History 513, European Cultural History 1880-1920 - Summary

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Lecture #2 - September 10, 1979 - 47:71 min (mp3)
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Out of the revolt against bourgeois society came what we know as “modern culture.” The revolt was directed against the world of the dominant life style that set the tone of culture in general in Europe. Theodor Fontane’s “Jenny Treibel” is important, because this novel depicts this style of life and the problems it involved. Obviously, Jenny Treibel lives in a confident bourgeois world, with its historical novels, preparations for dinner parties, its admiration of the middle ages, architecture, and the like, a world of respectability and restfulness. The idea of control is very important in the novel. Religious vocabulary is applied to a class hierarchy, and the revolt against it is “impiety.” Jenny Treibel’s is a life style based on positivism, disguised materialism, as a philosophical justification, Manners and morals were the cement of bourgeois society. Marriage was very important; and spas were the watering places of the bourgeoisie. Already around 1800, spas emerged as the new marriage markets that maintained the class structure and its manners and morals. Marriages were symbols of the prevalent hierarchies, both socially and politically. Political parties were part of the old hierarchy and all it involved. Life commenced in orderly fashion. But matters were not really that simple: it is quite clear that hierarchies are contingent. Jenny herself has strong sentiments; her materialism is disguised by sentimentality and romanticism. She condemns marriages that lack romance. But this sentimentality has its limits, especially when the marriage of Jenny’s son is concerned. In the end, Jenny’s sentimentality disguises bourgeois materialism. Women have a very active role in this bourgeois society through the  safeguarding of the marriages of their children.

The important difference between Jenny Treibel and Philip Roth’s Mrs. Portnoy is that the latter has no pretension of culture, of higher taste. At the time of industrialization, when, unlike in court society, everything is in flux, it is more important than ever to maintain hierarchy. Mistresses became irreconcilable with bourgeois respectability, though – for men - affairs with servants were permissible. Women could enjoy respectable excitement through travel and tourism, and through the support, though not the production, of culture and art. The ambivalence of Fontane himself is expressed in a kind of irony, of distance, as in the figure of the Professor in the novel. But on the other hand he is enamored of the bourgeoisie. Fontane treats with irony what he loved. Eventually, “Jenny Treibel” is an optimistic novel, subtly permeated with a certainty that this style of life will go on. Note several important things: the neo-romantic idea of the bourgeois woman and mother, the linchpin of an orderly universe; just as in nationalism, the word “crime” is irreverent; Berlin, not just Paris or London, is important. In all of the great novels, for example the novels of Balzac, we encounter the same kind of bourgeoisie. By that time, bourgeois life had become ritualized. One of the rituals is the dinner party, where the same people always met the same people, ate the same food, served by the same servants. This represented the cement of bourgeois society, connected to the idea of refinement and upward mobility. However, there were many other social rituals, involving dress, furniture, music, and cleanliness. All these distinguished the bourgeois from the lower classes and gave him a sense of an orderly world. At the conclusion of “Jenny Treibel”, we see that bourgeois society has not changed that much. But as far as the times are concerned, disguised materialism is integrated into the whole ritual of respectability. Now it becomes clear why the time was ripe for a revolt of youth, a revolt not against the mother, but against the father, culminating in the desire to symbolically, “kill the father.” It was a revolt against respectability, against arranged marriage. The life style of Jenny Treibel was accompanied by a system of thought which was optimistic, materialistic, involved both with toleration (it is a polite society, another great difference with Portnoy’s society) and style. The great difference between Jenny Treibel’s liberal world and the conservative world of the nobility is that the nobility has a historical conscience, tied to the role of Christianity. The life style of the bourgeoisie is different: liberal ideas have replaced ancestor worship. The modern bourgeoise has its roots in the Enlightenment, not in Christianity. By that time, reason meant restraint, which was an inheritance of the Enlightenment. Unreason is eccentricity. In Proust’s novels, the homosexual and the Jew are tolerated because they are amusing, and the nobility had always been tolerant of the amusing. Not so in “Jenny Treibel” were liberals are much less tolerant of differences in manners and morals, including eccentricity. For them, eccentrics had to be described in scientific, medical terms, as people who were ill and could therefore not be socialized with.           

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