GOTTFRIED KELLER
A VILLAGE ROMEO AND JULIET
Gottfried Keller (1819-1890)
German-Swiss short-story writer and novelist of the late 19th century realistic school. However, Keller wanted to become a painter. Of his works, Green Henry, a story of a failing artist, has been called by some critics the greatest Swiss novel. Keller was involved in the Swiss civil disputes of the time. He opposed the idea of a Swiss national literature, insisting that every writer should remain within his own language community, and regarded his own works as belonging to German literature.
Einer wilden Meeresbrandung hat das schöne Spiel geglichen;
Alles Laub war weisslich schimmernd nach Norosten hingestrichen.
Also streicht die alte Geige Pan der Alte laut und leise,
Unterrichtend seine Wälder in der alten Weltenweise.
In den sieben Tönen schweift er unerschöpflich auf und nieder,
In den lieben alten Tönen, die umfassen alle Lieder.
Und es lauchen still die jungen Dichter und die jungen Finken,
Kauernd in den dunklen Büschen sie die Melodien trinken.
(from 'Waldlied')
Gottfried Keller was born in Zürich. His father was a lathe-worker who died when Keller was five years old. The second marriage of Keller's mother was unfortunate; he left the home after some years. Keller attended Armenschule zum Brunnenturm; Landknabeinstitut to the age of 13, and then Industrieschule (1832-33). At the age of 15 he was expelled from the school for a very small prank, and forced to find an occupation. In 1834 he apprenticed himself to the landscape painters Peter Steiger and Rudolf Meyer (1837), and went to Munich to study painting at the Academy. After two years he returned to Zürich, abandoning art for writing in 1842. During this period he did not have a paid job. He associated with German political refugees and participated in demonstrations against the Catholic leaders of Luzern. Keller published his first poems in 1846. A number of his early works were written in the manner of such liberal political poets as Herwegh and Freiligrath (1810-1876), who later became a strong admirer of Bismarck.
Sponsored by the Zürich government from 1848 to 1850, he studied at Heidelberg where he attended the lectures of Ludwig Feuerbach, a German materialist philosopher and critic of religion. Feuerbach's influence is seen in SIEBEN LEGENDEN (1872). It treated the early period of the Christian era and focused on all kinds of temptations, sexual mostly. In 'Eugenia' a young Roman woman refuses the offer of marriage by Aquilinus, a young proconsul. She chooses philosophy instead of love, dresses as a man and becomes a monk. When a pagan woman falls in love with her, Eugenia rejects her advances. The woman accuses her of rape. Eugenia secret is revealed, and she marries Aquilinus. Keller's writings attracted the attention of Nietzsche, who admired the author's fight against romanticism and and saw in this a sign of strength and inner wellbeing. However, Keller never adopted Feuerbach's atheism, but remained faithful to Christian humanism which he had inherited from his mother.
Between the years 1850 and 1855 Keller studied at the University of Berlin. Keller's economic situation was difficult, but these years saw the maturing of his first major work, the long autobiographical DER GRÜNE HEINRICH (Green Henry). It appeared in 1854-55; the revised edition, in which Henry does not die at the end, was published in 1880. Green Henry is customarily identified as a Bildungsroman, in succession to the seminal work, Johan Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795-1821, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship). Keller greatly admired Goethe, but Green Henry has been placed rather in the company of Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure (1895). Émile Zola (1840-1902), the great French naturalist writer, who observed the nasty side of humanity, Keller considered a mean person. "Indeed, the most compelling charm of his [Keller's] genius is his characteristic serene cheerfulness," Erich Auerbach wrote in Mimesis (1946), "which is able to play its game of benign irony with the most incongruous and repulsive things."
Green Henry has connections with Balzac's La Recherche de l'absolu and the short story 'Le chef-d'oeuvre inconnu'. It is partly an autobiographical story of the frustration and defeat of an artist. The protagonist, Heinrich Lee, is called green because all of his boyish clothes were made from his father's green uniforms. Heinrich loses his father at an early age, he is fired from the school, and he studies painting in Munich. Heinrich has wavered between two women: Anna represents for him heavenly love, and Judith, a widow, the earthly needs. He finally discovers that he can never achieve more than a moderate competence as an artist. After the death of his self-sacrificing mother, Heinrich dies of shame for having impoverished her. In the revised version he lives on in dispiriting bureaucratic service. Keller himself hated the early version, written in a third-person narration, and burned it. He improved the later one by using the first-person form, and tried to avoid any excessively melodramatic scene at the end. Whereas the first version had not gained much attention, the change of the tragic ending contributed later to the wide acclaim of the book.
"Je weniger aber ein Seldwyler zu Hause was taugt, um so besser hält er sich sonderbarerweise, wenn er ausrückt, und ob sie einzeln oder in Kompanie ausziehen, wie z.B. in früheren Kriegen, so haben sie sich doch immer gut gehalten. Auch als Spekulant und Geschäftsmann hat schon manchen sich rüstig umgetan, wenn er nur erst aus dem warmen, sonnigen Tale herauskam, wo er nich gedieh." (from Die Leute von Seldwyla, 1856-74)
In 1855 Keller returned to Zürich and became a cantonal secretary (1861-76) after his wandering years. His acquaiantances included the German composer Richard Wagner, who described him as strikingly helpless and fragile, but honest and wise person. Much of his later life Keller spent without any signs of Bohemian tendencies, although he was often seen in Weinstubes of the city, sitting reticently at his table. Keller never married after having had misfortunes in love – . The most important person for Keller was his sister, who took care of him, and whose life he made miserable by his hypochondria. During his 15 years of service, Keller came to recognize the deepening antagonism between soulless capitalism and artistic individualism. Keller attacked the sometimes brutal economic development that transformed Swiss society and supported forces of liberalism – "more than once a change of government and the expansion of freedom have resulted from an unjust cause or untrue pretence," he once wrote.
ROMEO UND JULIA AUF DEM DORFE (1876), one of Keller's most famous books, was an adaptation of Shakespeare's famous plot, but set in a Swiss village. To save his bride, Vrenchen, from the violence of her father, Sali hits him on the head with a rock. The two young lovers manage to steal one day of happiness and at the end of the story their dead bodies, sleeping on a hay bed, are found from a river boat. Keller's last novel, MARTIN SALANDER (1886), reflected his bitter fears of an ever-growing gap between the spirit of business and the spirit of art. His other works include DIE LEUTE VON SELDWYLA (1856), a collection of humorous novellas, all set in the fictional town of Seldwyla, ZÜRICHER NOVELLEN (1878), and DAS SINNGEDICHT (1882). – Keller died in Zürich on July 15, 1890. Nowadays Keller's fame rests mainly on his short stories, in which he portrayed middle-class. Together with Jeremias Gotthelf and Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, Keller is generally regarded as one of the three major writers of 19th-century Swiss-German literature.
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