Did Lou inspire guilt, as well?

Abstract

Abstract I discuss the late nineteenth century emergence of the expressions guilt and guilt feelings (to denote a complex emotion, and not the established idea of culpability), across several European language-cultures. I nominate a specific spot in time as having prompted one of the earliest appearances in print of the German expression Schuldgefühl and its associated complex reflexive sense (that others – one's community – may hold you culpable for some transgression or impropriety, but you yourself know that any manifested remorse conceals a deeper absence of remorse). This is the occasion on which Nietzsche returned to his friend Paul Rée from a mountain hike with the irresistibly captivating and unchaperoned Lou von Salomé (a “summit experience” precise details of which are unclear.) As Nietzsche well knew, Rée was equally smitten with the delightful Lou: and here Friedrich had taken flagrant advantage (of Rée, ill-fatedly absent from the mountain adventure). In response to Rée's censure, Nietzsche feels in himself a complex reaction: not of remorse, exactly, and not at all of repentance, but Schuldgefühl (feeling of guilt), a new formulation for a newly-identified (or newly-invented) condition. Thereafter I chart what seems to be the spread of the phrase and concept (denoting the emotion) in some representative English literature Victorian fiction, in Freud, Kafka, and current non-literary usage. A final point of orientation is Vronsky's (or is it Tolstoy's?) projection of guilt feelings, avant la lettre, in Anna Karenina.