Spitteler, Carl (24 April 1845 – 29 December 1924)

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Carl Spitteler (24 April 1845 – 29 December 1924)

Malcolm J. Pender
University of Strathclyde, Glasgow

1919 Nobel Prize in Literature Presentation Speech

Spitteler: Autobiographical Statement

This entry was expanded by Pender from his Spitteler entry in DLB 129: Nineteenth-Century German Writers, 1841–1900.

BOOKS: Prometheus und Epimetheus: Ein Gleichnis, as Carl Felix Tandem, 2 volumes (Aarau: Sauerländer, 1880–1881); translated by James F. Muirhead as Prometheus and Epimetheus (London: Jarrolds, 1931);

Extramundana: Kosmische Dichtungen, as Tandem (Leipzig: Haessel, 1883; revised edition, Jena: Diederichs, 1905);

Das Wettfasten von Heimligen, serialized in Der Bund (3 September-10 October 1888); book publication edited by Martin Kraft (Zurich: Buchclub Ex Libris, 1980);

Der Parlamentär: Lustspiel in vier Akten (Basel: Gassmann, 1889);

Das Bombardement von Åbo: Eine Erzählung aus Finnland, serialized in Der Bund (27 January-24 February 1889); book publication (Bern: Gute Schriften, 1956);

Schmetterlinge, as Tandem (Hamburg: Verlagsanstalt und Druckerei Aktien Gesellschaft, 1889);

Friedli der Kolderi (Zurich: Müller, 1891);

Der Ehrgeizige: Lustspiel in vier Aufzügen (Bern: Lack & Scheim, 1892);

Gustav: Ein Idyll (Zurich: Müller, 1892);

Literarische Gleichnisse (Zurich: Müller, 1892);

Balladen (Zurich: Müller, 1896);

Der Gotthard (Frauenfeld: Huber, 1897);

Lachende Wahrheiten: Gesammelte Essays (Florence & Leipzig: Diederichs, 1898); translated by Muirhead as Laughing Truths (London & New York: Putnam, 1927);

Conrad der Leutnant: Eine Darstellung (Berlin: Verlag der Romanwelt, 1898);

Olympischer Frühling: Epos (Leipzig & Jena: Diederichs, 1900–1905)-comprises part 1, Die Auffahrt: Ouvertüre; part 2, Hera die Braut; part 3, Die hohe

Zeit; part 4, Ende und Wende; 2 volumes (1907); revised, 2 volumes (1910)—includes part 5, Zeus;

Glockenlieder: Gedichte (Jena: Diederichs, 1906);

Imago (Jena: Diederichs, 1906);

Gerold und Hansli, die Mädchenfeinde: Kindergeschichte (Jena: Diederichs, 1907); republished as Die Mädchenfeinde: Eine Kindergeschichte (Jena: Diederichs, 1920); translated by Vicomtesse de la Roquette-Buisson as Two Little Misogynists (New York: Holt, 1922);

Meine Beziehungen zu Nietzsche (Munich: Süddeutsche Monatshefte, 1908);

Meine frühesten Erlebnisse (Jena: Diederichs, 1914);

Unser Schweizer Standpunkt: Vortrag (Zurich: Rascher, 1915);

Gottfried-Keller-Rede, in Luzern gehalten am 26. Juli 1919 (Lucerne: Wicke, 1919); republished as Gottfried Keller: Eine Rede (Jena: Diederichs, 1920);

Warum ich meinen Prometheus umgearbeitet habe: Vortrag (Zurich: Rascher, 1923);

Prometheus der Dulder (Jena: Diederichs, 1924); Gesammelte Werke, 11 volumes, edited by Gottfried Bohnenblust, Wilhelm Altwegg, and Robert Faesi (Zurich: Artemis, 1945–1958).

Collections: Meistererzählungen, edited by Werner Stauffacher (Zurich: Manesse, 1990);

“Echte, selige Musik—”: Musikalische Schriften, edited by Andreas Wernli (Basel: Schwabe, 2002).

Edition in English: Selected Poems of Carl Spitteler, translated by Ethel Colburn Mayne and James F.Muirhead (London & New York: Putnam, 1928; New York: Macmillan, 1928).

PLAY PRODUCTIONS: Der Parlamentär, Basel, Basel Municipal Theatre, November 1889;

Festspiel zur Eröffhung des Zürcher Stadttheaters, Zurich, Zurich Municipal Theatre, 30 September 1891.

OTHER: “Eugenia, eine Dichtung,” in Carl Meißner, Carl Spitteler (Jena: Diederichs, 1912), pp. 108-132.

Carl Spitteler was a generation younger than the best-known nineteenth-century writers of German-speaking Switzerland, Gottfried Keller and Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, and he occupies an anomalous position in the literary tradition that his two older compatriots did so much to establish. Spitteler was inspired by a belief in the writer-poet as a visionary, a notion at odds not only with the pragmatic Swiss ethos but also with dominating trends in literature written in German at the close of the nineteenth century and at the opening of the twentieth. In Spitteler’s view, the contemporary belief in unfettered progress, with its emphasis on the practical application of the sciences, helped to demystify and trivialize life. The function of literature was not to reflect this impoverishment in the real world but to counter it by providing inspiration and solace. Spitteler is, therefore, associated much less with the German-Swiss narrative literary tradition than with the cultural pessimism proclaimed by the German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. In his chosen medium of the epic poem—a form he sought strenuously to revive as the only one compatible with the high calling of the writer-poet—Spitteler drew on classical and Oriental mythology to depict the suffering and folly of humanity within a misbegotten creation. The major redeeming feature in the works by which Spitteler set most store is the noble figure whose singleness of purpose in the face of humiliation and deprivation at the hands of those who have temporal power bear witness to an ideal beyond anything entertained by the common herd.

Spitteler’s was an elitist view that set itself against contemporary styles such as realism and naturalism and against the genre of the novel. While he enjoyed a certain vogue in the early years of the twentieth century, he was certainly not widely read by the time of his death in 1924. As characteristic of this development, biographer Werner Stauffacher cites the reaction of Walter Benjamin, who, as a young man, praised Spitteler highly in an essay of 1911 and then never mentioned him again in any of his writings.

The contemporary perception of Spitteler offers several contradictions. First, the form and content of what he regarded as his major works did not appeal to a wide public at the time of their publication and appeal even less to contemporary nonspecialist readers, so that he is now known almost exclusively for the narratives in the realist and modern manner that he undertook as mere exercises in an attempt to establish his name in the literary world. Second, Spitteler held himself aloof from political activity (although his essays show his awareness of contemporary situations); yet, the highly political speech he made at a turbulent moment just after the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Unser Schweizer Standpunkt (1915, Our Swiss Point of View), remains a key definition of Swiss neutrality in the modern world. Third, Spitteler was awarded the 1919 Nobel Prize in Literature (the only native-born Swiss writer to have received this honor); but despite his undoubted literary strengths, Spitteler is a somewhat anachronistic figure in the German-speaking literary scene from the 1880s to the 1920s and today is simply not read in the way in which Keller and Meyer continue to be read. In a short essay of 1905, titled “Welche Werke sind veraltet?” (Which Works Are Outdated?), Spitteler made fun of literary histories that gave artificial life to works already dead and concluded: “Ein Werk ist dann endgiiltig veraltet, wenn ein Meister es nicht mehr zum Vorbild neh-men kann und mag” (A work is out-of-date for good when an accomplished writer no longer wishes or is able to take it as a model). This judgment comes perilously near to fitting his own work, for there is virtually no trace of his influence in the German-Swiss writing that came after him.

The first child of Karl and Anna Dorothea (Brod-beck) Spitteler, Carl Georg Friedrich Spitteler was born on 24 April 1845 in the small town of Liestal, some thirty miles southeast of Basel. In 1849 Karl Spitteler was appointed federal treasurer in the wake of the reforms that set up the Swiss Federation in 1848, and the family, which by this time included a second son, moved to Bern. The boys attended primary and secondary school in Bern until the return of the family to Liestal in 1857, when Spitteler was sent as a boarder to the Humanistisches Gymnasium (Classical High School) in Basel. There he received instruction from Wilhelm Wackernagel, the first incumbent of the chair of German at the University of Basel, and from the great art historian Jakob Burckhardt, whose pessimistic views were an important influence on Spitteler.

In 1860 Spitteler made the acquaintance of the artistically and musically gifted Widmann family; the son, Joseph Viktor, remained until his death in 1911 a lifelong friend and a tireless campaigner for recognition of Spitteler as a writer. Also in 1860 his youthful aunt Sophie Brodbeck, only eight years his senior, who had been widowed, returned to her hometown of Winter-thur. Her recognition of Spitteler’s special nature and her sympathetic response to the problems he was experiencing in relation to his future destiny earned her in his eyes the designation “Eugenia,” meaning in this case not only “high-born” but also “the guiding spirit” of his youth; she provided inspiration for him for many years. Spitteler’s contacts with the Widmann family helped to further his talents for art and music (he became an accomplished pianist), but he decided after a period of inner turmoil in the autumn of 1862, a year he later called “das entscheidende Jahr” (the decisive year), that he would devote himself exclusively to the high calling of Dichter (writer-poet). Almost twenty years elapsed, however, before his first publication, Prometheus und Epimetheus (1880–1881; translated as Prometheus and Epimetheus, 1931).

Difficulties in his relationship with his practical-minded father were the first substantial obstacle to the realization of Spitteler’s literary goals after he graduated from the Humanistisches Gymnasium in 1863. Under paternal pressure, he then opted for law, which he studied at the University of Basel for two semesters. He suffered a complete physical and mental collapse in 1864, and in the autumn of that year Brodbeck became engaged to Widmann. A month later Spitteler fled to friends in Lucerne, where he remained for almost a year. During this period of isolation, he continued to work on transferring to paper his poetic visions. Communication with his father was gradually reestablished with the help of intermediaries, and on his return home it was agreed as a compromise that Spitteler would study theology at the University of Zurich. Starting in the autumn of 1865 he spent four semesters there, which were characterized by a critical attitude toward certain tenets of Protestant theology and by increasing involvement with his own literary projects. These projects were given more definitive direction by the advice of Burckhardt, whom Spitteler continued to visit in Basel, and who counseled against attempting drama. This advice accorded with Spitteler’s own recent experience: prior to his studies in Zurich, he had sought to give dramatic form to the travails of a rugged individualist in a uniform world through a portrayal of the biblical figure of Saul. Spitteler’s failure to shape this material had left him dispirited, and after hearing Burckhardt’s advice, he felt encouraged to turn to poetic forms, more especially the verse epic, which he saw as a fitting vehicle for his high aims and for which his model was Orlando furioso (1516) of the Italian Renaissance poet Ariosto. He began drafting material for an epic on Prester John, the twelfth-century legendary Christian priest who became king of Ethiopia.

Two semesters in 1867 and 1868 at the University of Heidelberg completed Spitteler’s formal requirements for his final examinations. At the German university Spitteler’s energies were only partially directed toward theology, however. He interested himself in philosophy and to some extent in psychology but chiefly in the development of his own literary work. The attempt to fashion a drama around Saul was definitively abandoned in favor of an epic depicting another figure who set himself against all manner of vicissitudes: in drafts depicting Heracles and his feats, the figure of Prometheus had begun to emerge, so that by the summer of 1867 Spitteler was able to see him as the central figure of an epic further developed in Heidelberg.

On his return to Switzerland in 1868, Spitteler began, in conjunction with his literary work, to prepare himself for his final examinations, which he failed in the autumn of 1869. After a further fifteen months of study, mainly in Basel, he again presented himself for examination and this time was successful, being awarded in the spring of 1871 the authority to preach. Spitteler then went through the qualifying procedures to become a Protestant clergyman in the Canton of Grisons but at the last moment withdrew his candidature, and, in a complete change of direction, he accepted in July 1871 the offer of a post as private tutor to a noble family in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Spitteler remained in Russia as a tutor for almost eight years, from 1871 to 1879. From 1871 to 1873 he worked for the family of Carl-Carlowitsch Standertskjöld, a Finnish-Swedish baron who was a general in the service of the Russian state; in the autumn of 1873 Spitteler moved to the household of the Baltic baron Niklaus von Cramer, with whom he remained until he left Russia for good. As well as giving lessons, Spitteler was expected to participate in the social life of the families, accompanying them to the theater and opera and participating in the summer holidays of both families, including several visits to Finland. Spitteler complained of the time taken up by these social engagements, but he was participating in a lifestyle that appealed to an aspect of his nature. In the 1880s he wrote up some of his observations of Russia, but his articles are confined to customs and habits; there does not appear to be any evidence that Spitteler engaged with the social reality of Russia nor indeed with the contemporary literature of the country—the main works of Aleksandr Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Leo Tolstoy that had been published at that time were in narrative prose, for Spitteler an inferior literary genre.

During the years in Russia he ceaselessly reworked the material that yielded his first book publication. Here, after the many false starts in Zurich and Heidelberg, the painful fashioning of the Prometheus epic as a classical form took place as he began to compose the story as such and not simply to list its possible themes. This process was to some extent accelerated by the decision to abandon verse and to opt instead for strongly rhythmical prose. He kept his friend Widmann informed of progress and in late 1876 sent a draft of the first part of the Prometheus epic to him. To his consternation, the reaction of Widmann, his closest supporter and sympathizer, was quite negative: Widmann advised him on no account to publish. He found the draft lacking in plasticity and symbolic impact, and he felt that it had an inappropriate linguistic register. Spitteler’s determination to overcome his problems with the material and the form was sustained by his high notion of the calling to which he had chosen to devote himself. That he was prepared to make the sacrifices demanded of a poet, not simply in terms of application and work, was further underlined by the outcome of his love affair with his young cousin Ellen Brodbeck (the daughter of Sophie Brodbeck from her first marriage) during a short visit to Switzerland in 1876: his renunciation of the relationship, which he saw as deflecting him from his true path, and his subsequent uneasy attitude toward her when, on his permanent return to Switzerland, he discovered her to be a wife and mother, later achieved literary form in his only novel, Imago (1906).

Spitteler returned to Switzerland in 1879. His father had died the previous year, so Spitteler’s financial situation was by no means secure, and additionally he felt obliged to provide for his mother. Widmann, who had become headmaster of a girls’ school in Bern, was able to help by offering him a temporary part-time post there teaching history. The job lasted a year, and thereafter Spitteler was obliged to seek further temporary teaching positions where he could find them. In 1880 Widmann was appointed literary editor of the influential Bern daily newspaper Der Bund (The Federation), and, ever mindful of his friend, he enabled Spitteler to begin his journalistic work by starting to publish in the autumn of 1880 Spitteler’s series of descriptive articles about daily life in Russia. At that time Spitteler was trying to find a publisher for Prometheus und Epimetheus; after the manuscript had been rejected by four publishers, the two volumes appeared at his own expense in 1880 and 1881. The books were published under the pseudonym Carl Felix Tandem, a reference to the German writer Jean Paul, whose work Spitteler valued highly and who had claimed to place the Latin words “tandem felix” (happy at last) on his desk when he had finished writing something.

Prometheus und Epimetheus depicts an ignoble world in which the kingdom of God on Earth fails to offer a counterweight to the baseness and falsity represented by the monster Behemoth. When the work opens, the brothers Prometheus and Epimetheus stand above common men by virtue of their noble natures and high ideals, and the angel of God wishes to make one of them king on Earth. His first choice is Prometheus, who is offered the throne on the condition that he renounce his allegiance to his soul, which acknowledges no other authority, and replace it with a conscience, which is, in each human being, the repository of generally prevailing and socially accepted views. Prometheus refuses the offer because his allegiance to his soul, his Herrin (supreme mistress), is total; thus, Epimetheus, compliant to law and custom, is chosen as king. Prometheus feels that he has been humiliated and is banished and must earn his daily bread in poverty.

The shortcomings of Epimetheus as ruler are revealed by two stories. First, Pandora, the innocent daughter of the guilty creator of the world, seeks to lessen the pain of human fate with a precious stone. Peasants find it and bring it to Epimetheus, who stifles his own inner promptings about its significance and, following his conscience, allows the stone to be neglected and become lost to mankind. Second, the angel of God has, as a mark of his favor, entrusted the care of his children to Epithemeus. But Behemoth successfully outwits the feeble Epimetheus, and two of the children are lost. At this point Doxa, the companion of the angel of God, appeals to Prometheus, who intervenes. The last child of God is rescued; the enemy hosts vanish; and Epimetheus is deposed. But Prometheus, spent after his efforts and old after his years in exile, declines the offered crown, and the future of the kingdom remains uncertain.

As Spitteler pointed out, the two brothers are not based on classical models but instead represent two contrary principles: Prometheus seeks to order his life in accord with the highest of ideals, and Epimetheus acquiesces in the ways of the world; the first battles relentlessly with contrary forces, and the second settles for the line of least resistance. The Prometheus figure, as well as having clear parallels to Spitteler’s self-perception, owes much to Burckhardt’s notions of historical greatness and cultural pessimism and also to the prominent figures in history evoked in the writings of Meyer. The metrically rhythmic prose and musical structures of Prometheus und Epimetheus impart a quality to it that derived from Spitteler’s perception of the epic. The work elicited practically no response from the critics or the public, despite Widmann’s best efforts on his friend’s behalf and despite a positive private statement from Keller in a letter to Widmann. More than forty years later, with his reputation established and near the end of his life, Spitteler published a refashioning of the same material as Prometheus der Dulder (1924, Prometheus the Endurer).

In the spring of 1881, under economic pressure, Spitteler took up a post that he held for four years at a high school in La Neuveville, northwest of Bern in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, where he moved with his mother. He was required to give lessons (conducted in French) in Greek, Latin, and German. Since this post was a full-time job, there was restricted time for him to pursue his own writing. Nonetheless, Spitteler, as well as drafting a play, “Jesabel,” was working on what became his second published text. Extramundana (1883, Extra-terrestrial Matter) was published through the good offices of Widmann by the Leipzig firm Haessel, who also published Meyer; the author did not receive a fee but was not required to pay for publication. The volume includes a collection of seven myths in verse, mostly pertaining to the creation of the world, and, in the first edition, carrying a set of explanations in prose. Once again, there was virtually no public reaction, but this time Spitteler himself expressed reservations about the quality of the poems. However, Extramundana marks nonetheless a stage in his long literary apprenticeship: first, in the handling of verse, albeit not too successfully; and second, in the isolation of individual themes from the Prometheus material, a pointer to the more open construction of Olympischer Frühling (1900–1905, Olympic Spring).

In 1883 Spitteler married Marie Op den Hooff, who was the daughter of a wealthy Dutch family that had settled in Switzerland, and who had been his pupil at the girls’ school in Bern. The couple had two daughters: Anna, born in 1886, and Marie Adéle, born in 1891.

Work on two texts continued. With the play “Jesabel,” Spitteler sought to depict the clash between Queen Jezebel and the prophet Elijah partly in line with the theatrical conventions of his age and partly in line with the model provided by the plays of Friedrich Schiller: on the one hand, an historical subject rendered in blank verse in five acts, and on the other hand, a distribution of focus reminiscent of Schiller’s Maria Stuart (1801)-acts 1 and 4 for Elijah, acts 2 and 5 for Jezebel, and a confrontation between the two in act 2. The completed manuscript was circulated among well-disposed friends and critics but received largely negative responses, and a revised second act sent to the Basel Municipal Theater in 1886 was rejected. Spitteler had better fortune with another project. He returned to his drafts from the 1860s on Prester John and reworked this material into Eugenia, a literary rendition of his relationship with Sophie Brodbeck, who appears as the duchess Eugenia, the benevolent and sympathetic promoter of her nephew John. The first cantos of this epic were serialized in DerBundin early 1885.

In the autumn of the same year, Spitteler was able, again through the efforts of Widmann, to obtain a job as Feuilletonsredaktor (reporter in the cultural features section) with the newspaper Grenipost (Border Post) in Basel. The move with his family to Basel was the start of a seven-year period of literary journalism, during which Spitteler substantially widened his acquaintanceships in literary circles and published many essays. In the nearly two years with the Grenipost, he reviewed books, wrote articles on the arts, and commented, initially at least, on politics in Switzerland and elsewhere in Europe, the latter activity demonstrating that the famous speech of 1914, Unser Schweiier Standpunkt, was not a completely isolated incident. The Grenipost eventually ran into financial difficulties, necessitating Spitteler’s dismissal in the spring of 1887.

Almost three years of insecurity followed, during which short periods of employment as a literary journalist filling in for absent staff members supplemented the fees he earned from his freelance stories (some of which drew on his Russian experiences), essays on literature and aesthetics, and book reviews. Keller had been prevailed upon by Widmann to read Prometheus und Epimetheus and Extramundana, but Keller’s favorable private comments had been followed neither by public support for Spitteler nor by recommendations on his behalf. In 1887 Nietzsche, who had succeeded Spitteler’s teacher Wackernagel in the chair of German at the University of Basel, was impressed by a collection of Spitteler’s essays sent to him by Widmann and recommended Spitteler to Ferdinand Avenarius, who was about to launch Kunstwart (Curator), a Munich periodical that became highly influential and for more than twenty-five years published Spitteler’s contributions on a range of literary and aesthetic topics. The importance of this contact was also that it afforded Spitteler a voice beyond the boundaries of Switzerland—he was slowly establishing a reputation in the literary world, and journeys to Germany and Austria brought him into contact with editors of other leading reviews, though not always with an outcome in his favor.

The pressure to earn a living left little time to further Spitteler’s own literary projects, but, as always, he persevered. A comedy play, “Bacillus” (Bacillus), was scheduled to start rehearsals at the beginning of 1888 at the municipal theater in Bern but was cancelled at the last moment, partly because the actors protested that the play was impossible to perform as it stood. The plot, which centered on small-town intrigues connected with highly dubious scientific experiments on people who had agreed to fast, was serialized in story form in the autumn of the same year in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (New Zurich Newspaper) as Das Wettfasten von Heimligen (The Fasting Competition of Heimligen). In 1889 Spitteler’s collection of poems, Schmetterlinge (Butterflies), appeared with a Hamburg publisher, once more at his own expense. Every poem centers on a butterfly or is seen from the perspective of a butterfly, which is presented as being symbolic both of the fate of humanity in an evilly disposed world and of the beauty and ephemerality of human love. Schmetterlinge marks a change from the visions of Prometheus und Epimetheus to a closer observation of the real world.

A comedy, Der Parlamentär (literally, the bearer of a flag of truce), which had gone through several reworkings and which dealt with corruption in the Russian army and civil service, was performed in November 1889 in Basel, but the reception at the premiere was so negative that the play was immediately removed from the repertoire. Despite Spitteler’s perception of the weaknesses of the play, he was convinced that a poor production contributed materially to the debacle. It was a severe blow to Spitteler’s hopes for the theater, and it remained, during his lifetime, the only performance of a theatrical work by him that had not been commissioned.

By the end of 1889 Spitteler, despite reverses and disappointments, had acquired sufficient standing for the prestigious and influential daily Neue Zürcher Zeitung to offer him a post in its literary and cultural section. This job represented a major advance for him, not only in terms of his personal reputation but also in financial terms, for it was a well-paid post. Spitteler moved to Zurich and worked there from the beginning of 1890 to the middle of 1892. His contacts in the world of literature increased and became firmer. He was able, by means of his reviews and essays in the leading newspaper of German-speaking Switzerland, to contribute to public standards of taste and judgment; and he was able to encourage talented writers by publishing their work in the columns for which he was responsible. The writer who had struggled to make his name was now, in his mid forties, a man with a position of influence whom people sought out.

In the summer of 1890, Spitteler’s novella Die Mädchenfeinde (translated as Two Little Misogynists, 1922) was serialized in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung .This work, the adventures of two boys of about ten years old, drew on the topography and to some extent on the experiences of the author’s childhood, but there is sufficient distance from the latter for the narrative flow not to be impeded. Spitteler’s reputation as a writer was enhanced when Meyer withdrew at the last minute from a commitment to write a short theatrical piece to celebrate the reopening of the Zurich Municipal Theater after its destruction by fire in 1890. Spitteler accepted the commission, and Der Ehrgeizige (Greedy for Honor) was performed in November 1889; since the scenery had already been built and the expectations of a conventional celebratory allegory were also already in place, Spitteler had little choice but to create a temple of the Muses presided over by Apollo, the incorporation of light and perfection, where the good things in the contemporary theater and opera world were passed in review for the benefit of the new theater. Friedli der Kolderi (1891, Quarrelsome Friedli) appeared with the publishing house Miiller of Zurich. It was a short story portraying the largely self-inflicted misadventures of a young farm boy in a conscious attempt by Spitteler to counter the contemporary sentimentalization of country life.

In 1892 Spitteler published two more books with Müller. Gustav: Ein Idyll (Gustav: An Idyll), a short story expanded from a strand in Das Wettfasten von Heimligen, is set in a picturesque small town and concerns a young man who, after initial reverses and with the help of a devoted woman, gains confidence in his talents as a composer, and has parallels with Spitteler’s situation. The cycle of poems Literarische Glekhnisse (Literary Parables) presents in parable form the forces against which the author had struggled for so long and which, by the end of the 1880s, must have seemed to be vanquishing him: the belittling of idealism, the restrictiveness of the much-vaunted contemporary realist style, the self-regarding nature of literary society, and the derivative-ness of much of what it produced. Yet, the tone is not harshly polemical, nor is the perspective overly particular, so that the poems generate a sense of wide concerns and universal applicability—factors picked up by the critical response, which was unanimously positive and welcoming.

The deaths in Lucerne, within a year of one another, of Spitteler’s mother-in-law and sister-in-law left his ailing and wealthy father-in-law alone. Accordingly, in the summer of 1892 Spitteler obtained a release from his contract with the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and moved with his family to Lucerne so that his father-in-law could be cared for and his affairs administered. For Spitteler the move represented a radical change. His reputation to that point was to a large extent based on his work as an essayist and critic; in his father-in-law’s house, freedom from having to provide for his family allowed him to return to realizing the high ideals envisaged in the vows of “das entscheidendejahr.” When his father-in-law died in 1893, Spitteler became a wealthy man, and, although his financial situation would have permitted him to relax, his remaining thirty-two years were characterized by ceaseless activity: he participated in the cultural life of his adopted city; he traveled frequently in Europe up until 1914; he accepted many invitations to lecture; and he attended conscientiously to a huge correspondence. But, in a testimony to the depth and strength of his sense of mission, his major concern continued to be the composition of his literary works.

In the early Lucerne years many old ideas were refashioned and new ones drafted. Four publications before the end of the century (one a commission) demonstrate Spitteler’s range at this point. First, Balladen (1896, Ballads) again evinces his independent attitude toward genre and fashion. The poems are by no means all ballads in any accepted sense of the term; the majority are revisions of dramatic and epic fragments, and many draw on mythology and legend. Neither in form nor in content do they relate to contemporary German poetry. Second, in 1894 the Gotthard Railway Company approached Spitteler with the request that he write a publicity book on the company, and he accepted in the mistaken belief that the task could be carried out without serious interference with his own work. Not until the spring of 1897 was he able to deliver the manuscript, which was published as Der Gotthard in the autumn of the same year. Third, Lachende Wahrheiten (1898; translated as Laughing Truths, 1927) is the first work to be published by Diederichs of Leipzig who, on the recommendation of Avenarius, had approached Spitteler for a collection of his essays and had thus begun a long and not always easy collaboration. Lachende Wahrheiten includes essays on mainly literary and aesthetic subjects; more than half of the essays in the main section had already appeared in Kunstwart and others in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung .Fourth, Conrad der Leutnant (1898, Conrad the Lieutenant), which had already in 1897 been serialized in a German magazine under the title of Der schwarze Sonntag von Herrlisdorf (The Black Sunday of Herrlisdorf), is one of the pieces that Spitteler regarded as exercises in writing in the realist manner. He wanted to show that it was by choice and not from inability that he did not depict the real world in the epics that he regarded as his major contribution to literature. The presentation in the novella of the clash between a father and a son over the management of a village inn, of the social conflicts within a restricted framework, and of the interpersonal relationships on differing levels of society verges at times on caricature. The tragic death of the son does not seem properly motivated and fails to impart to the reader a sense that it is a necessary outcome of the action.

The work regarded by Spitteler as his magnum opus, and the one for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize, was Olympischer Frühling, which appeared with Diederichs in four volumes between 1900 and 1905, each volume including a part of the structure of the poem as it had been developed at that time; it was republished in its revised and final form in five parts in two volumes in 1910. From Spitteler’s papers, the particular genesis of the huge undertaking can be traced back to the time Spitteler spent in Zurich, but the general idea of the epic as the supreme achievement of literature goes back to the influence on the young student of Burckhardt, whose praise of the genre accorded so well with the notions of dedication and mission inherent in Spitteler’s transformation in “das entscheidendejahr.” Olympischer Frühling represents the high point of Spitteler’s realization of his self-image. His good fortune in the later 1890s had freed him from financial care and enabled him to emerge from what he termed his “time under chloroform” when he worked as a teacher and journalist and to devote himself to the fulfillment of his high calling. Thus, the formation of his ideas and their committal to paper, some of which were present in Balladen, had gained steadily in momentum, reaching fruition in the first years of the new century.

Like Prometheus und Epimetheus, Olympischer Frühling is set in a cosmic landscape and draws on mythology for its characters, all of which is a device permitting Spitteler to present his view of the determinants of human behavior. The rhythmical prose of the earlier epic has been replaced by iambic hexameters with alternating masculine and feminine rhymes, and the five parts of the final version total some twenty thousand lines. In part 1, Die Auffahrt: Ouvertüre (The Ascension: Overture), Ananke, who represents unalterable necessity and who, as a symbol of the predetermined, even mechanistic forces of fate, is himself controlled by even more incomprehensible forces, is dispatching, in fulfillment of the cycle of change that each eon demands, a new generation of gods to control the earth. Under the guidance of Hades and Uranos, the gods make their way to Olympus, the sun-drenched peak in whose shadow the humans live. In the course of the two-day journey, the gods simultaneously witness and represent the forces governing the world: the immutability of the biological life represented by Ananke on the one hand, and, on the other, the counterforces that, together, rise superior and that are contained in the moral will that Hades has taught them and the premonitions and longing in respect of the future imparted to them by Uranos. Their progress is characterized by a sense of awakening, of a new beginning against which is set the twilight of the god Kronos as a pointer to the ephemerality of the coming Olympian splendor. From the palace of light of the daughters of Uranos, the new gods arrive by airship at the heights of Olympus.

In part 2, Hera die Braut (Hera the Bride), the god who succeeds in winning the queen will become king of the gods. Here, too, there is a cyclical pattern: each eon Genesis creates a superwoman to be queen of the gods who, however, is subject to aging and death because she has a drop of Amazon blood and who Genesis will eventually replace with her more beautiful daughter. Hera is the current queen. Competitions in singing, reciting, running, chariot racing, and interpretation of dreams and prophecy are organized, and in the course of these events the individual qualities of the gods begin to emerge. The victor is Apollo, who triumphs over Zeus, Eros, Poseidon, and Hermes. He is the god of the spirit and most noble of all heroes, who harmonizes physical and spiritual perfection; but his victory is irrelevant, for Ananke has determined in advance that Zeus, the taciturn, ruthless man of action, possessed by a will to power that deprives him of all happiness, shall be king of Olympus. He wins Hera, the dominating, intriguing woman who ensnares men, and he inherits her matriarchal empire. At the suggestion of Zeus, Apollo agrees to rule in the realm of beauty while Zeus rules in the realm of reality.

In part 3, Die hohe Zeit (The Noble Time), the goddess of fate, Moira, suspends time to allow a celebration of the union of Zeus and Hera to take place; an Olympian spring ensues, during which the gods and their companions descend to Earth to experience adventures that have a symbolic content. Pallas rebels against death as a destroyer but is eventually reconciled to it as beneficial and just; Apollo, who drives the chariot of the sun, has to contend with the foolishness of those who seek to impose a new sun on him; Dionysius, the visionary youth, is a symbol of religious experience; Poseidon, representing the foolish man of strength, vainly expends his energies in seeking to cause water to flow uphill. The sequence of episodes depicts play and struggle, enjoyment and disappointment, and pleasure and sorrow.

In part 4, Ende und Wend (The End of the Noble Time), Aphrodite, with her grace and beauty, enslaves men and drives them to every form of folly on her behalf, and her overweening pride at her powers causes her to stage for the benefit of the other gods a display of the manner in which she can create disruption in human affairs. But Ananke has become alarmed at the license and chaos that Aphrodite’s behavior is causing and decides to intervene.

In part 5, Zeus, Ananke confirms his rule on Earth when, as the mass of humans seek to free themselves, he reasserts his dominion over them by confirming their lack of dignity and spiritual independence. Hera’s power over Zeus is lost when she shatters the magic glass ring given to her by Moira. The gods are summoned back to Olympus by Zeus, who has decided to go in disguise to the land of humans, where he discovers that they revere an ape dressed as a king. Enraged at this blindness and stupidity and at their treatment of him, Zeus resolves to exterminate the human race; but Grogo, the daughter of Ananke, forces him to relent, and he decides instead to help the human race. He prepares his son Heracles for the task of redeeming humanity, and the epic poem closes with the young man who obeys his own soul—a cardinal distinction between Heracles and the generality of humans—leaving to begin his mission. His departure is linked to the opening of the epic and so to the hopefulness of a new beginning, but it is also attended by the knowledge that the redemption of humans as they have been depicted in the course of the poem will pose a challenge verging on the insurmountable: as Heracles says on his departure in the closing lines: “Mein Herz heifit ‘Dennoch’” (My heart is called “Nevertheless”). The hope is that Heracles will inspire by his example.

Olympischer Frühling, like Spitteler’s earlier epic, is pessimistic. The world is deeply flawed and in thrall to death and violence. Human behavior is governed by pride, greed, foolishness, and shortsightedness, and the control exercised by these failings over the majority of people makes a mockery of the concept of free will. Only a few great figures stand above the soulless, mindless herd, but because they are perceived to be different, they are cast out. Although Spitteler drew on mythological models for the characters and situations in Olympischer Frühling, it cannot be said that he created a mythological world, since the figures are incorporations of the reality of his own psychological world, and the gods are humans who enact episodes from his own life. The defiant statement at the close by Heracles represents an irrational affirmation of life in the face of the mechanistic and deterministic view of life being put forward by science. More problematic was the epic form itself, the central characteristic of which was for Spitteler the presentation of all inward states of mind in visible external actions—his hope that the intention of his epic would be understood in a naive fashion by his readers was almost bound to fail with a public who had lost belief and become skeptical of anything claiming artless simplicity. Similarly, Spitteler’s hope that he could revive the epic was bound to fail at a time when there was no longer a perception of the world as a unified whole. On the other hand, it has been claimed that with Olympischer Frühling, Spitteler rediscovered rhyme for poetry in the German language.

The reception of Olympischer Frühling was favored by several factors. First, it was published by a respected German house with a good publicity network. Second, Avenarius published over an extended period extracts and progress reports from the poet himself in Kunstwart, keeping the epic in the public eye. Third, a review by Widmann of Hera die Braut had attracted the attention of the Austrian musician and composer Felix Weingart-ner; in 1904 Weingartner published in brochure form an essay on Spitteler and became generally active on Spitteler’s behalf in Germany, where the distance of Olympischer Frühling from daily reality and from disturbing modern literary trends such as naturalism appealed to a certain middle-class readership. The appearance of the epic in its various forms over a period of ten years kept it fairly constantly in the view of the reading public. Although Olympischer Frühling met with the critical acclaim that Spitteler had so much wanted and had not received for Prometheus und Epimetheus, it did not sell in significant quantities. It is true that Olympischer Frühling was a breakthrough for Spitteler to the wider German-speaking audience beyond Switzerland, gaining him his first literary prize, Austria’s Bauernfeld Foundation prize, in 1904 and establishing his reputation. But the poem, like the other epic works with which Spitteler struggled hardest and longest and by which he set most store, was much less widely read than those he regarded as mere literary exercises, and this situation has not substantially changed since his death despite the availability of an excellent eleven-volume edition of his collected works with full scholarly apparatus published between 1945 and 1958 at the behest of the Swiss Confederation.

In 1906 Diederichs of Leipzig took over the publication rights of the works that had been published elsewhere prior to the association with the German firm, and they also in the same year brought out two new publications: Spitteler’s last book of lyric poems, Glock-enlieder (Bell Songs), and his only novel, Imago. Glocken-lieder celebrates the role of the bell in human life and had its origins in Spitteler’s time in St. Petersburg, where the lack of bells reminded him of their presence during his upbringing in Switzerland. The poems, in contrast to the first version of Olympischer Frühling, are unambitious; some were later set to music, and the volume sold well over the years.

Imago, on the other hand, was described by Spitteler, for whom writing was never easy, as the most difficult text he ever fashioned, and this claim is confirmed by the massive amount of draft material from which the final version emerged. One difficulty lay in constructing the story—his final reckoning with his love affair of the late 1870s with Ellen Brodbeck—in such a way that the fictional characters were not too clearly identified with real-life people. Another problem was finding adequate literary expression for the power of the creative imagination. The narrator, Viktor, a writer, returns to an unidentified small town where, four years previously, the impact of his meeting with a young woman named Theuda caused her to become in his eyes “Imago,” the incarnation of the power of his Strenge Herrin (exacting mistress), his poetic muse. But Theuda, because she has married a pillar of local society, has become “Pseuda” (the false one), and Viktor has returned to avenge her perfidy. The incomprehensibility in bourgeois eyes of this undertaking is shown by the reaction of Frau Stein-bach, a young widow in love with Viktor, who cannot believe that the imagination can so influence real life; but for Viktor the imaginative powers, through the medium of art, have a point of reference beyond society and can provide alternative possibilities to society’s otherwise unchallenged interpretation of reality.

Viktor resolves to convert to his own views and values the society represented by Pseuda. To this end, he participates in the activities of the “Idealia,” a cultural circle of which Pseuda is the honorary president and which Viktor holds in extreme contempt since he regards the events that it organizes as both intellectually undemanding and ruthlessly normative. But he has seriously underestimated the difficulty of his task. On the one hand, his intellect and his emotions, his drives and his wishes, presented in interior monologue as warring factions in his personality, confuse his judgment at every turn with their disputes and seriously hamper the execution of his challenge to society. On the other hand, Pseuda becomes the representative of society’s uncompromising defense of its values: Viktor’s submission to her in an attempt to regain her attention is in fact directed by her exclusively toward obtaining his unquestioning assent to the social and intellectual status quo. He must seek an accommodation with her brother Kurt, for example, a dilettante writer lionized as a creative talent by the “Idealia,” for whom Viktor is a bizarre and disruptive eccentric. Gradually, he assumes the role of amorous swain who is permitted to fetch and carry and is too intoxicated with the new concord established with Pseuda to grasp that the challenge that he issued has been resolved wholly in favor of society.

Viktor’s illusion that Pseuda is coming to regard him with increasing warmth is shattered when Frau Steinbach discloses that Pseuda is relating to her friends, for their amusement, Viktor’s disclosures to her. Outraged at having been the object of amused tolerance, yet at the same time accepting this humiliation as one of the trials he must bear, Viktor leaves town, taking with him the manuscript he has been working on during his stay. He resolves henceforth to dedicate himself solely to the service of his “Strenge Herrin,” of whom he has a vision at the railway station. Frau Steinbach, who is also present there, remains as unnoticed by him as the signals of affection and esteem she has been giving for the previous four months, and so she serves as a reminder of the price that the pursuit of Viktor’s goals costs him. Arguably, Frau Steinbach represents the possibility of a realizable compromise between art and life. On the other hand, the impossibility of a real relationship with Theuda constitutes a necessary psychological element in the artistic process.

Imago has an interesting historical perspective: on the one hand, Viktor subscribes to a bygone notion of the calling of the writer, which only his financial independence permits him to sustain; on the other hand, the novel points forward by showing the extent to which the mass dissemination of print and picture was standardizing cultural expectation and response. The story presents, in a middle-class setting, the Prometheus theme of renunciation and humiliation endured on behalf of a higher calling, and the ironic manner of its telling makes it one of Spitteler’s most accessible texts. The irony operates on three levels: on a personal level, irony creates distance from still painful memories of Spitteler’s own experience; on a formal level, irony creates a method of coming to terms with the fact that the novel, which so strikingly depicts the disesteem in which the creative imagination is held by society, conforms to the mold already established by Keller for expressing the conflicting claims of artist and Bürger (bourgeois citizen); and on a thematic level, irony is a method of accepting the fact that the protagonists in Imago clash in a manner that underlines the extent to which they are prisoners of attitudes which modern bürgerlich society prevents from coming to a composition. A final irony, in view of Spitteler’s dislike of professional psychologists—who, in his opinion, contributed to the shallowness of the modern age—is that in 1912 Sigmund Freud, at the suggestion of Carl G.Jung, named his journal for the application of psychoanalysis to the humanities Imago after the novel, because the book offers so many good illustrations of psychological theories.

In the fourteen years from the turn of the century to the outbreak of World War I, Spitteler, no longer a young man and not always enjoying the best of health, was ceaselessly active. In addition to the heavy demands of his creative work and to the travel, correspondence, and program of lectures in Swiss and German cities, he wrote essays and received many visits from those who came to pay their respects to the person whom they regarded as a great living writer. By 1908 Spitteler was sufficiently in the public eye in the literary circles in German-speaking Europe to be invited by Avenarius to write for Kunstwart a long essay titled Mein Schaffen und meine Werke (My Creative Work and My Books).

After the publication of the final version of Olym-pischer Frühling in 1910, intimations of mortality began to manifest themselves: in 1911 Widmann died, followed in 1913 by the death of Spitteler’s mother, to whom he was close and to whose memory he published Meine frühesten Erlebnisse (1914, My Earliest Experiences). Spitteler’s autobiographical writings have three stages: early reflections on himself composed in the decade from 1861 to 1871; memories set down in maturity between 1902 and 1914; and finally, in 1924, an attempt to create an overall view of his life. During the second stage, the descriptions of his life and attitudes were written initially in largely random fashion but cohered during 1912 into an autobiography, the manuscript of which was ready for publication when the death of his mother prompted Spitteler to revise his intentions and to publish his remarkable evocation of the first four years of his childhood, the only part of his autobiographical writings to appear in book form during his lifetime, although some short pieces appeared in newspapers and journals. The strength and universal relevance of Meine frühesten Erlebnisse lie in Spitteler’s refusal to sentimentalize and in his determination to take completely seriously the images and fears of childhood; in this connection, he writes: “Es gibt, von innen gefühlt, gar keine Kinder; das ‘Kind’ ist eine Erdich-tung der Erwachsenen” (Felt from within, there are no children at all; the “child” is a fabrication of grownups). Significantly, Freud, in a note added to a later edition of his Traumdeutung (1899, Interpretation of Dreams), quotes Spitteler’s definition of a child’s dream from the first section of Meine frühesten Erlebnisse as being almost identical to his own: “Unbefugtes Auftauchen unterdriickter Sehnsuchtswiinsche unter falschem Ant-litz und Namen” (Unauthorized surfacing of suppressed longings with the wrong countenance and name).

Shortly after the outbreak of World War I Spitteler carried out what is frequently characterized as the one overtly political act of his life. He was invited, at a time when Switzerland was surrounded by nations at war, to offer his views on Swiss neutrality. His speech of 14 December 1914, delivered to the Zurich branch of the Neue Helvetische Gesellschaft (New Helvetic Society) and published as Unser Schweiier Standpunkt, had both immediate and enduring consequences. He opened by stating that his sense of obligation to his duty as a citizen had overcome his initial reluctance to come to this public podium—divisions between German-speaking and French-speaking Switzerland were the concern of every Swiss. German- and French-speaking compatriots must recognize that, despite the cultural ties created by common languages, Germany and France were politically separate from Switzerland; and that the German- and French-speaking parts of Switzerland, for all their differences with each other, constituted a political unity. Spitteler went on to create what was for him a cardinal distinction between the “brothers” who lived within the frontiers of Switzerland and the “neighbors” who lived beyond them: the political brother was closer than the best neighbor. Additionally, a neutral country had to preserve a certain political distance to all neighbors, which was more difficult for the German-speaking Swiss toward Germany than for the French-speaking Swiss toward France, if his own close cultural ties to Germany were a yardstick. And this neutral stance attracted opprobrium because warring neighbors perceived it as a failure to identify with what they regarded as the justice of their particular cause. At the same time, it was necessary to condemn injustice such as the German invasion of neutral Belgium. Spitteler closed by urging all his compatriots to adopt a posture of modesty in the face of the tragedy unfolding in Europe and to avoid pointing to the multilingual structure of the country as an example for Europe, since Switzerland was currently not setting a good example.

Spitteler’s formulation of the cultural and political paradox of being Swiss has become the classic modern definition of Swiss neutrality. In his hour-long, beautifully constructed discourse, Spitteler provided for his countrymen a vision of Switzerland as a moral challenge. The speech created an immediate sensation, being exaggerated and distorted by champions of both Germany and France. Spitteler had been aware of the price he might pay for making his views public, but the vehemence of the storm took him by surprise. It cost him some of his contemporary Swiss and all of his German popularity and damaged irretrievably some of his personal relationships. Yet, the content of Unser Schweiier Standpunkt continued to remain a source of guidance and succor throughout World War II and was, at a 1954 ceremony at the University of Zurich to mark the fortieth anniversary of the delivery of the speech, held to have set out still-valid principles for the comportment of the Swiss toward one another and toward other countries.

During his later years in Lucerne, Spitteler came to be regarded in Switzerland as the main living figure in German-Swiss Letters in 1905 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Zurich; in 1909 he was made an honorary citizen of the city of Lucerne; in 1915 Spitteler’s portrait was painted by Switzerland’s greatest living artist, Ferdinand Hodler (whom Spitteler had defended the previous year when Hodler was the subject of virulent attacks for signing a protest against German aggression); and the celebrations for his seventieth birthday in 1915 and his seventy-fifth birthday in 1920 were attended by participants from the highest levels of Swiss life. The long, painful years in the wilderness had finally yielded their reward.

In 1920 Spitteler received the crowning international award, the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1919 (a year in which no award had been made). It was claimed at the time and since that the French writer Romain Rolland, who had himself been awarded the prize for 1915, had been instrumental in recommending Spitteler to the committee. In his presentation speech on 10 December 1920 (Spitteler was not present at the ceremony because of ill health), Harald Hjärne, chairman of the Nobel Committee, stated that the award was made quite specifically for Olympischer Frühling .He claimed that the work had achieved popularity after the publication of its final version, that its circle of readers had widened, and that the printing for that year (1920) was “expected to run into several thousand copies.” Yet, Spitteler had “intentionally chosen a subject and an approach that were bound to bewilder and even repel many readers of different dispositions and inclinations or of different backgrounds of taste and education.” Hjarne went on to stress the distinctive nature of Spitteler’s undertaking, rejecting as misguided, comparisons with Homer and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and indeed defiantly stressing its distance from contemporary trends. Hjärne concluded by expressing the Academy’s “admiration for the independent culture of Spitteler’s poetry.” It was a speech that did not shirk presenting the ambiguities of Spitteler’s position. Spitteler felt that his years of being ignored were handsomely vindicated.

Also in 1920 Spitteler published a 1919 speech he had given on the occasion of the celebrations marking the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Keller, Gottfried Keller: Eine Rede (Gottfried Keller: A Speech). The speech marked the last time that Spitteler, then seventy-four, held an address on a subject other than his own works. Spitteler had had a somewhat ambivalent attitude toward Keller since their only meeting in 1881, for he believed that if the great man had made his private views of Spitteler’s work public, Spitteler would have been spared many years without recognition. But in 1919 he thanked his predecessor and listed the qualities that made him a great writer: his modesty, his truthfulness, his painter’s eye, his humor, and the surefooted accuracy of his portrayals. But Spitteler then went on to caution against two developments in the Swiss perception of the great writer since the latter’s death in 1890. First, it was dangerous to deify any one writer, since to do so blighted the living literary tradition—one single model of excellence devalued all who followed. Second, Spitteler challenged the assumption that Keller’s apparent ability to marry writing and politics had been achieved without cost; for Keller’s Doppelspurigkeit (twin-track nature), as Spitteler called the ability so much admired by the Swiss, had been possible because Keller’s poetic inspiration did not flow constantly so that, for all his greatness, he was not among the truly great. It was thus misguided to demand of Swiss writers that they engage themselves politically in the manner of Keller: a writer served his country better by using his talent to produce immortal works than by becoming just one more politician among many. It is clear that Spitteler’s reservations about Keller, however justified, are colored by his own view of the social role of the writer.

The major task of Spitteler’s last years was the recasting of Prometheus and Epimetheus, and the result was Prometheus der DuMer, Spitteler’s last published work. In a speech delivered in 1922, Warum ich meinen Prometheus umgearbeitet habe (1923, Why I Reworked My Prometheus), Spitteler insisted that the work on his last project, which had in fact being going forward since at least 1910, was not a revision of the original epic but was a new, quite independent epic on the same theme that was designed not to replace Prometheus und Epimetheus but to stand beside it; his motive in writing the new work was to repay the fifty-year-old debt to the young man who in 1869 first had the vision of the basic theme of Prometheus and Epimetheus. Spitteler replaced the rhythmic prose of the first epic with the rhyming hexameters used for Olympischer Frühling and imparted a clearer and more rigorous structure. Thus, while the new epic is still divided into two parts, there is now a balance in that each part has four cantos, and the original 340 pages have been reduced to barely 200. The story line remains, in broad terms, that of the first work; but all subplots have been removed or better integrated, and the altered title reflects both the emphasis on Prometheus and the dark nature of the world that requires the kind of endurance he embodies. The theme of death is much more ominously present than in the first epic. Prometheus, uncompromisingly certain of his mission, stands out more prominently as the repository of the values of the soul in contrast to those of conscience, to which he refuses to surrender. The ineffectiveness of the values of conscience are again underscored by the pusillanimity and failure of Epimetheus despite his elevation to the kingship. Once again, Epimetheus proves incapable of recognizing the gift of the golden apple from Pandora as the divine gift of salvation and is unable to ward off the deadly threat posed by Behemoth. The conflict between the kingdom of God and the world of Behemoth, stripped of all that is extraneous, emerges in stark clarity; its resolution, upon the intervention of Prometheus, is more restrained than in the earlier work. One last test remains, the tendency of the soul to indulge in overweening pride, and Prometheus succeeds in reconciling the individualistic aspects of the soul with its obligations to the human community at large before he withdraws from the world with his brother. Prometheus der Dulder, for all its qualities, may have been even less suited to the tastes of its time than Prometheus und Epimetheus had been nearly half a century previously.

Carl Spitteler’s sense of mission persisted to the end. Plagued by circulatory disorders and the disabilities of age, he had, with help, completed correcting the proofs of Prometheus der Dulder at the end of October 1924. He was able to receive the first copies of the book and to read reviews of it before he died on 29 December 1924.

Letters

Carl Spitteler, Joseph Viktor Widmann: Briefwechsel, edited by Werner Stauffacher (Bern: P. Haupt, 1998).

Biographies

Werner Stauffacher, Carl Spitteler: Biographie (Zurich & Munich: Artemis, 1973);

Justus Hermann Wetzel, Carl Spitteler: Ein Lebens und Schaffensbericht (Bern & Munich: Francke, 1973);

Fritz Schaub, Carl Spitteler (1845–1924) in Luzern: Dichter, Essayist, Journalist/Musikkritiker, Pflanzenforscher, politischer Mahner, Cineast (Lucerne: Maihof, 1994).

References

Paul Baur, Zur Bewertung von Spittelers Poesie (Basel: Baur,1964);

Gottfried Bohnenblust, Carl Spitteler: Dichter und Heimat(Bern: Haupt, n.d.);

“Carl Spitteler,” Quarto: Zeitschrift des Schweizerischen Literaturarchivs, 4/5 (April 1995);

Robert Faesi, Spittelers Weg and Werk (Frauenfeld & Leipzig: Huber, 1933);

Werner Günther, Dichter der neueren Schweiz, volume 1 (Bern & Munich: Francke, 1963), pp. 228–280;

Margaret McHaffie, “Prometheus and Viktor: Carl Spitteler’s Imago”, German Life and Letters, 31 (October 1977): 67-77;

McHaffie and J. H. Ritchie, “Narrative Technique in Spitteler’s Conrad der Leutnant,” German Life and Letters, 14 (October 1960): 45-51;

Otto Rommel, Spittelers Olympischer Frühling and seine epische Form (Bern & Munich: Francke, 1965);

Roger Scharpf, Carl Spitteler (1845–1924) und die Anfänge der modernen Erzählkunst in der Schweiz (Bern & New York: Peter Lang, 1999);

Philipp Theisohn, Totalität des Mangels: Carl Spitteler und die Geburt des modernen Epos aus der Anschauung (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2001).