Disenchantment as Reenchantment and the Genesis of the Pöbel in Gottfried Keller's Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe

Abstract

This article reads Gottfried Keller's Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe (1856) alongside Hegel's Philosophie des Rechts in order to explore the novella's account of the origin of the dispossessed Pöbel and demonstrates that Keller's novella ultimately anticipates Marx's critique of Hegel's account of civil society. In the first part of the article, I show that the farmers, driven by an ideal of bourgeois individuality, make a bid for legally substantiated recognition of ownership that eventually results in a process of property liquidation. In the second part, I argue that the fathers' failure is mirrored in the children's failed effort to legitimate their sexual difference in a marital institution. Ultimately, their suicide pact is not contrary to the ethical code they struggle to satisfy throughout the novella but fulfills the capitalistic logic of exchange in the form of asset liquidation. I conclude by reflecting on the status of myth in Keller's realism, arguing that the artwork reveals the contradictions of the social world that it belongs to, not by constructing a vantage point beyond myth, but rather by representing its own appropriation of myth.