Der Herr Etatsrat : Theodor Storm’s Critical Reflection on Ersatzreligion

Abstract

Scholarship on the role that Theodor Storm’s personal history plays in his literary work has frequently addressed the matter of his religious beliefs. David A. Jackson traces both Storm’s “Feuerbachian atheism” (Theodor Storm 106) and his resultant “concern with alternative values” (19). The ultimate “alternative value” for Storm, Jackson argues, is “die Liebe zwischen Mann und Frau,” which Storm characterizes in his correspondence with his then fiancee, Constanze, as “eine gottliche Offenbarung” and “unmittelbare Gottheit,” indeed to such an extent that “ja Liebe ist schon Religion” (qtd. in Jackson, “Storms Stellung” 46). Barbara Burns’s work on Storm represents a variation on – though certainly not a departure from – Jackson’s in two related ways. First, she qualifies Storm’s atheism as a “gradual movement away from religious faith towards secular humanism” (10), and the latter principle is certainly one foundation of Storm’s oeuvre. Second, she focusses the “Liebe” of the correspondence specifically on “[d]evotion to spouse and family,” which, she argues, “virtually constituted a replacement religion for Storm,” with “the idea of the family unit not only as the source of solace, but even of salvation and a degree of immortality.” This understanding of Storm’s religious views shapes Burns’s reading both of his early novellas, in which “the idyll of stable and peaceful relationships” is “removed from the evil and distress of the outside world,” and of his later works, with families that today would be called dysfunctional facing “the invasion of negative forces into what ought to be a sanctuary and an impenetrable stronghold” (19). Certainly, the replacement religion identified in Storm scholarship is reflected in his work in ways that have yet to be explored. This paper will analyze some of these, but is concerned primarily with Storm’s self-critical and socio-critical engagement with the very phenomenon of Ersatzreligion.1 While one typically – and rightly – associates this theme in Storm’s work with Der Schimmelreiter (1888), it is even more prevalent in the earlier and less familiar novella Der Herr Etatsrat (1881). In keeping with the darker nature of Storm’s later work, this novella