Hints for the Teaching of Modern German Literature

Abstract

MOST STUDENTS of modern German literature, influenced by such reasoning, expect to find the books and the short stories with which the course deals not too much at variance with their own Unterhaltungsliteratur in the popular magazines. Yet to large degree recent German literature has its very foundations in the writings of the Classic and Romantic Schools, circumstance which may confuse the uninitiated. Thus even Lewis Mumford finds the present-day German authors for that reason too aloof and conceited, lacking somehow a common sense that binds us to other men, humility which accepts the infinite processes and powers that men call God.' How different from every-day reading modern German literature can be, is shown by the typical selections in H. G. Fiedler's Oxford Book of German Prose.2 These excerpts are not taken from pleasant stories, whose end one might guess after having read the first few lines, but they are concerned partly with the description of nature and its wonders as, for instance, in Hermann Lbns' Heidebuch, partly with the weal and woe of all mankind, as in the historical work of Ricarda Huch, Der Dreiszigjihrige Krieg; finally there is the inner world, das innere Reich, whose representatives for Fiedler are Hermann Stehr, with his Geigenmacher and Rudolph Binding's Das innere Auge. And we can see from modern German literature, as typified by this selection, that Goethe's influence is felt more strongly than ever; rightly enough, two selections are dedicated to him, one by Gerhart Hauptmann, Jena, Weimar und Goethe, and the other is Wilhelm Schifer's treatment of Goethe's Faust.