So hold und schön und rein
A strange story, this one.
Working on the end of the nineteenth century, one is always aware of an aftermath. The First World War is just around the corner, the Europe familiar to late-Victorians shortly to reshape itself dramatically. Baltic Germans would have more reason to feel dispossessed than most.
In the very last issue of Alaudae from February 1895 (see Lugubelinus passim) Ulrichs includes a translation into Ancient Greek of a poem by Heinrich Heine:
“You are the very image of a flower,/ graceful and fair./ When I look at you a great sadness/ seizes my heart./ I would place my hands/ on your head,/ praying that God may save you,/ graceful and fair.” This is a variation on a tradition in Germany that generally leaves me pretty cold, the practice of translating classics of German lyric poetry into Latin. But I like this Greek version of “Du bist wie eine Blume”. It manages to be a faithful translation of Heine’s original and also match its rhyme and accentual iambics and the simplicity of expression that carries its subject so well:
Du bist wie eine Blume,
So hold und schön und rein;
Ich schau’ dich an, und Wehmuth
Schleicht mir in’s Herz hinein.
Mir ist, als ob ich die Hände
Auf’s Haupt dir legen sollt’,
Betend, daß Gott dich erhalte
So rein und schön und hold.
You are like a flower,
So fair and fine and pure;
I look at you, and sadness
Steals into my heart.
I feel as if I should lay
My hands upon your head,
Praying that God preserve you
So pure and fine and fair.
As Ulrichs indicates underneath, this Greek version was composed by Wilhelm (Guilielmus) Christiani, from Dorpat in Livland, or in present-day terms Tartu in Estonia. Christiani was at the time (1894/5) a student in Altklassische Philologie, Classics, at the Kaiserliche Universität zu Dorpat, a German-language university within the Russian Empire mainly serving the Baltic Germans who formed a ruling class within the modern-day Baltic states. I am not sure how Ulrichs came by Christiani’s poem (the author may have sent it himself), but Ulrichs certainly had contacts in Dorpat/Tartu, and perhaps a prize-winning student composition was sent to him by one such source.
Sixty years later, in the early 1950s, Wilhelm Arnold Christiani, by this time an octogenarian, was in correspondence with the Austrian academic Josef Matl, with whom Christiani shared some letters sent him some years before by Vatroslav Jagić (1838-1923), an important scholar of Slavic studies and Matl’s own teacher.* After his first degree in Classics Christiani had also turned to Slavic studies, hence his correspondence with Jagić. He offered Matl a sketch of his own career along with Jagić’s letters, explaining how he had originated in the Saint Petersburg circle of Slavists (he drops some names of contemporary Slavists at the University of Saint Petersburg) and was “subsequently active in Posen (Poznań) and Berlin as teacher, censor or editor (at the Foreign Office) in Polish and Russian.”
This is a selective curriculum vitae, to say the least. A fuller account is to be found in Wer ist’s (the German pre-war Who’s Who) for 1935. He was born in Testama, present day Tõstamaa in Estonia on November 27th, 1871, his father a Lutheran pastor. After Dorpat he had studied in Berlin and Saint Petersburg, and worked as a journalist in Berlin, St Petersburg and Strasbourg, then as a librarian in Saint Petersburg, back in Dorpat, and in two libraries in Posen (Poznań) for as long as the city was a Prussian possession (that is, until the First World War), the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Bibliothek (now the University Library) and the Raczyński Library, of which he was Director in 1913-14. After the Great War there was a move into public service as Press Attaché and Vice-Consul in the German Embassy to Warsaw, capital of the newly reconstituted country of Poland, and more than a decade in the Government Press Office during the Weimar Republic as Polish editor. Then the bombshell: “Since 1933, Polish editor in the Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda“, an institution which played a central role in the Nazi regime’s efforts to control German public opinion.
Other sources fill in details:** that Christiani’s first degree at Dorpat had lasted from 1891 to 1895; that his turn to Slavic languages took the form of a doctorate written between Berlin, Dorpat and Saint Petersburg (1904-1906) on foreign words in written Russian in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and that shorter publications followed, mainly in the journal Archiv für slavische Philologie, (founded and edited by Vatroslav Jagić and the leading journal in the field). Meanwhile his publication in 1942 on a branch of a German mercantile family in Warsaw strongly suggests, by the series in which it was published, Nordostberichte, by its publisher, Publikationsstelle Berlin-Dahlem, and by its apparent interest in Germans settled beyond the pre-war borders of the Reich to the east, that Christiani was fully engaged in Nazi generation of propaganda.
We started from a sensitive response to a poem of Heinrich Heine. What makes Christiani’s life trajectory a little more striking still is that Heine, a Jewish poet, was a figure of some controversy in the German-speaking world of the 1890s. A plan to install a statue commemorating Heine in his hometown of Düsseldorf in time for the centenary of his birth in 1897 had since 1887, when it was first proposed, become mired in the intensely nationalist politics of the late nineteenth-century German Empire. Heine’s Jewishness was not the only point at issue–the poet had favoured Napoleon, and could certainly not count as a German patriot–but antisemitism rapidly became a major part of the mix. A statue of the Lorelei which had been intended for Düsseldorf, alluding to Heine’s celebrated poem on this Rhenish siren, was eventually erected in a park in the Bronx. A statue of Heine himself set up by the leading supporter of the Düsseldorf campaign, Empress Elisabeth of Austria, at her villa on Corfu, is the subject of Tony Harrison’s poem Gaze of the Gorgon. It was removed from the villa by Kaiser Wilhelm II when he bought it and is now in a park in Toulon, in southern France.
Yet Wilhelm Christiani, who had translated another poem of Heine so very well, would end up working for Joseph Goebbels.
Christiani had written to Matl from Pörtschach, and he died in this pleasant Austrian resort on Wörthersee, at the age of ninety, in 1962.
************************
* J. Matl, “Varoslav Jagić an Dr. Wilhelm Christiani (unveröffentlichte Briefe)”, Wiener Slavistisches Jahrbuch 2 (1952), 161-170, at 162.
** C. L. Gottzmann and P. Hörner, Lexikon der deutschsprachigen Literatur des Baltikums und St. Petersburgs (2007), I.330; E. Eichler et al., Slawistik in Deutschland von den Anfängen bis 1945. Ein biographisches Lexicon (1993), 87 (G. Schröter).
Latin for losers
We’re often asked these days to think about the role of Classics in Empire, the ways in which the classical educations and general conditioning enjoyed by many colonial officials shaped their perceptions and practice. I’ve written about such things myself, here for instance, and here, and here. But studying Europe in the 19th century, as I’ve been spending a lot of time doing this last year, has alerted me to something like the direct opposite. Step away from the colonial powers of Western Europe, as Mateusz Stróżyński has explained of Polish national self-expression, and the role of Latin in particular can get a bit more complicated.
In what follows I offer some examples of Latin deployed to resist imperial power. I’ve encountered them in Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’ Latin-language newspaper Alaudae (1889-95), and it’s fair to say that, even though it is an explicit aim of Alaudae to promote Latin as a language that can overcome differences and inequalities between the peoples of Europe, he sometimes seems not to appreciate the full implications of what he is describing.
It would certainly have been grist to Ulrichs’ mill if he had appreciated what he was looking at. There’s a powerful moment in Issue 23 of Alaudae, from April 1892, where Ulrichs has reproduced the conclusion of a Latin oration delivered by Arthur Palmer marking the conferment of an honorary degree (from Trinity College Dublin) on Arthur Balfour, Chief Secretary for Ireland and later PM. The first part of the speech had featured in an earlier issue back in March 1891, just a month after the actual ceremony. Ulrichs’ source for the event was the Freeman’s Journal, a leading Dublin newspaper edited by William H Brayden, a regular correspondent of Ulrichs who is later spotted in the Aeolus chapter of Ulysses. Freeman’s Journal deployed its powerful voice in support of Home Rule, a kind of qualified independence for Ireland vigorously opposed by Balfour.
The conclusion of the Journal‘s account follows Balfour out of the gates of Trinity, a bastion of Unionism, and onto the streets of Dublin. Here are Ulrichs’ Latin version and a translation, at the end of which Ulrichs editorialises interestingly. By way of explanation: Charles Stewart Parnell had been the leading proponent of Home Rule, but was in fact at the time of the Journal‘s report already caught up in a scandal that would undermine his dominance of nationalist politics. By the time of Alaudae 23 he was dead at 45. Dublin Castle, meanwhile, just a couple of hundred yards up Dame St. from Trinity College, was the seat of British administration in Ireland:
“With the conclusion of the ceremony, Balfour left the University premises in a carriage to return to Dublin Castle, accompanied by a great throng of students. Seeing this, passers-by stopped and began to shout ‘Long live Parnell’!
We have in front of us the newspaper Freeman’s Journal, dated Dublin, Feb. 11, 1891, which describes these events and presents the whole speech in Latin, without translation.
Thus has Latin served the ruling party. Who knows whether tomorrow it may be destined to serve those who struggle and toil? Why indeed should honours not be conferred in this universal tongue upon those also who earn them in the national cause of the Irish people?”
Why indeed not? Vivat Parnell certainly has a ring to it. For Ulrichs Latin is a language that belongs to no one, and thus can as well celebrate the underdog as the powerful. In two moments at least in Alaudae we can see Latin doing pretty much that, I think, even if Ulrichs doesn’t quite realise it.
The first is some information Ulrichs has received from Istanbul, and the recollection it provokes of two medical students he had met during his residence in Würzburg, thus 1867-70:
“Not even in Constantinople is the Latin language spurned. In a high school in the Greek suburb of Pera, whose headmaster is Ch. Hadjichristou, Esq., it is taught by two masters. And years ago in Würzburg I knew two young men studying medicine there originating from Asia Minor, Greek speakers who had been taught Latin. “I have read,” said one of them, “beta of the Aeneid” (Book 2 of the Virgilian poem). Moreover, I remember they said, “We are Romi”. (Romii, that is, ‘We are Romans’.) They declared themselves to be Romans, not Hellenes, Romans of the eastern branch, descendants of those Romans who fought under the Comneni and the last of the Palaeologi.”
Ulrichs is talking about Greeks within the Ottoman Empire, whose identity was very much bound up with the continuation of the Roman Empire in East until the Ottoman capture of Constantinople/Istanbul in 1453. Maintaining that Roman identity even extended to learning the Latin language and reading Virgil’s epic of the foundation of Rome. What is this if not a minority community resisting the majority imperial culture by recourse to the Latin language?
My second example is from another empire to the north. Ulrichs has received a communication concerning a professor at the Universität Dorpat, a German-language institution in what is now Tartu, Estonia, at this stage well within the borders of the Russian Empire:
“At the Universität Dorpat Prof. Hoerschelmann has been teaching several subjects in Latin since 1892. Others he does still continue to teach in German; but he has decided, from Jan. 1, 1895, to deliver all of them in Latin. (So I was informed by letter on Dec. 9, 1894, in German.)”
In fact neither Wilhelm Hoerschelmann, a professor of Latin and Greek, nor Ulrichs would survive 1895. Ulrichs I think understands Hoerschelmann’s decision to teach in Latin as reflecting a recognition on the professor’s part of Ulrichs’ ideal of Latin as a universal language. But a more likely explanation is that a German-language university like Dorpat, which dispatched Lutheran pastors and well-educated German administrators across the Russian Empire, was at this point in history under pressure to Russify, a policy pursued by the last two Tsars Alexander III and Nicholas II (who assumed the throne in November 1894). What does a German-speaking classical philologist do in these circumstances? To avoid teaching in Russian, he adopts a language to which the authorities cannot object (Ulrichs provides evidence elsewhere of the high status Latin could claim in Imperial Russia) and which is neither German nor the demanded alternative. Again, it seems, a beleaguered minority reaches for Latin to defend its identity.
There are other moments in Alaudae comparable to this, among them my favourite passage in the whole run of issues, and almost the first bit I translated, the account of the pharmacists’ ball in Brno (Brünn), now in the Czech Republic but then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where an awkward choice between Czech and German—and the default option was presumably German—was sidestepped by composing the dance card entirely in Latin. It is a beautiful, and in retrospect deeply poignant, anecdote. I wrote about it back here, at the very start of my involvement with Ulrichs.
I owe to Kresho Vuković my familiarity with Lav Subaric, “National identities and the Latin language in Hungary and Croatia: Language conflicts, 1784-1848”, in Th. D’haen, I. Goerlandt & R. D. Sell (eds.), Major versus Minor? – Languages and Literatures in a Globalized World (2015), pp. 53-66. Let me just quote part of Subaric’s summary of his fascinating account of developments within the Austro-Hungarian Empire:
“Confronted with the threat of the imperial politics of Germanization under Joseph II, the elite of the lands of the crown of St. Stephen [roughly Hungary and Croatia], united in their Hungarian identity, reacted by insisting on the use of Latin. After the threat was removed, the emerging Magyar identity saw Latin as a problem and tried to replace it with the national language. Other inhabitants of Hungary and Croatia, faced with the Magyar aspirations, initially held on to Latin, but the Croatian national movement soon saw Latin as a problem and tried to abolish it. Finally, inside Croatia, those who opposed the new national language saw Latin as a safeguard of their political identity.”
I did suggest that the historical role of Latin is complicated. But Subaric’s next observation is hard to dispute: “The dual role of Latin in this series of language conflicts, and especially its role as a defence for the national identity, has faded from collective memory.”