Idealism and Disillusion in Grabbe's Aschenbrodel

Abstract

Grabbe's Aschenbr6del has been very largely ignored in the secondary literature. The fairy tale comedy as a dramatic mode has never enjoyed a high critical estimate and the somewhat cursory studies on this genre fail to distinguish Grabbe's play from numerous experiments of the later Romantics.' Specialist studies on Grabbe's work as a whole also give little attention to Aschenbridel. The tendency of earlier critics, exemplified for instance by Otto Nieten,2 was to see the play as another example, like the earlier Nanette und Maria, of Grabbe's cynical attempts to attract the public by experimenting in popular forms far removed from his own real interests and problems. The recent biographer Fritz B6ttger3 largely continues this interpretation in suggesting that the play is a somewhat irresponsible by-product outside Grabbe's true development. Even F. J. Schneider,4 whose study of 1934 still provides the most serious estimate of Grabbe's work, finds much of the play derivative and insincere, although he does pay respect to the effectiveness of many of the comic figures. Yet Aschenbrodel may well justify a more sympathetic approach. The play has, above all in its comic scenes, a curious attraction and vitality. It is the only other work besides Scherz, Satire, Ironie und tiefcre Bedeutung in which Grabbe gave free vent to his irrational and often grotesque sense of farce. Moreover, despite the limitations of this somewhat constraining literary form, we see here as clearly as anywhere in Grabbe the clash between idealist and skeptic, between the dreamer and the man of bitter and desperate disillusion. An appreciation of