Worlds Elsewhere (14 page)

Mozart's
The Tempest
was one of the great operatic might-have-beens. But then
Zauberflöte
contained enough magic of its own, I thought as I walked back through the darkened, silent streets of Weimar. For all the silliness of Schikaneder's plot, the music was transcendent, grave and mystical, filled with an exultant sense of joy but also the strange youthful gravity Mozart summoned without apparent effort. Listening, I felt the philosophical tangles of Goethe and Weimar classicism and nostrification slipping away: Mozart had the measure of me.

He certainly had a way with recognition scenes. When Pamina and Tamino were reunited in the final act, it was via a duet of heart-stopping simplicity and grace, their vocal lines winding ecstatically around each other while strings pulsed mesmerically underneath. Forget airy sprites and frolicking masquers: the transposition that introduced it, from a lambent A-flat major to a shimmering F major, was a conjuring trick that rivalled anything written by Shakespeare.

AS I BOARDED THE TRAIN,
my head was full of everything I'd seen. For all the ardent, sometimes alarming zealousness of German Shakespearians –
unser
Shakespeare, divine Wilhelm and the rest – it was possible to explain away their obsession as Roland Petersohn had done: as an exaggerated symptom of the nationalistic fervour that swept through many new European states in the revolutionary years of the mid-nineteenth century.

Shakespeare had been essential to the renaissance of German literature and drama for the German Romantics; from there, particularly once Germany had an authorised translation, it wasn't the
craziest leap to declare him an honorary German. Many countries had tried to plant a flag in Shakespeare, whether it was fables about his supposed Sicilian origins or recent Canadian attempts to claim that a seventeenth-century oil painting now kept in a vault in Ontario, the Sanders portrait, is the only surviving portrait done from life (and thus a more authentic relic than anything owned by Canada's two ancient rivals, America and Britain). Such nationalistic appropriations were a touch naive; but they testified, if little else, to Shakespeare's global reach and the intensity of devotion he inspired worldwide.

Another period of the Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft's past was infinitely more troubling. While at the Goethe-Schiller Archive, I'd glanced at the society's papers, ordering a couple of box files on the off chance they might throw up something. One box was from the 1930s and included a colourful copy of the magazine
Die Woche
commemorating a Weimar performance of
Was Ihr Wollt
(
Twelfth Night,
translated under its playful alternative title
What You Will
). The issue was published in 1932. I didn't have the time – or the German – to dig deeper, but it fired a question: what
had
happened to the Gesellschaft the year following, once the National Socialists had seized power?

The answer wasn't hard to find. The English-language history printed on the Gesellschaft's website restricted itself to a taut and legalistic paragraph, but was at least clear: the DSG had fallen squarely under the influence of the Nazi regime. Party officials had infiltrated the board, Jewish subscribers been forced to resign. The annual Shakespeare-Tage were remodelled to accommodate Nazi interests and ideologies.

There was barely an academic or literary institution that had not been forced into some ghastly accommodation with Hitler's regime, but it was conspicuous that the Party had shown such interest in Shakespeare. Could it be related to those nineteenth-century attempts to claim him for German culture? And what happened once the second world war had begun, when Germany and the country of Shakespeare's birth were officially at war?

The website article had been written by an academic from Hanover, Ruth von Ledebur, who had researched the Gesellschaft's history and was coming to the conference in Munich. I emailed, asking if we could meet. In the meantime, I downloaded a slew of journal articles to my laptop to read on the train.

What I read made my head throb even more. The early years aside,
the DSG had done its best to keep out of the political intrigues that overtook Germany during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It prided itself on its internationalist reputation, boasting that by 1911 its members included Theodore Roosevelt and King George V of England, alongside the emperors of Austria and Germany.

Such amity did not last. One flashpoint was the first world war, when Shakespeare had – like so much else – been drawn into the conflict. As in 1864, an anniversary was responsible: 1916 was three hundred years since Shakespeare's death, the cue for events in various cities around the world, among them Prague, New York, Madrid and Copenhagen.

The story went something like this. Hearing that German Shakespearians intended to plough ahead with their celebrations despite the fact that there was a war on, an elderly British playwright called Henry Arthur Jones had written a pamphlet pouring caustic scorn on the idea that Germany could find anything at all to celebrate in Shakespeare. Jones had made a name on the late-Victorian stage with society dramas, to great commercial but little critical success. (Oscar Wilde once quipped that ‘there are three rules for writing plays. The first rule is not to write like Henry Arthur Jones; the second and third rules are the same.') Now sixty-five, a semi-invalid, Jones was crabbed and cantankerous, devoted to defending his country's honour with a mania that verged on lunacy.

In
Shakespeare and Germany,
published in 1916, Jones turned his fire on German claims to own Shakespeare, which by that stage had hardened into a trope:

It was not incidental that Jones's title page stated that
Shakespeare and Germany
had been ‘written during the Battle of Verdun'.

The pamphlet may have been deranged, but in one respect it was dead right – caught up in its own brand of nationalistic fervour, the Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft had indeed convinced itself that 1916 should be a bellicose celebration of the Germanness of Shakespeare. When president Alois Brandl addressed his colleagues in Weimar in April 1914, even before hostilities formally commenced, he insisted that ‘Shakespeare belongs to our spiritual armament', and ended quoting the words of Henry V before Agincourt:

Brandl would not be the first to reach for
Henry V
during wartime – and was certainly not the last – but the effect was to entrench divisions between British and German academics. When an erstwhile colleague of Brandl's, the Anglo-Jewish scholar Israel Gollancz, was assembling a
Book of Homage to Shakespeare
for 1916, asking representatives from countries worldwide to send in tributes to the plays and poems, Germany and Austria were pointedly uninvited. Another DSG stalwart, the dramatist Ludwig Fulda, suggested that if the Kaiser's army were to win the war, a clause should be inserted into the peace treaty ‘stipulating the formal surrender of William Shakespeare to Germany' (it was a ‘mistake' that he had been born in England in the first place). It seems unlikely that Fulda knew of Henry Arthur Jones's pamphlet, which suggested the Germans would try to do exactly this. And it was apparently not a joke.

In March 1933, once the Nazis had seized power, the Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft was even more eager to conform. Nervous about the newly passed legislation concerning
Gleichschaltung
(‘falling-into-line'), the society hurriedly recast its Shakespeare-Tag celebrations to remove any taint of opposition. Echoing Freiligrath the century before, the new keynote speaker, Max Deutschbein, enlisted none other than Hamlet to this new
Völkisch
cause, ‘not only the most powerful revelation of the poet himself, but … at the same time the most striking embodiment of the heroic-Germanic man'.

The Party repaid the compliment handsomely. Within the year, the DSG was receiving funds from the foreign office. Fervent right-wingers
soon thronged its ranks. Rainer Schlösser, a journalist and favourite of Goebbels, became a committed member, as did Joachim von Ribbentrop, later Germany's ambassador to Britain. A rubicon loomed in 1936, when the translator Hans Rothe, whose muscular, modernist versions of Shakespeare had been popular during the Weimar era, found himself under attack. Remarkably, the dispute made headlines: the SS house magazine
Der Schwarze Korps
weighed in, and in May 1936 none other than Goebbels gave a speech proclaiming that ‘literary experiments' on writers such as Shakespeare were not to be tolerated. (Rothe had already fled the country.) Invited to offer scholarly judgement, the Gesellschaft dithered before eventually ruling that Rothe's translations were inferior to Schlegel-Tieck.

Things became stranger, and more sinister. Otherwise innocuous
Jahrbuch
articles began to bristle with terms such as
Kampf
(‘struggle') and
Streben
(‘striving'). A lowpoint came in that same year of 1936, when Professor Hans F. K. Günther, whose eugenic research had made him an object of veneration for many senior Nazis, joined the board. The author of such works as
A Racial Typology of the Jewish People,
Günther was not selected, needless to say, for his expertise in literary criticism. On Shakespeare-Tag that April, he gave a talk. Its full title was ‘Shakespeare's Girls and Women from a Biological Perspective', an ominous nod to an essay on the heroines by the Jewish poet Heinrich Heine.

Even by the surreal standards of National Socialism, the talk makes for bewildering reading. Günther argued that Shakespeare was a fervent eugenicist, committed throughout his works to ideals of racial purity, whether in Sonnet 1's claim that ‘from fairest creatures we desire increase' (to breed) or the way in which, at the close of
Twelfth Night,
Viola and Sebastian recognise each other because of their ‘noble' ancestry.

‘Some of you might be somewhat shocked at my attempt to connect Shakespeare with questions of heredity, selection, eradication and birth statistics,' Günther announced:

According to the notes, his speech was received ‘with applause'. The text is there, in cold print, in the 1937 issue of the
Jahrbuch.

Later I read a translation of the resignation letter of one Dr Ludwig Goldstein from Königsberg. The letter had arrived in 1933. ‘My entire life I have been a faithful and active member of the German Shakespeare Society,' Goldstein began:

Three years later, by the time Günther stood up to deliver his speech, there would have been no Jewish members whatsoever. Ludwig Fulda, so stridently nationalistic during the first world war, was also a Jew, and had also been forced to resign. In 1939, denied entry to the United States, he committed suicide.

Waiting for my connection on the platform, I thought grimly of the train journey I had just taken. A few minutes out of Weimar, we had passed a large forest, the Ettersberg, the hunting ground for the Dukes of Weimar since at least the seventeenth century. As we had swept past, I had seen through the rich green of the trees a tall thin spire in austere grey brick. Solitary and immense, it surveyed the land for miles around. It was the monument to the Buchenwald concentration camp, less than six miles from Weimar. The trains had gone there too.