Christian Dietrich Grabbe

• Born: December 11, 1801
• Birthplace: Detmold, Germany
• Died: September 12, 1836
• Place of death: Detmold, Germany

Other Literary Forms

Christian Dietrich Grabbe wrote various critical articles on the theater, including reviews of his own dramatic works. A notable article, “Über die Shakespearo-Manie,” written and published in 1827, marks his attempt to free himself from the dramatist who had influenced him most since his school days. It strongly opposes the William Shakespeare cult in Germany and calls for national originality on the German stage. Despite Grabbe’s assertions, Heinrich Heine, among others, has identified Grabbe’s strong kinship with William Shakespeare.

Achievements

Three-quarters of a century ahead of his time, Christian Dietrich Grabbe was a direct precursor of Friedrich Hebbel’s realism, Gerhart Hauptmann’s naturalism, the expressionist theater of the 1920’s, and Bertolt Brecht’s epic theater. In the early nineteenth century, both Georg Büchner and Hebbel studied Grabbe’s dramatic techniques. It was not, however, until the vogue of naturalism in the last decades of the century that Grabbe was rediscovered for the stage. In the twentieth century, expressionism brought a second rediscovery. Technically, Grabbe’s theater represented a strong move away from the rounded plot and the unities of the classical theater to an “open” form. Instead of the traditional five acts, his plays juxtaposed numerous separate scenes to light up the theme from many sides. In their general tone, his plays, like the man himself, “poured the corrosive acid of the intellect” on feelings with a relentlessness that resulted in nihilism: “My intellect is empty and feeling destroyed.”

Grabbe’s life was dramatized by Hans Johst in a play entitled Der Einsame (pr. 1917; the lonely man). Brecht’s Baal (wr. 1918, pb. 1922; English translation, 1963) was written as an ironic reply to Johst’s sentimentality and seems to reflect a dynamic poète maudit such as Arthur Rimbaud or Paul Verlaine rather than the more passive, shattered figure of Grabbe.

Biography

Christian Dietrich Grabbe was born in Detmold, the capital of Lippe, a small duchy in Westphalia (now in Germany), on December 11, 1801, the only son of a jail warden. A frail child, one of his earliest somber experiences consisted of conversations with a prisoner on death row. He always considered it his great misfortune to have been born in a provincial town in which an educated man was regarded as simply “a run-down fatted ox.” At the age of sixteen, he discovered the works of Shakespeare, and the direction of his literary career was decided: “I can only write . . . what Shakespeare did: dramas.” A grant from the duchy enabled him to study philosophy and history, first at the University of Leipzig, then at Berlin, where Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Wilhelm von Humboldt were then on the faculty. In both cities, he frequented literary salons and associated with young authors of the time, including Heinrich Heine and other Sturm und Drang, Romantic, and post-Romantic celebrities. Later, Heine gave Grabbe a rather left-handed compliment, praising him as “one of the greatest German dramatists, . . . a drunken Shakespeare.”

Grabbe often went to the theater, drank excessively, and visited houses of prostitution, where he probably contracted syphilis. After failing to get his first plays published or to obtain a job as an actor, the disheartened young man returned to Detmold, where, following a brief period of stagnation, he surprised everyone by passing his bar examinations. In 1826, he became a legal officer for the duchy’s small military contingent, a post he held until two years before his death, when he voluntarily retired because of ill health, alcoholism, and overwork, all of which impeded his literary productivity. In 1827, four of Grabbe’s plays were finally published; only one of his plays, however, Don Juan und Faustus, was ever performed during his lifetime, in 1829. In 1833, Grabbe married Louise Christiane Clostermeier, daughter of a local archivist and historian who had been instrumental in his obtaining the opportunity to go to the university; the marriage proved disastrous for both. Before a year was over, Grabbe began a wandering existence, first to Frankfurt, then to Düsseldorf. Finally, a sick and penniless man and an alcoholic, he borrowed money to return home to Detmold, an unwelcome patient in his wife’s house, only a few months before his death on September 12, 1836, in his mother’s arms.

Analysis

What puts Christian Dietrich Grabbe far ahead of his time as a historical dramatist is that he does not feel compelled to simplify history in order to meet moralistic needs—as did Schiller with his Wilhelm Tell (pr., pb. 1804; William Tell, 1841), reducing a vast politicosocial drama into one of individual morality and personal, family self-defense—or to subsume the action under a single overriding thesis-antithesis dramatic tension—as did Hebbel in Judith (pr. 1840; English translation, 1974), turning a religio-national heroine into an erotically fascinated superwoman. On the contrary, when Grabbe revises history, as he does in Hannibal, the reason is not to tighten the material within an idealistic force-counterforce dramatic scheme but to condense historical time in order to elucidate the variety of external social and material factors that constitute the dramatic situation. This awareness of complexity is at the heart of Grabbe’s theater; he abandons the traditional dramatic bipolarity or positive-negative dualism in favor of multiple ethical and sociopolitical vectors, each depicted in detail according to its own specific reality and not distorted under bipolar constraints. The vehicle for this kind of drama is Grabbe’s “open” form, much studied by other dramatists since his time. This form consists of no rounded plot and no classical unities, but instead numerous separate short scenes to capture the multifaceted disparity of the forces brought to bear on the central character, and no streamlining or idealization, but instead a critical, dispassionate scrutiny of a rich and complex character and his or her cultural world. The result is greater historical accuracy and critical validity.

Herzog Theodor von Gothland

Grabbe’s first extant play, Herzog Theodor von Gothland, is rich in reminiscences of Shakespearean and other dramas, especially the fate tragedies (for example, Adolf Müllner’s Die Schuld, pr. 1813; Guilt, 1819), a genre that it rejects in principle in favor of a destiny ruled by chance.

The play’s main character, like Karl Moor in Friedrich Schiller’s Die Räuber (pb. 1781; The Robbers, 1792), is a man disillusioned by a catastrophe precipitated on him by a treacherous enemy, and who turns bitterly against God and humankind. Misled into believing that his older brother has murdered his younger one, Gothland sees it as his duty to commit fratricide to avenge the first crime. Raging with grief and remorse when he discovers his error—“I believed I was acting most justly, and I murdered my innocent brother”—Gothland revolts against God for having permitted him to sin; indeed, he regards God as an evil being who has created humankind only for the sadistic pleasure of destroying it. Tormented with guilt and hating everyone, he takes command of the enemy forces against his own nation and indulges in sadistic cruelty and destruction. After having, in an elegiac description, admired the idyllic existence of a weary farmer plodding homeward, the envious Gothland reasons: “I don’t see how he deserves this beautiful destiny more than I do; if he had been tempted as I was, he would have fallen as I did,” and he maliciously orders the farmer’s house to be torn down and his fields trampled. Succumbing to a powerful destructive urge in a frenzy of slaughter that presages the Nazi horrors, Gothland orders the massacre of five thousand Swedish prisoners. He denies the existence of God and of any transcendental realm of objective values. He has totally lost his “faith in mankind, without which there is no love, only eternal hatred, . . . and which alone makes him humane.”

This first play of Grabbe, circulated in manuscript in the literary circles of Berlin, shocked his contemporaries. Even the cultured salon hostess Rahel von Varnhagen found its crude portrayals of vice and crime so repugnant and alarming that she wanted the manuscript removed from her house immediately, for “she could not sleep a wink as long as that atrocious work was there.” In a sense, this play was an antidote and reply to the sugary, prudish Romantic fare of the German stage at the time. In Grabbe’s vision, insipid idealistic love in sylvan Arcadias is replaced by perfunctory sex with a beautiful prostitute, and “sweet and glorious” patriotic death is transformed into senseless brutal slaughter described in all its gory details; one character is even locked inside a tomb and hears the worms gnawing on the corpses. The net effect is one of post-Romantic Weltschmerz, or disillusionment: The need for ideals is strongly felt, but the real world is now perceived as totally devoid of them, with a resulting despair and pessimism.

Jest, Satire, Irony, and Deeper Significance

Jest, Satire, Irony, and Deeper Significance, written in 1822, immediately after Herzog Theodor von Gothland, presents the same bleak, nihilistic world, but in the guise of a Romantic literary comedy (lampooning contemporary literature, especially that written by and for women). Rising above the genre, it directs the brunt of its irony and satire not at literature but at the world itself.

The plot is hilarious, using traditional motifs in a new ribald, ironic manner, scintillating with barbs in every direction. A drunken schoolmaster tries to present a stupid farm boy as a genius because the boy’s father has promised him a vat full of brandy. Four natural scientists discover the Devil wrapped in a thick fur coat and frozen stiff on a hilltop; he has had to leave his warm home in Hell temporarily because housecleaning is taking place there. The scientists dispute the Devil’s identity and decide that such an ugly face could belong only to “a German woman-writer.” When revived, the Devil identifies himself as a churchman “honored with a papal order,” and he is taken to the castle of Baron von Haldungen. Here the main plot begins to unreel. Liddy, the baron’s intelligent, beautiful niece, is courted by three suitors: Warnthal, who is willing to sell her for money; Mordax, who lusts for her body and is willing to kill to get it; and Mollfels (Soft-Rock), ugly but sincere, intelligent, and decent, who in the end wins the lady. The Devil makes a deal with Warnthal and Mordax, giving Liddy, who is to be abducted, to the latter. This plot is foiled when the schoolmaster, at a cabin in the forest, the romantic scene of Liddy’s intended abduction, captures the Devil in an iron cage, using as bait either prophylactics or Casanova’s works, depending on the version. The Devil’s grandmother, a beautiful, elegant young lady (“Don’t you know that we immortals remain eternally young?”), comes to his rescue and takes him home to Hell, as the housecleaning is now finished. Mordax and Warnthal escape into the audience, and author Grabbe appears before the curtain falls, carrying a lit lantern, amid the schoolmaster’s jeers:

That is the damned Grabbe, or, as he really ought to be called, the dwarf-crab, the writer of this play! He is stupid as a crowbar, criticizes all writers and is himself worthless, has bow-legs, cock-eyes and a pale monkey-face! Let’s lock him out, Baron, let’s lock him out.

As the play ends, Liddy rebukes him: “Schoolmaster, schoolmaster, how bitterly you scold against the man who wrote you!”

The play abounds in jokes and makes very lively stage fare, which is why, since its rediscovery, it has remained in the German repertory year after year. Much slapstick comedy is connected with the Devil. He loses a horseshoe from one of his hoofed feet and must go to the blacksmith to be reshod. More than once he absentmindedly amuses himself by sticking his finger in the candle flame, and he smashes a valuable chair to light a fire in the oven, where he is discovered lying in the fire to warm himself. All this amusing activity is in the mode of the low comedy of the medieval Fastnachtsspiele (carnival plays).

At times, exaggerations almost suggest the modern Theater of the Absurd. The schoolmaster draws a long ink mark across his face to give the impression of being absentmindedly devoted to his pedagogical tasks. He has a wide knowledge of contemporary literature because every other week his cousin sends him half-rotten herring “wrapped in the fresh galley-proofs of the most miserable poetic works and periodicals”—which happen to be the best literary products of the time. The poet Rattengift (Rat-Poison) explains his greatest inspiration—namely, to write a poem about his total lack of inspiration. Warnthal, the venal suitor, in a very comic scene, bargains with the Devil to sell Liddy at a price based on her attributes item by item: The Devil is willing to pay two thousand talers for her beauty; seven thousand talers for her fine, soft hand (because that will make her slaps softer); but only thirty-one cents for her innocence because that was the going rate on the streets of Berlin; and only three cents for her imagination, since that ruins the complexion, causes rings under the eyes, and spoils the soup. Liddy herself is virtually the only nongrotesque character in the whole play: the very opposite of the sentimental, clinging females of the traditional stage at that time—a beautiful yet intelligent and enlightened young woman who stands solidly on her own two feet and sees through the schemers around her.

Don Juan und Faustus

Don Juan und Faustus is a much more streamlined play than the sprawling Herzog Theodor von Gothland. Its dialogues lead straight to the point, and its action moves efficiently. In a bizarre mixture of German classicism and Romantic irony, it blends together two important thematic traditions of the stage. Don Juan represents the hedonistic quest for worldly pleasure, Faust an unbounded desire for metaphysical insight. The connecting link is Donna Anna, the governor’s daughter, whom they both want and whose wedding to Don Octavio they both seek to sabotage. In a pact with Faust, the Devil promises him Donna Anna, “this most beautiful woman in Rome,” in return for his eternal damnation. Faust agrees in order to see intellectually how love would have made him happy but first insists on visiting the depths of Hell and the heights of the stars. On his return, the Devil makes him fall passionately in love with Donna Anna. Don Juan kills her father and her fiancé in duels, and Faust kidnaps her and takes her to his magic castle, where he tries futilely by all kinds of diabolical tricks to win her love.

In a key dialogue between the counterposed protagonists, Don Juan rejects Faust’s quest for the preternatural: “Why superhuman, when you remain a man?” Faust, in reply, asserts humankind’s intrinsic striving for transcendence: “Why a man, if you do not strive for the superhuman?” The two never become truly human: They are a theatrically effective counterposition of two possible extreme stances, neither of which represents an adequate ethical and human scope of feeling or responsibility. Faust, in a burst of hatred at being rejected, finally murders Donna Anna. In the end, the Devil comes to fetch both Don Juan and Faust. Faust surrenders willingly out of remorse over Donna Anna’s murder, while the unrepentant Don Juan—to whom repentance would have meant the surrender of his personal identity—is dragged to Hell in the traditional manner by the governor’s statue. Both Faust’s absolute striving for access to the preternatural, beyond all earthly limits and without inhibitions by any ethical principles, and Don Juan’s unidealistic hedonism are defeated, the result of their egotism and their lack of real love in their approach to the beautiful Donna Anna. The play never achieves tragic dimensions because its protagonists represent ideas rather than psychologically credible persons; however, as a tragicomic drama of ideas effectively intermingling burlesque and thought, this play has a very modern tone, and so, together with Jest, Satire, Irony, and Deeper Significance, it is one of Grabbe’s works that still is performed regularly.

Kaiser Friedrich Barbarossa

Grabbe completed only two plays of a projected eight-play cycle on the Hohenstaufen dynasty, a period that marked the pinnacle of secular culture and imperial power in the high Middle Ages. The first of these, Kaiser Friedrich Barbarossa, depicts that emperor’s struggle against the Papacy and its regionalist ally, Duke Henry the Lion, of Saxony. Both as a man and as a ruler, Barbarossa is depicted as a paragon, seeking for the nations a secularized state “free of clerical slavery.” Pope Alexander III questions Barbarossa’s aims: Is he not trying to impose his dynasty on the whole world? Barbarossa and Henry the Lion are initially the closest of friends, but the different temperaments and destinies of their north and south German clans lead inevitably to their conflict. There is an element of the fate tragedy in this: The two men are not free to escape such a conflict even if it goes against their personal choice. Their respective political positions as leaders of different peoples will inevitably put them at the head of opposing armies. Henry is not guilty of breach of loyalty; he breaks with Barbarossa because he cannot in good conscience support the emperor’s plans for world conquest. The plays’ sprawling onstage battle scenes are said to be practically unperformable.

Kaiser Heinrich VI

Kaiser Heinrich VI portrays Barbarossa’s son, who has inherited his father’s ambition for world conquest. Even at seventeen, he aspires to subjugate Russia and North Africa to Hohenstaufen rule. He lacks the milder qualities of his father. His personality is concentrated on the single driving force of political ambition, and he lacks all human feeling except greed for power. Irreligious, deceitful, and unscrupulous, he stops at nothing to attain his ends, yet for all his striving he is struck down by a heart attack while at the height of his power. Whereas his father and Henry the Lion had illustrated the conflict between personal desire and historical necessity, Henry VI exemplifies how all political grandeur is destined to fall. A courtly poet sums up this theme of the play: “All this glory will vanish some day! It is too great! And greatness is eternal only in the realm of fantasy.” Henry’s dying words are: “To die so unexpectedly, so miserably—Oh, if only I had never been born!” Death, the great leveler, leaves the mighty empty-handed.

Napoleon

Grabbe broke new ground in the writing of historical dramas with his Napoleon: Oder, Die hundert Tage (Napoleon: or, the hundred days). The traditional emphasis on a psychological or ethical flaw in the protagonist that leads to his destruction is abandoned in favor of a more objective portrayal of the social world in separate scenes that illuminate the political vectors controlling the course of events. Accurately, impartially, and with no artificial reshaping to force them into a line of plot, Grabbe depicts the conflicting persons and elements in a vast panoramic historical study. Yet the result is not a formless factuality; by the self-analyses and commentaries of various characters, the vantage point is placed at a sufficient distance from the action to give a holistic picture of the historical epoch and its specific Zeitgeist. Thus, Grabbe presents the drama of an entire historical period rather than merely of one self-determining protagonist. A battery of vectorlike scenes traces Napoleon Bonaparte’s return to power after his exile on the island of Elba and his defeat at Waterloo after one hundred days in a wide spectrum of politicosocial reality. Although, on the surface, the traditional five acts are retained, they have lost their dramatic function, which is assumed by powerful scenes depicting Napoleon’s antagonists: the mobs of Paris, Louis XVII and the returned nobility, Gebhard Leberecht von Blüchner and the Prussians, the duke of Wellington and his British staff and troops. The outcome is determined by real confrontations and chance events and does not appear as merely an extrapolation of ethical principles or a conflict of ideals. Except for two former soldiers of Napoleon’s “grand army,” most characters, including Napoleon himself, appear in only one or two scenes. The play is justly famous for its mass scenes with the Paris rabble and for its battle scenes, perhaps more suitable for the cinema than for the stage. The overall technique of the play is a meticulous marshaling of precise objective detail, presented with vivid directness and a modicum of commentary; the audience becomes, as it were, an eyewitness of the events as they occurred.

At the time of writing, only fifteen years after Waterloo, the Restoration had clamped the repressive rule of the monarchs and nobility back on Europe, and the Biedermeier age of apolitical retreat to private happiness, comfort, and boredom seemed stagnant and degenerate compared with the enthusiasm that Napoleon, as bearer of the ideals and turmoil of the French Revolution, had aroused in many Europeans, including—though without hero worship—Grabbe himself, who once wrote: “With Napoleon’s end, the world became like a book we had finished reading, and we stood before it like a reader cast back out again, reflecting on what he had read.” Although Napoleon, however talented and even genial, is depicted as simply a man whose greatness was not intrinsic but borne by a multitude of fixed or chance social factors, as a man flawed by self-centered ambition and vanity, in some passages the suspicion arises that his defeat was a defeat of genuine human aspirations for justice, equality, and brotherhood, for a new era of happiness worth far more than the drab, humdrum Restoration of the ancien régime.

Hannibal

Again in Hannibal, the hero is destroyed not by any inner conflict or flaw but by the concerted though variegated forces at work in the social world of his time. More than any other of Grabbe’s protagonists, Hannibal incarnates the author’s pessimistic sense of life. Grabbe takes some liberties with history, condensing and fusing events and characters from the entire ancient world and from two different Punic wars to capture the spirit of the great conflict between the two superpowers, Rome and Carthage. The great Carthaginian general, the victorious Hannibal, faces two enemies: his military opponent Rome and the unappreciative Carthaginian politicians and businessmen, who have no concept of their country’s national interests and honor. The play opens with Hannibal’s decisive victory at Cannae in 216 b.c.e., which put him “at the gates of Rome,” and ends with the total destruction of Carthage in 146, according to Cato’s famous dictum: “Carthago delenda est” (Carthage must be destroyed).

Only about half as long as Napoleon, this drama similarly lights up the action from many sides, but it is far more streamlined, and only a few characters of its vast dramatis personae are developed with any detail. The author’s anti-Carthaginian stance is suggested in the slave-market scene and in the sacrifice of children to Moloch, scenes that show the cruel mercantilism and abject inhumanity of the Carthaginian citizenry. Plotting against one another and at cross-purposes to their country’s welfare, the Carthaginian leaders withhold troops and supplies needed to meet the Roman threat. Hannibal is rejected by his countrymen and wastes his career by becoming a mercenary, selling his military skills to various other countries. Finally, betrayed to the Romans by his current employer, Hannibal takes his own life with poison in order to avoid falling into the hands of the Romans. His disloyal master, in a ritualistic gesture devoid of substance, drapes a red royal cloak over his corpse.

The disciplined Romans are contrasted with the selfish, squabbling, bourgeoisified Carthaginians, and especially in the persons of the two Scipios, they are worthy and dangerous opponents for Hannibal, but the Roman world is not idealized either. It, too, is based on slavery, war, and boundless cruelty. By a skillful anachronism, Grabbe fuses the playwright Terence with the historian Polybius to provide a cultured observer who is sickened by the horrors of war. The real world is not a comedy but a devastating tragedy in which brute power and cruel impulses destroy entire societies. Nor is Hannibal, as a man of this same ancient world, exempt from this cruelty: He ruthlessly orders scouts crucified for having misled the army. More fundamentally, he lacks vision and has no ambition to break the cycle of war and slaughter.

As in Napoleon, the main character is the absolute center of focus, illuminated from various perspectives, though formidable opponents are also developed. This drama, too, presents a sociopolitical and cultural portrait of an entire age. Its conflict is not the projection of one man’s psychological or ethical problem. The struggles are fought out on a real plane without moral valuation. In Hannibal, a great man is destroyed by the limitations of the epoch that created him.

Die Hermannschlacht

Completed in Grabbe’s last months, just before his death, Die Hermannschlacht (the battle of Arminius, or Hermann) deals with the famous victory of the Germanic tribes in the Teutoburg Forest not far from the dramatist’s own native town of Detmold. This play is not divided, even externally, into five acts. Instead, a central portion containing the long, shifting events of the battle is framed between a prologue that establishes the setting, the Roman campaign to subjugate the Germanic tribes in their own forested homeland, and an epilogue in Rome after the three Roman legions in Germany have been exterminated. This was a most crucial defeat for Rome because it prevented the Roman Empire from extending its borders to include all Central Europe and completely subjugating the Germans and forced it instead to set up a defensive perimeter along the Rhine and its tributaries. Relying on a historical work, Wo Hermann den Varus schlug (1822; where Hermann defeated Varus), by his father-in-law, Christian Gottlieb Clostermeier, Grabbe used the actual local place names for the various events, and he presented the Germanic tribesmen realistically, giving them the simple down-to-earth character of Lippe peasants rather than resorting to semimythical idealization as prior writers had done. Only the two commanders are developed in any detail: Hermann, who sees the need for an overarching Germanic unity but realizes that this is unattainable since the tribes have no national concept and are united only as a loose aggregate to oppose Roman oppression, and Varus, commander of the Roman troops, a brave man trapped in a disastrous situation. Die Hermannschlacht is not, however, a piece of propaganda for German unity; its aim is purely historical: to portray the objective factors at work in a crucial battle of world history.

Bibliography

Cowen, Roy C. Christian Dietrich Grabbe. New York: Twayne, 1972. A basic study of Grabbe’s life and works. Includes bibliography.

Nichols, Roger A. The Dramas of Christian Dietrich Grabbe. The Hague: Mouton, 1969. An analysis of the works of Grabbe. Bibliography included.

Sutherland, Margaret Anne. The Reception of Grabbe’s “Hannibal” in the German Theatre. New York: Peter Lang, 1984. Sutherland examines Grabbe’s Hannibal, paying particular attention to how it was produced and staged as well as how it was received. Contains bibliography.