[In the following essay, Foster examines various aspects of Gotthelf as an author, including which German writers influenced him, the themes of his fiction, and the role of Christianity in his works.]

In the first edition of J. G. Robertson's History of German Literature, published in 1902 and for many years the standard work on the subject in English, the Swiss novelist Jeremias Gotthelf was dismissed in half a dozen lines. Today it would hardly be an exaggeration to claim—echoing Goethe's famous prophecy about himself—that there is a new science called Gotthelf. The standard edition of his works already extends to forty volumes, with four more planned, new books on him are published almost annually (one of the most recent is in Japanese) and 1967 saw the timely appearance of a “summary of the state of Gotthelf studies”.¹ All this is as it should be; Gotthelf is a writer of tremendous force and vitality whose partiality for larding his German with his native Berndeutsch must not be allowed to obscure his essential universality, even if it does erect a barrier—though by no means an insuperable one—to appreciation outside Switzerland and to translation into languages other than German.

The name Jeremias Gotthelf is a literary pseudonym, as is fairly obvious from its prophetic and biblical overtones. The real name of the man who chose to write under it was Albert Bitzius. Although Bitzius lived for most of his life in the country and wrote almost exclusively about country people, the Bitzius's (the name is a corruption of the Christian name Sulpicius) were in fact a patrician family from the city of Berne itself, where under the ancien régime they belonged to the circle of families entitled to hold all but the highest offices. Albert Bitzius was born in 1797 in the little country town of Murten, some twenty-five miles west of Berne, on the linguistic frontier between French and German-speaking Switzerland. His father was a pastor in the Bernese Church (a Calvinist Church that shows traces of Zwinglianism) and there never seems to have been any doubt that Albert would follow in his father's footsteps. After learning the elements of Greek and Latin from his own father, he went in 1812 to the “Green School” (the Gymnasium) in Berne, and on from there to the Academy, the forerunner of the University of Berne. He completed his theological studies successfully in 1820 and was appointed curate to his father in the parish of Utzenstorf, whither the latter had moved in 1805 when Murten was allotted by Napoleon's Act of Mediation to the Canton of Freiburg. However, Bitzius's formal education was not yet over, for in 1821 he took leave of absence from his pastoral duties and went off for a year to the University of Göttingen—much favoured at that time by students from Berne—to enlarge his theological and general knowledge. There he attended G. J. Planck's lectures on theology, read a good deal of Scott and developed an enthusiasm for Schiller, about the only classical German writer whose influence can be clearly traced in his work (in the historical tales). He rounded off his year at Göttingen with a trip to North Germany, penetrating as far north as the island of Rügen and returning home via Berlin, Leipzig, Dresden and Munich. It is worth laying some emphasis on the extent of Bitzius's formal education, for it reminds us that although he was thoroughly familiar with the Bernese farmer's life—the rectory at Utzenstorf had a farm attached to it—and tends to be described as a “novelist of peasant life” (which indeed, among other things, he was), his mental world is basically that of an educated upper-class urban Bernese, not that of a peasant. Similarly, although Bitzius emerged as a writer fairly late in life—he was nearly forty when he wrote his first novel—research has shown that it cannot be asserted, as it once was, that there are no signs of literary interests and activity in earlier years. If little is proved by the fact that in 1816 he won third prize at the Berne Academy for an essay on the subject “Ist sich das Wesen der Poesie der Alten und Neuern gleich? Zeichnet sich die neuere durch besondere Eigenschaften aus, and welches sind die Ursachen dieser Verschiedenheit?”², it is rather more significant that the papers he left behind after his death contained a number of unpublished early essays and reports of considerable interest (especially the “Gespräch der Reformatoren im Himmel” and the “Chronik von Lutzelflüh”), that his youthful sermons display an increasing clarity and rhetorical force, and that before he sat down to write his first novel he had contributed some twenty-five articles to the Berner Volksfreund, the organ of the moderate Liberals in the canton of Berne. Some of these Frühschriften would repay a good deal more study than they have yet received.

Back in Utzenstorf with his father, Bitzius threw himself with enthusiasm not only into the normal pastoral duties of a curate but also into the educational work that developed on a country clergyman in those days (the pastor was directly responsible for primary education in his parish). His father was a keen educationist who had had dealings with Pestalozzi, and his son inherited the interest to a marked degree. In fact, Karl Fehr³ rightly speaks of Bitzius as possessed by the furor paedagogicus, and it is this enthusiasm for education that is the key to the eventual transformation of Albert Bitzius into Jeremias Gotthelf, or at any rate the trigger that started the process. A word is here necessary, if we are to see Bitzius's passionate interest in education in the proper perspective, on the social background to it. Up to 1798 Switzerland had been a loose confederation of independent cantons and subject territories, with full citizenship confined to the patrician oligarchies who ruled the capitals of the cantons; by 1831 not only had the subject territories been raised to the status of independent cantons but all the inhabitants of the individual cantons had full political and legal rights. The trouble was that a large proportion of the population, especially in the country, was not equipped to exercise its new responsibilities. People in Bitzius's position were acutely aware of this gap between duty and capacity, and the desire to fill it was the conscious aim that made Bitzius a writer.

When Bitzius's father died in 1824 his son did not succeed him as pastor of Utzenstorf because he had not yet served the required five years as a curate. Instead he was moved, still a curate, to the big parish of Herzogenbuchsee in the valley of the Aare, between Solothurn and Langenthal. It is interesting to note that during his early years here Bitzius had his only personal encounter with Pestalozzi. In 1826 Pestalozzi addressed the Helvetische Gesellschaft in Langenthal (it was in fact the last public speech he made), and the list of those present includes V(erbi) D(ivini) M(inister) Albert Bitzius.⁴

Bitzius's time at Herzogenbuchsee was on the whole not a success; he clashed with the local Oberamtmann or governor, Rudolf Emanuel von Effinger, over a proposal to build a new school (Bitzius was a man who liked his own way), and was dismissed from his post. But for the good offices of a friend in Berne he would have been sent to the lonely parish of Amsoldingen, near Thun; in fact the posting was cancelled and he was appointed instead to the Church of the Holy Spirit in Berne itself, the most important church in the city after the Minster. Bitzius had misgivings about this appointment because he did not possess a very good speaking voice for sermons. His misgivings were justified; the Church authorities were not satisfied with his efforts in Berne and a year and half later, on New Year's Day 1831, he found himself on his way to the remote country parish of Lützelfluh in the Emme valley, north-east of Berne, still a curate and in fact by now the oldest one in the canton. Bitzius was now thirty-three; he was a man of considerable ambition, as is clear from several passages in letters he wrote as a young man, and at this point in his life he could not have felt that he had achieved a great deal or that his prospects looked particularly encouraging. Nevertheless, it was in Lützelflüh that Bitzius was to find himself and to end his days. The rest of the story of the birth of Jeremias Gotthelf cannot be better told than in the words of a brief autobiography which Bitzius wrote in 1848: “After the death of Herr Fasnacht (the pastor of Lützelflüh) I was elected pastor of the parish. … A year later I married the grand-daughter of my last principal [i.e. Fasnacht], the daughter of Professor Zeender of Berne, who was famous in his time.

“At that period the Canton of Berne was the scene of various struggles, none of which was fought out with more bitterness than the educational one. As a member of the Cantonal School Board, as a lecturer at a refresher course [for teachers] which the Education Department arranged in Burgdorf, while Herr Fellenberg held an opposition course at Hofwyl, and later as a school inspector, I was to some extent involved in these struggles and broke more than one lance with Fellenberg.⁵ This, and the character of my parish [the Emmental farmers were proud and reserved, and viewed their pastor, an ‘outsider’, with suspicion], which condemned me to a slow wait, to a kind of passivity, awoke in me more and more the urge to express myself in writing on matters concerning the people, although nothing was more contrary to my nature than sitting down to write. My nature had to submit; in July 1836 the continually increasing need broke out in the ‘Bauernspiegel’. Since then there is no end to it, so that I am constantly amazed how a boy who could not keep his feet still could develop into a man who spends so much time sitting and writing”.⁶ The end in fact came some eighteen years after Der Bauernspiegel, in 1854, by which time Bitzius had produced twelve novels (and half a thirteenth), about forty shorter tales and a considerable number of Kalendergeschichten or anecdotes, not to mention his political journalism, a fairly voluminous correspondence and the sermons he preached to his flock every Sunday.

Der Bauern-spiegel (to give the title its original orthography) is an Ich-Roman, the autobiography of an orphan to whom Bitzius gave the name that he was to adopt as his permanent pseudonym. It begins with a memorable sentence of remarkable power:

Ich bin geboren in der Gemeinde Unverstand, in einem Jahre, welches man nicht zählte nach Christus.⁷

The habit of giving characters and places imaginary names indicative of their nature is one which Gotthelf shares with his contemporaries Trollope and Dickens; no doubt the farmers of Unverstand would have gladly supplied a school like Dotheboys Hall with skimmed milk and stale eggs. This first sentence sets the tone of the whole book, which deals almost exclusively with the darker side of rural life, the “Schattenseite”, as Gotthelf calls it in his preface. He was writing primarily, as we have seen, to educate his fellow-countrymen, and he had to show them their faults before he dared to dwell on their virtues. Jeremias loses his father, a poverty-stricken tenant-farmer, early in life. The home is sold up and Jeremias is thrown on the parish, who board him out, as was the custom with orphans, with various farmers. Despised and ill-treated by most of them, Jeremias grows up with little faith in God or man. He falls in love with Anneli, a maid on a neighbouring farm, visits her in her room one night (in accordance with the custom of the “Kiltgang”, frowned upon by Gotthelf) and gets her with child. He determines to marry her, but Anneli dies in child-birth, thanks to the clumsy and brutal ignorance of a country doctor. Sick of life, Jeremias runs away to Paris, where he joins the Swiss guards of Charles X. There he makes friends with Bonjour, a veteran of Napoleon's Russian campaign, who restores his faith in life and makes a true Christian of him. With the fall of the Bourbons in 1830 Jeremias and Bonjour return to Switzerland. Jeremias falls ill, and on his recovery finds that Bonjour is dead and has left him some money. He looks round for some useful job under the newborn democracy, but is advised by a wise friend, a weights-and-measures inspector who is a mouthpiece for Bitzius's own views, that the democracy has not yet found itself and is not ready for the services of honest men. His friend suggests that he should settle down at some decent country inn, do a little unofficial educational work on the regular guests and write his autobiography. Jeremias follows this advice. He is about to be appointed parish clerk when he falls ill, his book just completed, with visions of Anneli before his eyes. This bare, compressed summary of Der Bauernspiegel naturally gives no idea of its power, which proceeds from its manner as much as from its matter. In this first novel Gotthelf's highly individual style is already almost fully developed. Sometimes terse, sometimes leisurely and rhetorical, it is always vivid and trenchant, like the Emmental dialect that it echoes and occasionally introduces word for word, as for example in a class-room scene, where any request for an explanation of the catechism is met with the sharp injunction: “Büb, lern du, das gaht di nüt a!”⁸ As Gotthelf remarks, with a touch of the ironical humour that abounds in his novels,

Das waren noch die guten, alten Zeiten, wo man in der Schule Religion lernte, und nur Religion. …⁹

Der Bauernspiegel brings in many themes treated in greater detail in later books: the meanness and avarice of many farmers, the unchristian treatment of the orphaned and the poor, the inadequacy of the primary schools and the superstitious conception of religion too often prevalent in the farm-houses. Indeed, as Carl Manuel first pointed out in his early but still pertinent biography of Bitzius (1861),

Es [der Bauernspiegel] ist das Urbild und Vorbild, wir möchten fast sagen: das Programm aller seiner späteren Schriften. Seine wichtigsten späteren Bücher sind gleichsam schon in nuce in diesem ersten enthalten.¹⁰

Gotthelf's second novel, Die Leiden und Freuden eines Schulmeisters, (two volumes, 1838-39), takes up the school question. It describes the struggles of Peter Käser to teach reading, writing and the elements of religion to classes of a hundred or more, and to support a growing family on his miserably inadequate pay. Like Der Bauernspiegel, it emphasizes the darker side of Swiss country life. The third novel, Uli der Knecht (1841), and its later sequel, Uli der Pächter (1848), are more mellow in tone. The indignation that had first driven Gotthelf to write had temporarily exhausted itself, and it is not until the course of political events roused his angry opposition that a note of bitterness again returns to his writing. The two Uli books portray the successful struggle of a farm labourer to improve his position in life. The next novel, Anna Bäbi Jowäger (two volumes, 1843-44), deals with the preference of the peasants for consulting quacks rather than qualified doctors, and was written at the request of the Bernese public health committee. A rich and many-stranded book, it contains amongst much else an interesting discussion between a country clergyman and his progressive doctor-nephew on the proper relationship between priest and doctor, and is in many ways the most profound of Gotthelf's novels. The most delicate in psychological analysis is Geld und Geist (1843-44), the story of the misery brought on a happy and prosperous family by a quarrel between the farmer and his wife about a sum of money the former loses through negligence. The knot is loosed by the wife's humility and her readiness to cast out the beam in her own eye first. Geld und Geist has been described by H. M. Waidson in an interesting comparison as a work of “classical simplicity”, possessing “the inwardness and purity of Goethe's Iphigenie auf Tauris or Torquato Tasso—an action limited to a small number of characters who represent the highest ethical and cultural level attainable by the social group to which they belong”.¹¹Jakobs des Handwerksgesellen Wanderungen durch die Schweiz (1846-47) is the one novel with a theme totally outside Gotthelf's own experience and is less convincing than the rest, though often very entertaining. Like the last two novels, Zeitgeist und Bernergeist (1851) and Die Erlebnisse eines Schuldenbauers (1854), it reflects Gotthelf's alarm at contemporary political and social trends.

Of the three novels not so far mentioned, Der Geldstag (1845), Käthi die Großmutter (1847) and Die Käserei in der Vehfreude (1849), the first two date from Gotthelf's mature middle period, while the last may be roughly described as a “political” novel, though it is a good deal more relaxed in tone than Zeitgeist und Bernergeist or Die Erlebnisse eines Schuldenbauers. The dates given in brackets after the names of the novels are in all cases those of publication, which usually followed fairly swiftly on composition, except in the case of the unfinished “Der Herr Esau,” written in 1844 but not published until 1922.

The main criticism that can be advanced against Gotthelf's novels is that they are formless. It is true that he is always ready—like many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novelists—to digress from his narrative in order to discuss, usually in a didactic tone, any subject that arouses his interest or indignation. It has in fact been discovered that, on average, about one-tenth of each novel is taken up by the author's reflections. But Gotthelf's work defies the application of ordinary canons (if such exist in the case of the novel)—he has been described as an “erratic block” in the landscape of German literature—and in most of these digressions the vigour of his language and personality carries off what in a lesser writer might well seem tedious and out-of-place. This formlessness reaches its climax in the huge fragment “Der Herr Esau,” where after 500 pages of rumbustious description of the doings of three separate families—those of a Radical politician, an old-fashioned aristocrat and a prosperous farmer, all three presented almost as caricatures—it is difficult to see where and how (if ever) the novel was going to end. But it is only fair to Gotthelf to remember that he never published “Der Herr Esau.” It would be equally possible, certainly nowadays, to criticize others of the novels as too well made, in so far as they are neatly tied up with happy endings. The fact is that with Gotthelf, as with any important writer, a plot is only a peg for the presentation of a view of life. Rudolf Hunziker gets near the heart of the matter when he says in his notes to Jakobs Wanderungen:

“Gotthelf's Künstlernatur (war) nach ethischen, nicht nach ästhetischen Prinzipien orientiert. Ihm bedeutete stets die Sache, die zu sagen das Feuer seines lodernden Temperamentes ihn zwang, das Wesentliche. Hatte er jeweilen den stofflich—ethischen Plan gefasst, so war damit zugleich die Frage nach der Form zu einem guten Teil gelöst. Zu der Lehre, dass die gleichzeitige Konzeption, die aprioristische Vermählung von Inhalt und Form die natürliche Vorbedingung für die Entstehung eines Kunstwerks sei, bildet der Fall Gotthelf ein vortreffliches Paradigma.”¹²

Gotthelf himself was little concerned with literary artistry as such; he declares in the Armennot, a treatise on the problem of poverty published in 1840, that he has found more intellect displayed in a well-laid hedge than in many a book. Nevertheless, some of his short stories do show a good deal of conventional artistry, especially “Die Schwarze Spinne” (1842), a horrifying tale of a pact with the devil, and “Das Erdbeeri Mareili” (1851) the charming little idyll of a poor country girl who finds her niche in life as the lady's maid of a woman whom she worships. It is significant that attempts to trace links between Gotthelf and the literary movements of his time find most of their supporting evidence in these shorter tales (many of them can properly be described as Novellen, which meant less to Gotthelf than his novels; he felt that his genius needed a big canvas. There can be no question that the historical tales, the “Bilder und Sagen aus der Schweiz,” are Romantic in inspiration; themes from Scott's novels have been traced in some of them.¹³ Attempts, on the other hand, to classify stories like “Das Erdbeeri Mareili” as “typically Biedermeier”¹⁴ are less well-conceived; the theme of “Das Erdbeeri Mareili” may be—coincidentally—Biedermeier, but the language and style as a whole remain pure Gotthelf and highly individual. The same is true of the almanac stories which Gotthelf produced for the Neuer Berner Kalender from 1839 to 1844. In editing an almanac Gotthelf was following in the footsteps of Matthias Claudius, Johann Peter Hebel and many other lesser writers too, but again he put his very personal stamp on the whole project. As H. M. Waidson says,¹⁵ the Neuer Berner Kalender gives us a picture of Gotthelf's imaginative world in miniature.

The ground-note of all Gotthelf's work is a deeply-felt, undogmatic Christianity expressed in straightforward and traditional terms:

Es ist und bleibt also das Christentun in vollem Sinne des Wortes der einzige wirksame Balsam für die eiternde Wunde [poverty and social discontent].

“Christus ist und bleibt der einzige Heiland für die sieche Welt.”¹⁶

As a young theological student, Gotthelf had given signs of a fairly casual attitude to his chosen profession and shown less interest in the subtleties of theology than in going out into society and meeting people. He says in the short autobiography already mentioned:

“Die Gesellschaft und namentlich die weibliche nahm mich mehr in Anspruch als die Wissenschaft.”¹⁷

Here, by the way, we surely have a glimpse of that side of his nature which made him into a novelist, and one with such sure psychological insight. However, be that as it may, by the time Albert Bitzius decided to turn himself into Jeremias Gotthelf, Christianity had become a tried, tested and all-embracing view of life which was to colour everything he wrote. As K. Guggisberg puts it pregnantly in his introduction to the Frühschriften,

“Die reformierte Tradition Zwinglischer Observanz hat sich in ihm mit dem Herderschen Offenbarungsuniversalismus zu einem einheitlichen, Natur, Geschichte und Gegenwart umfassenden Wirklichkeitsverständnis verbunden.”¹⁸

If a certain unresolved tension between an Old Testament and a New Testament conception of God is sometimes apparent, that is perhaps due to the Volksschriftsteller's need to frighten his readers from time to time—for their own good—with a little thunder from Sinai.

For Gotthelf, man is a creature of God, who had defined good and evil in his commandments and revealed himself more fully in the person and teaching of Christ. His presence can also be felt behind the whole visible world:

“Doch noch viele Engel gehen durch die Welt. Die Feuerflammen sind Engel des Herrn und auch die Wasserströme; Bettler sendet der Herr aus und ruft uns durch sie bald zur Weisheit, bald zur Barmherzigkeit. Steine legt uns der Herr in die Wege und lässt den Tau fallen zu unseren Füssen, alle sind Engel Gottes.”¹⁹

Reminiscences of the Bible are common in Gotthelf's language and imagery. The world is “God's immense temple” and what we do in it decides not only our life here and now, but also what will happen to us for all eternity:

“Der Mensch ist nach dem Ebendbild Gottes geschaffen; nach der Herstellung dieses Ebenbildes soll der Christ streben, er soll versuchen, göttlich zu leben im sterblichen Körper, die Erde zu einem Vorhofe des Himmels zu machen.”²⁰

When Uli realised that he had been living a worthless life,

“Es kam ihm vor, als ob da zwei Mächte sich um seine Seele stritten, fast gleichsam ein guter und ein böser Engel, und jeder ihn haben wollte.”²¹

In spite of the “als ob” and the “gleichsam”—the fundamentalist bowing to rationalist—there is no confusion in Gotthelf's world between good and evil, although they may sometimes be closely intertwined and difficult to differentiate. Behind his characters stand heaven, hell and eternity. Good is compliance with God's will, and evil opposition to it. Evil may spring from inside, from man's naturally weak and sinful nature, which Gotthelf strongly emphasises:

“Was ists nun aber, das eine, welches die äusserlich so verschieden gestellten Menschen auf die gleiche Stufe bringt, in ihren Verhältnissen zu ihren Mitmenschen innerlich so gleichmacht? Es ist die Leidenschaft, das Laster, die übermächtig gewordene Sinnlichkeit, der alte Mensch, der jede Hülle abgeworfen, alle Rücksichten überwunden hat. Es ist dieser alte Mensch, der Gott und Nächsten hasset, untüchtig ist zu allem Guten und geneigt zu allem Bösen.”²²

The novels contain many characters enslaved to these evil instincts: the Dorngrutbauer in Geld und Geist more or less selling his daughter to Kellerjoggi, Johannes in Uli der Pächter reviling his dead father after bleeding him white while he lived, the lazy innkeeper Steffen and his wife Eisi in Der Geldstag living for nothing but their own comfort. Even those in whom the new man has already stirred may fall back into serious sin; Uli becomes a cheat and perjurer. Not that the tone of the novels is pessimistic; Christ has broken the power of evil. In the last resort, of course, evil always springs from inside the individual, but it can come from outside in the sense of spreading from one set of persons to others. This, Gotthelf felt, was happening in the political life of the Canton of Berne, and of Switzerland as a whole, in his own day. He was no mere reactionary and as an enlightened Liberal had welcomed the “new order” of 1831, but in the rise of Communism, and more urgently Radicalism, he saw the traditional Christian way of life of his countrymen threatened. His attack on Communism is the novel Jakobs Wanderungen; his long struggle against the Radical politicians who governed Berne from 1838 to 1850 reaches its climax in Zeitgeist und Bernergeist. This unyielding, obsessional opposition to the materialistic tendencies of the time as they appeared in microcosm in Switzerland is one of the things that makes Gotthelf a particularly interesting figure. In many respects his attitude was an exaggerated one; but he did point to the dangers to society implicit in Radicalism (Communism, of course, was still in its infancy and at that time a less pressing danger) with prophetic rightness, and studied moderation is not to be expected of prophets. Even Gottfried Keller, who was on the other side of the fence politically (though he was not blind to Gotthelf's purely literary gifts), was prepared to admit by the time he wrote Martin Salander that “progress”—a Radical watchword mercilessly guyed by Gotthelf—had its limitations as an ideal.

It has to be remembered that in those days Radicalism signified for contemporaries more or less what Communism signifies for us today. It implied a philosophical as well as a political standpoint, and one that was quite contrary to the traditional Christian view of life. The Liberals of the thirties had put the individual before the State, which, with Montesquieu, they regarded as a necessary evil, whose main function was to protect the liberty and rights of the individual. The Radicals of the forties gave the State a more positive function. Their thinking was largely based on that of Hegel, who regarded history as the progressive self-revelation of the universal spirit and the Prussian State as its most perfect embodiment so far. But the real prop of Radicalism was Hegel's critic Feuerbach, who changed the whole character of his predecessor's system by doing away with God and asserting that the decisive factor in human existence was physical environment. His theory that religions are merely attempts to provide imaginary compensation for real misery was to have a profound effect on Marx, Engels and Lenin. It would be futile to pretend that the reforming spirit of Radicalism produced no beneficent results, but nothing has occurred in the century since Gotthelf's death to prove that he was wrong in opposing its materialism, which he saw, rightly or wrongly, as liable to affect every aspect of life. He says in the preface to the novel Zeitgeist und Bernergeist:

“Wer mit Liebe am Volke hängt, klar in dessen Leben sicht, der muss überall mit der radikalen Politik feindlich zusammentreffen, denn dieselbe ist eigentlich keine Politik, sondern eine eigene Lebens—und Weltanschauung, die alle Verhältnisse einfasst, der ganzen Menschheit sich bemächtigen will.”²³

Zeitgeist und Bernergeist, perceptively described by H. M. Waidson as “an eschatological novel”, may be regarded as Gotthelf's final reckoning with Radicalism. It was written to support the Liberals (who were now in effect the conservative party) in the electoral campaign of 1850, but did not appear until after their victory. Like Jakobs Wanderungen (where we never learn what craft it is precisely that James the Journeyman is supposed to ply), it suffers from the schematic construction always liable to spoil tendentious books (usually, once Gotthelf began to write, his joy in creation swamped his conscious aims, so that what was planned as a short story would end as a full-length novel), but remains an impressive summary in plastic form of his beliefs about the nature and purpose of human life. It is the story of two families, those of Ankenbenz and Hunghans. Friends from boyhood, these two are the richest and most respected farmers in the village of Küchliwyl. When the book opens, a shadow is about to cloud the two men's friendship. Hunghan's wife confides to Benz's wife that her husband is neglecting his family and his farm in favour of politics, in which he supports the Radicals. The rest of the book describes how Hans gradually ruins himself by his devotion to Radicalism. Not until his wife has died from worry and his favourite son from a stroke at a drinking-party does he realise the error of his ways and decide to mend them. His old friend Benz, who has quietly remained a staunch Conservative, is only too glad to help him make a fresh start. Only the worst side of Radicalism is shown in the book, and Gotthelf admits as much in the preface, where he declares that he has no quarrel with the honest men in the Radical Party. The politicians who lure Hunghans away from his wife and family are depicted as godless, pleasure-seeking careerists, whose motto is “Look after yourself first”. One day Ankenbenz meets Hunghans and his Radical friends at an inn, and one of the politicians describes his conception of religious freedom thus:

“Politische Freiheit ist ein Unding ohne religiöse Freiheit, und die religiöse Freiheit besteht nicht darin, dass jeder glauben kann was er will, sondern darin, dass keiner mehr einen Glauben hat, anders zu handeln als Naturgemäss, keiner mehr an ein zukünftig Leben denkt …”²⁴

Benz walks home reflecting with horror on the idea of a life without God. The most convincing parts of the book, considered purely as a novel, are the pictures of Benz and his wife and children at home. They form one of those old-established farming families that Gotthelf excelled in portraying.

But before we write off Zeitgeist und Bernergeist as, artistically, not a complete success, it is worth pausing to consider just what artistic category Gotthelf fits into, if any. With his scathing denunciations of the times in which he lived and his large output of political journalism, he seems to me to be a figure who can be as well compared with a Juvenal, a Savonarola or a Karl Kraus as with other novelists. In his lighthearted moments (and there are plenty of these) there is almost a touch—ludicrous though it may sound in this context—of Gilbert and Sullivan. In the last analysis he is simply sui generis.

Nevertheless, for much of the time he is also a superb novelist who possesses the one gift essential to a novelist—pace modern literary theory and champions of the New Novel—that of being able to create convincing characters and to place them in a realistic setting; in other words, the gift of creating a coherent world of his own. Gotthelf possessed this gift in such abundant measure that he was able to sit down some time after completing a story and continue it quite effortlessly, almost, it would seem, ad infinitum; he added in this way two further long sections to the original Geld und Geist and talked at one time of adding a fourth; and Uli der Pächter, the sequel to Uli der Krecht, was writen some seven years after the original novel.

Gotthelf unfolds before us a living panorama of a people whose life he thoroughly understood (he was as good a judge of a horse or a cow as any of his parishioners) and with whose attitude to it he sympathised. It is a picture of a world of farmers and country tradesmen—some poor, some rich—engaged in the essential business of life: working, eating, sleeping, marrying, dying. No romantic halo hovers over the countryman's life; a farmer's prosperity is measured by the size of his manure heap, and on at least two occasions people fall into the ponds of liquid manure that surround the heaps. On the other hand, farming is not regarded as a sordid round of unsatisfying toil; it is a hard but interesting life accepted as a matter of course, the fundamental form of civilised life. The unit is the family, with, in the richer ones, the labourers and maids who live in the farmhouse. This society is not a matriarchy, but the farmer's wife has an important part to play, knows it, and is swift to dominate a shiftless husband. Marriages are arranged preferably for love, but with an eye to convenience. The Emmental farmer's attitude to marriage is amusingly illustrated in the short story “Wie Joggeli eine Frau sucht”; a rich young farmer does his wooing disguised as a tinker, so that he can see the local young ladies at work in their homes. The outward sign that all is well with a family's spiritual condition is attendance at church on Sunday; Änneli, in Geld und Geist, is reconciled to her husband after a Sunday sermon. Round this central core of the family farm in the Emmental or Oberaargau stand pictures of the other aspects of country life: the village schoolmaster's home in Die Leiden und Freuden eines Schulmeisters, the inn in Der Geldstag, the vicarage in Anne Babi Jowäger, village life as a whole in Die Käserei in der Vehfreude, which describes, with a wealth of expert knowledge, the establishment of a cheese co-operative. The details are filled in by the short stories, which provide vignettes of almost every country trade and delve back as well into the history and legends of this long-established and stable society, a society with which Gotthelf has a sort of love-hate relationship, feeling that it needs reform as well as defence.

For Gotthelf is no mere Heimatkünstler or sentimental chronicler of rural life; these country scenes and country people are simply the particular form of life which he knows best and in which as an artist he therefore necessarily clothes this own enormously powerful vision of life, a vision based on a deep and subtle understanding of human nature.

It is the same with his use of dialect. Gotthelf's Berndeutsch is not something that he introduces into his Hochdeutsch at nicely calculated intervals to add charming touches of verisimilitude; his characters rise up before his eyes speaking as they would in everyday life, and he cannot at these moments do anything but write Berndeutsch. Here again, form and content are one. In so far as dialect invades the narrative as opposed to the dialogue (which occupies, on an average, roughly two-fifths of each novel,²⁵ it is again because Berndeutsch terms and forms are the most concrete and vigorous means at Gotthelf's disposal for expressing the ideas he has in mind. Gotthelf made the point himself in a letter to I. Gersdorf:

“Ebenso will ich nie im Dialekt schreiben, und auf den ersten zwanzig Seiten wird man wenig davon merken, nachher werde ich dazu gezwungen, ich mag wollen oder nicht, und vieles lässt sich freilich nur im Dialekt treu geben. Zudem ist unser Dialekt wirklich gar bündig und kräftig, und manches verdiente in den allgemeinen deutschen Sprachschatz aufgenommen zu werden.”²⁶

He tried at times to produce versions of his work—Uli der Knecht, for example—with the Berndeutsch eliminated, for the benefit of the North German public, with whom he scored quite a hit in his lifetime. The result was not a success; most of the speed and vigour has gone. For instance, “Dein Hudeln kömmt mir zu oft wieder” expands into the dull paraphrase, “Deine Nachtschwärmereien und dein Betrinken kommen mir zu oft wieder”.²⁷ Not that Gotthelf is a dialect writer in the normal sense of the term; his language is a Mischsprache that swings constantly between the two poles of Hochdeutsch and Berndeutsch—this is part of its fascination—and is really his own creation. The early twentieth-century French critic Muret saw this:

“En matière de langage, Gotthelf doit être considéré comme un génie créateur.”

Walter Muschg is even more enthusiastic, and more specific:

“Sein Berndeutsch ist monumental, von einem Riesen geprägt, es setzt sich nur zur Hälfte aus dem mundartlich Geläufigen zusammen. Die andere, grössere Hälfte war von ihm und nach ihm niemals da. Sein Sprachgefühl hat den Dialekt in eine Sphäre weggehoben, die nur vom Schöpfer her überschaut und begriffen werden kann.”²⁸

In this domain it is hardly too much to compare Gotthelf with Luther, to whom, as Guggisberg has pointed out,²⁹ he is remarkably similar in character and temperament. In the “Gespräch der Reformatoren im Himmel” it is Luther who gets all the best lines, like the splendidly Gotthelfian challenge:

“Wisst ihr auch, was Reformation ist? Die endet sich nie.”³⁰

Of course, Gotthelf's use of dialect does put difficulties in the way of the non-Swiss reader—what is needed is an edition of the novels with notes at the foot of each page, so that the reader is not held up—but it has not prevented him from being translated into French, Italian, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, Hungarian and English.³¹ Most of the English translations date from the nineteenth century and are a bit heavy-handed, but a very effective version of “Die schwarze Spinne” appeared only a few years ago.³² Dialect presents less of a problem in the shorter stories because it appears much less frequently than in the novels; sometimes hardly at all.

Gotthelf has had no real literary progeny because he is quite literally inimitable, but Strindberg's second novel, Hemsöborna, seems to have been modelled on Uli der Knecht (Strindberg came across Gotthelf's work while living in Switzerland),³³ and Thomas Mann has described how he read Uli and its sequel while writing Doktor Faustus, “in order to keep in touch with great narrative literature”.³⁴ In Switzerland Gotthelf has been for many years now a popular classic, with all kinds of paper-back editions of individual stories on sale in every bookshop. The centenary of his death in 1954 provoked a number of radio and film adaptations, some of them, naturally enough, conveying little more than the plot of the particular stories on which they were based. As Karl Fehr says,³⁵ Gotthelf is a mine of poetic beauty—and of religious, psychological and ethical wisdom—that is far from being exhausted; it is the scholar's job, especially as we move further and further away from Gotthelf's own age, to ensure that the true nature of his greatness is not lost from sight.

Notes

1. Karl Fehr, Jeremias Gotthelf (Albert Bitzius), Sammlung Metzler, J. B. Metzlersche Verlag, Stuttgart, 1967.

2. “Is ancient and modern poetry similar in nature? Is modern poetry distinguished by special characteristics, and what are the reasons for this difference?”

3. K. Fehr, op. cit., p. 38.

4. Verhandlungen der Helvetischen Gesellschaft zu Langenthal im Jahre 1826, quoted by Bloesch, Jeremias Gotthelf. Unbekanntes und Ungedrucktes über Pestalozzi, Fellenberg und die bernische Schule, Berne, 1938.

5. Philipp Emanuel von Fellenberg (1791-1844): a Swiss educationist with an international reputation at the time. Bitzius disliked the amount of influence he wielded in Berne and considered his rationalist approach harmful to religious life.

6. Selbstbiographie, in Jeremias Gotthelfs Persönlichkeit, ed. by W. Muschg, Verlag Benno Schwabe & Co., Klosterberg, Bâle, 1944, p. 26. Gotthelf wrote this compressed autobiography at the request of G. L. Meyer von Knonau, archivist of Zürich, for a handbook on Switzerland which was never in fact published.

7. SW, vol. 1, p. 7. Almost untranslatable. “I was born in the parish of No-sense, in a year which was not reckoned as one of our Lord's.”

8. SW, vol. 1, p. 79. “You just learn, boy; that doesn't concern you.”

9. “It was still the good old days, when one learned religion at school, and only religion …”

10. C. Manuel, Jeremias Gotthelf, sein Leben und seine Schriften, reprinted by the Eugen Rentsch Verlag, Erlenbach-Zurich, 1922, p. 52. “It is the archetype and prototype, one might almost say the programme of all his later writings. The most important of his later books are already contained in nuce, so to speak, in this first one”.

11. H. M. Waidson, Jeremias Gotthelf, An Introduction to the Swiss Novelist, Oxford, Blackwell, 1953, p. 84.

12. R. Hunziker in SW 9, p. 510: “Gotthelf's artistic nature was guided not by aesthetic but by ethical principles. To him, what his fiery temperament compelled him to say was always the essential thing. Once he had decided on the content and ethical theme [of a story] the question of form was already largely resolved. The case of Gotthelf is an excellent example of the doctrine that simultaneous conception, the a priori marriage of content and form, is the natural precondition for the birth of a work of art.”

13. T. Salfinger, Gotthelf und die Romantik, Bâle, 1945, pp. 123 f.

14. F. Sengle, Zum Wandel des Gotthelfbildes, GRM, 1957, p. 248.

15. H. M. Waidson, op. cit., p. 158.

16. SW 15, p. 255 (Addendum to Die Armennot): “Christianity in the full sense of the word is and remains the only effective balm for the festering wound. Christ is and remains the only saviour for this sick world.”

17. “Society, especially feminine society, made more demands on my time than scholarship.”

18. SW, supp. vol. 12, p. 8. A Tacitean summary that almost defies translation. “The tradition of the Reformation in its Swinglian form united in him with Herder's notion of universal revelation to form a unified view of reality embracing nature, history and the contemporary world.”

19. SW, 3, p. 156. “Many angels still walk through the world. Flames are angels of the Lord, and streams, too; the Lord sends out beggars and through them He calls us now to wisdom, now to mercy. The Lord lays stones in our path and drops the dew at our feet; all are angels of the Lord.”

20. SW 15, p. 97. “Man is created in God's likeness; the Christian should strive after the restoration of this likeness, he should try to live a godlike life in this mortal body and to make this earth a forecourt to heaven.”

21. SW 4, p. 46. “It seemed to him as if two powers were striving for his soul, almost as it were a good and a bad angel, and each wanted to possess him.”

22. SW 13, p. 361. “What is it, the one thing that reduces men who are superficially quite different to the same level, and makes them so alike in their relations with their fellow-men? It is passion, vice, sensuality triumphant, the old Adam, who has cast off every veil and conquered every scruple. It is this old Adam that hates God and neighbour, is incapable of any good and inclined to every sort of evil.”

23. SW 13, p. 9. “Whoever is fond of the people and sees clearly into its life must clash with Radicalism, for it is not merely a political standpoint, but a whole philosophy of life that affects every human relationship, that wishes to gain control of the whole human race.”

24. SW, vol. 13, p. 200. “Political freedom is useless without religious freedom, and religious freedom does not consist in everyone's believing what he likes, but in no one's any longer believing in anything but a natural mode of life without any thought of a life to come …”

25. A. Reber, Stil und Bedeutung des Gesprächs im Werke Jeremias Gotthelfs, Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin, 1967, p. 23.

26. SW, supp. vol. 5, p. 335. “Similarly, I never set out to write in dialect, and in the first twenty pages little of it will be noticed; after that I am compelled to do so whether I want to or not; and certainly many things can only be rendered truly in dialect. Moreover, our dialect is very succinct and forceful, and many expressions would merit being incorporated in the general German vocabulary.”

27. Uli der Knecht, North German, “bowdlerised” version published by Springer, p. 3. Quoted by A. Reber, op. cit., p. 80.

28. Gabriel Muret, Jérémie Gotthelf, Librairie Félix Alcan, Paris, 1913, p. 443; W. Muschg, Gotthelf. Die Geheimnisse des Erzählers, C. H. Beck'sche Verlangsbuchhandlung, Munich, 1931, p. 447. “His Berndeutsch is monumental, coined by a giant; it is only half composed of current dialect. The other, greater half never existed before or after him. His feeling for language lifted the dialect into a sphere which can only be surveyed and understood by the creator.”

29. K. Guggisberg, Jeremias Gotthelf. Christentum und Leben, Max Niehans Verlag, Zürich and Leipzig, 1939, p. 53.

30. SW, supp. vol. 12, p. 186. “Do you really know what reformation is? That is something that never ends.”

31. H. M. Waidson, “Jeremias Gotthelf's Reception in Britain and America,” Modern Language Review, vol. 43, Cambridge, 1948; J. R. Foster, “Jeremias Gotthelf's Reputation Outside Switzerland,” German Life and Letters, 1955.

32. The Black Spider, trans. by H. M. Waidson, Calder, London.

33. M. Lamm, August Strindberg, Stockholm, 1940, vol. 1, pp. 378 ff.

34. Th. Mann, Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus, Bermann-Fischer Verlag, 1949, p. 60.

35. K. Fehr, op. cit., p. 96.

N.B. SW = Gotthelf's Sämtliche Werke, ed. by R. Hunziker and H. Bloesch, 24 volumes and 16 supplementary vols., Zürich, 1911 ff.