SOURCE: Brown, M. A. L. “Lenz's Hofmeister and the Drama of Storm and Stress.” In Periods in German Literature: Volume II: Texts and Contexts, edited by J. M. Ritchie, pp. 67-84. London: Oswald Wolff, 1969.

The choice of a drama to represent the Storm and Stress in a work of this kind is not surprising. Despite the undoubted affinity which existed between the Storm and Stress conception of creative genius and the poetic form of the lyric, an affinity reflected in the finest poems written by Goethe between 1770 and 1775, drama was the most popular mode of literary expression with this generation of young writers. It was the field, as they saw it, on which their revolutionary battles could be best fought and won. It enabled them, in the words of one critic, to present “a microcosm of the world” which would be both “immediate and active, combining speech and gesture”.¹ But why choose a play by Lenz? Or perhaps one should ask, expanding the implications of the question, has the drama of this brief period sufficient artistic merit or even interest to justify such a choice on any other than purely historical or representative grounds? Until about fifteen years ago the answer from the critics might well have been a heartfelt “No!” An unholy alliance of quite separate factors made a serious critical study of Storm and Stress drama, as distinct from a historical one, a remote possibility and Lenz was the particular victim of this situation, as of so many others in his lifetime.

Mature, balanced critics always feel an instinctive revulsion from the immature extravagance of emotion and form such as Goethe, Schiller and Klinger but not Lenz were lucky enough to outgrow: Hettner finds in Lenz's works “unruly impertinence in place of depth of emotion and passion”.² Gundolf describes him as a “crazy dreamer, the usual case-history of the outsider with illusions of genius”³ and a standard modern history comments: “with him [Lenz] freedom becomes unbridled behaviour”.⁴ The lofty self-assurance of these comments also demonstrates a further difficulty in any critical approach to Lenz: in his case even more than in Goethe's, it is difficult to prevent biographical fact from colouring one's whole interpretation of the works and to stop oneself finding “internal lack of system” coupled with “the ruins of external unity” everywhere in his dramas because they were present in his life.⁵ A critical difficulty of a different kind altogether arose because German critical discussion of drama has tended to see it strictly in terms of “tragedy” or “comedy” (seeing German drama itself as tragedy) and to be embarrassed by the existence of plays in an “impure” mixed form. The concentration on tragedy extended also, naturally enough, to the discussion of dramatic structure: there existed a highly sophisticated critical vocabulary which was well-adapted to analyse or describe a “classical” drama by Lessing, Schiller, or even Kleist, but its emphasis on “ordered structure” made it inadequate to describe a characteristic Storm and Stress drama except by negatives, e.g. as “a polymorphic dramatic event”.⁶ Lenz's two best known plays, Der Hofmeister and Die Soldaten, are not only structurally at variance with the strict canon—even Brecht writes of Der Hofmeister that “the contents unfold in all directions in natural disorder”⁷—they defy straightforward categorization as tragedies or comedies altogether. By 1968, however, this no longer counts as an immediate disqualification on aesthetic grounds. Prompted partly, perhaps, by developments in the contemporary theatre in Germany and elsewhere, a new and productive interest has been shown by critics not only in Storm and Stress and in Lenz but also in the broader questions of tragicomedy as a genre and its tradition in Germany and of “open form in drama”. The important critical studies that have appeared since 1958 by Guthke,⁸ Hinck,⁹ Klotz,¹⁰ Höllerer,¹¹ Schöne¹² and Titel¹³ constitute a revaluation of Lenz's work in particular and have produced immediate results—a collected edition has appeared,¹⁴ a complete one is under way¹⁵ and a reprint of the correspondence is promised (though a theatrical revival has yet to be announced). The respectability of Storm and Stress no longer has to be established by referring to its close association with the Enlightenment.

Der Hofmeister appeared anonymously in the spring of 1774, not quite a year after the first publication of Goethe's Götz von Berlichingen and while the Storm and Stress movement was in full spate. It was hailed rapturously in the Frankfurter Gelehrte Anzeigen, the organ of the writers of Storm and Stress, as an exciting new contribution to the wave of works which was sweeping away the last desiccated remnants of pseudo-classicism.¹⁶ One contemporary at least was seriously convinced that, after Götz von Berlichingen and Der Hofmeister, German literature could compete with Shakespeare.¹⁷ Lenz had possibly worked on an early version of the play even before he left Königsberg for Straßburg in 1771; the earliest version of which a manuscript exists, however, dates from 1772 and the play in its final form was completed between that year and 1774. It was also during the years 1771-4 that Lenz's most important theoretical work was written, in particular his major contribution to the dramatic theory of Storm and Stress, namely, his Anmerkungen übers Theater. These were probably originally delivered in the form of lectures to the literary-philosophical society in Straßburg of which Lenz was still a member (as Goethe had been earlier) and they were then revised for publication in 1774. During these years Lenz's activities centred on Straßburg and Alsace, the region which almost seems to form part of all early Storm and Stress activities as a result of the happy chance which brought Goethe and Herder together there and provided them with an ideal combination of scenery, folk-poetry and architecture as a stimulus to ideas, an illustration of theories, and an inspiration to poetry. Lenz had arrived in Straßburg just in time to meet Goethe before the latter's departure for Frankfurt, immediately wished to model himself on him and was soon in regular correspondence with Goethe himself and with members of his circle such as Herder and Lavater, meeting them as frequently as possible when they travelled through Straßburg.

It is easy to make Der Hofmeister sound like the worst kind of Storm and Stress product in the bad old sense—a farrago of fantastic and confusing invention with no recognizable shape. The action moves rapidly by means of a large number of mostly short scenes from one setting to another, and from one type of setting to another—indoors, outdoors, in town, or country, in manor or hovel; the characters and also the plots proliferate; shots are fired in anger and a suicide attempt is made on stage; off-stage one character castrates himself and another goes to the dogs in a more than usually literal manner; the passing of two years here and nine months there in intervals of the action is referred to casually; the dialogue abounds in oaths and imprecations but also alludes explicitly to Shakespeare, Rousseau and Lessing; true emotion verges on incoherence or inarticulateness; three favourite Storm and Stress themes are all included: the seduction of a girl who then has to flee her parents and live wretchedly; the artificiality, cynicism and emptiness of upper-class life; and the antagonism between children and parents. But all of this, though true, misrepresents a play in which the basic situations are surprisingly “normal” and continuity from one scene to the next is in fact very carefully maintained, though not by means of any “closed action”.

The action of Der Hofmeister in outline is as follows: a new tutor is appointed to an aristocratic household; shortly afterwards the daughter of the house has to part from her childhood sweetheart who is leaving to spend three years at university; once there he takes up his new life and is soon involved in the exploits of his student friends while at home the girl is involved with the new tutor; when she becomes pregnant she and the tutor leave her home, separately, and they do not subsequently meet; much later her father finds her on the very point of committing suicide, he saves her and she is reunited with her family, eventually also with her old sweetheart who takes her back along with his infant son; one of his student friends is also happily reunited by the end with a girl whose honour he had earlier compromised and with his own father from whom as a student ne'er-do-well he had been estranged; by this time the tutor, aghast at the consequences of his own sexuality has castrated himself, but nevertheless he can find a peasant girl who will be happy to marry him. Essentially these happenings are domestic, arising out of one initial family situation and culminating in a happy family reunion from which the outsider who had joined the family at the beginning is finally excluded, but they are also concerned with the social issue of class, as the outsider is of a lower class than the others. With the exception of the act of self-mutilation, however, are the situations and the action remote from experience? The structure of the drama largely follows the pattern of the events themselves; it is only in the last act that one is conscious of the sequence of events being forcibly arranged to produce a well-timed grand finale. In almost the full Storm and Stress sense of the term the play is “Shakespearean”: it is a long story spread over a number of years, full of incident and emotion, with the action dividing and proceeding simultaneously in different places before being reunited; a large number of characters drawn from different social backgrounds are involved; comedy and tragedy are mingled. However, the Storm and Stress characters par excellence, the “grosser Kerl” or the “Kraftweib”, are missing, along with the vast historical scale of events within which they usually operate and which also forms part of the “Shakespearean” manner.

His irreverent polemic with Aristotle in the Anmerkungen übers Theater¹⁸ might lead us to expect that Lenz would totally disregard the unities of time and place and the action of Der Hofmeister clearly requires that characters become separated from each other over a long period of time. It is from this separation and the resultant isolation that the emotional crises flow. At the same time, however gleefully he cocks a snook at authority in the Anmerkungen (e.g. in the phrase “the ever so ghastly, sickeningly famous Bull of the Three Unities”),¹⁹ he expresses his admiration of Shakespeare elsewhere²⁰ for throwing aside the two unities of time and place only where the third one, that of action, demands it; the unity of action or at least of dramatic interest he does not wish to see destroyed. In Der Hofmeister there is no suggestion that he is trying to stretch the new freedom as far as it will go, no sense of leaping from place to place out of sheer youthful exuberance to the detriment of dramatic unity or probability. Instead the distances covered result naturally from the situations (e.g. son leaving home for university, then moving to another one, pregnant daughter leaving home in panic, disgraced tutor likewise, distracted father pursuing both) and the situations are essentially domestic and firmly rooted in the social reality of Germany in Lenz's own lifetime. The wish to convey a sense of political, historical or geographical scale by moving the action from place to place, which is important for example in Götz von Berlichingen, plays no part in Der Hofmeister. As a good follower of Storm and Stress, Lenz views the miniature portraiture of “regular” drama with distaste—too much of experience is squeezed out for his requirement of a “picture of human society” to be met. The choice of a contemporary setting in Germany for Der Hofmeister and Der neue Menoza, and one in Flanders for Die Soldaten, gives him sufficient freedom to do this; the more remote and less substantial Storm and Stress settings, whether Italianate, pseudo-American or historical, are rejected.

The Storm and Stress writers as a whole preferred the “open” form of dramatic structure to that of “closed action” for a number of reasons. No doubt the combined power of Shakespeare's histories and tragedies and the native product Götz von Berlichungen outweighed even the emotional force of Ugolino and demonstrated that the dramatic power of a whole drama does not have to be in direct ratio to the “concentration” of the action. But more significantly, this new generation of writers was attracted by and responded wholeheartedly to the sheer diversity of reality, to the possible range of human experience (in spite of the limits set), and to the characteristically individual quality whether of human beings, historical periods, nations, regions, social classes. Lenz's personal enjoyment of the “multiplicity of natural phenomena” comes out strongly in his critical writings, especially in the Anmerkungen, and he uses the term “Raritätenkasten” (casket of curiosities), as Goethe had done, to convey the sense of a constantly moving, excitingly coloured panorama passing in front of our eyes which may be provided by historical events themselves but can also be created by the dramatist in imitation of reality. The idea of showing an individual standing against the “inevitable course of the whole”²¹ would clearly also require dramatic action on the broadest possible scale, but this is not relevant to Lenz's dramas.

A further important characteristic of the “open form”, as Klotz has emphasized in general and Titel shown in relation to Lenz, is that the action unfolds in time as a “Geschehen” (happening) rather than a “Handlung” (plot), as a chronological sequence of which the drama itself can show only a part or parts and which will necessarily be discontinuous—the action of the play is presumed to “continue” in the lapses of time between scenes or acts—and which may lead eventually to a conclusion. If so, however, this will not have been suggested earlier in the drama as inevitable or implicit in the situation, background and character of the opening. The effect produced in Der Hofmeister is one of at times almost casual chronological continuity rather than of concentrated, one-directional causality—even once the action of the play is well advanced a number of possibilities or directions remain open at any given moment for further development. The opening scene of the drama is a simple early example: it takes the form of a monologue, a traditional opening or so it seems, except that here the speaker, Läuffer, instead of recapitulating past events for the benefit of the reader, past events on which the action of the drama will largely depend, is running through his personal employment prospects for the immediate future. He lists the range of possibilities and rules them all out on one count or another; presumably the situation must be resolved soon or he would not be anxious, but he is not desperately anxious and the insistent “by today at the very latest” of Wallenstein, Der zerbrochene Krug, or Maria Magdalene is quite absent. The next scene follows on directly as two more characters appear in the same street and we realize that the issue is more nearly decided than Läuffer realized; by the third scene his new position is established fact—events have moved in a particular direction quite quickly after all. Much later in the action Läuffer seeks refuge with the village schoolmaster (a completely new character, but the reasons for Läuffer's choice of host, if only implied, are obvious enough); he is given shelter and protected in his immediate danger, but then he stays on and on till he comes to expect to remain there to the end of his days; from this gloomy prospect he is saved by the totally unexpected appearance and intervention of Lisa. In a rather similar way, we have Fritz and Gustchen at a moment of extreme emotional anguish and uncertainty at the very end of Act I and we may well expect, if we mistake the structure of the play, to be shown at the beginning of Act II what has happened to them, but by then two whole years have elapsed during which, as we soon learn, Läuffer has stayed on as tutor and Gustchen and Fritz have stayed apart, but Fritz has formed no new attachment and neither, yet, have Gustchen and Läuffer though their state of unhappiness, has steadily intensified over the period. Fritz has grown up, “you're not a child any more” (II, 3) and Gustchen has presumably taken her first communion, but nothing else has “happened’. It is only when Gustchen is about to commit suicide and her father must arrive in time to prevent her that the time factor is crucial to the action. When Gustchen's father looks for her lost child, he is successful eventually; Fritz races home in the end not, say, in time to prevent her marrying someone else, but because (as he believes) she is dead—how soon or late he arrives matters to him but not to the action. A number, though not all, of the scenes have a consciously inconclusive ending which emphasizes this absence of plot tension still more e.g. they finish on the phrase “we'll know eventually” (IV, 6) or “we'll see” (IV, 4).

It may perhaps still be felt that this structure, if not chaotic or fragmented, is shapeless and serves no useful purpose in relation to subject or theme, especially as the act divisions do not correspond to natural breaks in the action or to regular or symmetrically spaced divisions of time. The result, however, is not confusion and if one accepts Schöne's general statement of the theme of the play it can be seen that the apparently shapeless time sequence is the mould which contains the repetition, with a large number of variants, of an exemplary event or situation.²² One could go further and suggest that it is also the means by which Lenz can create, within a relatively limited, realistic framework, emotional extremes of characteristic Storm and Stress violence. In his most convincing analysis, Schöne sees the play as a series of variations on the theme of the Prodigal Son, a parable which might have been designed to be a Storm and Stress archetype as it illustrates not only the difficult relationship of father to son, but also jealousy between brothers. According to Schöne this is the thematic link between the different sets of characters and the apparently straying strands of the action. The action has a well-defined general outline in that at the beginning (from Act I, 3 to the end of the act) all the main characters are together. It is the dramatic function of Act I to show them grouped together in this way before the first imminent departure, that of the son, Fritz. From the beginning of Act II until Act V the characters are dispersed, separated and estranged, seldom communicating with each other and suffering constantly from loneliness, poverty and remorse. In the final two scenes (V, 11 and 12) the family is together again and is even extended to include Gustchen's infant and Pätus along with his father, grandmother and bride. Läuffer is now excluded from the group, but has already, in the immediately preceding scene, found himself a wife. Schöne argues that the key relationships in the drama are those of parents to children and not, for example, those of friends or lovers. Läuffer's father misjudges his son's interests, makes an ill-advised choice of education for him, and encourages him to submit to indignity and humiliation in his employment. He is concerned at his son's suffering—but helpless; and there is every reason to agree with the Privy Councillor that he himself is largely to blame for his son's situation. The Major treats his son with brutal contempt; he dotes on his pretty daughter who deceives him. The Major then goes nearly mad with grief, more at losing her than at what she has done; without her the very idea of family is meaningless and he would rather go and fight with the Russian army against the Turks than stay at home, bereft of her, with his wife. He finds his daughter about to commit suicide from grief at the suffering she has caused him, not out of hopeless love for Fritz. The latter in the meantime has got into difficulties because of a friend's financial escapades and his father, the Privy Councillor, abandons him to his fate. The friend in question, Pätus, has been cast off by his father for over-extravagance and dissolute living and his substitute mother, the landlady, Frau Blitzer, has lost all patience and had him thrown into jail for debt. Wenzeslaus becomes a substitute father for Läuffer and even expresses hopes of turning him into a father of the church, after his terrible deed has removed all further hopes of physical paternity. The musician, Rehaar, out of paternal affection and a proper concern for his daughter's honour, has to send her away, to separate her deliberately from her family. The emotional heights of the final protracted reunion depend only partly on the skilfully contrived cumulative effect which is spread over two scenes and scarcely at all on the conventional unmasking and recognition of a host of long lost or even unsuspected relatives. The full emotional effect is produced because parents and children have to beg forgiveness of each other, as Gustchen and the Major did earlier, and to admit to the terrible wrong they have done. When all consciences are clear again and all debts from the past, emotional and otherwise, are paid, Fritz can solemnly adopt Läuffer's son as his own—an appropriately extravagant gesture of magnanimous fatherhood which rounds off the two scenes perfectly. Interestingly, the model morality of Fritz's act was lost on the contemporary critics at the time of the play's first appearance. The fact that it is clearly intended to excel his earlier acts of self-sacrifice and loyalty could not make the critics overlook the other moral implications of his deed, namely that he is foolish enough to marry a woman who has earlier been seduced and whose disgrace was publicly known.

Because the language in which the characters express themselves and describe their situations is less violent, less prone to rhetorical exaggeration than that to be found in Klinger's dramas or those of the young Schiller, and because the only two acts of destruction or aggression in Der Hofmeister are self-inflicted rather than directed at other characters, and perhaps also because of Lenz's preference for short speeches and short scenes, it is easy to underestimate or overlook the emotional intensity with which many moments in the play are charged and to conclude that in this respect Der Hofmeister is moderate enough to be untypical of Storm and Stress. In an article on Die Zwillinge, K. May wrote:²³

The passion of man's drive for expansion catches fire and spreads, flares up and fades away, then roars up again filling the work from beginning to end. This inner process is the only real action, ringing the rhythmical changes of tension and counter-tension up to the crescendo when it finally explodes into external action when the brother is murdered.

And he sees as the most characteristic feature of Storm and Stress drama the way in which this “inner process” forms the only real action and determines the dramatic structure. It is something very close to this which Lenz is aiming at in Der Hofmeister, but true to his own principles and conscience he wished at the same time to portray and comment on contemporary social reality. The story of the Prodigal Son enabled him to do this not merely by supplying a model of a family conflict situation which could be given a social setting of the author's choice; it is also part of the New Testament story that the son plunges from a position of material comfort, to one of extreme poverty, hardship and misery, which lasts until his return home, when quite abruptly the pendulum swings to the other extreme and he is surrounded by feasting and rejoicing. The father sums up the extremes of his son's experience in the memorable comment “This my son was dead and is come alive again”. Obviously the “internal action” of Der Hofmeister is not the course of a passionate “drive for expansion” leading to murder, but rather one of anxiety or unhappiness breaking in on a character and being intensified, degree by degree, over a considerable period of time to a point of hopeless suffering, of “wretchedness” (Elend) which is not tempered by any hope, however precarious, of a solution, but at best by the thought of an escape into death. The progression takes the form of material hardship and social descent as well as emotional loss and deprivation and it leads into such depths that the ultimate horror of suicide can be contemplated. At the beginning Läuffer is uncertain about the future, the uncertainty is then removed and the first blow delivered to his conceit, but then his salary is pegged down and down long past the point where only his conceit suffers; the mockery and insults of his employers, both shown in the action and reported, mount by Act II to such an extent that he says with literal directness, “I'll have to find some way to put an end to this wretched existence, seeing that I'm not allowed to kill myself” (II, 2); three scenes later things have got still worse—“How can I stand it any longer? I must quit” (II, 5). His only escape is to the humble and ill-fed post of Wenzeslaus' scribe, where he actually has to do some work and where he can soon say of his new master, “He'll schoolmaster me to death” (III, 4), and indeed Wenzeslaus promises that soon he will not know himself. After this the shock of recognizing his new-born son stuns him completely: his response is to castrate himself.

At Gustchen's first appearance she is already desperate or at least thinks she is, but in fact she is still half a child and playing at passion as her solemn vow of constancy to Fritz demonstrates: “I give you my oath that as long as I live I shall be no other man's wife, even if the Czar of Russia himself were to ask me” (I, 5). Two years later she is a capricious young lady whose only pleasure in life, as she says half in tears, is her drawing. Three scenes later, when she is presumably already pregnant, she feels ill and totally isolated, her family show no interest or affection, and she fears that Läuffer too may leave her; half in a dream she falls back into the Romeo and Juliet fantasy she had shared with Fritz and describes her situation in the heightened language of tragedy, “Can't you see your Juliet is dying for you—hated, despised, rejected by the whole world, by her own family even” (II, 5). At her next appearance she is brutally changed, much more so than her father had suggested in describing the deterioration of her looks and health before she left home: now she lives in a hovel in the forest where she wears a rough smock and has food enough for only two days; she has given birth to a child, but fears that to add to her suffering she might have her father's suicide on her conscience as well; her own suicide is the next logical step when her strength is at an end and she still has no news of him.

Pätus begins as a penniless student, penniless as the direct result of his own pleasure-seeking extravagance. In one quickly-moving scene his situation deteriorates rapidly. He has no outdoor clothes, so, as a simple solution to the dramatic situation, he chooses not to go out; the landlady's remark that even his dressing-gown looks “as if it had been strung up on the gallows and then fallen off and landed in a heap underneath” (II, 3) is not so easily shrugged off; then comes the serious threat of the debtor's prison; when in desperation he decides to go to the theatre in August wearing a wolfskin, he is chased in terror through the streets of the town by dogs, as he believes mad dogs, to the great amusement of the respectable citizenry. The heartless practical joke which leads to this is played by his friends, but it anticipates the later more malicious comment that he is “the last word in loose living, a man I wouldn't give twopence for even if he were dying on a dung-heap” (III, 3). Fritz voluntarily accepts imprisonment on Pätus' behalf to let his friend travel home to beg for money, but Pätus returns empty-handed and helpless, with no solution to the situation.

The Major is increasingly anxious and worried as he sees the progressive change in his daughter; he gives way to strange fancies and thoughts of destruction and violence; this melancholy becomes desperate when he discovers the reason for his daughter's changed behaviour and then when he loses her he becomes almost demented, determined to die if he cannot find her, or even to die in order to rejoin her beyond the grave: “I must have my daughter again, if not in this world then in the next” (IV, 3).

It is this downward progress to despair, wretchedness and thoughts of death which gives the drama a many-stranded pattern of emotional tension despite the absence of superficial suspense in the movement of the action. The multiple strands of this tension extend over most of the action—the depths of Läuffer's agony are reached only at the beginning of Act V. The tension is broken in a way which for Gustchen and the Major is highly charged with emotion, but it need not be—it is reported that Fritz and Pätus have evaded their responsibilities; they then simply change their universities and continue happily enough. Läuffer recognizes his drastic act as a turning point, even supposing that it will not lead to his death: since the loss of his innocence, he says:

I progressed step by step in passion and ended up in despair. If he were not going to lead me to my death perhaps I could begin to live again and be reborn as Wenzeslaus.

(V, 3)

After the turning point there follows for all the characters a lull, a definite slackening of the tension, an Entspannung, to use May's term, e.g. Gustchen's situation between IV, 5 and V, 11; Läuffer's in V, 9; Fritz's from IV, 1 where his escape from prison is reported to V, 6; the Major's from IV, 5 to the discovery of the infant in V, 12; Pätus' in the scenes with Rehaar. During this lull the characters need to appear very seldom and do or say very little and again, as at the end of Act I, one wonders what will cause events to turn definitely in a new direction. The answer is a series of surprises which occur when the characters least expect them and transform the earlier near-tragic end and the period of uncertainty and aimlessness following it into delirious happiness and rejoicing: the now sexless Läuffer is meditating gloomily on a theological future when Lise walks in on him; Pätus resolves the duel with Rehaar and undertakes to marry his daughter, whereupon the money he and Fritz both need to get home falls into his lap; Fritz gets the deceitful letter telling him of Gustchen's death (first shock!) and Pätus wins the money needed to travel home, so they do this and Fritz is reconciled with his father, but decides that he must follow Gustchen to her supposed, watery grave when all the time (second shock!) she is in the next room; the Major's wish of finding his grandson is granted. Lenz ensures that the period of lull does not coincide for the different characters apart from Gustchen and her father, although at the same time he has to contrive to keep the final unions and reunions to the very end. Paradoxically, one is most aware of the separation of the strands of the action at the point where each disappears from the stage for a long period. The progression from a fairly normal situation at the outset, with little suggestion of serious underlying tensions, to an extreme of despair in which suicide or castration is seriously considered or even effected, and thence to heights of elation in which it is not inappropriate to speak of being “wiedergeboren” (born again), is swift and overwhelming, and, as we have seen, many times repeated.

The character who reacts to the upward and downward swings of emotion with the maximum of uninhibited spontaneity is, of course, the Major whose completely unreflected choleric or melancholic outbursts, violent language, abrupt exclamations and at times almost demented ravings have all the emotional turbulence expected of a Storm and Stress hero. Two reactions reveal this aspect of him with particular clarity: the first when he shoots at the man whom he knows to be the seducer of his daughter but who he also hopes may know her present whereabouts; and the second when he has just saved Gustchen's life. After the shot he exclaims:

God! Is he dead? (Slaps his own face). What have I done? Can you really not give me any more news of my daughter?

(IV, 3)

On saving Gustchen he is simultaneously aware that she deserved to die for her immorality, that she had disgraced her family and that he is overjoyed to have her back. The contradictions are expressed with heartfelt immediacy in the words:

Oh my darling, my one and only treasure. To be able to hold you in my arms again, godless wretch!

(IV, 5)

Obviously the Major lacks the full amoral “drive for expansion” and power of a Storm and Stress hero, but interestingly it is he who sets the action moving by his first ill-considered act of employing the tutor, and he sustains part of it at least by looking for and finding Gustchen and subsequently her infant son. Without the missing “power”, the “grosser Kerl” is in some danger of becoming comic or ridiculous and indeed the Major's behaviour is often criticized, notably by his wife, who describes the comic extravagances of his eccentric behaviour as judged by conventional standards of upper-class good taste, and by his brother, the Privy Councillor, who is an enlightened rationalist. From the second scene of the play onwards, the Privy Councillor tries to demonstrate to the Major by argument and persuasion the folly of his actions—much later in the action when all else fails he inevitably has to restrain him by force. It is usual to consider the Major as wild and ineffectual, lacking the insight which his brother shows most clearly in his admirable enunciation of the meaning of freedom at the beginning of Act II. It is in the name of Enlightenment principles (and in its vocabulary), that the Geheimrat launches this lucid, full-scale rationalist attack on many faults of contemporary German society and its attitudes, an attack which completely overwhelms the wretched pastor who has prompted it by voicing his own acceptance of the status quo. It may be that this eloquent Enlightenment defence of freedom and the right of the individual to it shows the common ground that existed between Enlightened “Humanität” and Storm and Stress “Natur”, and that Lenz shows considerable magnanimity by portraying the Enlightened Councillor as far and away the most admirable character in the play.²⁴ However, judged by actions rather than words in the crucial test of who is the better father, the Major does better and the Privy Councillor less well than might be expected—the latter's fine principles and analytical intelligence fail him (and his son) later in the action when he accepts an account of his son's bad behaviour and extreme misfortune with calm resignation as divine punishment for his own earlier misdeeds and does nothing to help him. He takes this callousness further when Gustchen later tries to intercede for Fritz; he tells her that his son does not deserve special consideration because he has not reached the point of trying to kill himself: he has not earned paternal forgiveness hard enough. The Major, by contrast, brushes aside the perfectly reasonable protests at the futility of his endeavours and the suggestion that his daughter is probably already dead and simply forges ahead to find her. The Major is a comic figure, not because his impulses are so exaggerated but because this so often makes them self-defeating, yet he is in no sense a ridiculous one, and on one occasion at least he has sufficient self-awareness as a Storm and Stress figure to utter the words “even though I cannot give it a name, I can feel it and comprehend it” (III, 1). By the end of the play the Privy Councillor is once again the more sympathetic figure he had appeared at the end of Act I, where his lecture to the “foolish children” on the theme of their irresponsibility is qualified by his genuine fondness for them and his appreciation that their sense of panic on Fritz's departure, if not their grand passion, is quite genuine.

In Storm and Stress drama in general, moderation of feeling and the physical restraint of passionate feelings are equally deplored and verbal expression as a means of conveying emotional states to the reader or the audience is supplemented by a whole language of physical gesture and movement which evidently has the function of “expressing” even more immediately than is possible in words. Hinck has analyzed this aspect of Der neue Menoza²⁵ in his edition of that play and the frequency and precision of the indications of physical movement and gesture in the plays of the young Schiller have often been commented on. In Der Hofmeister the gestures may replace words entirely or add something not contained in the words, or they may reinforce words, or they may take over in a form of “Steigerung” where words are no longer adequate. Only occasionally do the stage directions themselves suggest the same absolute correspondence of gesture and feeling as those in the early Schiller dramas commonly do, e.g. “he pushes him angrily” (IV, 3). The gestures in Der Hofmeister are often conventional, e.g. throwing oneself at someone's feet to beg forgiveness; they are always clear and precise, and usually uncomplicated by any conflict of feelings, the outstanding exception to this being the love “pantomime” sequence in Act II, 5 where the words, the feelings and the gestures are operating on different levels.

The following examples chosen from the many scattered over every page of the play will illustrate this technique. In Act V, 11 when Fritz and his father meet after their long separation their inevitable greeting is simply, “Father!” “Son!”—but the meaning of the words comes out only in the accompanying gesture: Fritz (falls on his knees before him), Privy Councillor (raises him up and embraces him). The step by step intensification of feeling is demonstrated very simply in Act II, 5, V, 10 and V, 12 (Fritz embracing the infant) as in the graduation from “takes her by the hand” to “rushes to embrace her” and finally “kisses her” in Act I, 5. Gesture reinforcing speech when the feeling has already been given forceful verbal expression is clearest in the many instances where anger leads to abusive language, then threats, and finally to physical intervention, e.g. simply and conventionally “gives him a clout on the ear” (IV, 6), or more “characteristically” “drags his wife from the theatre unconscious” (III, 1). The emotional states most commonly conveyed by gesture are anger, affection and shock, but pleas for forgiveness and general excitement (e.g. “rushes in”, “leaps out”, etc.) are also commonly uttered in this way. Extreme, instantaneous shock is a characteristic Storm and Stress emotional state shown by instant loss of consciousness, e.g. at the opening of Act III (Major's wife) and Act V (Läuffer) and in Act V, 6 (Fritz). The last case is interesting as Fritz does not quite pass out, perhaps because he is prepared for a shock inwardly and outwardly—the latter by throwing himself in a chair before the fateful letter is read to him; that he is visibly overcome is then shown by his friend's gesture of sprinkling him with lavender water; subsequently Fritz stands up but sits down again to cover his face in anguish at the thought of his own guilt, and then finally leaps to his feet presumably from frustration at his wish to take some action where none is possible. All the dramatis personæ use this gestural language—the infant even becoming an object for others to gesture with (Act V, 1 and 12)—but it is differentiated to express individual characteristics. Pätus expends more physical energy on gestures of joy or despair than any other character, and the Privy Councillor predictably least of all. His normal calm is broken usually to correct or restrain the gestures of others, e.g. by raising Gustchen from the ground when she has thrown herself at his feet (Act I, 6) or by holding back his brother (Act III, 1 and IV, 3—here he is forced finally to fire off a pistol in the air to prevent the Major from injuring someone). However, the nature of the final reunion scene moves even this restrained rationalist: as the scene opens (V, 11) the Privy Councillor and Fritz run into each other's arms, and as it closes, the Privy Councillor wipes away a tear.

It has already been remarked that this play combines two different kinds of thematic material, both of which were popular with the Storm and Stress artists—the father-children relationship and the attack on social injustice. The former is exploited here for its emotional and moral potential, as we have seen, but not because of its social (or metaphysical) implications. What is remarkable about the social criticism in Der Hofmeister is not the towering passions and colourful denunciation it employs, but the concreteness and precision with which injustice is defined and illustrated. The difference between the life led by the aristocratic characters and the others is repeatedly measured with candid realism in terms of money and food and drink, and to a lesser extent clothes and housing. The Privy Councillor himself is not content with a theoretical definition of freedom, freedom as a principle, but translates this immediately into the details of day-to-day social experience (II, 1). In that section of society which prides itself on its refinement of taste one may spend some thirty thousand gilders on learning to dance, consume six hundred oysters and twenty bottles of champagne with only one companion (and suffer no after-effects) and pass one's time otherwise with card-playing, hunting, serenades, country-walks and other entertainments, moving from town to country as appropriate. Swimming is no doubt too practical and inelegant to be an aristocratic pastime, so the elegant Graf Wermuth declines to jump in to help the drowning Gustchen. A privileged servant, such as a private tutor, may receive roast beef for lunch every day and punch every evening and permission to be seated on the sofa beside a lady, but, quite apart from the insults he has to endure, his salary is screwed down year by year to the point where he can no longer live on it. The village schoolmaster is well aware of the extreme simplicity of his own regime and points out its advantages to Läuffer, but the facts remain: he drinks wine two or three times per week and coffee, tea and chocolate not at all, and although he has a cooked meal at mid-day he goes without breakfast and eats a simple cold supper such as Knackwurst and salad from a table without a cloth. Like the schoolmaster, the student Pätus smokes a lot, but having a wealthy father he can afford coffee and gorgeous clothes till his money runs out and he has to live on credit: then his problem is how to find the fare home in order to ask for more money. Once Gustchen descends to living in a hovel she and Marthe have to rely on begging for charity to support themselves and the infant which is raised somehow on a diet of “cabbage and root vegetables”. The details of this documentation, some of them provided in lengthy descriptions by individuals of their own or other people's way of life, others mentioned in passing, a few referred to in stage directions, form an eloquent statement of some of the major faults in contemporary German society. Their irrefutable authenticity makes them much more telling and exact as social criticism than any possible symbolic interpretation of Wenzeslaus' crabbedness and Läuffer's mutilation as wounds inflicted by society.

An acute awareness of faults in their own society and a sense of bitterness at their own sufferings in consequence frequently activated Storm and Stress writers, but they usually made their point more obliquely by choosing a historical or foreign setting and the aim of their attack was seldom as sharply in focus as in Die Soldaten and Der Hofmeister. Lenz had his own experience of soldiers and of being a private tutor, the latter being a common fate of well-educated sons of burgher families who had to earn a living at that period. He also had a clearly defined intention as a dramatist which he formulated in a letter to the Gräfin de la Roche: to write about the social classes as he knew them to be and not “as some persons from a higher social sphere imagine them”.²⁶ His proposals for a cure in both plays, though of a practical nature, are less convincing than the diagnosis of the disease and indeed, despite the abundance of teachers and pupils in Der Hofmeister, an ideal teacher is not shown. The figure of Wenzeslaus with his spectacles on his nose, his rule in his hand, and his pipe in his mouth is a magnificent grotesque which allows Lenz to indulge his taste for caricature, but he accepts his situation and has adjusted himself to it. He may treat aristocratic trespassers roughly and money-grabbing doctors satirically but he is not a reformer. It is the Privy Councillor who really argues for social upheaval and, by an ambiguous irony which brings the social criticism of Der Hofmeister neatly into line with other Storm and Stress dramas after all, he is an aristocrat.²⁷

Notes

1. J. D. Stowell, in Periods in German Literature, ed. J. M. Ritchie (London, 1966), p. 90.

2. H. Hettner, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur im 18. Jahrhundert (Leipzig, 1928), p. 140.

3. F. Gundolf, Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist (Berlin, 1922), p. 256.

4. H. de Boor and R. Newald, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur, Bd.6/I, Von Klopstock bis zu Goethes Tod (Munich, 1957), p. 259.

5. F. J. Schneider, Die deutsche Dichtung der Geniezeit (Stuttgart, 1942), p. 201.

6. H. Schauer's article on Das Drama in P. Merker, W. Stammler, Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturgeschichte, I, p. 247.

7. B. Brecht, Werkausgabe (Frankfurt am Main, 1967), Bd. 17, p. 1221.

8. K. S. Guthke, Geschichte und Poetik der deutschen Tragikomödie (Göttingen, 1961); and K. S. Guthke, “Lenzens ‘Hofmeister’ und ‘Soldaten’. Ein neuer Formtypus in der Geschichte des deutschen Dramas”, in Wirkendes Wort, 1959, Vol. V, p. 274-86.

9. W. Hinck ed., J. M. R. Lenz, Der neue Menoza (Berlin, 1965).

10. V. Klotz, Geschlossene und offene Form im Drama (Munich, 1960).

11. W. Höllerer, Interpretation of Die Soldaten in Das deutsche Drama. Interpretationen. Vol. I, ed. B. v. Wiese (Düsseldorf, 1958).

12. A. Schöne, Säkularisation als sprachbildende Kraft (Göttingen, 1958).

13. B. Titel, “Nachahmung der Natur” als Prinzip dramatischer Gestaltung bei J. M. R. Lenz (Diss. Frankfurt am Main, 1962).

14. Werke und Schriften, ed. Titel und Haug (Stuttgart, 1966/67).

15. J. M. R. Lenz, Gesammelte Werke in vier Bänden, ed. R. Daunicht. So far appeared Dramen I (Munich, 1967).

16. “Despite some reservations the Frankfurter Gelehrte Anzeigen of 16 July 1774 welcomed this as one of those refreshing works, like life-giving rain over land suffering from a long drought. More precisely this drama was felt to open up new paths for an art languishing in the chains of a desiccating pseudo-classicism”. “Nachwort” to the Reclam Hofmeister, ed. K. S. Guthke (Stuttgart, 1966), p. 85.

17. “I could never bring myself to believe that a German would ever seriously compete with Shakespeare, wrote Johann Georg Scherff on 27 September 1774 … but first Goetz von Berlichingen and now Der Hofmeister have conquered my fears”. Ibid, p. 85.

18. Werke I, pp. 329-62.

19. Ibid., p. 344.

20. Werke I, pp. 363-8, “Über die Veränderung des Theaters im Shakespear”.

21. “Rede zum Shakespeares Tag”, in Goethe's Werke, Vol. 12, Hamburger-Ausgabe, 1953, p. 226.

22. A. Schöne, op. cit., pp. 92-139.

23. K. May, “Die Struktur des Dramas im Sturm und Drang” in Form und Bedeutung (Stuttgart, 1957), p. 45.

24. Interpretation of Der Hofmeister by H. O. Burger in: Das deutsche Lustspiel, ed. H. Steffens (Göttingen, 1968).

25. Der neue Menoza, ed. W. Hinck, pp. 84-92.

26. Briefe, I, p. 115.

27. Cf. R. Pascal, The German Sturm und Drang (Manchester, 1953), especially the chapter entitled, Sturm und Drang and the Social Classes, pp. 56-86.

References are to the following editions:

J. M. R. Lenz, Werke und Schriften, Vols. I & II, ed. B. Titel and H. Haug (Stuttgart, 1966, 1967)

Briefe von und an J. M. R. Lenz, Vols. I & II, ed. K. Freye and W. Stammler (Leipzig, 1918).

Bibliography

Most of the important recent critical writings referring in detail to Lenz are named above; some additional titles are as follows:

B. Markwardt, Geschichte der deutschen Poetik, Vol. II, Part II, Sturm und Drang (Berlin, 1956).

L. Schneider and R. Loewenthal (eds.), Sturm und Drang. Kritische Schriften (Heidelberg, 1949).

H. B. Garland, Storm and Stress (London, 1952).

E. Genton, J. M. R. Lenz et la scène allemande (Paris, 1966).

W. H. Bruford, Theatre, Drama and Audience in Goethe's Germany (London, 1950).