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:

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.

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* 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).