[In the following essay, Benario suggests that Freytag's novel of academic life, Die Verlorene Handschrift, was inspired by the author's relationship with the scholars Theodor Mommsen and Moriz Haupt.]

A few years ago, Professor Géza Alföldy published a splendid article in which he reexamined an inscription from Rome and identified the honoree as the historian Tacitus. The title is cryptic; it is “Bricht der Schweigsame sein Schweigen? Eine Grabinschrift aus Rom.”¹ I did not understand the significance of the first part until it was pointed out to me that it invoked a novel by Gustav Freytag (1816-1895) entitled Die verlorene Handschrift.² It is a vast work; in the edition which I used it covers 826 pages,³ while a translation of the whole reaches 953!⁴ I find the story bloated and excessive,⁵ yet the novel was popular among Freytag's contemporaries and in the following generations reached at least sixteen editions. By 1923 there had been 77 reprints with a total of 159,000 copies in print.⁶ The last reprint was published in 1942.

In the very first chapter, a university professor of Classical Studies named Felix Werner comes across a comment written by a monk during the Thirty Years War about a manuscript of an author whom the monk cannot properly identify. It bears the title Das alt ungehür puoch von ussfart des swigers. A later scribe had added the information that the book was in Latin, almost unreadable, and began with the words lacrimas et signa. The professor recognizes that the words appear in the fifth chapter of the Annales and divines that the original title had been Taciti ab excessu, which the monk rendered Vom Ausgange des Schweigenden, “From the departure of the Silent One.” The manuscript was a Tacitus. Could it have survived?

The professor enthuses to a friend,

“Wenn es aber wäre”, fuhr er auf, und seine Augen strahlten, “wenn uns die Kaisergeschichte des ersten Jahrhunderts, wie sie Tacitus geschrieben, durch ein günstiges Geschick zurückgegeben würde, es wäre ein Geschenk, so gross, dass der Gedanke an die Möglichkeit einen ehrlichen Mann wohl berauschen darf wie römischer Wein.”

(16-17)

“but if it were so,” he continued, his eyes flashing, “if the imperial history of the first century, as written by Tacitus, were restored by a propitious fate, it would be a gift so great that the thought of the possibility of it might well, like Roman wine, intoxicate an honest man.”

(I 12)

And much later, Professor Werner emotionally repeats this desire,

“Wenn sie aber gefunden wird! Es ist nur ein kleiner Teil unseres Wissens aus alter Zeit, der in ihr verborgen liegt. Und doch würde gerade dieser Fund eine verdämmernde Landschaft mit hellem Glanze erfüllen, und einige Jahrzehnte des alten Lebens würden für unser Auge in festen Umrissen sichtbar werden, als ob sie in nächster Vergangenheit lägen.”

(667-68)

“But if it is found! It is only a small portion of our knowledge of ancient times that lies concealed in it. And yet it is just this discovery that would pour a flood of light upon a landscape hovering in twilight, and several decades of ancient life would become visible to our eyes with as distinct an outline as if they lay in a nearer past.”

(II 357)

This is the thread that holds the entire narrative together, the driving force which leads the professor into circumstances and events that would not normally fall to the lot of an academic. His hope to find this manuscript is ultimately quashed, although his sovereign undertakes to satisfy his eagerness with a skillfully made forgery,

“Kurz gesagt, ich wünsche, dass Herr Werner recht bald auf eine sichere Spur der Handschrift geleitet werde, wenn es nicht möglich ist, die Handschrift selbst herbeizuschaffen.”

(583)

“In short, I wish that Mr. Werner should soon be put upon a certain trace of the manuscript, if it is not possible to obtain the manuscript itself.”

(II 259)

Subsequently, the forger receives the professor's violent rebuke,

“er ist ein untreuer Philolog, ein Verräter an seiner Wissenschaft, Fälscher und Betrüger da, wo nur Ehrlichkeit ein Recht hat zu leben, ein Verdammter da, wo es keine Sühne und Gnade gibt.”

(752)

“he is an unfaithful philologist, a traitor to learning, a forger, and deceiver in that in which only honorable men have a right to live, a cursed man, for whom there is no repentance and no mercy.”

(II 456)

Tacitus is not present for large parts of the whole, although the eighth chapter of the first book is entitled “Noch einmal Tacitus,” but his aura always is. In this chapter, Freytag reveals a deep understanding and appreciation of the historian. Elsewhere he comments upon the academic profession,

“wie die ganze geistige Entwicklung der Menschheit nichts sei als ein ernstes und andächtiges Suchen nach Wahrheit.”

(241)

“that the whole intellectual development of man is, in fact, nothing but an earnest and reverent search after truth.”

(I 271)

Tacitus even intrudes upon a planned holiday with his wife in Italy.

“Gut”, versetzte der Professor, “also die Alpen, dann bis Neapel. Ich habe nur zuerst einige Wochen in Florenz für den Tacitus zu arbeiten.”

(456)

“Very well,” said the Professor; “to the Alps and then to Naples; but in passing I must work a few weeks at Florence upon Tacitus.”

(II 114)

Who was Gustav Freytag, the author of such an intriguing subject? The judgment of a scholar who published a school edition of the novel, much abbreviated, in 1898 remains valid after a century's passage:

There is no novelist who is more worthy of the attention of the student interested in recent German literature than Gustav Freytag. He is called by his countrymen the forerunner of the new school of Realists, and certainly none of the writers who can be ranked with him have surpassed him in grace of language, historical insight, lofty ideals, or in knowledge of human character. … Die verlorene Handschrift has a special interest as revealing certain phases of academic life in Germany. The picture which it presents of German university life, both from the point of view of the professor and the student, cannot fail to be instructive and interesting.⁷

A few years before, an English critic had claimed that “A more national writer than Gustav Freitag, Germany has hardly ever had.”⁸

Only a few details of his life are particularly pertinent in the present context. In his twenties, he was Privatdozent for German literature at the University of Breslau, and in 1848, with a friend, bought a weekly publication, Die Grenzboten, which they jointly edited for well more than a decade and made extraordinarily important as an organ of national liberation and unification. The city in which he lived during these years was Leipzig. In 1848, the University of Leipzig filled its chair of jurisprudence with the young Theodor Mommsen, who, in his brief stay in the city until he and two colleagues, Otto Jahn and Moritz Haupt, were removed from their chairs because of their political activity, formed part of a group, both social and intellectual, to which Freytag also belonged. He and Mommsen developed a friendship which grew ever deeper and endured until Freytag's death more than forty years later.⁹ Their correspondence was extensive, their personal relations extremely close, they seem never to have fallen out even though they disagreed violently on some matters of a public nature in which they were both involved. Indeed, it was in a letter to Freytag, years after the occasion, that Mommsen related the circumstances which led to his writing the Römische Geschichte.¹⁰

When Freytag's novel appeared in 1864, he and Mommsen had known each other about a decade and a half, and Mommsen was then resident in Berlin. How did Freytag come to the idea of writing a lengthy novel about such a classical theme, and particularly based upon Tacitus? Had Mommsen had some influence?

The first question can be certainly answered, but I very much doubt that the historian had anything to do with the choice of Tacitus. Yet this was the period when Mommsen might well have been thinking of writing the next volume of his R.G., and he might have remarked that the loss of much of Tacitus' major works made the task of the modern scholar more difficult, even though Mommsen had a low opinion of the Roman's qualities. Most people will recall his statement that Tacitus was the most unmilitary of historians.¹¹

Freytag relates in his “Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben” that it was actually Moritz Haupt, the eminent Germanist and Classicist, who cast the seed for the novel which eventually appeared.

Schon einige Jahre vor dem Erscheinen von “Soll und Haben” hatte Haupt mich plötzlich aufgefordert, einen Roman zu schreiben. Dies stimmte damals mit stillen Plänen und ich hatte ihm zugesagt. Zu der verlorenen Handschrift aber steuerte er in ganz anderer Weise bei. Denn als wir einmal zu Leipzig, noch vor seiner Berufung nach Berlin, allein beieinander sassen, offenbarte er mir im höchsten Vertrauen, dass in irgendeiner westfälischen kleinen Stadt auf dem Boden eines alten Hauses die Reste einer Klosterbibliothek lägen. Es sei wohl möglich, dass darunter noch eine Handschrift verlorener Dekaden des Livius stecke.¹²

Already a few years before the appearance of Soll und Haben Haupt had suddenly urged me to write a novel. That coincided then with my secret plans and I agreed. But he led me to The lost manuscript in a totally different way. For as we once sat together alone in Leipzig, before his call to Berlin, he revealed to me in the greatest confidence that the remains of a monastery library survived on the property of an old house in some small city of Westphalia. It could be possible that in it was also a manuscript of lost decades of Livy.

Haupt was actually recalling a long tradition. B. L. Ullman described the circumstances well:

With the fourteenth century we begin to come upon hopes of finding the lost books of Livy. The hopes are soon followed by rumors. One of the first is related in a letter written by the Florentine scholar, Coluccio Salutati, in 1397. The letter is addressed to the Margrave of Moravia, who had told Coluccio that he had seen a complete Livy, and had, in fact, promised him a copy; but Coluccio had scarcely been convinced. But now the story was repeated to him by one of the Margrave's subordinates with such convincing detail that Coluccio was aroused. The manuscript was said to be in a monastery near Lübeck and so old that no one could read it. As late as 1850 the well-known scholar, Moritz Haupt, thought that the story of the Margrave of Moravia was worth investigating.¹³

Haupt was essentially the model for the hero of the novel, but not without some changes. “Mit einem Wort, er war ein sittlich makelloser, aber schwieriger Charakter; der Professor Felix Werner in Gustav Freytags ‘Verlorener Handschrift’ hat, nach dem eigenem Zeugnis des Autors, nicht alle Züge des Vorbilds in sein Wesen aufgenommen.”¹⁴ (“In a word, he was a scrupulously moral but difficult character; Professor Felix Werner in Gustav Freytag's Verlorene Handschrift, according to the author's own words, did not display all the characteristics of his model in his own manner.”)

Why Freytag, when years later he came to write the novel, chose to change the treasure from Livy to Tacitus we cannot divine. Several factors may well have coalesced. In 1855, Haupt had published a scholarly edition of Tacitus' Germania. In 1859, Freytag began to publish his Bilder aus der deutschen Vergangenheit, in the early parts of which he would have found Tacitus useful and Livy essentially valueless. Might it also have had something to do with the public's anticipation of Mommsen's history of the early empire, a volume (or volumes) never in the end undertaken?¹⁵

The correspondence between Mommsen and Freytag, which has been skillfully exploited by Lothar Wickert for his biography of Mommsen but has never been fully published, reveals the intimacy and the intellectual exchange between them. Wickert speaks of “die geistige Wahlverwandschaft, die keinen Anspruch kennt, aber auch keiner Legitimation bedarf, weil sie ihre Begründung in sich selber findet.”¹⁶ (“the spiritual relationship which recognizes no claim but requires no legitimation, because it finds its basis in itself.”)

On 29 September 1863 Freytag began a very long letter with the salutation “Mein teurer Mommsen,” to which on 2 October the latter replied. The conclusion displays the warm relationship between them and the families:

Am Dienstag abend sollen Sie herzlich willkommen sein; meine Frau ist Ihnen besonders dankbar, dass Sie ihr die Freude Sie zu erwarten schon jetzt vergönnen. Ach unsere alten Leipziger Zeiten, wo sind sie hin! Man könnte in eine schandbar elegische Stimmung verfallen, wenn man's bedenkt, was so alles an lieben Menschen und guten Worten den Bach hinab geflossen ist. … Leben Sie wohl. Immer Ihr M. Ich erwarte Sie bei mir.¹⁷

You will be heartily welcome on Tuesday evening; my wife is particularly grateful to you because you already now give her the pleasure of expecting you. Oh our old Leipzig times, where have they gone! One could lapse into a shameful elegiac mood when one considers how many dear people and good words have flowed down the stream. … Be well. Always your M(ommsen). I await you in my house.

Mommsen recognized Freytag's literary eminence; in 1881, he spoke of him as Poetarum qui hodie apud nos sunt facile princeps, although there was probably a realization therein that the poets of the present day were of lower rank than such recent predecessors as Goethe, Schiller, and Heine.¹⁸ Ten years earlier, he had dedicated the first volume of the Römisches Staatsrecht to Freytag.¹⁹ On 22 November 1893, thanking Freytag for his congratulations on the fiftieth anniversary of Mommsen's doctorate, he wrote, “Wir haben viel geteilt, lieber alter Freund, viele mit einander geliebt und dann begraben. Es ist manches wider den Strich gegangen, was wir heute nicht ausgraben wollen; das, denke ich, wird verschwinden, wenn wir einmal wieder—wenn noch einmal—uns Auge in Auge sehen.” (“We have shared much, dear old friend, we have together loved many and then buried them. We have had some disagreements which we do not want to dig up today; that, I think, will disappear when we again, if there will be an again, gaze at each other eye to eye.”) Another meeting was not to be; Freytag died in 1895.²⁰ In the Nachlass of Freytag material are numerous press clippings reporting Mommsen's many honors.²¹

The influence of Die verlorene Handschrift surfaced in a time even nearer our own. In the 1920s, an elaborate fraud stemmed from a German, Dr. Max Funke, who claimed that he had seen the long sought Livy manuscript, which was in the possession of an Italian friend. The bubble of Funke's hopes, we know not whether for wealth or notoriety, was punctured by F. W. Hall of Oxford and A. E. Housman of Cambridge. All Funke's claims closely paralleled the circumstances in Freytag's novel.²²

This novel, tracing the quest for a lost manuscript of Rome's greatest historian, was Freytag's only piece of fiction which dealt with a subject within Mommsen's vast sweep. It represented a unique coincidence of interest in their long and friendly relationship. Each, at the height of his profession, rejoiced in the other's honors and achievements.²³

Notes

1. MDAI(R) [Mitteilungen. Deutsches Archaeologische Institut. Abteilung Rome] 102 (1995): 251-68.

2. I am grateful to B. Overbeck of the Staatliche Münzsammlung München for this information and for illuminating discussion.

3. Die verlorene Handschrift. Roman in fünf Büchern (Berlin: Deutsche Buch-Gemeinschaft G.m.b.H., no date).

4. The Lost Manuscript. Authorized translation from the Sixteenth German Edition. Two Volumes. (Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Company, 1890).

5. L. Thomas, “Bourgeois Attitudes: Gustav Freytag's Novels of Life in nineteenth-century Germany,” Proceedings of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, Literary and Historical Section 15, part 3, (1973): 70: “it is this ironic humour which enlivens the book and offsets the dreary preaching at the middle-class reader which is found in both novels [Soll und Haben is the other] and should be skipped by all readers.”

6. Thomas (above, note 5) 59.

7. K. M. Hewett, Freytag's Die Verlorene Handschrift (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1898), iii.

8. C. Alberti, “Gustav Freytag,” The National Review 10 (1887-1888): 80.

9. Otto Jahn in 1855 described this circle of friends (Wickert [see next note] III 36): “Eine mässige Anzahl von Männern, die sich zum Teil schon früher nahe gestanden hatten, war durch die gemeinsamen Interessen und Erlebnisse des Jahres 1848 noch enger miteinander verbunden und sie kamen damals in zwangloser Geselligkeit häufig zusammen. Während alle die höchsten Interessen geistiger Bildung teilten und mit Ernst verfolgten, gehörten sie ihren Beschäftigungen, Studien und Liebhabereien nach sehr verschiedenen Richtungen an, und eben diese Mannigfaltigkeit gab dem Verkehr den grössten Reiz. … Namentlich für uns Gelehrte war der Umgang mit Männern unschätzbar, welche bei echter Bildung—was leider von den Gelehrten nicht so schlechthin gilt—von ihrer praktischen Stellung aus dem Leben ganz andere Gesichtspunkte abzugewinnen wussten und dem Verkehr einen reichen Inhalt gaben.”

10. L. Wickert, Theodor Mommsen. Eine Biographie. Band III. (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1969), 655-56, letter of 13.3.1877. (Hereafter referred to by volume and page number.) The first few sentences follow: “Wissen Sie, wie ich dazu gekommen bin die römische Geschichte zu schreiben? Ich hatte in meinen jungen Jahren alle möglichen anderen Dinge im Sinn, Bearbeitung des römischen Criminalrechts, Herausgabe der römischen Legalurkunden, allenfalls ein Pandektencompendium, aber dachte an nichts weniger als an Geschichtschreibung. Da traf mich die bekannte Kinderkrankheit der jungen Professoren dem gebildeten Leipzig zu gegenseitiger Belästigung einen Vortrag über etwas zu halten, und da ich eben an dem Ackergesetz der gracchischen Zeit arbeitete und mit diesem selbst doch bei meiner künftigen Frau mich allzu schlecht eingeführt haben würde, so hielt ich einen politischen Vortrag über die Gracchen. Das Publikum nahm ihn hin, wie ähnliche Dinge auch, und ergab sich mit Fassung darein von dem berühmten Brüderpaar auch ferner nur eine dunkle Ahnung zu haben. Aber unter dem Publikum waren auch K. Reimer und Hirzel gewesen, und zwei Tage darauf kamen sie zu mir und fragten mich, ob ich ihnen nicht für ihre Sammlung eine römische Geschichte schreiben wollte. Nun war mir das zwar sehr überraschend, …”

11. Römische Geschichte V (1885), 165 = The Provinces of the Roman Empire I (1886), 181: “A worse account than that given by Tacitus of this war (Boudicca's uprising) in A xiv, 31-9 is scarcely to be found even in this most unmilitary of all writers.”

12. G. Freytag, Karl Mathy. Gedichte. Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben. (Leipzig: H. Fikentscher, no date), 649-50.

13. B. L. Ullman, “The Post-Mortem Adventures of Livy,” in Idem, Studies in the Italian Renaissance (Rome: 1955), 64. I am grateful to P. Pascal and L. W. R. Gillison for this reference.

14. Wickert (above, note 10) III 76; see also the letters quoted in his note 10, III 434-35. For a detailed discussion of the close relationship between the two, see W. Unte, “Gustav Freytag und Moriz Haupt,” Jahrbuch der Schlesischen Friedrich-Wilhelms Universität zu Breslau 28 (1987): 129-59. I am indebted to E. Mensching of the Technische Universität Berlin for sending me a copy of this article and for comments and suggestions. C. M. Ternes of the Centre Alexandre-Wiltheim, Luxembourg, has my gratitude both for comments upon this paper and for his essay of some years ago (below, note 23).

15. The intriguing question why Mommsen never wrote this history is discussed by A. Demandt, A History of Rome under the Emperors. Theodor Mommsen (London and New York, 1996).

16. Wickert I 34.

17. Wickert II 320-23.

18. Wickert IV 201, Mommsen, Gesammelte Schriften 8, 384.

19. Wickert IV 201.

20. Wickert IV 202.

21. L. Ping, “Gustav Freytag and the Prussian Gospel: Novels, Liberalism and History” (Ph.D. diss., University of Oregon, 1994), 212, note 14.

22. Ullman (above, note 13) 76-77.

23. Freytag has been almost entirely ignored by classical scholars in recent decades. I know of only one essay which discusses him and his work: C. M. Ternes, “Die Verlorene Handschrift de Gustav Freytag: Tacite dans la deuxième moitié du 19e siècle,” in Actes du Colloque Présence de Tacite (Tours 1992), 257-67. Nor have Germanic scholars devoted much attention to the author and this work; the MLA bibliography is sparse. A useful and charming little volume, well-illustrated, is Gustav Freytag. Leben und Werk, published by the Gustav-Freytag-Archiv und -Museum (Wangen in Allgäu, 1970), with text by K. Fleischer and M. Fleischer-Mucha.

    This paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South in Knoxville, TN, on April 7, 2000. I am grateful to this journal's anonymous referee for penetrating comments, as well as for the editor's assistance.