironic twist, then, Tieck’s puppet poetics intervenes in Franco-German politics of the day: with the banned Hanswurst returning to a German play in the disguise of Artois, Tieck discredits both the French prince and his demeanor in German exile as well as the classicist opponents of Hanswurst in Germany. Performing as a swaggering, dim-witted French émigré, Tieck’s Hanswurst not only derides the political and military ambitions of the exiled aristocratic loyalists but also reinforces the invasive conduct of the French princes. Tieck’s play (just as Nau’s historical account sketched above) is both part of the “Coblenz syndrome” but also critically comments on the failure of the German electoral states to curb the princes’ appetite for power, prestige, and sumptuous lifestyles.

The puppet play can be understood as a literary intervention into the migration politics of the Romantic period, although (or, rather, because) the text never reached the printing press during Tieck’s lifetime. The play seems to have been written for a birthday party,¹⁷ and it is very likely that Tieck read it out aloud in one of his artistic salons. As Harro Zimmermann (313) and Regina Köthe (14) have shown, literary fiction representing French migrants in the late eighteenth century took on a journalistic, politically motivated character aiming to influence and alter public opinion about the émigrés. The “Coblenz syndrome” had dominated both daily papers and literary texts since 1792 and coined “das Bild des ‘dekadenten Popanz’ gegen das des ‘armen Flüchtlings’” [“the image of the ‘decadent bugbear’ against the ‘poor refugee’”] (Köthe 22) that helped turn the public increasingly averse to émigrés in general. It is this discourse that Tieck's play taps into and as part of which Tieck shores up the bias against Artois (who, in fact, was still in search of political asylum in Europe by the time Tieck wrote the play) and the French royals in his large circle of friends and colleagues. In addition, Hanswurst's princely performance of Artois reflects popular discourse on the royal émigrés as a media spectacle and the emotionally charged, distorted staging of “the émigré” in historiography and the press, an acting out “the role of Artois” that is much more indicative of German resentments against the French princes than it is accurate in characterizing the actual émigrés.

However, satire and puppetry cannot be considered the default mode of Romantic writing about migration around 1800. Many (often aristocratic) Romantics were also anxious about losing their sociopolitical standing and hereditary privileges in a time of growing enthusiasm for secular, egalitarian, and republican ideals. The French émigrés fleeing from their homes after the overthrow of the monarchy were thus regarded as stand-ins for a possible destiny of the aristocracy more generally. For some Romantic conservatives, the émigré nobility thus became a social group to identify with and get involved for; at the same time, they could agitate to change the revolutionists: “Individualisierung, Mitleid, empfindsame Stilisierung [der adeligen Auswanderer] sind die Wechselmünzen konservativer Stimmungsmache” [“Individualization, pity, sentimental stylization (of aristocratic emigrants) come in exchange for conservative propaganda”] (Zimmermann 313). As I will highlight, a conservative spectrum in Romantic circles can be linked to such an aesthetics of pity. Rallying against revolutionary powers and taking sides with the émigrés, selected writings of Clemens Brentano (1778–1842), Joseph von Eichendorff (1788–1857), and Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué (1777–1843) clearly show an interventionist agenda when it comes to representing migration against revolutionary forces—during and after the Napoleonic Wars.

Empathetic interventions: Brentano, Eichendorff, Fouqué

The negative perception of the Artois, who was known for his “intemperate drinking, addiction to gambling, and mad pursuit of women” (Beach 314) even before he took refuge in Koblenz, was diametrically opposed to the positive view of the Prince de Condé, with whom Artois shared the will to “restore everything to its former state” (d’Agay 29). Louis-Joseph de Bourbon, Prince de Condé (1736–1818), led a counter-revolutionary army of “gentlemen soldiers” and was widely hailed as “a modern knight,” “proud and courageous,” “a military man, loved and respected by his soldiers” (30), even after the “Armée de Condé” stationed at Worms was defeated in the battle of Valmy in 1792. In 1800, Condé’s army (the only one left under the émigré government) was dissolved by Condé’s ally, George III. This was the same year in which Clemens Brentano published his novel Godwi (“ein[en] verwilderte[n] Roman” [“a novel run wild”], as the subtitle indicates), in which Brentano fictionalized the Colonel General Prince Condé, as well as the Maréchal General de Broglie (1718–1804), who served as the Minister of War for the émigré government until 1795 (Mansel 6). Brentano’s eponymous character Godwi, himself anything but a sedentary protagonist, mentions (nameless) refugee clergymen and the exiled opponents of the Revolution, Condé and de Broglie, in a letter to his friend Römer:

Aehnliches Schweigen ergriff mich, als ich die Opfer ihrer Meynungen, alte aus Frankreich vertriebene Priester, in unsern Promenaden mit Thränen im Auge ihr trocknes Brod essen sah, als ich den Greis Broglio, als ich den silberlockigen Condé den Hut in der Hand mit zur Erde gesenktem Kopfe auf Zeitungen warten sah.

[A similar silence seized me when I saw the victims of their opinions, old priests expelled from France, eating their dry bread in our promenades with tears in their eyes, when I saw the old man Broglio, when I saw the silver-haired Condé, hat in hand, waiting for newspapers with his head bowed to the ground.] (82)

Godwi tries to explain the affects of silence evoked by the hermit Werdo Senne by comparing them to the silencing brought about by the confrontation with exiled émigrés (82). Although both priests and princes feature as somewhat infirm exiles, Godwi clearly distinguishes between the “tears” of “victims” (priests)¹⁸ and the sorrow of the military leaders turned senile and inactive in exile, doomed to await good news of the political role-reversal that would allow them to return to France. In this both victimizing and sympathizing aesthetic, the representatives of the ancien régime emerge as seemingly harmless veterans: they appear less of a potent(ial) danger but rather seem to be in need of pity and solidarity. Both priests and counter-revolutionary commanders are presented as pitiable subjects in exile whose prime “natural powers” have been quenched like the might of “Mount Vesuvius”;¹⁹ their powers are linked to the past with only the silent pleas remaining, indicating the yearning for home. On the one hand, Brentano thus caters to favorable opinions dominating popular discourse about Condé;²⁰ on the other, he propagates a conservative view by sympathizing with the émigré government and its (suspended) army, cooperating with allied forces to counter the Jacobins’ military expansion projects.

Condé and de Broglie were aging but powerful combative enemies first of the Revolution and then of Napoleonic rule in France. Representing the émigrés as vulnerable subjects yearning for home, Brentano’s Godwi character renders a sympathetic reading of the royal emigrants and their life in German exile. In this respect, the novel—which features various migrants and their struggle to find new homes and ways of belonging in foreign lands—can be read as an act of intervention, a fictional form of “stepping in” for French émigrés, arguing against the displacement of both members of the Catholic church and royal counter-revolutionists.

A similar conservative perspective characterizes a poem written by Joseph von Eichendorff, probably composed at the beginning of 1804 (see Regener). The text was not published during Eichendorff’s lifetime and is supposed to be the translation of a French poem (Schiwy 109). It distinguishes between the émigrés as fateful “victims” on the one hand and revolutionary “monsters” on the other:

[An die Revolutions-Ungeheuer und Emigranten Frankreichs]

Ihr, des olympischen Donners Räuber!

Die ihr der ewigen Menschheits Rechte Altäre zertrümmert,

Tyrannen der Erde!

Zittert—denn ihr seid unsterblich!

Doch ihr, des eisernen Schicksals Opfer,

Über die eines Gottes Vaterblicke wachen,

Irrend im fremden Gefild’

Tröstet euch—ihr seid unsterblich!

[{To the revolutionary monsters and emigrants of France}

You, the robbers of Olympian thunder!

You who smash the altars of eternal humanity's rights,

Tyrants of the earth!

Tremble—for you are immortal!

But you, victims of iron fate,

Over whom a God’s fatherly gaze watches,

Wandering in a foreign land,

Take comfort—you are immortal!] (505)

Eichendorff wrote the poem while he was still at school. For the about sixteen-year-old, however, the text is more than a simple exercise in literary translation. It not only emphasizes young Eichendorff’s “zeitgeschichtliche[s] Interesse” [“interest in contemporary events”] persisting throughout his literary career, but also illuminates how political Romanticism is deeply entrenched in “konservative[] Milieus” [“conservative milieus”] opposed to reforming feudal structures of the state and diminishing aristocratic supremacy (Schiwy 109). The text finds both republican revolutionaries and royal emigrants “immortal,” yet for very different reasons, and with very different trajectories. While the revolutionaries are denigrated politically, the emigrants are ensured God’s protection. Since they are regarded as offenders of both the laws of divine order (“robbers of Olympian thunder”) and fundamental historic achievements that amount to the sacred pillars of civilized mankind (“eternal human rights”), the poem describes the revolutionaries as “monsters” and “tyrants of the earth” who will forever be remembered for their notorious inhumanity. The emigrants, by contrast, are not only ensured of God’s protection, but their odyssey in exile shall also be mitigated by posterity’s favor (“Take comfort”), with the poem performatively trying to speak out in their favor and keep the memory of the exiles alive.

Similar to Brentano’s downplaying of the political and military power of the generals and sympathizing with Condé and de Broglie, then, Eichendorff combines a poetics of victimization focused on émigré loyalists with a poetic mobilization against French republicans. Partaking in the formation of nationalist agendas and patriotic sentiment surrounding the fall of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation in 1806, Brentano’s and Eichendorff’s conservative interventions are covert but plain: Brentano embeds his sympathy with exiled clerics and his partisanship for French loyalist warlords in a novel not primarily concerned with the politics of the day; Eichendorff translates from the French and aligns himself with the émigrés in a clean copy manuscript attached to four other (also not entirely unpolitical poems) that were most likely meant for peer review, if not for publication (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Clean copy of Eichendorff’s manuscript, including “An einen Stutzer, mit einem Brutuskopfe” [“To a dandy, with the head of Brutus”] on top, “An ebendenselben” [To the very same”] and “Der Jüngling und das Mädchen” [“The young boy and the girl”]. © Freies Deutsches Hochstift Frankfurt, Hs-28809.

Both Romantics express support for cooperations with counter-revolutionary emigrants in the fight against revolutionary France. Their Romantic intervention both targets critics of émigrés and evokes sympathy for “the victims” of the Revolution, whom they perceive as homeless (and harmless) exiles in need of German solidarity. Both writings seem to negotiate growing tensions between the French and German peoples in the aftermath of the grande terreur and in the face of the Coalition Wars. Interfering in the increasingly Francophobic atmosphere in which “the French” generally became personae non grata enemies, they follow a similar route as Fouqué did twenty years later in his revisionist account of the turbulent events surrounding Bonaparte’s rule of the German people.

Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s novel Der Refugié oder Heimath und Fremde [The Réfugié or Home and Exile], published in three volumes in 1824, is set at the time of the Coalition Wars and tells the story of the Gautier family, whose Huguenot ancestors had fled religious persecution in France more than a hundred years before.²¹ Fouqué, one of the most prolific writers of German Romanticism and himself a descendent of Protestant French refugees (Schmidt, Diegmann-Hornig), follows the trials and tribulations of the Gautier family. The novel opens with an idyllic setting in front of the Gautiers’ house located in a small village situated in the Harz Mountains where Father Gautier’s Huguenot ancestors had settled after their expulsion from France. Some farmers pass the house and refer to Gautier as “ein rechtes Muster für alle Prediger weit und breit … unser Herr Jottjé!” [“a proper example for all preachers far and wide, our Mr. Jottjé!”] (1: 2). The narrator identifies the malapropism “Jottjé” “nach norddeutschem Sprachgebrauch” [“according to northern German language use”] (1: 2), but nonetheless makes clear that the pastor and his sermons are held in high esteem in the village community. Furthermore, Gautier’s assimilation becomes evident in the fact that he is the first preacher holding mass in German while his ancestors had limited their office as pastors to “ihre[] sogenannte[] Refugié-Colonie” [“their so-called réfugié colony”], preaching in French (1: 2). Although the beginning of the novel thus suggests that the Gautiers have successfully integrated into the sociocultural fabric of their German “host country,” the subsequent events of the narration paint a different picture. Robert Gautier (the pastor’s son), particularly, is met with hostility. At school, Robert is beaten up and bullied by his “native” German peers:

“Jottjé willst du nicht heißen, Bürschchen? Wohl gut! Wir wollen dich nennen, wie dein Name geschrieben wird. Aber wir sprechen’s nicht französisch aus. Das brauchen wir nicht, wir braven deutschen Jungen!—. … Dich aber sprechen wir deutsch aus, wie dein Name geschrieben wird. Und dann heißest du Gauthier!” “Das Gauthier!” schrieen sie Alle jubelnd. “Ja ja, das Gauthier soll er künftig heißen.”

[“You don’t want to be called Jottjé, boy? Very well! We will call you according to the spelling of your name. But we won’t pronounce it in French. We don’t have to do that, we good German boys! […] We’ll pronounce you in German, as your name is written. And then you are called Gau-thier!” “The Gau-thier!” they all shouted jubilantly. “Yes, yes, the Gauthier shall be his name henceforth.”] (1: 25)

Calling him a “foreign species” (literally translated, “Gau-thier,” a composition of the German nouns “Gau” and “Thier,” meaning “country-animal”), Robert’s classmates make him a cultural “Other.” The only person supporting Robert in this bullying scene is the boys’ teacher, himself a refugee, “der wackre Emigrant Roussilac” [“the brave emigrant Roussillac”], “Sprachmeister und Fechtmeister in einer Person” [“master of language and fencing in one”] (1: 21). Although Roussillac is not a main character of the story, his French emigrant status makes evident the alliances between French-born individuals fighting for a common cause: the freedom of the German people. Thus, at the end of the novel, both confessional and national differences have been dissolved for ideological reasons and the joint venture of opposing Napoleonic rule. As comrades-in-arms, Robert and Roussillac find commonalities not only in their migrant background but first and foremost in a war for “our heart of Europe, our beloved Germany”, as Robert announces with patriotic pathos (3: 328). To his parents, the soldier Robert writes about his experiences during church service in Berlin in preparation for battle: “Roussillac war neben mir hingekniet während des Gottesdienstes. Der Emigrant neben dem Refugié! Der Katholische neben dem Evangelischen! Gewißlich, das war doch bereits eine Art von Kirchenvereinigung” [“Roussillac was kneeling next to me during the service. The emigrant next to the refugee! The Catholic next to the Protestant! Surely, this was already a kind of church union”] (3: 328–29). Against the background of a shared purpose, confessional, political and biographical differences become upstaged in Robert’s perspective: réfugiés and emigrés, religious refugees and political emigrants dedicate themselves to fighting Napoleon.

The figure of the réfugié is Fouqué’s means of connecting pasts and presents of “refugeeism” and of making sense of the different hi/stories of French exiles in German lands. When Napoleonic troops invade the Gautiers’ hometown, the family is asked to subject themselves to French rule; refusing to comply, they are banned from their home: “Es gilt nur eben die kurze Anzeige: Ihr seyd abgesetzt, mein Freundlein, und verbannt auf das rechte Elbufer hinüber. Und somit macht, daß ihr fortkommt!” [“Only the short announcement is valid: You are deposed, my friend, and banished to the right bank of the Elbe. And so make sure you get away!”] (1: 268). For the Gautier family, réfugié history thus repeats itself: after two hundred years at home on German soil, the family is again forced to flee. It is one of the many instances in the novel when the Gautiers (as both the inheritors of migrant histories and the protagonists experiencing refugee stories) start to embrace and gain confidence in their special status as réfugiés. Reading out the letters of recommendation that Mr. Gautier has received from colleagues and friends in the days preceding the departure of the family, Robert’s mother bemoans the terms in which people describe her husband, yet she is corrected by him:

“[H]ier nennt dich Einer in all seiner großen Liebe und Bewunderung: exsul! Und exsul—so viel des Lateines versteh’ ich auch noch—exsul, das heißt ein Ausgewanderter, ein Vertriebner, ein Emigrant!”—“Ein Réfugié!” entgegnete sanftlächelnd Herr Gautier. “Sollte ich jammern und winseln, weil auch ich ward, was meine ehrbaren Väter waren?”

[“[H]ere is one who calls you exsul in all his great love and admiration! And exsul—that much of the Latin I still understand—exsul, that means an emigrant, a displaced person, an emigrant!”—“A réfugié!” replied Mr. Gautier with a gentle smile. “Should I moan and whine because I too have become what my honorable fathers were?”] (1: 293–94)

Although the Gautier family is repeatedly confronted with practices of ostracism and expulsion, neither their faith in God and divine providence nor their support for the struggle against Napoleon wanes.

Fouqué’s novel evokes sympathy for both réfugiés and émigrés and creates an idealistic image “of the morally staunch and faithful Huguenot” as both a member of an elected people and a role model for Prussian-German identity (Thiez 17).²² The text fosters refugee alliances and favorably presents Franco-German protagonists fighting for German integrity against the French empire and its self-crowned leader. Writing about the age of revolutions from a migrant perspective and interconnecting different stories about expulsion and exile, The Réfugié can be read as a political intervention. It empathizes with French emigrants past and present and reveals their struggles against discrimination and their unsuccessful search for a socially acceptable identity. Furthermore, it painstakingly strives to show réfugiés pledging allegiance to the German people at a time when Francophobic attitudes had become common rhetoric: in Fouqué’s historical fiction, the Gautiers clearly serve as ideal Prussian citizen-patriots. Finally, the novel reminds Fouqué’s contemporaries of the émigré-soldiers fighting against Napoleonic rule and dying in the Wars of Liberation, such as Robert Gautier, who is killed (tragically but not in battle) during one of the last campaigns against the French. Fouqué thus sides with Franco-Germans discriminated against due to their migrant backgrounds and gives voice to the suffering and the identity crisis of réfugiés in the context of the yet-to-become German nation.

Conclusion

As my readings suggest, German Romantic writers reflected on and critically engaged with contemporary discourses about French exiles and the postrevolutionary politics in “the Age of Emigrations” (Pestel, “Age” 206). Yet interventionist approaches and political attitudes in these Romantic texts come in various forms and functions depending on the figures and political connections of the refugees in question: while Brentano and Eichendorff oppose practices of expulsion and the victimization of emigrants, and also try to evoke compassion for loyalists, exiled clerics and chief counter-revolutionary protagonists in the turbulent years between 1799 and 1804, twenty years later, Fouqué is primarily concerned with issues of Huguenot identity and the revision of Franco-German histories in Restoration Germany. Representing both réfugiés and émigrés as subjects to pity (as victims of expulsion and warfare) and/or to identify with (as Prussian-German patriots), Fouqué’s novel makes a compassionate plea for Franco-German friendship and tries to remind the German readership of how French refugees and German citizens fought side by side against Napoleonic oppression. Tieck's earlier puppet play, by contrast, ridicules and criticizes the behavior of the French exiled princes feasting on the European peoples who are forced to satisfy the courtly appetites of Artois and his men operating the émigré government and trying to restore the French monarchy. Focused on the princely politics of the alliances between German electors, French émigrés and counter-revolutionary forces in the Romantic period, Tieck represents the ousted Hanswurst disguised as a grotesque version of the “real” exiled Comte d'Artois—as an opportunistic, power-hungry, despotic fool. Like other intellectuals and historians of the Romantic period, Tieck critically assessed and challenged the politics of benevolence of the German governments towards the royal émigrés. Romantic fiction and literary practices in the Romantic period thus indeed often cater to conservative viewpoints but also serve as a means to express political opinions (despite and because of censorship) and influence the discourse on French exiles in both empathetic and critical ways.

Notes

1 Translations from the German are my own, unless indicated otherwise.

2 The most recent post-Romantic “scandal” developed when the Swiss journalist Matthieu von Rohr posted statistics about Germans having “the highest share of unvaccinated people in western Europe” and entitled these findings as the latest consequences of “Deutsche Romantik: Anthropophasie, Homöopathie, Impfgegnertum” [“anthroposophy, homoeopathy, opposition to vaccination”] (Rohr). As Stefan Matuschek has argued convincingly, Rohr’s suggestion is overly simplistic and cannot withstand close inspection.

3 See also Georg Lukács’ fierce Marxist judgment of German Romanticism as a bourgeois, apolitical movement.

4 “This, therefore, is the core of all political romanticism: the state is a work of art, the state of historical-political reality is the occasion for the work of art produced by the creative achievement of the Romantic subject. It is the occasion for poetry and the novel or even for a mere romantic mood” (Schmitt 125). For a latest critical review of “political Romanticism” and Schmitt’s narrowed perspective on German Romantic art in particular, see Löwe’s “Politische Romantik” and Grauel.

5 Beiser is a staunch critic of “the apolitical interpretation of Romantik”: “it is necessary to stress the exact opposite: that it was of necessity political, and indeed gave pride of place to politics” (35). As Gill argues, the German Romantics “use[d] their literary practice to introduce programmatic dissent into the well-ordered arrangement of entrenched custom, whether philosophical, aesthetic, scientific, religious, or political in nature” (21).

6 As Jasanoff, Pestel and Jansen and others have noted, historiographical accounts still lack critical assessments of how “two hundred thousand loyalists and royalists on the move … made an age of revolutions into an age of refugees” (Jasanoff 38). Jansen suggests that further research is needed to understand the transnational effects of refugeeism in the Atlantic world around 1800 (“Aliens” 3–4).

7 Around 150,000 loyalists, royalists and members of the ousted clergy fled from France after 1789. Before the first emigrant laws were passed in the assemblée legislative in 1791, the émigrans were those returning to France by the end of the year; everyone else was considered as émigrés, i.e., as having left the country for good. The distinction between émigrans and émigrés broke down after 1791 in German usage as well (Pestel, Weimar 11; see also Pestel and Winkler).

8 Nau’s “eye-witness” account reads: “Artois und Condé genossen am mainzer [sic] Hofe viele Ehre. Alles, was sie in ihrer unglücklichen Lage aufmuntern konnte, wurde angewendet. Der Donner der Kanonen verkündigte ihr königliches Herkommen; und starke Ehrenwachen schützten sie für der Wuth der Propagandisten. Der Kurfürst von Trier gab ihnen Wohnung und Aufenthalt; er gab ihnen alles, was in seinen Kräften stand, diese Gäste nach ihrem Stande, und ihrer alten Gewohnheit in Frankreich gemäß, zu bewirthen.” [“Artois and Condé enjoyed many honors at the court of Mainz. Everything that could cheer them up in their unhappy situation was applied. The thunder of the cannons proclaimed their royal birth; and strong guards of honor protected them from the fury of the propagandists. The Elector of Trier gave them lodging and a place to stay; he gave them everything in his power to entertain these guests according to their status and the old customs in France”] (19).

9 For Tieck’s position in and impact on Romantic circles and his star-studded reception as “king of Romanticism,” see Günzel, and Stockinger and Scherer.

10 The title of the play was coined by Tieck’s editor, Rudolf Köpke.

11 Not only in Tieck’s play(s), but also in various other writings and theater performances, Hanswurst remained on stage as both a comic and revelatory character (Ziltener).

12 See “Gottsched vertrieb mich, weil er allein meine Rolle spielen wollte” [“Gottsched banned me as he was set on playing my role himself”] (Tieck 125), as Hanswurst declares. Tieck discredits in his prologue literary critics drawn to Francophile principles:

   Entfernt euch schnell, ihre strengen Kritiker,

   Die ihr den Mund ob jeder Farce zieht,

   Als wenn ihr saure Aepfel speisen thätet;

   Hinweg, gelehrt Geschmeiß, das nur nach Batteux riecht! Odi profanum vulgus et arceo!

   [Be gone quickly, you stern critics,

   Who draw your mouths at every farce,

   As if you were eating sour apples;

   Away, scholarly scum that smells only of batteux! Odi profanum vulgus et arceo!] (77)

13 “Ci-devant” in (post-)revolutionary France was used to refer to those members of the nobility who had lost their legal status, as they had either fled the country or opposed the new governmental order (see Doyle).

14 Artois was known as a “womanizer” in pre-revolutionary France. According to French public opinion, he not only provided the Queen, Marie Antoinette, with entertainment and diversion as part of his position at court, but he was also her lover (Beach 314–15).

15 Catherine II of Russia was in fact one of several international monarchs supporting the émigré armies financially (Pestel, Weimar 50).

16 Just as his real counterpart, Artois/Hanswurst considers leaving his exile in German territories for Britain: “Ich werde zu den Engländern meine Zuflucht nehmen müssen. Wenn mir Pitt nicht seine Tochter zur Frau gibt, so bin ich nun verloren!” [“I will have to take refuge with the English. If Pitt does not give me his daughter as a wife, I am lost!”] (Tieck 121). In 1793, Artois had been denied exile in the British Isles; in 1796, he moved to Edinburgh before being invited to Britain in 1799. He had a permanent residence in London until the Bourbons were restored to the French throne and he could re-migrate to Paris as Charles X. He was forced to go into exile again at the height of the July Revolution in 1830 (Mansel).

17 See Köpke xii and Tiepke 76.

18 The tears of the exiled priests bear an intertextual reference both to Dante’s Divine Comedy and Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister. Brentano’s novel thus relates itself to the literary history of exile and the related affective aesthetics of nostalgia, identity, and belonging.

19 Vesuvius is the second comparative image Godwi uses to describe the affect brought about by the silent forces of both Werdo Senne and the French émigrés: “Aehnliche Ruhe wird mich ergreifen, wenn ich über die Berge von kalter fester Lava um den Vesuv herumwallen werde” [“A similar calm will grip me as I surge over the mountains of cold solid lava around Vesuvius”] (82). The three silences link three tenses (Werdo=present; émigrés=past; Vesuvius=future) and contribute to the mobile aspect of both the narrative and Godwi’s life.

20 See Nau’s insistence on Condé’s “Bescheidenheit und Einsicht” [“modesty and insight”] in contrast to the extravagant behavior of the princes in Coblenz (21).

21 For a detailed discussion of Fouqué’s novel in the context of knowledge productions in the hi/story of migration and Huguenot myth-making, see my “Migration”.

22 For a discussion of the novel’s borussophilia in the context of patriotic inclinations and Huguenot identity struggles in the early nineteenth century, see my “Migration”.